Contemporary Canadian Literature Research Articles

Postmodern Challenge of Historiography in Contemporary Canadian Fiction:

As defined by Georg G. Iggers and promoted by Hayden White, the postmodern challenge of historiography calls into question the objective enquiry and truth value of history writing. Many works of fiction have embodied this trend, embracing the challenge by exploring objectivity and the retrievability of the past. In contemporary Canadian literature, such cases are also to be found. The novel Weird Sister (1999) by Kate Pullinger thematizes history and history writing, utilizes Gothic elements, and employs the elements of historiographic metafiction, e.g. as characterized by Linda Hutcheon. The book features characters representing the so‐called silent voices whose testimony had remained lost in the official historical record. This paper aims to show that the depiction of the impossibility of uncovering the truth about the past represents a significant contribution by contemporary fiction authors to the postmodern challenge of historiography, with Pullinger’s novel emerging as a notable contribution to this discourse.

Outpatient hysteroscopy is effective for uterine cavity evaluation following failed office-based endometrial biopsy.

Failure to obtain an office-based endometrial biopsy for abnormal uterine bleeding is not uncommon. Although operating room-based procedures are traditionally considered the gold standard assessment tool in these circumstances, outpatient hysteroscopy is a less invasive, more cost-effective, and safer alternative. However, there is no contemporary Canadian literature on the effectiveness of an outpatient approach for this specific population. We aim to evaluate the effectiveness and outcomes of outpatient hysteroscopy for uterine cavity evaluation for patients who have failed an in-office endometrial biopsy attempt. We conducted a retrospective cohort study of all patients referred to an academic outpatient hysteroscopy unit between January 2015 and January 2018, who underwent an outpatient hysteroscopy following failed endometrial biopsy. Data were collected from electronic medical records. Of the 407 consecutive patients who underwent an outpatient hysteroscopic procedure, 68 met inclusion criteria. Postmenopausal bleeding was the most common indication for initial biopsy, and most failures were attributed to cervical stenosis. Outpatient hysteroscopies were successfully completed in 96% of cases (n=65/68). Failure resulted from either anxiety and discomfort (n=2), or severe intrauterine adhesions (n=1). Overall, 10% of patients subsequently required an operating room-based hysteroscopy, either to complete a myomectomy or polypectomy, or to allow general anesthesia. Outpatient hysteroscopy identified endometrial hyperplasia and cancer in 4.5% and 3% of patients, respectively. Outpatient hysteroscopy following unsuccessful office endometrial biopsy attempts appears to be a feasible, safe, and cost-effective investigation strategy that may prevent the need for an operating room-based procedure in 90% of cases.

Book Review: Carnivalizing Reconciliation: Contemporary Australian and Canadian Literature and Film beyond the Victim Paradigm

Book Review: Carnivalizing Reconciliation: Contemporary Australian and Canadian Literature and Film beyond the Victim Paradigm

The Turn to Indigenization in Canadian Writing: Kinship Ethics and the Ecology of Knowledges

This article heeds the recent shift in cultural criticism and creative writing toward imagining "a functional ecology of knowledges in Canada" (Coleman, "Toward" 8) that takes its conceptual lead from Indigenous epistemologies. Through close reading Thomas King's novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), Wayde Compton's short story collection The Outer Harbour (2014), and Daniel Coleman's nonfiction book Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place (2017), the article connects Indigenous notions of kinship to the turn to trans-systemic epistemologies in contemporary Canadian literature and criticism. My analysis draws on Indigenous theories of kinship underlying Indigenous resurgence and decolonization and sets them in conversation with King's reflections on storytelling and world-building, Compton's theoretical charting of African Canadian space as Afroperipheral within diaspora criticism, and Coleman's self-retraining to redefine settler belonging and knowledge. This analysis concludes that, by promoting an awareness of the interdependence between the natural environment, humans, and other-than-human beings that is central to Indigenous epistemologies, these works contribute to the shift toward the construction of an ecology of knowledges and hold the potential for renewed decolonizing efforts, social justice, and environmental sustainability.

Evidence of Reading in Reading Michael Ondaatje’s Novel “The English Patient”

The main aim of the book reading is to gain knowledge and contains numerous sources of information. Reading makes a person to be depth on subjects. Literature is a unique creation by human to expose, understand, to share self experience. Reading offers human to escape from the present, detects from problems and responsibilities in day to day lives. Moreover, reading literature exercise into the world of imagination. Everyone enjoy stories, it offers a reader to meet with many characters and to journey into their world, in attempting with their happy and unhappy. A person will be creative by reading a lot in perceiving truth, making valuable decision, dealing with complex situation in life and also reading helps one to use the logic and to reason well. Reading books continually make more satisfied with life and happiness; it makes one to feel the activities and the involvement by them in life are worthwhile. Michael Ondaatje works characterize in countless ways the best of contemporary Canadian Literature in English. Michael Ondaatje writing focuses not only on Canadian Literature but focus on the world prospect. This paper highlights on the evidence of reading books in Michael Ondaatje’s novel “The English Patient”, the joint winner of Booker Prize for fiction in 1992 and was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1996.

Who said “vulnerable”? Literature, Canada, precarity, affect

ABSTRACTThis article draws on Judith Butler’s notions of vulnerability and precarity to propose an approach to the study of contemporary Canadian literature that is both aesthetically and politically involved. In recent work, Butler implies the possibility of engaging, through the field of literature and critical theory, with the production of vulnerability at the heart of human crises. If that is so, it is crucial to emphasize the role of postcolonial literatures in tackling contemporary forms of violence and revealing the normative frames that empower those forms. The article argues for the usefulness of critically reading Canadian literature in those terms, if only as a response to the large number of texts that narrate and engage the multiple sites of human vulnerability, implicitly calling for a mode of analysis that draws attention back to the political potential of the aesthetic, and endorsing what could be thought of as a post-post-structuralist moment.

Bad feelings, feeling bad: the affects of Asian-Indigenous coalition

ABSTRACTThis article theorizes the affective forms that Asian-Indigenous alliances might take, using examples from contemporary Canadian film and literature as a cultural testing ground. Building on the efforts of scholars like Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and Malissa Phung to trace a literary genealogy of Asian-Indigenous relations in Canada, the article first considers the structures of feeling which bolster efforts towards coalition-building between Asian settlers and First Nations. Rather than extending an optimistic or redemptive model, the article suggests that negative affect (or, what Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings”) ought to be taken seriously as both an unavoidable presence and a potential catalyst in and for active solidarity. The article then analyzes Sto:lo author Lee Maracle’s short story “Yin Chin” and Peter Blow’s documentary film A Village of Widows with an eye towards how bad feelings underpin the narrative calls to action in both texts. The article concludes by considering the role that bad feeling can and does play in terms of inter-referencing practices among cultural and historical scholars.

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

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

“[They] would say she was betraying Poland already”: Major Themes in Contemporary Canadian Literature by Writers of Polish Origins

In June 2015 The Canadian Polish Research Institute organized a panel discussion chaired by professor Tamara Trojanowska called “Writing Change and Continuity: Culture, Languages, Generations.” The debate featured esteemed writers of Polish descent: Eva Stachniak, Andrew Borkowski, Ania Szado, Jowita Bydlowska and Aga Maksimowska. Although the writers in question do not belong to the same generation and do not share exactly the same emigration experience, nowadays they form a distinguished group of Canadian writers of Polish origins. The aim of this paper is to look at the selection of the latest texts written by authors of the Polish diaspora in Canada such as Eva Stachniak’s The Chosen Maiden (2017), Jowita Bydlowska’s Drunk Mom (2013) and Guy (2016), Ania Szado’s Studio Saint Ex (2013) and Aga Maksimowska’s Giant (2012) among others. This paper does not venture to repeat the conclusions drawn during the panel but rather to extend the exploration of the recent Polish diasporic, multivoiced writing as well as offer a modest supplement to the famous analysis of ethnic writing proposed by Smaro Kamboureli in her Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada (2009). Hence, the discussion comprises the authors’ choice of themes, (dis)appearance of immigrant motifs, references to Poland as a country of origin and Canada as the new homeland as well as an analysis of the genres the aforementioned authors use.

The Outline of Contemporary Canadian Literature

The Outline of Contemporary Canadian Literature

Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s by Larissa Lai (review)

Larissa Lai. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in 1980s and 1990s. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2014. 260 pp. $42.99. It has been twenty years since Writing Thru Race conference ignited a series of conversations about race and Canadian literature in Canada. In conclusion to her book, Larissa Lai recalls this conference as a pivotal moment: As an organizer and a participant in this conference, I experienced it as a devastating turning point in anti-racist cultural organizing in (214). Lai's book tracks urgency of debates and desires that lead up to this devastation and productivity of its aftermath. Slanting I, Imagining We identifies and unfolds a crucial two-decade period in Canadian literary history. Differentiating this period from 1970s and early 1980s that were marked by labour of breaking silence, Lai understands that the late 1980s and 1990s are marked by a recognition of difficulty in speaking and writing, not because of any lack of ability of talent on part of racialized writers, but because of problems inherent in racialized formations (9). Lai shows how difficulties of race and writing that explode out of this period illuminate crucial relationship between literary production and activism. This book articulates necessity of anti-racist critical practice as part of Asian Canadian literary criticism. In so doing, she calls attention to specificities of this historical period. Importantly, Lai's investigation of this period marks indispensability of activist practices that come out of coalitions built across and between racialized and minoritized communities. For example, she recalls for us that Lenore Keeshig-Tobias's work on initiating debates on appropriation of voice preceded organizing work that lead to Writing Thru Race, and, as this book definitively shows, contemporary Asian Canadian literature is shaped by Writing Thru Race and dialogues that it generated. That is, Lai tracks way that contemporary Asian Canadian literature emerges out of connections with broader conversations about race in Canada that in turn come out of engagements with questions of indigenous literature and voice. For Lai, Asian Canadian literary production must be understood within this context of this intersection of multiple communities. Further, Lai resists a linear history of Asian Canadian literary production. She recognizes that such a narrative ... inadvertently denies discontinuities, reversals, and aporias in experience, self-understanding, self-sameness, and writing, as well as ongoing racisms and injustices that can so easily be erased through myths of origins and myths of arrival (7). With impressive astuteness, this book refuses progressivist histories. It does not track movements for sake of identifying them as historical events but in order to understand their historicity. Thus, first chapter identifies way in which very myths of origins and arrivals that Lai resists in her criticism can, in context of literary production, become vulnerable to becoming incorporated in name of nationalism. …

Pushing Comfort Zones: Promoting Social Justice Through the Teaching of Aboriginal Canadian Literature

In this paper we highlight findings from a teacher inquiry group study designed to explore possibilities for teaching contemporary Canadian literature to promote issues of social justice in secondary classrooms. Drawing on Boler and Zembylas’s notion of a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’, our paper will focus on the experiences of two teachers in the group who, through the selection and teaching of two Aboriginal Canadian texts, moved away from well-established pedagogical practices. We explore the role of the inquiry group in supporting teachers in their attempts to problematize unquestioned assumptions and address the absences in their curricular practices and examine the potential of using Canadian literature to enhance students’ understanding of historical marginalizations and structural inequalities. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our research for pre-service and in-service educators who face the challenges of teaching in increasingly diverse schools.

Presenting the Past: The Tendentious Use of History in Contemporary Canadian Literature

Since at least 1970, Canadian writers have been working to represent historical events and Native life in their poetry and prose fictions mainly from a postcolonial perspective and metafictively. They have produced a broadly written fiction that is ideologically postmodern in its deconstruction of realist fiction's presumptions and designs respecting history, while in their interrogation of the ideology in received versions of narrative history they implicitly further their claim to a truer historical truth. Examples of this revisionist literature proliferate in contemporary Canadian literature, in works by every major Canadian writer of the past half-century. Apart from the politics of its implicit claim to historical truth, more often than not such art is lessened by sentimentalism. Two of the most celebrated examples of this continuing revisionist literary history are Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981), which deals with the mistreatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War—their forced evacuation from Canada's West Coast, their internment, the confiscation of their property, and for some their deportation—and Rudy Wiebe's representative short story. “Where is the Voice Coming From?” (1982), which works as do his big novels of various indigenous people's histories of victimization.

Nora Tunkel. Transcultural Imaginaries: History and Globalization in Contemporary Canadian Literature

Nora Tunkel. Transcultural Imaginaries: History and Globalization in Contemporary Canadian Literature

The Chronotope of the Threshold in Contemporary Canadian Literature for Young Adults

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

The Sea Stacks Project: Enhancing the Use of Regional Literature in Atlantic Canadian Schools

Research over the past two decades has amply demonstrated the importance of literature to the formation of both regional and national cultural identity, particularly in the face of mass market globalization of children’s book publishing in the 21st century as well as the predominance of non-Canadian content from television, movies, books, magazines and internet media. However, Canadian children appear to have only very limited exposure to Canadian authors and illustrators. In Atlantic Canada, regional Atlantic Canadian authors and illustrators for children receive very limited critical attention, and resources for the study and teaching of Atlantic Canadian children’s literature are few. Print and digital information sources on regional children’s books, publishing, authors and illustrators are scattered and inconsistent in quality and currency. This research project directly addresses these key concerns by summarizing the findings of a survey of Atlantic Canadian teachers on their use of regional books. In response to survey findings, the paper concludes by describing the creation of the Sea Stacks Project an authoritative web-delivered information resource devoted to contemporary Atlantic Canadian literature for children and teens.

The Chronotope of the Threshold in Contemporary Canadian Literature for Young Adults

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4.2 (2012) Maksimowska, Aga. Giant. St. John’s: Pedlar, 2012. 226 pp. $20.00 pb. ISBN 978-1897141472. Print. Snyder, Carrie. The Juliet Stories. Toronto: Anansi, 2012. 304 pp. $22.95 pb. ISBN 978-1770890022. Print. Stevenson, Robin. Inferno. Victoria: Orca, 2009. 240 pp. $12.95 pb. ISBN 978-1554690770. Print. Walton, Jo. Among Others. New York: Tor, 2011. 302 pp. $24.99 hc. ISBN 978-0-7653-2153-4. Print.

Troubling tricksters: revisioning critical conversations

Troubling tricksters: revisioning critical conversations

Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces in Canadian Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces in Canadian Literature Laura Moss (bio) Chelva Kanaganayakam, editor. Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces in Canadian Literature. TSAR. 204. $24.95 ‘The fact that official policy must, by simplifying issues, construct or reconstruct binaries is why every culture needs literature.’ Donna Bennett’s argument about the vital role literature plays in countering the limitations of both cultural policy and binary thinking provides a fitting epigraph for much of the work collected by Chelva Kanaganayakam in Moveable Margins, eleven essays that seek to re-examine shifting spaces in contemporary Canadian literature. Now, [End Page 415] in the middle of the ‘culture wars’ in Canada, the book is nothing short of vital reading. While in recent days some cultural commentators have focused on the economic benefits to the nation of a vibrant arts community, others have concentrated on the devastating effects funding cuts to arts programs will have on expanding views of Canadian culture. If arts and culture programs are at stake, so too is the complexity of creative engagements with culture embedded in literature that Bennett alludes to above. As Margaret Atwood said in the 25 September 2008 Globe and Mail, ‘[T]o be creative is, in fact, Canadian.’ The essays in this collection situate such Canadian creativity in an extraordinary range of spaces that necessarily emphasize the fluidity of cultural production in Canada today. The project of this book is to locate Canadian literature beyond the limitations invoked by the tired and out-of-date oppositional framework of mainstream and marginal writing that underwrote discussions of Canadian literature for years. Kanaganayakam claims that ‘whatever margins that were established over a period of time have shifted in multiple ways over the last several decades as the corpus of Canadian literature insisted on being redefined and reformulated.’ It seems that a recognizable centre has been replaced by constantly moving margins. Although acknowledging the range of responses to ‘margins’ in the book, Kanaganayakam also points to a commonality in the ways that the authors engage ‘the functions of community and space in relation to changing perceptions of boundaries.’ With the concentration on space, place, and community, these essays provide much-needed grounding to the soul searching that has accompanied many of the political discussions in recent days. As if to signal the groundedness of the essays, most of the authors draw on the spatial metaphor – sometimes linking it to existential and genealogical metaphors, as Cynthia Sugars does in her discussion of the imperfect search for post-colonial ancestors, and sometimes locating it on a chronological plane or in gendered terms, as Diana Brydon and Jessica Schagerl do in looking at globalism and empire. Thinking about space and landscape, either in terms of proximity or distance, allows the authors variously to approach the work of writers that span the spectrum of contemporary Canadian literature (in genre preferences, regional affiliation, and ethnic heritage), writers including Dionne Brand, Warren Cariou, Wayson Choy, Rienzi Crusz, Chief Dan George, Thomas King, Larissa Lai, sky Lee, Yann Martel, Michael Ondaatje, Al Pittman, M.G. Vassanji, and Fred Wah, to name some of those whose work is treated in detail. Beside the enduring focus on landscape and place, the fact that many of the contributors to this book have also contributed to discussions of post-colonialism and globalization in Canada is evident in a recurrence of interest in issues of belonging, home, community, and audience in [End Page 416] Canada and in the world. Post-colonial readings abound in this book. John Ball’s exploration of Douglas Glover’s Elle and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as Canadian Crusoes significantly updates decades of ongoing work on writing, back to canonical texts. Paolo Horta’s close reading of cosmopolitanism in Ondaatje’s The English Patient also engages with extant discussions of the same topic. The essays in this book do not all take a pan-Canadian approach to the literature produced in Canada. George Elliott Clarke’s call for a specific pedagogy of African-Canadian literature, Daniel Heath Justice’s work on affirming the sovereignty of Indigenous national literatures, Stephanie McKenzie’s writing about the overlaps between national identifications in Aboriginal poetry and...

Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms : cultural difference, visibility and the Canadian tradition

This essay focuses on the role of visual codes to construct cultural identities within a national framework in contemporary Canadian literature and culture, and analyses the novel Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto (1994) as an interesting study of such strategies of identitary formation in Canada. Clearly springing from the Asian Canadian rapidly growing field of writing, the novel sets itself to break institutional expectations in a number of ways. First, it exposes the asymmetries in the conditions of production of cultural identities in Canada and denounces the power of the codes of visibility in the production of cultural difference. Second, it recognizes, appropriates and reverses the functioning of cultural stereotypes, unveiling in the process their arbitrary nature. Third, it inscribes itself right into the Canadian tradition, putting into question the awkward division between mainstream and minority literature in Canada. This is done by means of a double move consisting of writing explicitly within the field of Asian Canadian tradition, specially because of its intertextual engagement with the multiaward-winning novel Obasan, by Joy Kogawa (1983), while entering and appropriating, at the same time, the texts of Canadian regionalism, specifically prairie fiction, as well as the larger national contexts of literature.