Aritha Van Herk Research Articles

Feminist Digital Ecology: Mimesis, Fictocriticism and Altering Technological Space

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the ways authors of fictocriticism—a hybrid form of writing that blurs literature and literary-critical commentary— reenvision the affordances of digital media and the rise of networked technologies in feminist materialist terms. I consider the crucial role of mimesis in fictocriticism to foster “becoming similar with” one’s environment, including its media, and how fictocritical mimesis can serve as a feminist tool for space-making and betweenness. Through close readings of Mauve Desert (1987) by Nicole Brossard, Places Far From Ellesmere (1990) by Aritha van Herk, and Steven Shaviro’s Doom Patrols (1995–97), I make the case that fictocriticism affords an altering and ecological conception of our digital age in which the land and architecture are also understood as networked spaces of nomadic identity and capacious flux.

Unexplored Spaces for Unconventional Paces: Mapping the Colonial and the Body through Aritha van Herk’s Work

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the feminist use of space in Aritha van Herk’s self-identified mixed work of geography and fiction. It fundamentally draws on scholarly work that has already focused on the spatial importance in van Herk’s fiction. For example, using Marlene Goldman’s insights, I examine the crucial role of space in women’s search for freedom and the interrogation of traditional gender norms. Her novels primarily explore how new settings – places with different gender-based codes – may result in new roles or options for the female subject. Thus, the author’s mapping consists of taking the characters to unusual venues or having them follow unconventional paths in order to expand the borders of the possible for women. Yet, the essay not only approaches the key interplay between place and gender but also aims to highlight the engagement with more recent perspectives that recognize the colonizing aspects of writings about exploration and place. In fact, I will show this colonial awareness informs to a great extent the feminist concern with mapping a new territory. Furthermore, the author is also particularly intent on inscribing the body, which has gathered less critical attention in comparison with the existing analyses of space.

THE DISAVOWAL OF THE FEMALE “KNOWER”

Pamela Sue Anderson’s project about vulnerability and the silencing of the female speaker began with her realization of the female philosopher’s position within academia. Exposing the disavowal of the female “knower,” Anderson lays bare the mechanisms of excluding women from intellectual, artistic and religious discourse. Moving beyond the negative configuration of vulnerability associated with an openness to violence, Anderson refigures it as an openness to affection. The denial of thus refigured vulnerability has led to the literal and discursive oppression of women through the “wilful ignorance” of their intellectual, emotional and sexual needs. In this article Filipczak analyses manifestations of this oppression exposed by female writers who illustrate the predicament discussed by Anderson in their fiction. Starting with Anderson’s refiguring of Antigone as a figure of dissent and marginality in her early work, Filipczak discusses Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, Morag Gunn from The Diviners by Margaret Laurence and Mary Magdalene from The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Michèle Roberts. What connects these characters is the fact that they are disavowed as knowers in intellectual, artistic or theological endeavours by male figures of authority who deny vulnerability as an openness to affection, and rely on social collusion with such denial. The analysis also refers to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Aritha van Herk’s Places Far From Ellesmere.

Below Freezing: Elegy for the Melting Planet by Donald Anderson

Reviewed by: Below Freezing: Elegy for the Melting Planet by Donald Anderson Daryl W. Palmer Donald Anderson, Below Freezing: Elegy for the Melting Planet. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2018. 161 pp. Paper, $24.95. In memorable lines from “The Snow Man,” Wallace Stevens tells us, “One must have a mind of winter / To regard the frost. . . .” For many readers, the pronouncement is simply chilling, but some of us consider it a manifesto. We “regard” frost and embrace being, in the poet’s words, “cold a long time.” We treasure wintrum frod, the Old English phrase for the wisdom that comes from living through many winters. Because I am this sort of person, I have written about Muscovites and Englishmen in the Renaissance. I have tried to explain the cold in Hamlet. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter every year when the first snow comes. My brumal bona fi-des matter because I want to recommend Donald Anderson’s Below Freezing: Elegy for the Melting Planet to you as essential reading for winter minds trapped on a warming planet. A gifted and accomplished writer of fiction and poetry, Anderson curates a life of reading about and living in the cold. In her eloquent foreword, Aritha van Herk rightly describes the book as a “collage-ledger,” creating a kind of “chiaroscuro.” In Below Freezing, Anderson’s stories of memory drift alongside boreal history (the Children’s Blizzard of 1888, the Air Florida plane crash in 1982), frigid facts (the summit temperature of Mt. Everest and the age of permafrost in Alaska), and a wide range of voices. We hear from Jimbo from Wreckmasters, reporters in the Denver Post, and Travis, who once ran out into the Alaskan cold on Christmas Eve. In striking ways, these voices jostle with those of Emily Dickinson, Robert Hayden, James Joyce, John Krakauer, Barry Lopez, and Jeanette Winterson, to name a few. Along the way, Anderson caches bits of cold classics such as Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” [End Page 295] Through it all, Anderson never loses sight of his focus: here is a timely, perhaps belated, reckoning with climate change and memory. The book’s first page announces the focus with a precise juxta-position of a Denver Post article quantifying the reduction of Arctic sea ice and Anderson’s memories of mittens. Readers with a special interest in the American West will find the book particularly appealing. With the opening paragraph, Anderson orients his project on the map of North America: “That mittens outwork gloves was a lesson learned, growing up in Montana— sure knowledge more aptly confirmed when an Air Force assignment landed me at a radar site in Alaska, three degrees north of the Arctic Circle” (3). Skipping back and forth between Butte, Montana, and the Arctic Circle, between recollections of family life and Air Force duties, Anderson assays Western memories of winter, holding them up in mittened hands. One need not have a mind of winter to appreciate the craftsmanship of the book and relish the accumulated wisdom. In fact, it is Anderson’s memory work that creates arcs, large and minute, in the book as he recalls attaching his tongue to a galvanized elementary school post, falling behind his father while snowshoeing through a storm, his father making ice cream out of icicles, his daughter determined to drive the old Datsun on a bitter day, and Bill Secours having survived a Grizzly Bear attack. In memory after memory, Anderson’s wry voice brings the book to life, sometimes for what he writes, other times for how he has listened: “I asked [Secours] for advice to survive in the North. Don’t eat yellow snow, he advised, serious as a bear attack” (148). The result is often bracing and beautiful, marked by wonder and wit, but never precious. Late in the book, readers may anticipate some sort of fanciful consolation as Anderson collects snowflake encomia: Winterson remarking on the wonder of snowflakes; a Zen proverb observing “No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place”; Thoreau remembering a particular snowflake and how it “reminded me...

Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place by Daniel Coleman

Reviewed by: Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place by Daniel Coleman Aritha van Herk (bio) Daniel Coleman. Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place. Wolsak and Wynn, 2017. Pp. 271. CAD $20. Biography as a genre is in the throes of change, altering its focus from those times and experiences that shape a human animal to increasingly fluid encapsulations of place, history, and contextual anatomy. Michel Foucault writes, in "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias," that "[t]he space in which we live, from which we are drawn out of ourselves, just where the erosion of our lives, our time and our history takes place … is in itself heterogeneous[,] … a set of relationships that define positions which cannot be equated or in any way superimposed" (331). In that light, Daniel Coleman's microscopic tilling of his "pretty average backyard in a pleasant but everyday neighbourhood" (237) in Hamilton, Ontario combines poetry and meditation, observation and dispatch. Through a carefully measured inhabitation of that contemporary cloister's spirit and soil, history and settlement, flora and fauna (both wild and cultivated), Coleman transcends the limitations of biography. Yardwork succeeds in exploring intimacy and geography, bringing them together in a reflection on belonging. Coleman's meticulous translation of his "yard" is a model of investigative discovery. Akin to naturalist Trevor Herriot's River in a Dry Land: A Prairie Passage (2000), about Saskatchewan's Qu'Appelle Basin, Yardwork engages with the complex stratigraphy of both generational and genetic shapings of one small piece of earth. As Edward Soja argues, the "trialectices of spatiality-historicality-sociality" (71) all interact in a patch of grass, a broken pine, planted flower beds, and the immutable traces of water. Such interactions inhabit this biography of an urban place. An integral sentence in Yardwork reads, "This ground contains more complexity than our abbreviated histories tend to admit" (75). From that springboard Coleman unearths the traces of all those who have gone before, first the Indigenous peoples whose home it was and is. Following them, he examines homesteading, settlement, purchase and barter and growth in an urban area much maligned as Canada's charmless industrial armpit, that "soot-stained gritty city that grips the southwestern shoreline of Lake Ontario" (10). Ironically, it is Hamilton's industrial reputation makes Coleman's yard-biography more poignant than if it were a beauty spot. His evocation of all that lurks beneath the surface of asphalt and tar becomes a threnody of possibility, one that moves from the very dirt to birds, trees, and air. [End Page 275] Coleman's care in recounting the origin stories of the Six Nations is enthralling and exemplary, and he moves from that deepest layer to geology, territory, archeology, and history in a careful exhumation of transfer, appropriation, and ownership. Different chapters examine hydro-life, the trees that are both native and imported, and the deer and other urban animals that quietly find their way, even in a city. Each element proposes its own layer, adding to the complex compost of what may be a small spot in the larger landscape but echoes as a meeting place, "a node in a global network" (199). In this Anthropocene epoch, human rampage and rapacity is intent on controlling, herding, and manipulating landscape, the natural world itself ancillary to human desire and ambition. Most effective in this work of eco-critique, personal discovery, and cultural research are the questions that Coleman arouses. Do any of us bother to learn about the ground we live on? Do we, even at a time when we are exhaustingly aware of the human degradation of our environment, truly understand the extent to which we insist on fitting the environment to suit ourselves, reading it, as we do, through our limited human apprehension? But Yardwork is no solemn lament on urban desolation. It is leavened by flashes of rueful humour: the racoon bandit night raiders who roll up Coleman's Kentucky grass, the white pine in his yard that is used as a flophouse by nocturnal animals, the futility of trying to channel water. Coleman is aware of his tendentious position, the irresistible desire to anthropomorphize, and he mocks his own search for signs...

West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative by Katherine Ann Roberts

Reviewed by: West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative by Katherine Ann Roberts Johannes Fehrle Katherine Ann Roberts, West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative. Montreal and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's UP, 2018. 404 pp. Cloth, $95 CAD; e-book, $44.95 CAD. Katherine Ann Roberts attended several WLA conferences while working on a manuscript now published as West/Border/Road. Her [End Page 325] monograph examines the presence of three tropes Roberts considers as both centrally US-American and present in the Canadian imagination as "imported but not foreign" (14). Their presence results from an asymmetrical relation between the two North American nations in which Canada is always looking to the US, which often does not look back. Canada is therefore immersed in US pop culture, while the US remains largely oblivious of its northern neighbor. Roberts's discussion of the West includes Aritha van Herk's writings and Guy Vanderhaeghe's western trilogy—The Englishman's Boy (1996), The Last Crossing (2002), and A Good Man (2011)—as well as a chapter discussing Jim Lynch's Border Songs (2009), the independent film Frozen River (dir. Courtney Hunt, 2008), and Richard Ford's Canada (2012) under the aspect of their representation of the Canada-US borderlands. Other sections examine the CBC crime series Intelligence (2006–2007) and The Border (2008–2010), the Québécois road films Route 132 and À l'origine du cri/Crying Out (both 2010), and the English-Canadian road movies One Week (2008) and Passenger Side (2009). Roberts approaches these works from a perspective of unapologetic Canadianness, a "critical nation theory" (23) that questions certain aspects of how national narratives are constructed, but does not reject nation-building per se, taking for granted instead a "need to take pleasure in forms of national belonging that are inclusive and non-hegemonic" (337). Bringing this decidedly Canadian critical perspective into contact with genre and Western studies approaches from Steve Neale to Neil Campbell, Roberts in the first chapter discusses Guy Vanderhaeghe's western trilogy as a "heterogeneous, unorthodox, decentered version" (83) of the Western that not only expands its traditional playing field to include the Canadian "Whoop-Up Country" in the 1870s, but manages to present a non-ironic counter-narrative to both the traditional and the revisionist Western. The latter is identified by Roberts (who presumably thinks primarily of Cormac McCarthy and Clint Eastwood) with "nihilism" and "endless cycles of male violence, corruption, and greed" (83), a description that seems too one-sided given the breadth and creativity of many less canonical US revisionist Westerns. Nevertheless, Roberts [End Page 326] convincingly argues for an engagement with the West in Canadian literature that is more nuanced than that undertaken by scholars like Arnold Davidson, who contrasts an ironic Canadian with a conservative US West. As Roberts argues, Vanderhaeghe's trilogy instead advocates an unironic, subtle heroism and masculinity that does not rely on violence and the domination of women. Chapter 2 examines Aritha van Herk's writing on the West, particularly her novel Restlessness (1998) and the short pieces "A Fondness for the Bay" (1998), "Washtub Western" (2004), "Shooting a Saskatoon (What Happened to the Marlboro Man?)" (2005), and "Leading the Parade" (2005). Collectively these texts put forth a Canadian experience focusing on female subjectivity and "the difficulties women writers face in writing themselves into the West" (85), a difficulty that leads not to resignation, however, but to a subversive engagement with a mythic West whose presence is taken for granted. Chapter 4 presents Roberts's engagement with US takes on the Canadian-US border, probing an overall lack of engagement with Canada in US texts. Even the works discussed do not really engage Canada, Roberts claims: Lynch's Border Songs uses Canada primarily by invoking the conventions of Mexico-US border fiction in which drugs, illegal immigrants, and violence enter the country from outside; Hunt imagines Canada merely as a Northern frozen desert; Ford uses it as "a metaphor for loss." In this fashion, these works for Roberts "illustrate the power of genre to inadvertently exacerbate the invisibility of Canada within the Canadian-American dynamic" (230). The remaining chapters...

Dutch-Canadian Writers Contribute to Canadian Literature

Canadian literature consists of many voices, ranging from indigenous peoples telling their stories to early immigrants chronicling their journeys. Since World War II Dutch-Canadian writers have added their voices to Canadian literature. Yet, with the exception of Guy Vanderhaeghe and Aritha van Herk, they receive limited scholarly attention in Canadian literary studies. This review of the early contributions of three Dutch-Canadian writers, John Terpstra, Hugh Cook, and Aritha van Herk, sheds light on their literary work, and shows that these Dutch-Canadian writers are recognized not as “foreign” or “immigrant” writers but have begun to break through the “CanLit” ceiling (Aponiuk 2015, 6, 51).

Performing the Canadian West

This article’s analysis will revolve around the contemporary literary reconfigurations of the myth of the old West with special attention to the Wild West as a performed space and a performed narrative. Attention will be paid to the reconfiguration of the myth by focusing, in turn, on chuckwagon races as “a synecdoche of the West” (van Herk) and their carnivalesque quality; the myth versus reality debate always accompanying the myth of the Wild West as well as the narrativization of the West; female characters who claim the spotlight of the new West; the ironic treatment of the traditional cowboy icon; and the front stage–back stage relations that contribute to the Wild West’s performativity and the ultimate survival in the postmodern world. The strategies of the myth’s dis- and re-membering as represented in two texts by Aritha van Herk—the short story “Leading the Parade” and the performance piece “Shooting a Saskatoon (Whatever Happened to the Marlboro Man?)”—will be examined to reveal an emergent new Canadian West.

Crossing the Cobequid: Meeting Places/Lieux de rencontre

Canadian studies has long served as meeting for disciplinary approaches. As this theme issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies demonstrates, Canadian studies continues to offer tremendous potential for interdisciplinary connection and co-operation. The essays assembled here were originally presented as papers at conference jointly organized by the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University and the Gorsebrook Research Institute at Saint Mary's University in September 2013. Places: An International Canadian Studies Conference/Lieux de rencontre: Colloque international en etudes canadiennes brought together academics, artists, and authors interested in placebased cultures and in creative and scholarly collaboration and production; they came from across Canada and around the world. As special feature of the conference, participants travelled from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Sackville, New Brunswick, crossing the Cobequid Pass and tracing the movements of Indigenous peoples through the millennia. In recognition, we broke the journey at the Glooscap Heritage Centre (now known as the Millbrook Cultural and Heritage Centre) in Millbrook, Nova Scotia, the authors of The Language of This Land, Trudy Sable and Bernie Francis, introduced Mi'kma'ki as a fluid and living landscape filled with networks of reciprocal relationships and moral obligations (2012, 25). Crossing the Cobequid little later that day became the occasion for reflecting on how the land is deeply embedded in Indigenous knowledge and society. As participants travelled from one place to another, from Halifax to Sackville, across the Cobequid Pass and the provincial border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, sharing their knowledge and learning from each other, ideas took shape and the interdisciplinary essays published here are the result.In addition to academic sessions and to keynotes by Andrea Bear Nicholas, Cole Harris, Tania Martin, and Graeme Wynn, the Meeting Places Exhibition featured work and performances by artists Alison Creba, Ray Fenwick, Eryn Foster, Frank Shebageget, Tom Sherman, Aaron Weldon, and Mitchell Wiebe, curated by Gemey Kelley at the Owens Art Gallery. The creative writers who gave public readings at the conference are similarly engaged in reimagining place. Poems and films by Hermenegilde Chiasson and stories by Alexander MacLeod are embedded in real and imagined places. Aritha van Herk's Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (2002) and Michael Crummey's pictorial elegy Newfoundland: Journey into Lost Nation (2004), written in collaboration with Greg Locke, meditate on the authors' relationship to the places they live. Each of their readings, like the artworks on display, enacted the generative role of in Canadian arts and culture.This theme issue shares some of the highlights of the gathering with readers everywhere. Since the emergence of Canadian Studies in the 1960s, has served as both marker of identity and an object of study. Understanding Canada as and understanding place(s) within Canada have been integral to the development of Canadian Studies, from Northrop Frye's inquiry where is here? in the Literary History of Canada (1965, 826), to the situatedness Smaro Kamboureli considers formative in Canadian literary culture (2014, 7), and to the critical readings of displacement, movement, and belonging produced from various inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives. Studies of region and regionalism in literature, from Laurie Ricou's influential Vertical Man, Horizontal World (1973) and Frank Davey's cultural critique in From There to Here (1974) to Patrick O'Flaherty's The Rock Observed (1979), proliferated in the 1970s.Although early studies of region may seem dated in an era when, under the pressure of globalization, national identities seem to dissolve with their borders, these readings of local and regional cultures in Canada shaped the emerging field of Canadian Studies, often creating their own object of study as well as new cultural expressions and products. …

The Paradoxical Discourse of Language and Silence in Some Contemporary North-American Texts on the Arctic

The Arctic has often been regarded (its various indigenous groups notwithstanding) as a desolate and silent void to be explored and defined by Euro-westerners, usuallyin terms of a masculine competitive ethos and an ethnocentric rhetoric of WesternEnlightenment and progress. Surprisingly, even many Norwegian arctic expeditionsof our own time tend to embody similar narratives of conquest and athletic prowess.Among contemporary North-American writers, however, this kind of discourse isprofoundly questioned, particularly by focusing on the problematic function oflanguage itself in our constructions of the Arctic. This article focuses on three North-American books in which the issue of the Euro-western linguistic appropriation ofthe Arctic, its natural environment as well as its peoples, is a major concern; they areall reflections on the issues of writing and silence with reference to the far north. Thethree books are: Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a NorthernLandscape (1987), Aritha van Herk's Places Far from Ellesmere (1990), and JohnMoss' Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape (1996). Central in allof them is the following issue: how to make the wordless landscape or the alienculture speak from under, as it were, the enormous compilation of centuries of Eurowesterntext. The article discusses four major strategies by which these three booksattempt to counteract and subvert earlier Euro-western ethnocentric and monologicnarratives of the Arctic: by the inclusion of feminine and indigenous voices; by thelegitimation of the sensuous life-world of the Arctic itself; by the self-reflexivesubversion of the authority of the language of their own texts; and by the use of astyle of paradox and contradiction. By way of such techniques, the books above try to create more open, dialogic and pluralistic readings of the Arctic.

Sundance Style: Dancing with Cowboys in Aritha van Herk’s (New) West

Aritha van Herk’s writing—fiction and non-fiction—constitutes one of the defining aspects of Canadian western letters of the last 20 years. Of the multiple Wests at work in her oeuvre, her playful reimaginings of the mythic West / American Wild West (e.g., the romancing of force and violence at the celebrated Calgary Stampede chuckwagon races or her “deconstruction” of the Marlboro Man) have, however, received scant attention from critics. This article will attempt to remedy this critical oversight by exploring the representation of this mythic West as it appears in four of her most recent performance pieces and short stories: “A Fondness for the Bay” (1998), “Washtub Westerns” (2004), “Shooting a Saskatoon (Whatever Happened to the Marlboro Man?)” (2005), and “Leading the Parade” (2006). The author’s purpose here is thus to examine the intersection of gender and the West in these less-studied texts, but also to use them as an inspiration for “the poetics of the crossing”— that is, the development of a specifically North American approach to Canadian literature that posits the Canadian imaginary not in deference to but in relation to the American.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Text as it happens – literary geography

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Text as it happens – literary geography

Icon, Brand, Myth: The Calgary Stampede (review)

Reviewed by: Icon, Brand, Myth: The Calgary Stampede Keith Walden Icon, Brand, Myth: The Calgary Stampede. Edited by Max Foran. Edmonton: AU Press, 2008. Pp. 354, $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper While the concluding section – an interview with the current ceo of the Stampede – leans towards boosterism, the other twelve essays in this collection are solid contributions to the history of Calgary’s signature event. Although the organization operates year-round exhibition facilities, most of the articles are focused on aspects of the annual ten-day festival. These include Glen Mikkelsen’s informative discussion of the evolution of the rodeo and the obstacles limiting its popularity; Aritha van Herk’s passionate elucidation of the intricacies of chuckwagon racing; Fiona Angus’s tracing of midway arrangements and the controversies surrounding them; Lorry Felske’s exploration of the city’s early parading tradition; Don Wetherell’s take on the Stampede as an invented tradition that, from its very inception, distorted the realities of Calgary’s past; and Hugh Dempsey’s review of Native participation, which argues that despite some racial insensitivity, the event has contributed to the preservation of traditional cultures. Some authors are interested in what might be termed aesthetic and contemplative aspects of the show. Fritz Pannekoek, searching for evidence of the impact of southern Alberta’s ranching heritage in Calgary’s built environment, finds that it is acknowledged mainly in commercial signage rather than public art, except on the exhibition grounds themselves. Reacting to suggestions that the Stampede impedes the growth of cultural sophistication in cowtown, Brian Rusted points out that as patron, client, and collector, the show has always been connected to the vibrant genre of western art, which has its own distinct conventions, standards, and institutions. Tamara Palmer Seiler wonders how an American figure, the cowboy, has come to be the predominant symbol of this Canadian institution, concluding that his presence derives both from the fact that the Canadian ranching frontier was an extension of the American one and from the influence of America’s powerful machinery of popular culture. As a regional figure, he embodies the ‘maverick’ identity of Alberta, while remaining [End Page 588] meaningful to those in other parts of the country and beyond. In a related piece, she and Robert Seiler dissect the symbolic meaning of the cowboy as he appeared on Stampede posters, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, arguing that while traces of local culture have been progressively removed from these publicity devices, the figure continues to address tensions across the nature/culture and past/present divides. Only one article deals with the more purely administrative history of the organization. In his own contribution, Max Foran investigates the link between the Stampede and the municipal government, especially regarding attempts to expand and improve the exhibition grounds, which are owned by the city. While the two entities have disagreed on occasion, their shared interest in the success of the enterprise and the prestige of the Stampede board and management have kept the relationship generally harmonious. There is some overlap among many of the articles, particularly descriptions of the origins of the event and the influence of Guy Weadick, the American-born showman who invented the show and eventually signed on as a key manager of it. There are also some divergent interpretations. For example, Aritha van Herk is impressed by the extent of popular interest in the chuckwagon races, which is growing if commercial sponsorship is an indication, while Glen Mikkelsen is more conscious that the appeal of rodeo is losing ground. More surprisingly, Tamara Seiler argues in one of her articles that the ranching industry ‘is clearly more the product of continental forces than of national ones,’ and in the other (with Robert Seiler) that the Canadian ranching enterprise ‘was in marked contrast to that of the American.’ It is unfair to speak of an omission in the book since it is not intended to be comprehensive in its treatment of the Stampede, but it would be interesting to know more about what transpired in the wider city during the show among ordinary Calgarians. Mikkelsen remarks that when he was growing up during the 1970s and 1980s, the whole community...

Challenging the Cartesian Self: Autobiography as an intertextual/interrelational discourse in the works of Aritha van Herk and Kristjana Gunnars

Recent works by the Canadian writers Aritha van Herk and Kristjana Gunnars articulate a metamorphic approach to autobiography that subverts the assumptions of authenticity and objectivity central to autobiography and historiography. van Herk's Places Far From Ellesmere and Gunnars' The Substance of Forgetting and The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust interweave fiction with history, autobiography with critical theory, and philosophy with cultural geography. Each text's reflexive awareness of itself as a hybrid continuum of oppositional discourses articulates a counter model of the ‘academic autobiography’ as a meditation on the writer's engagement with others. In dissolving the boundaries between texts and intertexts, authors and readers, each work engages the reader as a further extension of a textual continuum creating a community that challenges the assumptions of the Cartesian subject, offering instead a model of a narratable self.

Review of 'Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta,' Glenbow Museum, Calgary, AB

Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803–70) was the eldest son of a prosperous and well-connected merchant family in Charleston, SC. After attending Yale and studying law in Virginia, he embarked on a number of adventures that brought him to Texas in 1835, just in time for the Texas War of Independence, in which he briefly fought against Mexico. He was present at the Alamo, but was absent as a delegate to the constitutional convention of the Republic of Texas at the time it fell. He fought against the Comanches and rose to become a major political figure and landholder in Texas. At his death he owned more than 300,000 acres of land, mostly in the county named for him and his family. In the 1840s he had left a herd of cattle with slave caretakers on the Matagorda Peninsula, but, unlike other ranchers in the area, he refused to have his animals branded. His neighbours, perhaps ironically, began to refer to unbranded animals as ‘Maverick’s.’ Perhaps he augmented the herd’s natural increase by this method, laying claim to all unbranded cattle, perhaps he thought branding was cruel, but in any event the term maverick entered English to mean an unbranded cow and with a connotation of independence and aversion to herd mentalities. The Glenbow exhibition ‘Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta,’ based on novelist, critic, and professor of English at the University of Calgary Aritha van Herk’s book of the same title, 1 refers to this latter meaning of maverick. The exhibition, which opened in March 2007, replaces the earlier generic Alberta history gallery with a permanent show based largely on the artifacts of a number of colourful Alberta figures, focusing on the period of roughly 1850–1990. It shares the third floor of the Glenbow with the ‘Nitsitapiisinni’ galleries, devoted to Alberta’s Blackfoot peoples, and with ‘Native Cultures from the Four Directions.’ ‘Mavericks’ includes many hands-on exhibits, and 1 Aritha van Herk, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (Toronto: Viking

A Grave Garden: Aritha van Herk's Calgary

In her long poem Calgary, This Growing Graveyard, Aritha van Herk presents the cemetery as a public garden of critical reflection within the rapidly changing urban environment of Calgary, Alberta. Foregrounding the simultaneous processes of growth and decay, van Herk suggests that the cemetery as garden becomes symbolic not only of the city’s successive generations, but also of the ongoing creation, destruction, and recreation of the city’s physical-cultural landscape. First published in 1987, Calgary, This Growing Graveyard captures the “boom and bust” economy of Calgary following the implementation of Canada’s National Energy Program in 1980. Now in 2007, van Herk’s poem turns prophetic as Calgarians experience the growing pains that coincide with a lucrative economy, mass migration, and urban sprawl.

A Feminist Literary Cartography of the Canadian North: Women, writing and place in Aritha van Herk's Places Far From Ellesmere

This article examines the idea of North in Aritha van Herk's (1990) Places Far From Ellesmere, a feminist rereading of Anna Karenin that is also an exploration of place—Ellesmere Island—and of gender, identity and belonging. I situate my reading of Ellesmere firstly within feminist literary theory, focusing on the concept of intertextuality and on the implications of the concept, from the perspective of feminist theorists, for the acts of writing and reading. I further contextualise van Herk's work by outlining the growing sensitivity to the complexities of writing Canadian space in Canadian literary criticism. The focus then shifts to Ellesmere, beginning with an investigation of van Herk's representational practices and philosophies, which are organised around a critique of the relationship between writing, gender and power. I argue that van Herk's insistence upon the power of feminist textual rereadings, an insistence that results from her aversion to authority, critically shapes her geographical imaginary, and her understanding of North. By extending the text and thereby the practice of reading to geography, van Herk makes possible a feminist representation or rereading of the North that simultaneously contests the conventions of literature, of place and of gender. Ultimately, I argue that it is van Herk's commitment to investigate the processes of representation in which she is engaged that makes her representation of the North such a valuable text for feminist and literary geographers.

<i>Editions and Impressions: Collectors and Their Love of the Works of L.M. Montgomery</i>, by Mary McConnell, Cameron Treleaven, Aritha van Herk

<i>Editions and Impressions: Collectors and Their Love of the Works of L.M. Montgomery</i>, by Mary McConnell, Cameron Treleaven, Aritha van Herk

Women and Texts: A History, Some Space

COH{CLUSIOtTi ‘Women and(Te?(ts:A history, SomeSpace SUSAN RUDY University of Calgary [W]hat a remarkable space the Women and Texts conference must have been. — Larissa Lai (“Reading” 10) T h is s p e c i a l is s u e o f English Studies in Canada, “Women and Texts: Part Two,” like “Part One” (September 2001), was inspired by the bilingual Conference and Arts Festival named “Women and Texts: Languages, Technologies, Communities” held in Leeds, England, in June and July 1997. Co-organized by Lynette Hunter (Leeds), Marta Dvorak (Rennes), and myself,1 Women and Texts began with a very simple aim: to bring wo­ men together in order to work on ways o f expressing what is valued in their daily lives. Lynette, Marta, and I recognized that our lives were changing swiftly and radically with the chang­ ing contexts of population movements, global finance, and new technologies and that different words and ways of communicat­ ing were needed to begin to understand these changes and their impact. The conference was designed to bring together, not just critics, but critics and artists and audiences, and to get people talking about the interactive workings of social, cultural, and technological communication. In the call for papers we articulated our goals this way: “Women and Texts takes Canadian texts as its focus at the same time as inviting comparative work — artistic, critical and scholarly — with texts from societies around the world.” We rec­ ognized that in the 1980s and 1990s substantial developments had been made in the academic discourses by and about women, and that there were very many changes in women’s actual daily lives. We welcomed proposals not only for papers but for instalESC 28 (2002): 331-38 ESC 28, 2002 lations, readings, exhibitions, and performances addressing the following issues: WOMEN AND TEXTS AND LANGUAGES: representation, translation, poetics, aesthetics TECHNOLOGIES: media and communications, dissemination, local /national/international finance, cyberspace COMMUNITIES: legitimacy, citizenship, communal support, sit­ uated knowledges, migrant identities, building coalitions across differences of race and/or class, encouraging allian­ ces among lesbian, bisexual and/or heterosexual women. By focussing on Canada, a country that has been dealing with these issues for a considerable time, we hoped to encourage new approaches to expressing and acting upon what women value. Women and Texts was an interdisciplinary, intercultural, multimedia, and bilingual event of international standing that drew more than 254 participants from sixty-seven countries. The Women and Texts Arts Festival opened on 26 June 1997 several days before the Conference itself. More than sixty-seven women artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, translators, ac­ tors, performance artists, story-tellers, and an exhibit of wo­ men’s art books were featured.2 Women writers from Cana­ da included Jeannette Armstrong, Di Brandt, Nicole Brossard, Joan Clark, Hiromi Goto, Claire Harris, Nicole Markotic, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Sarah Murphy, Suniti Namjoshi, Nourbese Philip, Gail Scott, Audrey Thomas, and Aritha van Herk. A diverse constituency indeed, these women live in provin­ ces across Canada; some have been writing for decades, while others are just emerging; they are Native, Québécoise, Asian, Black, and White; and they are heterosexual, bisexual, and les­ bian. Their work, moreover, reflects the dynamic complexities of their experiences. Held from 2 to 5 July 1997, the equally diverse and dynamic Conference consisted of an astonishing twenty-one plenary ses­ sion papers as well as approximately forty papers delivered in parallel sessions. Plenary session topics included “the enormity of the everyday” (Chew), “ ‘Lesbian’ writing in Early Modern England” (Traub), “Racializing W hite Women” (Perreault), “Writing ourselves into the literature of the Caribbean” 332 RUDY (Pollard), “moving beyond a determining culture” (Rose), “So­ cial Advocacy” (Code), “Others Listening to Others” (Lim), “Getting Women On-Line” (Crow), “La Guerre, La Femme, La Culture” (Musabegovic), feminist theatre and art (Forsyth and Perron respectively), and “abortion, infanticide and matri­ cide in Contemporary Women’s Writing” (Stone). As Marjorie Stone, a plenary speaker who was then President of A C C U T E put it in a letter, the “conference was absolutely remarkable in the international networking it reflected and promoted, and in the forum it provided for learning about women...

Making it Home: Place in Canadian Prairie Literature by Deborah Keahey

REVIEWS Deborah Keahey. Making it Home: Place in Canadian Prairie Literature. Winnipeg: University of M anitoba Press, 1998. 178. $19.95 paper. Deborah Keahey offers her conception of “place” as the basis for a new reading of prairie literature. She takes issue with a gen­ eration of scholars who, in keeping with Henry Kreisel’s dictum that all study of western Canadian literature “must of necessity begin with the impact of the landscape upon the mind,” tended to identify “place” with the land and to impose forms of envi­ ronmental determinism on the literature. Keahey argues that the Prairies, where most of the people have experienced some sort of radical unsettling, require a more complex and flexi­ ble conception of “place,” one that recognizes it as a cultural construct, as “space inscribed by cultural, psychological, and social significance.” Place, Keahey says, is intimately related to “home,” and, in the creation of home in the literature she has under study, “land and landscape in themselves have relatively little effect or importance.” Keahey acknowledges a debt to that earlier, misguided gen­ eration more graciously than most young scholars proposing a radical departure, but, given her argument, it is surprising that she makes no mention of two fairly recent general studies. Robert Thacker’s The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagi­ nation (1989) applies the most explicit and unqualified of envi­ ronmental determinist theses to prairie literature, and Arnold Davidson’s Coyote Country (1994), while it does not address the concept of “home,” does approach the Canadian West as culturally and linguistically constructed space. And consider­ ing the word-play on “Home: Place” in her title, Keahey might have acknowledged American prairie writer Wright M orris’s The Home Place (1948), which focused literary attention on the title expression, a phrase that was apparently in common usage in the American West although rare on the Canadian prairies until the 1970s. Keahey also opposes the earlier critical tradition with a se­ ries of post-modern convictions about literature. Rejecting the canon and the tyranny of canonical genres, she is free to as­ semble some unusual selections and groupings of texts and to arrange them not chronologically but around a constellation of 393 ESC 27, 2001 “issues” that arose from her new reading of the literature. Under her first issue, “Imperial Inscriptions,” for example, she groups M artha Ostenso’s Wild Geese and R. J.C. Stead’s Grain, as fiction inscribing the old British imperialism, with two contem­ porary plays, Kelly Rebar’s Bordertown Cafe and Ian Ross’s fareW el, exhibiting the American and Canadian imperialisms that now inscribe prairie space. These unusual groupings enable Keahey to elaborate her conception of “home,” as in her chap­ ter “Relative Geographies” where she uses a pairing of Kristjana Gunnars’s Zero Hour and David Arnason’s Marsh Burn­ ing to illustrate the performative function of language in the act of writing oneself home without a physical home place. Her chapter “Centres of Gravity” includes another unusual but illu­ minating comparison. In Over Prairie Trails, Grove builds up an image of home as a sheltered bluff that he perpetually cir­ cles without quite entering, while Lorna Crozier, in the poems of Inventing the Hawk, speaks from within the “walled city of family” that represents a more ambivalent home, full of love and hate, nurturing and violence. Again in “Placing the Self in Motion,” Keahey contrasts Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes, in which the speaker quests after an elusive home that is past and female, some uneasy combination of sexual fulfillment and m aternal womb, with Aritha van Herk’s No Fixed Address, in which Arachne escapes an unsatisfactory past and identifies journeying itself as the only home. Keahey draws some new or neglected texts into her dis­ cussion, including Emma Lee W arrior’s short story “Compa­ triots,” Maria Cam pbell’s Halfbreed, and Uma Parameswaran’s Trishanku. She does include many established writers, although often not their most celebrated works; Rudy Wiebe, for exam­ ple, is represented by Peace Shall Destroy Many. And Keahey’s unexpected juxtapositions create some refreshingly new angles of vision, opening areas of insight into familiar texts and elab­ orating...