Fugitive Pieces Research Articles

Fugitive pieces

Fugitive pieces

“Words are Things”: Byron’s Fugitive Pieces

Conspicuously little critical attention has been devoted to Byron’s earliest publication, less even to his first collection, Fugitive Pieces (1806), a little book of poems—‘trifles’, as he calls them—written in his teenage years and meant only to be circulated privately among friends. Even for those critics who do not dismiss Fugitive Pieces as simply puerile, the consensus that ‘it did not as yet embody his final thoughts’ (Cochran) leads to the conclusion that Byron’s first books are unmistakeably personal works (McGann), that is to say, works that express a mental interiority in its infancy. While this is doubtlessly true, the material and linguistic dimensions of Byron’s early poetic experiments are at risk of being lost in an overtly biographical reading. ‘Words are things’, says Byron at various points across his oeuvre. Rather than positing Byron’s juvenilia as expressive of a certain character, a stage in his personal development, I want to trace a certain continuity of ideas, specifically regarding the (still embryonic) relationship between thinghood and the word.

Of the Body

Anne Michaels, of Jewish heritage, is most recognized for her critically acclaimed Holocaust novel, Fugitive Pieces, the subject of substantial scholarship. Less is written about her latest works of poetry and lyric prose, Correspondences: A Poem and Portraits (2013), All We Saw (2017), and Infinite Gradation (2017). Returning to themes of time, death, the sanctity of life, and love that animate and vitalize her literary corpus, she gathers intellectual, scientific, artistic, and moral influences, drawing – and drawing upon – a lineage, not genetic, but of consciousness. Just as memory honours lineage, the lives and works of others inform one’s being in the world as descendant. As Michaels’s work attests, memory and consciousness are of the body. And, while, in her view, “not religious,” the body is not only the site of a pragmatic faith – the will to carry on from loss, but the body is a limit and threshold – and threshold opens the gates of the mysteries beyond.

Echo in <i>The Winter Vault</i>

The intertextuality of Anne Michaels’s The Winter Vault may be found not only in recurrent themes and images from her earlier novel, Fugitive Pieces, and her poetry, but also in the inclusion of other writers in her novel. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism, chronotopes, polyphony, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque; John Hollander’s study of echo and transumption; and Douglas Hofstadter’s notion of “strange loops” – all offer means of understanding Michaels’s allusions and structure in her novel. They also shed light on how her writing remembers historical trauma and eventually finds redemption through language, love, and empathy. The central characters in The Winter Vault witness the devastation of Nubian villages along the Nile and Canadian villages along the St. Lawrence River. By listening closely to echoes and stories of past destruction, these characters find solace in recreating the Canadian landscape. The intertwining of characters, histories, and landscapes returns to the origins of civilization to emerge in forms of healing and post-traumatic redemption.

Creating a Community of Witnesses: Acts of Reading in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces

This article considers the reading effects of the mise en abyme in Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces to create a community of witnesses among readers. The novel’s multi-voicedness, created through a series of narratees and narrators, models complex identifications of the author, narrators, and reader. Through the figure of the reader presented by the narratees Bella, Michaela, and Naomi, as well as the narrators Athos, Jakob, and Ben, Michaels engages us in acts of reading and interpreting the ongoing effects of the Holocaust. She offers a prime example of not the eyewitness but the reader as witness in recent Canadian fiction.Cet article examine les effets de lecture de la mise en abyme dans Fugitive Pieces d’Anne Michaels pour créer une communauté de lecteurs en tant que témoins. Le caractère multivoix du roman, créé par une série de narrataires et de narrateurs, modélise les identifications complexes de l’auteur, des narrateurs et du lecteur. À travers la figure du lecteur représentée par les narrataires Bella, Michaela et Naomi, ainsi que par les narrateurs Athos, Jakob et Ben, Michaels nous engage dans des actes de lecture et d’interprétation des effets continus de l’Holocauste. Elle offre un excellent exemple non pas du témoinoculaire, mais du lecteur en tant que témoin dans la fiction canadienne récente.

“His Notebook Grew Orchids and Weeds”: Language, Burial, and Recovery in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces

Through the critical lens of trauma theory, this article explores Anne Michaels’s recurrent imagery of archaeological and geological excavations; burial, drowning, and uncovering; and the inconsistencies, repetitions, and ruptures in language and memory prevalent in Holocaust narratives. By focusing on the image of the buried journal as a kind of grave and unearthing its layered narratives, this article argues for Fugitive Pieces as an excavation of language and memory, and that it functions as a unique type of Holocaust narrative that seeks healing through reinterpreted ideas of place, geography, the body, absence, and displacement.À travers le prisme critique de la théorie du traumatisme, cet article explore l’imagerie récurrente d’Anne Michaels des fouilles archéologiques et géologiques, de l’enfouissement, de la noyade et de la mise au jour, ainsi que les incohérences, les répétitions et les ruptures dans le langage et la mémoire qui prévalent dans les récits de l’Holocauste. En se concentrant sur l’image du journal enterré comme une sorte de tombe et en déterrant ses récits superposés, cet article soutient que Fugitive Pieces est une excavation du langage et de la mémoire, et qu’il fonctionne comme un type unique de récit de l’Holocauste qui cherche à guérir à travers des idées

Liminality and Palimpsest in Anne Michaels’sThe Winter Vault

AbstractAnne Michaels’s first novel, Fugitive Pieces, garnered numerous awards and produced much scholarly discussion. The Winter Vault followed thirteen years later, but has received little critical attention. This novel traverses the spaces of the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the reconstruction of the Old Town of Warsaw. Time bubbles up through these layered landscapes, evidencing markers and minutiae of masses of human lives, as modern-day engineering feats are in the process of obliterating them. The plot of The Winter Vault spirals through palimpsests of not only place, but also time as it bubbles up in the present—carried along great rivers in Canada, Egypt, and Poland: the St. Lawrence, the Nile, the Vistula. In The Winter Vault Michaels’s evocative prose writing style continues to create an oneiric tone through which well-defined characters are forced by events across a threshold into hidden recesses of their own being. For the central characters in The Winter Vault, the painful rawness of the confusing and discombobulated liminal space in which they find themselves the wake of loss resonates through place, evincing palimpsests of lives and experiences of others across time. It is, perhaps, the interwovenness of human life and the ability to connect with the suffering of others that is the catalyst for Avery and Jean to connect to the suffering within themselves.

أنشطة المرأة الريفية المعززة للأمن الغذائي الأسري: بعض قرى محافظة سوهاج نموذجاً

قد أجريت هذه الدراسة كمحاولة للتعرف علي أنشطة المرأة الريفية في تحقيق الأمن الغذائي الأسري، ومعوقات ذلك، ومقترحات المواجهة، ثم إقتراح برنامج إرشادي لتدريب الريفيات المبحوثات علي إعداد غذاء صحي متوازن والمحافظة علي سلامة الغذاء. وأجرى البحث بمحافظة سوهاج والتي تحتل المركز الثاني على مستوى الجمهورية من حيث عدد الفقراء ممن لا يستطيعون الوفاء باحتياجاتهم الضرورية من الغذاء، حيث بلغ معدل الفقر بها 60% من إجمالي سكان المحافظة (الجهاز المركزي للتعبئة العامة والإحصاء لعام 2017/2018). ووفقاً لنفس المعيار تم اختيار ثلاثة مراكز هي: (جرجا، والمنشأة، وسوهاج )، ثم اختيار قرية واحدة من كل مركز فكانت قري البربا، والزوك الشرقية، ورافع القصير علي الترتيب، وتم حصر عدد الحائزين لأراضي زراعية بالقرى الثلاث فبلغ 1124 حائز بقرية البربا، و1115 حائز بقرية الزوك الشرقية، و1581 حائز بقرية رافع القصير، وكانت شاملة البحث زوجات الحائزين والتي بلغت 3820 وبلغ حجم العينة طبقاً لمعادلة كريجسي ومورجان 338 مبحوثة، تم توزيعها علي القري الثلاث تبعاً لنسبة تمثيل كل قرية في شاملة البحث وكانت بقرية البربا 100 مبحوثة، ومن قرية الزوك الشرقية 98 مبحوثة، 140 مبحوثة بقرية رافع القصير. وتم جمع البيانات خلال شهري مارس وإبريل عام 2020م من المبحوثات زوجات الحائزين علي أن تكون هي المسئولة عن إدارة شئون أسرتها غذائياً وبلغ عدد الاستمارات المستوفاة 320 استمارة. وتم استخدام التكرارات والنسب المئوية والمتوسط الحسابي لعرض البيانات. وكانت أبرز النتائج: أقتصرت معارف الريفيات المبحوثات لمفهوم الأمن الغذائي علي توفر القدرة المالية، ثم توفر الغذاء بالسوق، يليه سلامة الغذاء وخلوه من الملوثات وأخيراً مناسبته للمجهود، أما مدي مناسبة الغذاء للحالة الصحية لأفراد الأسرة، والمرحلة العمرية والنوع (ذكر/ أنثي) فكانت نسب معارف الريفيات المبحوثات في كل منها منخفض، قيام نسبة كبيرة من الريفيات المبحوثات بالعديد من الأنشطة لإنتاج غذاء للأسرة بكميات تحقق الاكتفاء الذاتي والذي قد يرجع إلي امتلاك الغالبية لحيازة زراعية ( فدان علي الأقل) بالإضافة إلي حيازة نصف الريفيات المبحوثات حيازة حيوانية من الجاموس مما يساعد في القيام بهذه الأنشطة. غالبية الريفيات المبحوثات يقمن بتخزين كلاً من البصل والثوم والقمح والذرة. إلا أن نسبة من تقمن بتخزين البطاطس والبقوليات والأرز منخفضة. ارتفاع نسبة الريفيات المبحوثات ممن يقمن بالصناعات الغذائية المنزلية وللاستهلاك المنزلي. إلا أن نسبة أقل تقوم بذلك لغرض البيع. وفي حالة عدم القيام بالتصنيع الغذائي المنزلي فإن البديل لتوفيرها هو الشراء جاهز. غالبية الريفيات المبحوثات (87,5%) مستوي ممارستهن لأنشطة إعداد غذاء صحي متوازن للأسرة بين المنخفض والمتوسط. غالبية الريفيات المبحوثات (84,1%) مستوي ممارستهن لأنشطة الحفاظ علي سلامة الغذاء بين المنخفض والمتوسط. وأهم المعوقات التي تواجه الريفيات المبحوثات في تحقيق الأمن الغذائي الأسري تتركز على الأسباب المادية مثل ارتفاع الأسعار وانخفاض الدخول، والأسباب الرقابية على الأسواق ومدخلات الإنتاج. وأهم مقترحات الريفيات المبحوثات لتحقيق الأمن الغذائي الأسري تركزت علي زيادة دخل الأسرة وتنوعها، مع تشديد الرقابة بالأسواق والأسعار، والتوعية الإرشادية بطرق الحفاظ على سلامة الغذاء. وتوصلت الدراسة لمجموعة من التوصيات بناءاً علي النتائج.

Buried within Sites And Sediments: The Relationship of Memory And Place in Georges Perec's W Or The Memory of Childhood And Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces

This paper illustrates the ways Georges Perec's W or the Memory of Childhood and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces unravel the implicit links between place and memory. As Perec portrays the biography of a character whose childhood memories are distorted by the catastrophe of Holocaust, Michaels; on the other hand, depicts the experience of the lack of memory of the survivors of Holocaust extended to the next generations. In their narratives, both writers attempt to unfold the essence of the unfolding relationship between memory and place and the ways it contributes to the main characters' pasts, and thus, to their identities. By relying on a number of theoretical frames related to memory studies such as Nicola King (2000) and Simon Schama (1996), the paper argues that the protagonists of the selected novels come to a better understanding of themselves, relying on several places and sites in reconstructing their memories. This research investigates the relationship between memory and place to elaborate on the key roles of the place in conceiving and revealing the buried memories in the two novels

The Midrashic Impulse

The Midrashic Impulse

Extra-Illustration and Ephemera

In “A Friendly Gathering: The Social Politics of Presentation Books and their Extra-Illustration in Horace Walpole’s Circle,” Lucy Peltz plays with the technical and metaphorical senses of “gathering” to reflect on the materiality and sociability of altered books in the Strawberry Hill set. The practice of extra-illustration consisted in unbinding the book, cutting loose the gatherings of leaves that make up its quires, in order to interleave them with additional pages, or to inlay each page into windows cut through larger sized paper. The process is captured in Walpole’s correspondence: “Mr Bull is honouring me, at least my Anecdotes of Painting, exceedingly. He has let every page into a pompous sheet, and is adding every print of portrait, building, etc., that I mention and that he can get, and specimens of all our engravers. It will make eight magnificent folios, and be a most valuable body of our arts.” Specimens collected and collated with the text anchor, document, and illustrate the words on the page. As a result, an identical multiple in a print run was turned into a unique object. Through the art of extraillustration, the extra-illustrator Richard Bull “erected for himself a monument of taste.” In its monumentalizing aims and dimensions, extra-illustration could be considered an antidote against ephemera, yet transience is inherent in its attempt to document the text with reproductions that might be dispersed. The concept runs the gamut, from Walpole’s paratexts—his title Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose (1758), which he presents as “trifles” and “idlenesses”—to his supposedly “diminutive” house, which he called “a paper Fabric and an assemblage of curious Trifles, made by an insignificant Man.” In this essay, I will read the practice of extra-illustration against the grain to recuperate the ephemeral side of “the pompous sheet,” the composite object unbound from its gatherings, and alternative forms of the page as a detached piece, a scrap, a caption appended to objects in the house. I will focus my discussion on two complementary book collections produced by Richard Bull: his extra-illustrated copy of Walpole’s Description of Strawberry Hill, now at the Lewis Walpole Library, and his curious compilation of occasional publications bound with the title-page A Collection of the Loose Pieces printed at Strawberry-Hill, and the alternative title Detached Pieces Printed at Strawberry Hill, now at the Huntington Library.

Fugitive Pieces: Walpole, Byron, and Queer Time

In their earliest works, Horace Walpole (Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose, 1758) and Lord Byron (Fugitive Pieces, 1806) built a queer temporality of fugitive time out of the occasional pieces and sporadic readers that Samuel Johnson first theorized in The Harleian Miscellany. These juvenile poets aligned several forms of fugitive print—loose scraps, detached fragments, burned books, and encoded secrets—and fugitive figures—political exiles, queer aristocrats, runaway slaves, and amateur poets (often themselves). Walpole and Byron redeem both carefree and imperiled fugitive lives by engaging two antithetical discourses of disappearance: languid, idle ease, and sudden, active flight. This discontinuous eighteenth-century poetics becomes increasingly racially coded as it crosses the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. Fugitive pieces linked Old World flights of fancy and New World runaway slave advertisements, collected works and secure colonial property, and literary selections and sugar cane extracts. In their surprising affirmations of an intermittent, occasional time that allies irregular idlers, miscellaneous fugitives, asylums for poetic pieces, and abolitionist accounts of disabled bodies, juvenile poets moved beyond their era’s straight narrative of imperial progress.

Spatial distribution of Cr-bearing species on the corroded tube surface characterised by synchrotron X-ray fluorescence (SXRF) mapping and micro-XANES: exposure of tubes in oxy-firing flue gas

Synchrotron X-ray fluorescence mapping and micro-XANES were employed to characterize the spatial distribution of individual elements and the speciation of Cr on the cross section of various tubes that were exposed to oxy-fuel flue gas at 650 °C, 1 bar for 50 h. The gas composition tested is close to the flue gas produced from oxy-firing of low-rank coal in pilot-scale tests. Multi-layered scales with an uneven distribution were observed for individual elements on both the top surface and spalled layer of carbon steel SS400. Oxidation is the major reaction causing the scaling of the tube, whereas the other reactions such as sulphidation and chlorination led to the buckling of tube surface. The use of Cr, even at a low concentration of 1.2 wt% in 12Cr1MoVG, is essential and can considerably reduce the tube corrosion rate, as well as minimize the difference between oxy-fuel and air-firing flue gases on the tube mass loss rate. The CO2 cycle with the involvement of oxidation (mainly of iron) and carburisation (of chromium) took place simultaneously for the Cr-bearing alloy, even under the coexistence of CO2 and a number of oxidizers in the flue gas tested here. The fast diffusion of CO2 and its derivatives facilitated a preferential occurrence of carburisation under the oxide scale. However, upon the closure of gas passage channels in the oxide scale of a high-Cr tube such as austenite SUS304, the reductants CO and carbon can flow back to tube top surface, causing the formation of carbide on the most outer scale that further fragments into fugitive pieces. Carburisation is also the major cause of corrosion of high-Cr tubes. In contrast, for a tube with medium Cr content, such as high-chrome T91 tube with 9 wt% Cr, it undergoes both oxidation and carburisation successively on the metal/oxide interface. The gas passage channels mostly remain open, and hence, the resultant carbide and carbon precipitate penetrated deep inside the tube.

Children Without Childhood: The Emotionality of Orphaned Children and Images of Their Rescuers in Selected Works of English and Canadian Literature

This article deals with literary depictions of social, political, cultural and religious circumstances in which children who have lost one or both parents at birth or at a later age have found themselves. The weakest members of society, the children looked at here are exposed to dangers, exploitation and violence, but are fortunate enough to be rescued by a relative or other sympathetic person acting out of benevolence. Recognizing that the relationship between the orphaned child, who is in mortal danger, and a rescuer, who most frequently appears unexpectedly in a relationship, has been portrayed in narratives throughout the ages and that we can therefore speak of it as being an archetypal one, the article focuses especially on three novels by Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist (1837–1839), David Copperfield (1849–1850) and Great Expectations (1860–1861) – and in Fugitive Pieces (1996) by Canadian writer Anne Michaels. Charles Dickens earned the reputation of a classic writer through his original literary figures of orphaned children in the context of the rough capitalism of the Victorian era of the 19th century. Such originality also distinguishes Anne Michaels, whose novel Fugitive Pieces portrays the utterly traumatic circumstances that a Jewish boy is exposed to after the Germans kill his parents during the Holocaust. All the central children’s lives in these extreme situations are saved by generous people, thus highlighting the central idea of both selected authors: that evil cannot overcome good. Rescuers experience their selfless resolve to save extremely powerless and unprotected child victims of violence from life-threatening situations as a self-evident moral imperative. Through their profound and deeply experienced descriptions of memories of traumas successfully overcome by central literary figures in a spirit of compassion and solidarity, Charles Dickens and Anne Michaels have left testaments of hope against hope for future generations.

Anthropocene Bodies, Geological Time and the Crisis of Natality

In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a ‘crisis of natality’. Engaging with two works of fiction – Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces – the article explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a ‘stratigraphic time’ associated primarily with maternal responsibility – involving a temporal give-and-take that passes between generations and across thresholds in the Earth itself. If this is a construction of inter-corporeality in which each life and every breath has utmost value, it is also a vision that exceeds the biopolitical prioritization of the organismic body – as evidenced in both McCarthy’s and Michaels’ gesturing beyond the bounds of the living to a forceful, sensate and enigmatic cosmos.

The Adventures of Miss Petitfour by A. Michaels

Michaels, Anne. The Adventures of Miss Petitfour, illustrated by Emma Block. Tundra Books, 2015. The winner of numerous awards, Anne Michaels has earned her place among Canada’s most talented wordsmiths. Long a respected Canadian poet, her brilliant debut novel—Fugitive Pieces (1996)—brought her international acclaim. The Adventures of Miss Petitfour is Michaels’ first book for children. Emma Block is a young freelance illustrator who has already established a reputation for delicately feminine and delightfully quirky illustrations. Her work can be seen in children’s books, Hallmark products, and in tableware. This book represents a nearly perfect partnership between the author and the illustrator.Among other things, this is a book about the stories we like to tell and read. The books in the village bookshop near Miss Petitfour’s house are divided into two sections: ho-hum and hum. The former are books in which nothing ever happens, but are “full of interesting facts that would never come in useful” and the latter are adventure books.This charming little book is certainly not ho-hum, but neither does it offer grand adventures. The adventures of the unconventional Miss Petitfour and her sixteen fun-loving cats—all of whom go everywhere with her, quite literally wherever the wind takes them—are adventures of "just the right size—fitting into a single, magical day." These little adventures demonstrate that sometimes “the best things happen” when “things work out differently than you expect.”Young bookworms and aspiring writers will be delighted to find that Michaels offers them a peak behind the curtain, one that reveals some of the key elements in the construction of a story, and explains how these elements function with clarity and wit. For example, in the midst of a major digression in a story about a trip to buy marmalade, we are told that a digression is “when the story wanders off the point and gets lost” and that it can be the best part of a story. Several digressions follow naturally and are clearly marked as such. In another story, we are told that a coincidence “is something that happens at just the right moment,” and that stories use them “to fix up tricky tangles”, following which, coincidentally, the story—about a confetti factory explosion—cleverly and humorously demonstrates the technique several times in rapid succession.The name of the main character—Miss Petitfour—is somewhat unexpected, but the delicate and ornate nature of the French pastry known as a petitfour makes it a suitable metaphor at the heart of a little book that celebrates little everyday adventures, decorative language, and fanciful illustrations in a way that is light and sweet and fun. This book is very highly recommended for children of all ages and is well suited for reading aloud.Highly recommended: four stars out of fourReviewer: Linda QuirkLinda taught courses in Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become a teaching librarian at University of Alberta’s Bruce Peel Special Collections. Her favourite children's book to teach is Hana's Suitcase, not only because Hana's story is so compelling, but because the format of this non-fiction book teaches students of all ages about historical investigation and reveals that it is possible to recover the stories of those who have long been forgotten by history.

Harmattan: A Philosophical Fiction by Michael Jackson (review)

Michael Jackson, Harmattan: A Philosophical Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 192 pp.There is distinctive structure to Michael Jackson's new book, Harmattan. It is reminiscent, in its effectiveness and its appeal, to the Holocaust memoir, Fugitive Pieces (1998), by the Canadian poet Anne Michaels: both are beautifully written books comprised of two unequal parts whose relation is unspecified-and suggestive by virtue of that fact. The explicit concern of both books is the relation between lives despoiled by war and the surface routines that precede and follow violence. Both ponder, too, the relationship between individual lives and the narratives that seem to live through those lives as if possessed of their identities. Jackson writes that it iscurious...the way in which individuals and their stories metamorphose, each borrowing its identity from elsewhere and leaving us perennially uncertain as to whether we are authors of our lives and who is the real author of any story told. (45-46)This quotation comes at the beginning of the second part of Harmattan, whose title invokes West African word for dry, parching wind that takes place at the turn of the year, blowing an obscuring, red, dusty, fog across the land.Jackson describes his book as philosophical fiction. It continues that interrogation, prominent in his recent works (e.g., Jackson 2013a, 2013b, 2013c), of how best to write the movement of contemporary lives- their power and freedom to access the wherewithal that enables their continuing to take meaningful shape-while also writing of the global forces apparently ranged against them. This writing could also be termed cosmopolitan in ethos. Is it not the case, Jackson urges, that their knowledge of the particularities of individual human lives (polis) enables anthropologists to illuminate the general conditions of universal human nature (cosmos)? our disciplinary focus is, or should be, this dialectic: illuminating the connections between human being and being human. In this enterprise, furthermore, the genre of expression-ethnography, fiction, philosophy, folktale, or myth-is less consequential than the author's sensibility.Is it not the case, for instance, that everywhere one discerns a human need to live life on one's (10-11)? Among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, as in Cambridge (England) and Cambridge (Massachusetts), for instance, Jackson has found people working to determine for themselves the order of their lives, and not to feel determined by world they have not created. Amid the contingency and unpredictability, the disintegration and humiliation of lives, people endeavour to inhabit world defined on their terms and in their time. It is the fleshing out of this specific human trait-both capability and liability-that occupies Jackson in both parts of his text and that gives his book sense of unity.The first part of the book is entitled, Limitrophes, Latin-Greek composite term suggesting sustaining frontier. This concept of fecund borderland pertains to the process by which human beings hope to effect personal and social order in their lives. Jackson adapts the term to:describe ethnographically and autobiographically, the life-giving potential of places, people, and powers [-also states of mind and genres of expression-] that lie beyond the pale of our established lifeworlds and to show that existential vitality depends on going beyond what has been prescribed by custom, internalized as habit, or enshrined in received ideas of truth and reality. (6)In order to live on their terms-to come into their own (4)-people everywhere move beyond the given world of culture, routine, and convention, of conformity, normativity, and traditionalism. The road of excess they find often gives way to a palace of wisdom (5).Among the Kuranko, this limitrophic insight expresses itself as the perceived necessary and complementary relationship between the myths that support the status quo and the folktales that explore fantastic possibilities. …

The Geography of Memory: Haunting and Haunted Landscapes in Contemporary Canadian Jewish Writing

ABSTRACT The refrain “Every moment is two moments” in Anne Michaels’s 1997 novel Fugitive Pieces, an exploration of traumatized memory and post-memory, could serve as a leitmotif pointing to the complexity of memory and witnessing in contemporary Jewish Canadian fiction. In the memory novels of Michaels, Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault (2009), and of Nancy Richler, Your Mouth Is Lovely (2001) and The Imposter Bride (2012), every moment is not so much two but multiple moments. These works unravel, reconstruct, and unravel again relationships among space, time, memory, and identity. The vexed and elusive nature of memory and its effects is concretized in disappeared or fragmented landscapes that haunt the characters: bogs and buried geographic features in Fugitive Pieces, cities emptied and flooded by the creation of dams in The Winter Vault, marshes and icescapes in Your Mouth Is Lovely, and bits of rock in The Imposter Bride. This essay explores the shifting chronotopes of memory through the depiction of haunted and haunting landscapes, and the overlay of memoryscapes with contemporary Canadian cityscapes.

Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity

Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity

Corporate Ties: Arthur Mervyn ’s Serial Economics

Corporate TiesArthur Mervyn’s Serial Economics Kristina Garvin (bio) In July 1798, an editorial note to correspondents appeared in the pages of Philadelphia’s Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence. Announcing that the serial publication of Arthur Mervyn had to be suspended, the editor took great pains to explain the delay: “The distance at which some of our Correspondents reside, or their indisposition, necessarily subjects us to the hazard of a pause in publication. This is the only excuse we have to offer for a temporary suspension of Arthur Mervyn” (“To Correspondents”). Weeks later, the Weekly Magazine and Arthur Mervyn suffered an even greater setback: yellow fever took the editor’s life, thereby causing the magazine to be suspended indefinitely. The serialization of Arthur Mervyn was never again resumed in magazine form, though Charles Brockden Brown continued his vision of the novel as a serialized work by issuing the book in two separate volumes in 1799 and 1800. These events illuminate a crucial aspect of serial publication: it was a risky venture for writers and readers alike. In early national magazines, there were no guarantees that serially published stories or novels would ever see completion. When the Weekly Magazine’s editor speaks of the “hazard” of disrupting readers’ expectations, he references the precarious nature of magazine writing, which could be disrupted by financial problems, shifting politics, geographical distances, or even natural disaster. Like Arthur Mervyn, many serialized fictional narratives were delayed or abandoned. Authors and editors were acutely aware that if they failed to generate interest in their work—or if they experienced the kind of setback suffered by the Weekly Magazine—they might not procure enough subscription money to continue publishing. For readers too, serials must have also seemed risky. If reading a novel was like “investing in a speculative venture” (Ingrassia 2), then reading a serialized novel was even more literally speculative, as readers must have wondered not only about the narrative’s [End Page 737] events but also the material terms of its delivery. Serials, more than integrated and completed texts, made transparent a relationship between writers and readers that was both contractual and speculative in ways that were both metaphorical and concrete. They required that writers continually satisfy readers’ desires by delivering textual wares across a period of time, and they demanded that readers make repeated emotional and financial investments by purchasing pieces of stories. This essay explains how Brown used the serial form to offer an economic model that could harness risk, capitalizing on the “hazards” of publication rather than shrinking from their potentially devastating consequences. Though serial publication was risky, its riskiest aspect—the deferral of its conclusion—paradoxically offered Brown a solution: by delaying the answers to the questions that his readers sought, he could secure their long-term investment. Seriality, I argue here, signified for Brown a new type of author-reader relations—one that understood the contract between readers and writers as unfolding over a period of time and without a preordained ending. We might appropriately describe this type of relationship as “corporate.” To understand what I mean by this term, we must recall that the “corporation” is a fairly modern invention—an “artificial being” as Supreme Court justice John Marshall would later write—that functioned as a “person” under the law, enabling individuals to form financial relationships that transcended the limits of the human life span.1 Crucially, the corporation allowed businesses to extend credit and pool risk, insulating individuals from the consequences of market fluctuations. After the Revolution, corporations became a tool for safeguarding economic development, and the unprecedented 317 new corporations that sprang up in the 1780s and 1790s evinced the need to establish financial mastery of the future.2 Corporatism heralded the advent of a marketplace that would be managed not by embodied individuals but by impersonal conglomerates. Arthur Mervyn intervenes in this emerging reality, offering a model of capital relations that displaces immediate fulfillment in favor of continued deferral. As a self-consciously serialized novel that calls attention to itself as open-ended, it is also a metaserial: Mervyn himself acts as a serialist, trading stories for a kind of metaphoric...