Volume 22, numéro 1, winter 1997

EN :

David Adams Richards's Miramichi trilogy (Nights Below Station Street, Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace, and For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down) resists certain forms of critical reception and ideological appropriation. It presents an opportunity to rethink the assumptions, biases, and missions of liberal pluralism and to reflect on the political effects of canon revision. This essay seeks to reassess both the assumptions of the framework in which Janice Kulyk Keefer, in Under Eastern Eyes (1987), slots Richards's work, and the ways in which his Miramichi trilogy diverges from - and stages resistance to - his critical reception and cononization, raising not just questions of region and cononicity but also of literacy and class.

EN :

Michael Ondaatje's novel is rooted in a body of literature for which the term "romance" was originally used: twelfth- and thirteenth-century retellings of Arthurian legends. The novel contains character and plot elements that are analogous to certain character types of Arthurian romance and to the earliest written narratives of quest for the holy grail. Examining the fisher king, the wasteland and other romance elements in The English Patient enables readers to develop a more critical judgement and interpretation of this (post)modern novel.

FR :

Francine Noël se sert de deux pratiques d'écriture contemporaine pour réécrire l'histoire des femmes au Québec : le récit historiographique postmoderne et celui qui tente, par le biais de la fiction, d'inscrire le passé des femmes dans l'Histoire officielle. Le projet de Maryse, qui est également celui de Francine Noël, vise à raconter une version ouverte et plurielle de l'histoire des Québécoises où le passé n'est pas "notre maître", mais un moyen de reconstituer une culture au féminin, jusqu'à présent refoulée, oubliée.

EN :

George Elliott's The Kissing Man anatomizes a small town, looking at the characters, institutions, and traditions that give a place coherence over time. This essay has a threefold purpose: to direct critical attention to this deserving work, to contextualize The Kissing Man in the continuums of the Canadian short story cycle and magic realism generally, and to offer a close reading of some key stories of the cycle, showing the ways they create symbols and rituals that enable the memories and create the meanings which Elliott envisioned as definitive of life in an unnamed southwestern Ontario small town at the middle of the twentieth century.

EN :

Drawing from Evelyn Hinz's new poetics of life writing, Perz suggests a parallel between auto/biography and drama. Just as a stage director employs stagecraft for the production of a drama, a life writer uses it to shape the way that he or she recreates life experience. Canadian writer Morley Callaghan dabbled in techniques of the stage when writing his memoir That Summer in Paris. In this text, Callaghan creates a narrative persona for his voice that performs the same tasks as a casting director, a lighting designer, and a costume designer.

EN :

Marie Laberge, l'auteur d'une vingtaine de pièces de théâtre et de quatre romans, croit que la mort imprime une certaine urgence à la vie. C'est ce qui l'a motivée à écrire et à continuer d'écrire. Ses pièces de théâtre se déroulent le plus souvent dans une atmosphère où règne la violence et où l'amour est absent. Ses personnages sont saisis dans un moment de cassure ou de blessure, soit un moment où tout peut changer. Elle écrit avant tout pour un public Québécois. C'est ainsi qu'elle anime des personnages dotés de paradoxes et de contradictions qui sont bien de chez nous.

EN :

Tim Lilburn does not think of himself as a writer, but as someone who looks, or someone who engages in various contemplative acts. He uses essays to figure things out, to draw lines from one point to another, something the poem can't do, or would do quite awkwardly. Poetry, however, is necessary to the human condition, because without poetic attention, the world could become too clear, and this is dangerous. His most recent book, Moosewood Sandhills is full of imperatives and references to "necessity". Poetry is a "courteous" way of seeing, but for Lilburn, all writing is truth-telling, a response to the oddness and distance of things.