Taking Stock, Reprise

This essay examines the 1978 Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel, and the publication that emerged from it entitled Taking Stock, as a moment that distills the ongoing tabulation of Canadian literature in various lists and inventories that seek to identify and anoint significant works. It focuses on two speakers at that conference, Robert Kroetsch and Marian Engel, as examples of major writers who are still read but who are gradually disappearing from contemporary cultural awareness, despite their important contributions to the development of the Canadian canon. Engel and Kroetsch participated in an important moment in Canadian literary history; Engel’s Bear and Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man embody a sense of what Canadian literature aspired to, but those works also foreshadow the evolution of Canadian fiction. Their authors straddle the penumbra of the last forty years, and how Canadian literature bloomed, matured, and now seems to withdraw not from its continuing bravura performance in the global literary world, but from its own memory and recognition of those early pathfinders. Their works speak to the paradox of Canadian writing as ironically unaware of its own invention

Breathing Under Water: A Ficto-Critical Response to Gail Jones’s “The House of Breathing”

Cet article se propose d’utiliser la nouvelle de l’écrivaine australienne Gail Jones “The House of Breathing” (1992), publiée dans le volume du même nom, comme point de départ pour une méditation sur le voyage transatlantique. Il se livre, de façon parallèle, à une évocation de souvenirs plus personnels. Le naufrage désastreux du Titanic tel qu’il est présenté par cette nouvelle est envisagé comme le moment clé qui hante le modernisme. Cet article s’empare de ce moment pour amplifier sa hantise par l’intermédiaire d’une exploration ficto-critique des voyages en bateau et de la noyade. En d’autres termes, il allie la critique à la fiction créative pour mettre en lumière l’échange que perpétue toute migration et il double la fiction d’une autre fiction qui la hante comme par un effet d’écho et d’anticipation

Frank Davey and the Firing Squad

Frank Davey's analyses of popular culture, nationalism, the media, and both print and material culture call to attention some of the hypocrisies practised behind the canonical drapes of Canadian literature. His early wrestlings with the discontents and self-deceptions of our critical practice taught critics and readers to be suspicious of paraphrase. But despite his sounding other alarms, his later discussions of our culture's continuing love affair with paraphrasis have been ignored. The critical silence that met his public and political texts Reading Kim Right (1993), Karla’s Web (1994) and Mr. and Mrs. G.G. (2003) is an indictment of our national collusion with a limited and limiting annotative or glossographic readerly practice. These “media” texts merit consideration as careful as that given Davey’s other poetical interventions

Correction [June 2012]

Correction: In the Winter Field Report, December 2011 to February 2012, two Golden Eagles were reported from the Ponca S.P. Christmas Bird Count (March 2012 NBR, page 9). This is incorrect; no Golden Eagles were seen on the Ponca Christmas Bird Count

Breathing Under Water: A Ficto-Critical Response to Gail Jones’s “The House of Breathing”

Cet article se propose d’utiliser la nouvelle de l’écrivaine australienne Gail Jones “The House of Breathing” (1992), publiée dans le volume du même nom, comme point de départ pour une méditation sur le voyage transatlantique. Il se livre, de façon parallèle, à une évocation de souvenirs plus personnels. Le naufrage désastreux du Titanic tel qu’il est présenté par cette nouvelle est envisagé comme le moment clé qui hante le modernisme. Cet article s’empare de ce moment pour amplifier sa hantise par l’intermédiaire d’une exploration ficto-critique des voyages en bateau et de la noyade. En d’autres termes, il allie la critique à la fiction créative pour mettre en lumière l’échange que perpétue toute migration et il double la fiction d’une autre fiction qui la hante comme par un effet d’écho et d’anticipation

The Radical Volte-Face of Place

This critical exploration and the accompanying meta-fictional narrative explore the impetus of how place inspires, despite its inherent truancy of expectation, an articulated desire, a longing or initiation of not-quite memory and its placeless intensity. How do stories of the past of place teach us a way to write story about and within place, to embark on the epistemological anxiety of writing what is ordinary, and thus remarkable. The essay addresses strategies of evasion that writing place enables in worlds that negotiate concealed history. By exploring interstitial space when dwelling place and circumstance together insist on inscribing past inhabitants, place reflects its reflectors