Canadian Authors Research Articles

Taking stock of the social determinants of health: A scoping review.

BackgroundIn recent decades, the social determinants of health (SDOH) has gained increasing prominence as a foundational concept for population and public health in academic literature and policy documents, internationally. However, alongside its widespread dissemination, and in light of multiple conceptual models, lists, and frameworks, some dilution and confusion is apparent. This scoping review represents an attempt to take stock of SDOH literature in the context of contemporary population and public health.MethodsWe conducted a scoping review to synthesize and map SDOH literature, informed by the methods of Arksey and O’Malley (2005). We searched 5 academic and 3 grey literature databases for “social determinants of health” and “population health” or “public health” or “health promotion,” published 2004–2014. We also conducted a search on “inequity” or “inequality” or “disparity” or “social gradient” and “Canad*” to ensure that we captured articles where this language was used to discuss the SDOH. We included articles that discussed SDOH in depth, either explicitly or in implicit but nuanced ways. We hand-searched reference lists to further identify relevant articles.FindingsOur synthesis of 108 articles showed wide variation by study setting, target audience, and geographic scope, with most articles published in an academic setting, by Canadian authors, for policy-maker audiences. SDOH were communicated by authors as a list, model, or story; each with strengths and weaknesses. Thematic analysis identified one theme: health equity as an overarching and binding concept to the SDOH. Health equity was understood in different ways with implications for action on the SDOH.ConclusionsAmong the vast SDOH literature, there is a need to identify and clearly articulate the essence and implications of the SDOH concept. We recommend that authors be intentional in their efforts to present and discuss SDOH to ensure that they speak to its foundational concept of health equity.

"It’s some cannibal thing": Canada and Brazil in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade’s artistic and philosophical manifesto of Brazilian cannibalism best enables readers to grasp Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s trilogy MaddAddam , in terms of its treatment of settler and Indigenous relationality in its satirical posthuman world. MaddAddam is a work of speculative fiction that satirically predicts possible outcomes of early 21st century neoliberalism. A survival tale, the trilogy articulates its angle of vision through motifs of literal and figurative cannibalism, highlighting settler and Indigenous relationality in the Americas. While situated in Canadian literary traditions, the work engages Brazilian anthropophagic (cannibalist) strategies to craft an ending that is ambivalent about settler futures.

A roundtable on Myroslav Shkandrij’s Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929–1956.

Editor's introductionSince 2015, our journal's publisher, Taylor and Francis, has sponsored the annual Canadian Association of Slavists' Taylor and Francis Book Prize. It is awarded annually for the best academic book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies published in the previous calendar year by a Canadian author (citizen or permanent resident). The winner of the 2016 prize, to be awarded at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Slavists at Ryerson University in Toronto in May, is Myroslav Shkandrijof the University of Manitoba for his book Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929-1956 (Yale University Press, 2015). To mark Professor Shkandrij's achievement and to further the discussion of his important work, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes invited three major Ukrainian scholars of literature and history (and the relationship between the two) to comment on the book. Following interventions from Yaroslav Hrytsak, Tamara Hundorova, and Oleksandr Zaitsev, Professor Shkandrij offers a response.Comment by Yaroslav HrytsakMy review of Myroslav Shkandrij's book is inevitably subjective. He cites me several times in his book and those mentions are always made in a positive context.1 This shows that in many, if not in the majority of aspects our views are very similar.I would like to emphasize one detail. Shkandrij did in his book the same thing I tried to achieve in my biography of Ivan Franko: he demonstrated that Ukrainian nationalism cannot be reduced only to politics or ideology but is also connected to literature. As a result, the main ideological principles are often formed by writers and in the field. As I tried to show, some of Franko's verses are simply rhymed political statements. Franko died one year before the revolution of 1917. The aspect of Ukrainian nationalism, if not strengthened, definitely did not weaken from the time of his death. It is no coincidence that two leaders of the Ukrainian national revolution, Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Semen Petliura, were a writer and journalist and that one of the most influential ideologists of Ukrainian nationalism, Dmytro Dontsov (and, appropriately, one of the main heroes of Shkandrij's book), was a critic. The other six heroes of the book, Olena Teliha, Leonid Mosendz, Oleh Olzhych, Iurii Lypa, Ulas Samchuk, and Iurii Klen, were writers and poets. According to the author, [a]s a group they best represented in literature the authoritarian brand of nationalism, one that is most closely associated with the integral nationalism of the OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists].2Viacheslav Lypyns'kyi called this phenomenon literary Ukraine. It was obvious to him that the Ukrainian national leaders had a predisposition to develop their political programs based on literary-cultural perceptions.3 Of course, this strong interdependence between nationalism and literature was not an exclusively Ukrainian phenomenon and scholars and theorists of nationalism have drawn attention to it for a long time. What is strange is that scholars of Ukrainian nationalism have studied this aspect so little and so rarely; for them, the intellectual history of Ukrainian nationalism was almost exclusively the history of political texts and military doctrines. Shkandrijhas filled a very important gap and, as a result, he has extensively broadened and changed prospects for research.I will not focus in detail on the book's other achievements such as the incorporation of new sources, for instance, texts that are deposited in Canadian libraries and archives and Dontsov's archive, which remains unexplored. However, I would like to emphasize other aspects that make his book different from other works. First of all, Shkandrijanalyzes in depth the attitudes of the Ukrainian nationalists towards the Jewish question. Secondly, he tries to examine whether this attitude was based on a racial approach and, as a result, whether it is possible to consider interwar Ukrainian nationalism to be a variety of fascism or Nazism. …

‘Under Trying Domestic Circumstances’

This article considers a collection of Plains Indigenous beadwork donated to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum by the Canadian author and collector Mary Weekes (1884–1980). Taking the rural cottage where she acquired her collection as a contact zone, the analysis considers how Weekes developed unusually intimate settler–Indigenous friendships that forced her to confront her complicity in colonial practices of dispossession and assimilation. It also interrogates how her dedication to Saskatchewan’s marginalised Indigenous peoples at times irreconcilably conflicted with her own marginalised status as a woman with persistent professional ambitions. Moreover, the article contends that Weekes’s domestic circumstances and exchanges of labour therein offer insight into the reproduction of settler identity in twentieth-century Saskatchewan and the simultaneous (and not necessarily oppositional) resistance of Indigenous dispossession.

The uneasy partnership of feminism and ageing in Carol Shields’s Unless

Unless (2002) is Canadian author Carol Shields’s final novel, a text concerned with the mother-daughter relationship and a woman’s place in a patriarchal world. It is also a novel about ageing and, particularly, with its forty-three to forty-four-year-old protagonist, about middle age. Attention to the novel’s representation of time, ageing, and generational identity suggests that this text, which is usually read as Shields’s most feminist work, does not propound a clear and certain feminist narrative. Reta’s story demonstrates that, despite the often strident feminist politics of this novel, the implications and effects of the intersection of ageing and gender cannot be fully articulated. Following on from the proliferation of writing in English about women and ageing in the 1990s, Unless can be seen as part of an emerging – and not necessarily coherent – conversation about ageing and gender in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Fictions of Race: American Indian Policies in Nineteenth-Century British North American Fiction

This article explores the hemispheric and transatlantic uses of race and empire as tropes of settler-colonial otherness in the novelThe Canadian Brothers(1840) by Canadian author John Richardson. In this pre-Confederation historical novel, Richardson contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance, and the British military alliances with the Natives in the War of 1812, with the brutality of American Indian policies south of the border, in an effort to craft a narrative of Canadian difference from, and incompatibility with, American culture. At the same time, the author's critical attitude towards all European military and commercial interventions in the New World illuminates the rootedness of both American and Canadian settler colonialisms in British imperialism, and exposes the arbitrariness and constructedness of the political boundaries dividing the continent.

Has Simeon's Vision Prevailed among Canadian Policy Scholars?

AbstractConcerned by the proliferation of idiosyncratic prescriptive case studies in the nascent subfield of policy studies, Richard Simeon, in his seminal 1976 article, asked scholars to produce more comparative policy research that aimed at explaining general events and contributing to theory building. The extent to which Simeon's vision materialized remains debated. With a view to informing this debate, we conducted a systematic content analysis of the articles published in five major generalist public policy journals from 1980 to 2015. The analysis reveals that Canadian policy scholars took a comparative turn, publishing more territorial, sector and time comparisons than in the past. We also found evidence that theoretical knowledge accumulation is more important today for Canadian authors than it was when Simeon wrote his article.

Of bicycles and bombs: assembling ecological testimonies of conflict in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

ABSTRACTCritical scholarship on Sri Lankan - Canadian author Michael Ondaatje’s postmodernist novel Anil’s Ghost has primarily focused on human and spectral agencies that animate the postcolonial politics of the novel. In this paper, I seek to complicate and expand such predominantly anthropocentric lenses by contending that material objects in the novel supplement its witnessing ‘from below’ in critical ways. I establish how bicycles, forest spaces, plantation houses and bombs are invested in as seminal ‘actants’ in the novel that impel a complex narrative of conflict violence and imaginaries of the future. The physical makeup of these objects as ‘assemblages’ are harnessed in the novel to produce an eco-critical ethics of witnessing, narrating and engaging with the postcolonial conflict zone that decentres the spectacular violence to foreground lived experiences of war and subaltern resistances to it.

1939 Ferriday archtop

In 2015, the Canadian author is gifted a mystery guitar made in London, August 1939. The article tracks down its origin and story, which is interwoven with the development of the early jazz scene in England.

That Skeleton is Naked! Challenges to the Canadian Picturebook

ABSTRACTThis article investigates censorship challenges to Canadian picturebooks as documented in interviews with 136 Canadian authors, illustrators, editors, and publishers conducted for the Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books in English Project. Overt challenges to access to books and other material for children in Canadian classrooms and public and school libraries have been reported in surveys and the media; the personal challenges experienced by creators and publishers, including pre-publication pressures, have been ignored. Qualitative content analysis of the interviews yields data on themes, patterns, and categories of the challenges. In identifying the challenges, conflicting ideologies in Canadian society are brought to light.

‘Powers of a squirrel, and also a girl’: Squirrel Girl and alternatives for women in superhero comic-books – an interview with Ryan North

Abstract Ryan North is a Canadian author who writes a host of comics, most notably Dinosaur Comics (www.qwantz.com, 2003-present), Adventure Time (2012–2014, winner of both an Eisner and a Harvey Award), The Midas Flesh (2013) and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (R. North and E. Henderson, 2015). North is also the creator of To Be Or Not To Be (2013), a choose-your-own-adventure version of Hamlet funded through Kickstarter, published as a book and also as a computer game. North has recently followed this with Romeo And/Or Juliet (2016).

Deviance and the Subversive Grotesque in Barbara Gowdy's We So Seldom Look on Love

This article examines We So Seldom Look on Love, a short story collection by the Canadian author Barbara Gowdy who displays a strong interest in extreme forms of physical and mental deviance in relation to the act of looking. Discursive forms are analyzed that revolve around the tyranny of the normative gaze and the fear of deviance, the bounded bodily ideal as opposed to the body in pieces. Kaja Silverman's psychoanalytic theory of the field of vision in relation to deviant bodies throws light on these recurring issues in Gowdy's short stories. Additionally, contemporary theories of the grotesque inform the analysis of the Gothic‐Carnivalesque, a subversive strategy with which the author provokes our perception and classification of humans, identities, and sexes. The collection will be shown to culminate in the final story that contains a scene in which a female protagonist bestows “the productive look” (Silverman) upon her transsexual husband.

Narratives of Space in the Writing of Five Contemporary Canadian Women Writers of Italian Origin

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the English writing of five Canadian authors of Italian origin – Darlene Madott, Maria Ardizzi, Licia Canton, Rosanna Battigelli and Dorina Michelutti – in terms of how they represent personal and inner spaces as a meaningful focal point for interpreting and reflecting on the dislocated subject’s quest for identity. I will show how they use the idea of compensatory spaces as a literary strategy to portray personal, private or inner spaces to articulate their characters’ processes of accepting or resisting cultural hybridity and multiplicity. The works of fiction I consider here embody the shifting perception of inner or personal spaces in the characters’ lives, and how this defines their spatial relationships with the new country in different terms and at different stages of the migrant’s process of accepting his or her new country. My reading is based on Homi Bhabha’s notions of third space and cultural translation and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopic spaces; I define these as compensatory spaces, an idea also rooted in Foucault’s view that heterotopies of compensation represent differences that transcend dichotomies and are open to fluidity. In this paper, the idea of third space addresses the process of cultural translation – understood not only as the positive and dialogic creation of a hybridized subject, but also as a narrative of conflicting personal spaces that gives voice to experiences of cultural dislocation.

The Influence of the ULSIA on the Proposed New Brunswick Land Security Act

The Uniform Land Secured Interest Act (ULSIA) may well be the proverbial prophet [which] hath no honour in [its] own country. ''2 Al- though apparently not yet adopted by any of the United States, it provided the Canadian authors of this paper with a valuable resource in the development of our just-completed Proposal for a New Brunswick Land Security Act. The actual prototype for the Land Security Act (LSA) was the province's recently-proclaimed Personal Property Security Act (PPSA). However, the New Brunswick PPSA was derived from PPSAs previously enacted elsewhere in common law Canada, all of which were derived, in turn, from Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code. Because the ULSIA was inspired by Article 9, it was of obvious and direct relevance to our own efforts to simplify and consolidate land security law along modern personal property security lines.In any law reform project, the initial gathering of political and institutional support for change is often the greatest challenge. Therefore, this article begins its comparative review of the ULSIA and its Canadian relative with a brief explanation of why the drafters think New Brunswick offered a hospitable climate for the reform of land security law at this particular time.

Transgressing Time, Place, Gender, and the Material: The Political Strategies of Louise Erdrich, Tomson Highway, and Daniel David Moses

The colonization of Aboriginal peoples in North America involved systematic efforts to control and eradicate Indigenous knowledges and cultures. However, Aboriginal peoples have resisted colonization through creative expression; creating space for the exploration and critique of the myriad identities informed by this relationship. This study focuses on work by prominent American and Canadian authors Louise Erdrich, Tomson Highway, and Daniel David Moses. Erdrich, who self‐identifies as Chippewa with mixed European ancestry, is best known for the interconnections of short narratives between and within her novels. Tomson Highway, a Cree novelist and playwright, is most famous for his cycles of“rez” playsdetailing life on a fictional Ontario reserve. Daniel David Moses, member of the Delaware First Nation in Brantford, Ontario and acclaimed Canadian playwright, is best known for his parody of non‐Aboriginal constructions of the “authentic Indian” in his work. These authors use political destruction of normative categories, particularly gender transgression, but also past and present, here and there, material reality and the spirit realm to create space for the playful exploration of Indigenous identities. I explore the ways in which gender transgression is nested in larger themes of playful category destruction and creative reconstruction to open up issues of political importance to these authors. By exploring these themes in conjunction with author biographies and interviews, I identify the political motives and implications of category transgression.

Nuptse & Lhotse Go to the Rockies by J. Asnong

Asnong, Jocey. Nuptse & Lhotse Go to the Rockies. Victoria, BC: Rocky Mountain Books, 2014. Print.Nuptse & Lhotse are sibling cats with a sense of adventure. Finding inspiration in the Canadian Rockies, author and illustrator Jocey Asnong sends the cats on an adventure through the Canadian Rockies to help Mrs. Jasper find her missing cubs, Yoho and Kootenay. The cats along with Mrs. Jasper travel through the scenic highlights of Mountain Parks, from the Valley of the Ten Peaks to Lake Louise, along the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks to the Spiral Tunnels and up to the Columbia Icefields, with a stop to ski along the way.The story is straightforward, with simple language that works for beginner readers or reading aloud. A map at the beginning situates the events of the story, a comparison of a teddy bear to a grizzly bear is lighthearted and informative, and a maze illustration works with the plot of finding the lost cubs and is a fun activity while reading. It is the illustrations that bring the story to life by combining pencil crayon drawings with collage to create a layered visual experience leaving something new to be discovered with each read. Seamlessly incorporated into the text and illustrations are aspects of mountain geography and culture. This includes an explanation of the blue-green colour of the mountain lakes that is part of the cats’ stop in Lake Louise and homage to legendary mountain photographer Byron Harmon. These details make good entry points for further classroom learning and connect to a number of curriculum areas.The publisher, Rocky Mountain Books, is known for publications that celebrate mountain culture and Nuptse & Lhotse Go to the Rockies is an excellent addition to their growing catalogue for young readers. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Lauren WheelerLauren Wheeler is a Program Lead at the Alberta Museums Association. When not assisting museums across Alberta, Lauren likes to explore and relax in her hometown of Canmore.

Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 by Anna Snaith

Reviewed by: Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 by Anna Snaith David Farley MODERNIST VOYAGES: COLONIAL WOMEN WRITERS IN LONDON, 1890-1945, by Anna Snaith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 278 pp. $99.99 cloth; $80.00 ebook. Modernism is so closely associated with the city that it is difficult to think of it apart from particular urban environments and contexts: fin-de-siècle Vienna, the left bank of Paris in the twenties, Weimar Berlin, the congresses of Moscow, the little magazines of Chicago, Harlem in New York City. The city has been the crucible of artistic creation, the indispensable location of networks, exhibition spaces, and printing houses, and the center of experimental writing, art, and music. In this historiography, perhaps no city has greater claim to being called the capital of modernism than London, home to Vorticism, Blast, and Bloomsbury. Yet as the field has expanded both temporally and spatially in recent years under the auspices of the new modernist studies, the focus has shifted away from the western city to locales and regions outside of Europe and America. In addition, the so-called “transnational turn” means that we need to see cities not as centers from which all culture emanates but as way stations through which goods, services, people, ideas, and cultures flow. Anna Snaith’s important new book Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 is situated right in the midst of this changing critical landscape. The colonial women she examines “voyage in” to London, bringing with them a range of issues and ways of seeing that ask us to reconsider not just London’s centrality in conceptions of modernism but modernism itself (p. 1). For the most part, Snaith leaves behind the familiar categories of influence, archive, coterie networks, or patronage that drive so much of modernist studies and instead focuses on shifting identities, the circulation of ideas, and the detrimental effects of transnational capital in the [End Page 283] twilight of empire. Her stated goal is both ambitious and urgent: “we need to construct alternative maps that depict the resistant spaces and networks that worked to counter an urban architecture that monumentalized imperial power” (p. 5). By deploying the map metaphor here (that ultimate document of imperial authority), Snaith acknowledges London as a source of imperial power while revealing it as an imagined and scripted place, one open to the redrawing of boundaries, the renaming of spaces, and to counter-cartographical approaches. If, as she acknowledges by drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, “space … is socially produced, not abstract, empty or geometrical,” she reimagines London as a heterotopia to the colonial women who voyaged there by sea (p. 4). Snaith focuses on seven women writers from different colonial spaces whose writings were shaped both by their colonial identities and their travels in complex ways: the South African novelist Olive Schreiner, the Indian activist and poet Sarojini Naidu, the Canadian author and journalist Sara Jeannette Duncan, the New Zealander Katherine Mansfield, the Dominican writer Jean Rhys, the Jamaican feminist author Una Marson, and the Australian novelist Christina Stead. As Snaith says of this diverse group and of the larger intersection of gender and empire, “women writers were actively writing themselves in to national narratives of belonging, and travelling in order to do so” (p. 11). However, Snaith is not interested in expansion in purely geographical terms, but rather she wants to expand the ways in which we read the complex interactions of gender and empire by showing how these women encounter the modern world in their writing and in their activism. In her chapter on Schreiner, Snaith provides a brilliant analysis of the role of both prostitution and the transnational diamond mining corporation De Beers in shaping gender identity at the height of imperialism. She shows the ways in which both diamonds and women’s bodies were similarly the objects of valuation and trade and how Schreiner’s fierce indictment of both the diamond trade and prostitution drove her creative output, even as Schreiner herself only partially saw her feminism aligned with an anti-imperial agenda. In her chapter on Naidu, Snaith focuses on the “inseparability of her...

Les longs romans du XVIIe siècle: Urfé, Desmarets, Gomberville, La Calprenède, Scudéry par Marie-Gabrielle Lallemand

Reviews 267 themes, including, for example,“Prolifération des non-lieux”and“Le lieu de mémoire générationnelle.” As these sample headings indicate, time, space, and identity appear as profoundly connected in texts from the many genres under scrutiny, including short stories, novellas, novels, drama, as well as songs and poems. Gabrielle Roy is shown to have opened the door after World War II to a new focus on the city as the Quiet Revolution was beginning to take hold with its sweeping social transformations and shift away from the privileging of rural culture. Taken as a whole, the essays are arranged to highlight a chronological progressive shift away from a struggle to establish a unified Francophone national identity within a pluralistic space, and toward a coming to terms with the increasingly pluralistic society of contemporary Canada, specifically due to increases in immigration. Thus, the essays address and transcend simple English versus French-speaking dichotomies. In fact, many of the Francophone Canadian authors under scrutiny, especially at the end of the collection, are not native to Canada, such as Danny Laferrière (Haiti), Sergio Kokis (Brazil),Ying Chen (China), and Abla Farhoud (Lebanon). In examinations of individual and collective identities, space (urban versus rural) and time (Bakhtin’s chronotope) form a unifying thread throughout this extensive collection. The essays, in addition to the organization offered by Julien, could have been arranged in any number of ways since many are almost companion pieces. For example, in one section, author Régine Robin provides insight into the writing of her novel, La Québécoite. In another section, Annette Hayward offers a close textual analysis of La Québécoite in“Villes et figures de l’entre-deux dans cinq romans québécois migrants.” Within the shift that Julien subtly makes manifest in her chosen grouping of the essays, Montreal (as well as other urban spheres in contemporary Canada) is considered by the contributors to have become a “villerhizome ,”“Babel Moderne,”“palimpsest,” and indeed as “post-national.” Some essays provide close explication de texte type analysis, while others are highly theoretical in nature. For readers new to Quebecois and Acadian French literatures, this vast collection will require much additional research, as general knowledge of the many authors and texts is assumed. On the other hand, this excellent comprehensive collection of erudite and thought-provoking essays is a must for the seasoned scholar of Canadian Francophone literatures. Rider University (NJ) Mary L. Poteau-Tralie Lallemand, Marie-Gabrielle. Les longs romans du XVIIe siècle: Urfé, Desmarets, Gomberville, La Calprenède, Scudéry. Paris: Garnier, 2013. ISBN 978-2-8124-09455 . Pp. 454. 49 a. Critics usually classify the romances included in this study as pastoral, adventure, heroic, or Greek. As Lallemand observes, however, contemporaries grouped them as models of the “long” genre supplanted by the nouvelle after 1670. In this book, she examines the shared techniques of insertion and amplification that account for the works’ great length. The first part deals with structural questions, exploring how writers drew on Heliodorus’s influential Théagènes et Chariclée in order to unify works whose “soul” was variety (29). Lallemand further argues that this narrative structure possesses,like epic,a moral and allegorical significance.The happy end that rewards the virtuous protagonists occurs at the level of the primary narrator, whose omniscience reflects that of providence, whereas the ultimate significance of the intercalated stories may escape their human narrators. The second part examines the encyclopedic pretentions the long romance inherited from epic and history. Aiming to instruct as well as to please, the romancers conceived their works as compendia of diverse types of knowledge.They also strove to create encyclopedias of discourse,perpetuating,through their inclusion of a range of oral and written genres, sixteenth-century notions of the novel as manual of eloquence. Part three, devoted to the genre’s theatrical elements and to poetry, further highlights the importance of direct discourse in the long romance . Recalling the theatrical careers of several of the romances, Lallemand treats La Calprenède’s works as exemplifying a larger tendency to turn key moments of the plot into “scenes” featuring monologue, dialogue, and...

Mundo cerrado, mundo abierto las estructuras del pensamiento moderno según Charles Taylor

Modernity as a period of human history, but above all as social imaginary, has been one of the topics most widely studied by Canadian author Charles Taylor. The article explores the concept of world structures through which the author argues that modernity is located within a framework closed to transcendence, and that such a framework has been built on the philosophical thought as a result of some epistemological, ethical and anthropological positions. The contrast between that what is closed and open, the immanence and transcendence, are the key elements of understanding proposed by Taylor to form the map of modern and contemporary thought; and, thus, explains dynamics -such as secularity- and the cultural consequences of scientific and technological development.

Books: Scar Tissue

Scar Tissue Michael Ignatieff Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 PB, 212pp, $18.00, 978-0374527693 Dementia can be a devastating neurological disorder which many of us fear. Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian academic, author and politician, explores the territory of dementia in this thoughtful novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize. This is a son’s story of his mother’s dementia and a moving meditation on the effects of loss and the nature of personhood. The narrator is a philosophy professor whose observation of his mother’s intellectual deterioration and its effects is contrasted with his brother’s …