Pub Date : 2020-11-12DOI: 10.14288/CL.VI241.191949
Kristina Getz
Amidst the theoretical and discursive landscape of 1970s liberationist feminism, Alice Munro published her 1978 short-story cycle, Who Do You Think You Are? The seventh story in the collection, “Providence,” remains one of the earliest examples of Canadian prose which explicitly explores the conflicts inherent to women’s experiences of feminist liberation and motherhood, and is among Munro's least critically explored stories. “Providence” captures the tenuous and exquisite experience of single-mothering a young child, its difficulties and sacrifices, and the equally painful and (still) unspeakable choice to leave one’s maternal role behind. Munro's central protagonist ultimately chooses feminist liberation over motherhood, unable to reconcile her desire for personal autonomy and freedom from the patriarchal family with her daughter’s need to be mothered.
{"title":"Alice Munro’s “Providence,” Second-Wave Feminism, and the (Im)possibilities of Reconciling Motherhood and Liberation","authors":"Kristina Getz","doi":"10.14288/CL.VI241.191949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14288/CL.VI241.191949","url":null,"abstract":"Amidst the theoretical and discursive landscape of 1970s liberationist feminism, Alice Munro published her 1978 short-story cycle, Who Do You Think You Are? The seventh story in the collection, “Providence,” remains one of the earliest examples of Canadian prose which explicitly explores the conflicts inherent to women’s experiences of feminist liberation and motherhood, and is among Munro's least critically explored stories. “Providence” captures the tenuous and exquisite experience of single-mothering a young child, its difficulties and sacrifices, and the equally painful and (still) unspeakable choice to leave one’s maternal role behind. Munro's central protagonist ultimately chooses feminist liberation over motherhood, unable to reconcile her desire for personal autonomy and freedom from the patriarchal family with her daughter’s need to be mothered.","PeriodicalId":44701,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43339625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-12DOI: 10.14288/CL.VI241.191621
Helena Van Praet
This essay explores how Anne Carson’s Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005) engages with the notion of authorship by reappropriating critical voices and rewriting central ideas. It accordingly takes Carson’s alleged name-dropping as a starting point to argue that Decreation is a project of re-engagement that is underpinned by synthetic disjunctions of competing viewpoints. To this end, Carson relies on the principle of intratextuality, which instils a blurring of the speaker’s identity in the reader, while her use of echoes ingrains the notion of decreation in the reader's mind. Since both aesthetic strategies hinge on the principles of creative reproduction and recognition, they are capable of evoking a sense of iteration. In this way, Carson’s collection instigates a critical re-evaluation of the notion of agency in literary production while still providing the reader with an—albeit paradoxical—centre of conceptual gravity, which is therefore better conceptualized as a network of relations.
{"title":"Writer’s Writer Revisits Authorship: Iteration in Anne Carson’s Decreation","authors":"Helena Van Praet","doi":"10.14288/CL.VI241.191621","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14288/CL.VI241.191621","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores how Anne Carson’s Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005) engages with the notion of authorship by reappropriating critical voices and rewriting central ideas. It accordingly takes Carson’s alleged name-dropping as a starting point to argue that Decreation is a project of re-engagement that is underpinned by synthetic disjunctions of competing viewpoints. To this end, Carson relies on the principle of intratextuality, which instils a blurring of the speaker’s identity in the reader, while her use of echoes ingrains the notion of decreation in the reader's mind. Since both aesthetic strategies hinge on the principles of creative reproduction and recognition, they are capable of evoking a sense of iteration. In this way, Carson’s collection instigates a critical re-evaluation of the notion of agency in literary production while still providing the reader with an—albeit paradoxical—centre of conceptual gravity, which is therefore better conceptualized as a network of relations.","PeriodicalId":44701,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48244551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-12DOI: 10.14288/CL.VI241.192427
Bronwyn Malloy
On his most recent solo album, Winter Wheat (2016), Winnipeg singer-songwriter John K Samson lingers in the liminal space between despair and hope, locating a fragile fecundity in the dormant growing season evoked by the album's title Winter Wheat voices a series of missed connections, unfinished stories, and interrupted conversations that cycle through many registers of despair before partially resolving into the tenuous hope that, as Samson writes in the title track (borrowing from Miriam Toews' novel A Complicated Kindness), "this world is good enough, because it has to be" Rather than advocating for complacency, Samson's songs perform a painful recounting of the past in order to imagine the troubled present as a time of tentative potential: though the world is not and has not been "good enough" as it is, still, to quote the title track, we must "salute the ways we tried, [and] find a way to rise" ("Winter Wheat") Though we may not know exactly "what survival means" ("Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist," Fallow), to use the words of artist Jenny Holzer that Samson quotes in Winter Wheat's album liner epigraph, listening to, for, and with weak hope in Winter Wheat might model some collaborative "way[s] to survive" Many narrators on Winter Wheat struggle with a central agon that feels very contemporary: when action is likely futile, should we act anyway? According to Samson, the band's name emerged from "a few places" (see Todd)
{"title":"\"T uned every ear towards a tiny lengthening of light\": Listening for Weak Hope in John K. Samson's Winter Wheat","authors":"Bronwyn Malloy","doi":"10.14288/CL.VI241.192427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14288/CL.VI241.192427","url":null,"abstract":"On his most recent solo album, Winter Wheat (2016), Winnipeg singer-songwriter John K Samson lingers in the liminal space between despair and hope, locating a fragile fecundity in the dormant growing season evoked by the album's title Winter Wheat voices a series of missed connections, unfinished stories, and interrupted conversations that cycle through many registers of despair before partially resolving into the tenuous hope that, as Samson writes in the title track (borrowing from Miriam Toews' novel A Complicated Kindness), \"this world is good enough, because it has to be\" Rather than advocating for complacency, Samson's songs perform a painful recounting of the past in order to imagine the troubled present as a time of tentative potential: though the world is not and has not been \"good enough\" as it is, still, to quote the title track, we must \"salute the ways we tried, [and] find a way to rise\" (\"Winter Wheat\") Though we may not know exactly \"what survival means\" (\"Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist,\" Fallow), to use the words of artist Jenny Holzer that Samson quotes in Winter Wheat's album liner epigraph, listening to, for, and with weak hope in Winter Wheat might model some collaborative \"way[s] to survive\" Many narrators on Winter Wheat struggle with a central agon that feels very contemporary: when action is likely futile, should we act anyway? According to Samson, the band's name emerged from \"a few places\" (see Todd)","PeriodicalId":44701,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44793602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-12DOI: 10.14288/CL.VI241.192425
R. J. Cox
{"title":"\"waist-deep in the criss-cross river of shadows\"","authors":"R. J. Cox","doi":"10.14288/CL.VI241.192425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14288/CL.VI241.192425","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44701,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48861407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}