Gendered Landscapes Synergism Of Place And Person In Canadian Prairie Drama

In an attempt to realize the relationship of character and landscape, recent Canadian Prairie drama has moved beyond the confines of theatrical space through a metaphysical evocation of place and time. The prairies are configured as an imaginative projection of the human psyche, expressed through images that are themselves a reflection of an interaction of human and elemental forces. In the works of three women playwrights in particular Gwen Pharis Ringwood\u27s Mirage, Sharon Pollock\u27s Generations, and Connie Gault\u27s Sky and The Soft Eclipse, character has metonymic resonance: it is contiguous with place and time. The relationship with place is not confrontational but synergistic. Typically, the male response to prairie landscape in earlier works of fiction by Robert Stead, Frederick Philip Grove, and Sinclair Ross, has been a posture of either triumph or defeat-a paradoxical configuration of vertical man in a horizontal landscape.1 Approached wholly as a masculine enterprise, the encroachment of man on the prairie environment has been defined by two things-solitude and an awareness of the surrounding emptiness: The basic image of a single human figure amidst the vast flatness of the landscape serves to unify and describe Canadian prairie fiction (p. ix). In his seminal essay The Prairie: A State of Mind, novelist and playwright Henry Kreisel similarly defines the relationship of qtan to the landscape as being that of an intruder: Man, the giant-conqueror, and man, the insignificant dwarf always threatened by defeat, form the two polarities of the state of mind produced by the sheer physical fact of the prairies (quoted on p. xi). Travel writer Edward McCourt also sees the relationship as paradoxical: The Saskatchewan prairies [are] a world that persuades [man] to accept the fact of his own curious duality-that he is at once nothing and everything, at once the dust of the earth and the God that made it. 2 Struggle and conflict characterize a masculine perspective of human interaction with the land in early twentieth-century Canadian prairie fiction. In Wolf Willow (1955) by Wallace Stegner, the relationship is more ambivalentboth adversarial and nurturing: Desolate? Forbidding? There was never a country that in its good moments was more beautiful. Even in drouth or dust storm or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous, once you have submitted to it with all the senses. You don\u27t get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it. You don\u27t escape sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and on your back. You become acutely aware of yourself. The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark. It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones.

The Construction and Deconstruction of Border Zones in Fronteras Americanas by Guillermo Verdecchia and Amigo's Blue Guitar by Joan MacLeod

The Canadian response to the political, cultural, and social crossing of American borders in Amigo's Blue Guitar by Joan MacLeod and Fronteras Americanas by Guillermo Verdecchia is shown as self-defensive, even though most Canadians have in their own histories negotiated a border. Amigo's Blue Guitar shows how members of a Canadian family fictionalize the experience of a political refugee from El Salvador whom they have sponsored, in order to authenticate or express positive self-images. Fronteras Americanas interrogates the "Latin" experience in North America, exploding stereotypes constructed by the media, and questioning the way self-identity may be constructed in response to the dominant "Saxon" culture. However, both plays also imagine the possibility of "dancing" in a space which precludes borders, of playing "a tune beyond us, yet ourselves." La réaction canadienne au passage politique, culturel et social des frontières Américaines en Amigo's Blue Guitar par Joan MacLeod et Fronteras Americanas par Guillermo Verdecchia est auto-défensive, même si la plupart des canadiens ont negocié une frontière au cours de leurs propres histoires. Amigo's Blue Guitar montre comment les membres d'une famille canadienne romancent l'expérience d'un réfugié politique venu d'El Salvador, qu'ils ont parrainé afin de rendre leurs propres images authentiques et positives. Fronteras Americanas questionne l'expérience "Latine" en Amérique du Nord en détruisant les stéréotypes créés par les médias et en remettant en question la façon dont l'auto-identité peut être construite en réponse aux hypothèses d'une culture "Saxonne" dominante. Néanmoins les deux pièces evoquent la possibilité de "dancer" dans un espace qui exclue les frontières, en jouant "un air à la fois au-delà de nous, mais toujours nous-mêmes.

Sharon Pollock's Portraits of the Artist

This essay is a study of Sharon Pollock's artist characters. Using concepts drawn from contemporary autobiography theory with Butler's theory of performativity, I examine three plays in detail—Blood Relations, Saucy Jack, and Moving Pictures—to show how Pollock develops an artist's power to produce identity, to articulate the meaning of a life in performance, and, in some instances, to resist those scriptings of life which limit or erase individuals. While I conclude with observations about these three plays, I also suggest that the paradigm Pollock explores through the artist character informs other of her plays and non-artist characters. Dans cet étude, on examine les portraits des artistes présentees par Sharon Pollock dans ses pièces, mais avec attention particulièr a Moving Pictures, qui raconte l'histoire de Nell Shipman, actrice et realisatrice. Pour creer la character de "Shipman," Pollock a utiliser l'autobiographie de Shipman et, dans mon analyse, j'applique les théories contemporaines d'autobiographics et performativity pour explorer comment Pollock monte l'enquete autobiographique de son "Shipman.