The Literary History of Alberta Volume Two

The Literary History of Alberta Volume Two PDF Author: George Melnyk
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 9780888643247
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book

Book Description
In this, the companion to the landmark volume The Literary History of Alberta, Volume One: From Writing-on-Stone to World War Two, George Melnyk examines Alberta literature in the second half of the twentieth century. At last, Melnyk argues, Alberta writers have found their voice—and their accomplishments have been remarkable. The contradictory landscape, the stereotypes of the Indian, the Mountie, and the Cowboy, and the language of the Other, speaking from the margins—these elements all left their impressions on the consciousness of early Alberta. But writers in the last few decades have turned this inheritance to their advantage, to create compelling stories about this place and its people. Today, Melnyk discovers, Alberta writers can appreciate not only this achievement, but also its essential source: the symbolic communication of Writing-on-Stone. The Literary History of Alberta, Volume Two extends the study of Alberta's cultural history to the present day. It is a vital text for anyone interested in Alberta's vibrant literary culture.

The Literary History of Alberta Volume Two

The Literary History of Alberta Volume Two PDF Author: George Melnyk
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 9780888643247
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book

Book Description
In this, the companion to the landmark volume The Literary History of Alberta, Volume One: From Writing-on-Stone to World War Two, George Melnyk examines Alberta literature in the second half of the twentieth century. At last, Melnyk argues, Alberta writers have found their voice—and their accomplishments have been remarkable. The contradictory landscape, the stereotypes of the Indian, the Mountie, and the Cowboy, and the language of the Other, speaking from the margins—these elements all left their impressions on the consciousness of early Alberta. But writers in the last few decades have turned this inheritance to their advantage, to create compelling stories about this place and its people. Today, Melnyk discovers, Alberta writers can appreciate not only this achievement, but also its essential source: the symbolic communication of Writing-on-Stone. The Literary History of Alberta, Volume Two extends the study of Alberta's cultural history to the present day. It is a vital text for anyone interested in Alberta's vibrant literary culture.

The Literary History of Alberta: From the end of the war to the end of the century

The Literary History of Alberta: From the end of the war to the end of the century PDF Author: George Melnyk
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Alberta
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description


Will the Real Alberta Please Stand Up?

Will the Real Alberta Please Stand Up? PDF Author: Geo Takach
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 0888647727
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Get Book

Book Description
One little question propels both author and reader on a genre-bending quest to find the elusive essence of a Canadian province built on sturdy stereotypes of oil-spoiled, beef-eating, bible-thumping rednecks devoid of class or culture. Through essay, interview, colourful observation, and whatever other exposé it takes to amplify the hyperbolic absurdity of seeking a simple answer to an incendiary question, Geo Takach spotlights the cultural complexity of this perplexing province. Readers will be delightfully edified after a dizzying romp around Wild Rose Country with Geo and a cast of citizens and celebs (alive and dead).

Leaving Shadows

Leaving Shadows PDF Author: Lisa Grekul
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 9780888644527
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
"On our way home, we stopped in Vegreville for one last look at the Pysanka-and, posing in front of it while my dad pulled out his camera, I wanted to cry. Are we doomed? Click. Is this all we are? Click. How do we drag ourselves out from under the shadow of the giant egg? Click." Conceived in a fervent desire for fresher, sexier images of Ukrainian culture in Canada, and concluding with a new reading of enduring cultural stereotypes, Leaving Shadows is the first Canadian book-length monograph on English Ukrainian writing, with substantive analysis of the writing of Myrna Kostash, Andrew Suknaski, George Ryga, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Vera Lysenko, and Maara Haas.

Bucking Conservatism

Bucking Conservatism PDF Author: Leon Crane Bear
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1771992573
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book

Book Description
With lively, informative contributions by both scholars and activists, Bucking Conservatism highlights the individuals and groups who challenged Alberta’s conservative status quo in the 1960s and 70s. Drawing on archival records, newspaper articles, police reports, and interviews, the contributors examine Alberta’s history through the eyes of Indigenous activists protesting discriminatory legislation and unfulfilled treaty obligations, women and lesbian and gay persons standing up to the heteropatriarchy, student activists seeking to forge a new democracy, and anti-capitalist environmentalists demanding social change. This book uncovers the lasting influence of Alberta’s noncomformists---those who recognized the need for dissent in a province defined by wealth and right-wing politics---and poses thought-provoking questions for contemporary activists.

High River and the Times

High River and the Times PDF Author: Paul Voisey
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 9780888644114
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book

Book Description
Founded in 1905, the High River Times served a community of small town advertisers and an extensive hinterland of ranchers and farmers in southern Alberta. Under the ownership of the Charles Clark family for over 60 years, the Times established itself as the epitome of the rural weekly press in Alberta. Even Joe Clark, the future prime minister, worked for the family business. While historians rely heavily on local newspapers to write about rural and small town life, Paul Voisey has studied the influence of the Times on shaping the community of High River.

Poetics of Naming

Poetics of Naming PDF Author: George Melnyk
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 9780888644091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book

Book Description
The Poetics of Naming is a fascinating blend of postmodern philosophy and mysticism that challenges our conventional view of language. It begins with the narrator’s discussion of a multi-faceted identity based on his name(s). Because this identity is multi-lingual and multi-national, its layering of the self leads to a confrontation with language. The narrator asks what is the relationship between language and truth? The formative power of language is great, but what happens when we become "languageless?" The book becomes an expression of a mystical experience the narrator calls "poesis" in which he stepped outside of language. Expressing this experience of languagelessness through language is the paradox at the core of the book. To achieve a simulation of languageless reality, the author uses a variety of linguistic techniques that uproot meanings, break-up words, and reconstruct terms in novel ways. Through deconstruction the metaphoric structure of language is revealed. This metaphoric structure is itself approached metaphorically so that the reader begins to sense the trap of a linguistic universe from which there is no escape. The book is a literary exercise that simulates the author’s poesis experience for the reader. Eventually the flood of words on the page begins to go out of focus and dissolve as the reader approaches languagelessness. The Poetics of Naming is not for the faint of heart. It challenges its readers to move away from the comfortable universe of ordinary language and its meanings and enter a world where the boundaries crumble like digital illusions and limitlessness appears on the horizon of consciousness. Poesis is frightening, frustrating and liberating.

The Literary History of Alberta Volume One

The Literary History of Alberta Volume One PDF Author: George Melnyk
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 9780888642967
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book

Book Description
Alberta's contradictory landscape has fired the imaginative energies of writers for centuries. The sweep of the plains, the thrust of the Rockies, and the long roll of the woodlands have left vivid impressions on all of Alberta's writers--both those who passed through Alberta in search of other horizons and those who made it their home. The Literary History of Alberta surveys writing in and about Alberta from prehistory to the middle of the twentieth century. It includes profiles of dozens of writers (from the earnestly intended to the truly gifted) and their texts (from the commercial to the arcane). It reminds us of long-forgotten names and faces, figures who quietly--or not so quietly--wrote the books that underpin Alberta's thriving literary culture today. Melnyk also discusses the institutions that have shaped Alberta's literary culture. The Literary History of Alberta is an essential text for any reader interested in the cultural history of western Canada, and a landmark achievement in Alberta's continuing literary history.

Ethical Encounters

Ethical Encounters PDF Author: Janne Korkka
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401209790
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book

Book Description
The problems of knowing and representing the other are acute every time we encounter a text as writers or readers. Ethical Encounters engages with the representation of encounters with alterity in the writings of the Canadian author Rudy Wiebe. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy on the ethics of encountering the other, the book argues that Wiebe’s writings show that the self’s knowledge offers an inadequate basis for ethically valid representations of those encounters. In the search for ethical ways of engaging with alterity, Wiebe’s writings offer new ways of employing silence and the presence of the unknowable as means to explore encounters with alterity. Ethical Encounters shows that dividing Wiebe’s work into two sharply distinct categories of ‘Mennonite’ and ‘First Nations’ writings overlooks important connections between the author’s central works and may seriously hinder the interrogation of narrative engagement with alterity. While such human encounters resonate against ethical strategies of representation, the greatest challenge for the ethics of encounter in Wiebe’s texts arises in encounters with the alterity of space. Ethical Encounters engages with both physical and narrative spaces which are not permanently fixed in landscape or geography, or in human perceptions of place, arguing that the most radical expressions of alterity in Wiebe’s writings emerge in encounters with the spaces of the Canadian North. The study raises questions about the relationship between the self and the other as they concern knowing: what does the self know when it claims to know another person or space? How does the narrating self negotiate the seeming collapse of its own knowledge when it encounters others whose stories cannot be known? Ethical Encounters casts new light not just on Wiebe’s writings but also on how we as authors and readers engage with expressions of alterity which refuse to be transformed into familiar, knowable forms. Janne Korkka is post-doctoral researcher and coordinator of the North American Studies programme in the Department of English, University of Turku, Finland. His main research interests lie in the problems of representing space and encountering alterity in Canadian writing. He is co-editor of Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other: Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation (2008). He teaches Canadian and postcolonial literatures and North American Studies, and publishes mainly on Canadian writing.

Projections of Paradise

Projections of Paradise PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401200335
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
Paradise is commonly imagined as a place of departure or arrival, beginning and closure, permanent inhabitation of which, however much desired, is illusory. This makes it the dream of the traveller, the explorer, the migrant – hence, a trope recurrent in postcolonial writing, which is so centrally concerned with questions of displacement and belonging. Projections of Paradise documents this concern and demonstrates the indebtedness of writers as diverse as Salman Rushdie, Agha Shahid Ali, Cyril Dabydeen, Bernardine Evaristo, Amitav Ghosh, James Goonewardene, Romesh Gunesekera, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Janette Turner Hospital, Penelope Lively, Fatima Mernissi, Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, M.G. Vassanji, and Rudy Wiebe to strikingly similar myths of fulfilment. In writing, directly or indirectly, about the experience of migration, all project paradises as places of origin or destination, as homes left or not yet found, as objects of nostalgic recollection or hopeful anticipation. Yet in locating such places, quite specifically, in Egypt, Zanzibar, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, the Sundarbans, Canada, the Caribbean, Queensland, Morocco, Tuscany, Russia, the Arctic, the USA, and England, they also subvert received fantasies of paradise as a pleasurable land rich with natural beauty. Projections of Paradise explores what happens to these fantasies and what remains of them as postcolonial writings call them into question and expose the often hellish realities from which popular dreams of ideal elsewheres are commonly meant to provide an escape. Contributors: Vera Alexander, Gerd Bayer, Derek Coyle, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Evelyne Hanquart-Turner, Ursula Kluwick, Janne Korkka, Marta Mamet-Michalkiewicz, Sofia Muñoz-Valdieso, Susanne Pichler, Helga Ramsey-Kurz, Ulla Ratheiser, Petra Tournay-Thedotou.