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This teaching note considers the benefits of including very short stories or "flash fiction" in the (Canadian) literature classroom. Because the genre is relatively new and favors brevity, it can be attractive to students. Teachers can be sure the students will have read the story, or even find the time to have them read entire stories in class. As well, choosing very short works lets us introduce a variety of Canadian authors to our students. We begin by questioning the dominance of context-hunting and theme-searching among young readers, and point out that this mode of reading comes at the expense of an appreciation or serious consideration of form and language. While historical context and themes are of course important to understanding any story, students often privilege the extra-textual over the literary merits of fiction; they are not necessarily reading literature as literature. The latter part of the note zeroes in on classroom experiences we have had while teaching stories by John Gould, Carin Makuz and Douglas Glover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the research conducted on comics and graphic novels in Canada, with a focus on cultural transfers and the challenges faced by creators from diverse backgrounds. It explores the development of Canadian comics in both English and French, as well as the impact of global trends like the globalization of the medium and the popularity of manga. The article also delves into the historical and cultural context of comics in Canada, including the dominance of Caucasian creators and the recent diversification of the industry. The research presented in the article aims to move beyond a binary view of Canadian comics and examine the intersections of culture and transfer within the medium. It emphasizes the importance of collaboration and the exchange of ideas between different linguistic and cultural communities, and highlights the role of translation in facilitating these transfers. The article also discusses the influence of French-Belgian and Japanese comics on the Quebecois comic scene, and covers topics such as translation, distribution, appropriation of superheroes, and the representation of Indigenous and multicultural perspectives in comics. [Extracted from the article]

Domestically produced Canadian superheroes face an uphill climb in their bids to be taken seriously. A domestically produced Canadian comic is one that is authored and published within Canada or within a territory on what is called Canada. Canada's troubled sociopolitical relationships with nationalism, colonialism, federalism, and separatism, merge with notorious Canadian stereotypes—like national inferiority complexes and apology culture—and serve to unnerve and disarm the Canadian superhero. While psychosocial in nature, these feelings, unconsciously nationalized, are rooted in cultural economics where imports from Britain or the United States are perceived to have higher financial and social value. These unsettlements continually prompt Canadian readers to question whether they can—or should—identify with a domestically produced Canadian superhero in le neuvième art. The answer tentatively seems to be yes, but only if they are humbled, satirized, or taken down a peg—knowingly or unknowingly, or only if these heroes are, in some manner, reflectively self-deprecating. Richard Comely's early run on the Captain Canuck franchise, particularly in his promotional pre-Captain Canuck no. 1 paratexts, root the character in deprecation as the hero is mocked and satirized by the citizens of his own comic. This fate is uniquely applied to Canuck while other nationalist and provincial superheroes—such as Pierre Fournier's Les Aventures du Capitaine Kébec (1973) and Mark Allard-Will's and Elaine Will's Saskatch-A-Man (2015)—engage in self-mockery without accidental patronization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a recent issue of the journal Canadian Literature, which focuses on the past, present, and future of Canadian comics. The issue, guest edited by Candida Rifkind and Zachary J.A. Rondinelli, features articles by both veteran and new scholars and is based on a virtual symposium on Canadian comics. The articles cover a range of topics, including the representation of Asian Canadian creators, the writing back of Indigenous, Black, and Jewish comics, and the exploration of Indigenous comic book art. The issue also includes historical and material approaches, such as an examination of Martin Vaughn-James's work and an exploration of censorship in Cold War-era Alberta. The volume concludes with a section on the highlights of the virtual symposium, including a roundtable on the preservation of Canadian comics and interviews with notable Canadian comic book artists. Overall, the issue provides valuable perspectives on the history of Canadian comics and offers new insights for re-envisioning the field. [Extracted from the article]

With a constantly evolving and newly erupting menu of scandals over the period extending from 2015 to the present, a sense of crisis has been instilled in Canadian literature. Whither CanLit? These continually unfolding scandals have pushed some scholars to respond through various attempts at inventory-taking. This article asks: are the kinds of inventory-taking the field is conducting somehow paradoxically deleterious? Is shame as an affect a productive way for processing and healing trauma? Does the current solution to unfolding scandals in the industry of Canadian literature, that of waging shame, actually preclude the resolution of scandal? Does waging shame reinforce the process of trauma itself? Is there some kind of misapprehension of shame as an affect in literary and cultural studies that might be augmented with a more medical understanding of the effects of shame on human beings? In short, what happens when shame becomes a disciplinary identity? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following upon the spurs of Sara Humphreys's I Manifest Destiny 2.0 i (2021) and Christopher Conway and Antoinette Sol's I The Comic Book Western i (2022), both published in the University of Nebraska Press's "Postwestern Horizons" series and both examining global manifestations of the Western in a specific nonliterary medium (video games and comic books, respectively), Joel Deshaye's I The American Western in Canadian Literature i , the latest addition to the University of Calgary Press's "The West" series, moves the critical debate on the Western genre back to literature and takes a "nationalist" approach - in a way. Chapter 4, "From Law to Outlaw: The Second World War, Westerns, and the '40s Pulps", constitutes another highlight of I The American Western in Canadian Literature i . At the same time, Deshaye seeks to trace the development of the Canadian Western, from the fiction of Ralph Connor and H.A. Cody at the beginning of the 20 SP th sp century via 1940s pulp Westerns, postmodern Westerns from the late 1960s through the early 1990s, and First Nations perspectives on the genre from the 1990s through the early 2000s, to the contemporary "resurgence" (347) of the (post-)Western in Canada in the wake of Robert Kroetsch's I The Man from the Creeks i (1998). [Extracted from the article]

This article will show that in Canadian literature, once problematized thematic criticism has retrenched itself as an interpretative thematics cohering under the sign of diversity (racial and sexual), anticolonialism, and anticapitalism. Theoretically guiding my critique are Frank Davey's classic essay "Surviving the Paraphrase" and the early work of Terry Eagleton. My article resends a signal first sent by Russell Brown, who in 2001 argued" that some kind of reassessment of thematics is needed because of the incessant reiterations about the danger of reading for themes," but with a difference. In Canada, thematic criticism that once valorized nation has become an anti-national thematic criticism. By considering a broad-based (albeit necessarily limited) sample of critical work on poetry from an academic journal, a literary journal, and a recent notable text in Canadian literary studies, I identify critical and cultural assumptions that inform casual and institutionally sanctioned professional practices in literary scholarship. Foremost among these assumptions is the incidental nature of poetry itself for the production of antioppression arguments. I argue that the means of this coverage has become a recapitulation of thematic criticism under the sign of a nation-hostile, programmatic, and yet sincere "diversity" that unintentionally limits the cohort it seeks to liberate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archibald MacMechan's regular column in the Montreal Standard entitled "The Dean's Window" (1906–1933) is an important index to educated antimodernist literary values. MacMechan brought his reading of world literature into his appraisals of the Canadian scene, through his groundbreaking work, Headwaters of Canadian Literature(1924). In a 1912 "Dean's Window" column, MacMechan, a published poet, opened with a poem of his own, "The Ballade of Canadian Literature," which anticipated F.R. Scott's "The Canadian Authors Meet"—itself a seminal work of early Canadian modernism. By no means binaries, the degree to which modernism and antimodernism could resemble each other is manifest in MacMechan's and Scott's poems, even though Scott's poem eviscerates the Canadian Authors Association, an organization of which MacMechan was a founding member. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages selected moments in Austin Clarke's literary journey to argue that in spite of his involvement in the development of Canadian literature (CanLit) during the 1960s and 1970s, the Canadian literary establishment continues to pay little critical attention to his contributions. This lack of recognition is specifically evident in recent writings about Canadian literature and the literary figures who spearheaded its development after Canada's Multiculturalism policy of 1971. Canada's becoming officially multicultural required a new narrative of Canada and new literary depictions of Canadians in their national literature, as ethnically diversified but of a single citizenship. I argue that Clarke's legacy as a Black writer should be given more prominence in Canadian institutions because today this legacy is under threat of erasure as the number of Canadian Black voices telling mainstream stories about Black people's experiences is evidently in decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett’s life story in Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novelThe Stone Diaries(1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. “Death,” the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy’s demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, “I’m still in here” (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy’s death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields’s postmodernist gem,The Stone Diaries, and Laurence’s modernist masterpiece,The Stone Angel(1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields’s title clearly references Laurence’s. Two decades after Williams’s insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction and biography and parodying canonical texts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that expressions of national identity in twentiethcentury Euro-Canadian literature often conceive of the nation as existing in both ethnic and ostensibly pluralist, immigration-based models, and that the former is frequently valorized over the latter, resulting in the implicit legitimation of settler colonialism. It does so by examining a few major theorizations of nationalism--constructivism, ethno-symbolism, and ethnonationalism--and suggesting that literary critics' frequent adherence to the constructivism of Benedict Anderson can sometimes obscure the aforementioned dynamic. Finally, this article reads Laura Goodman Salverson's The Viking Heart (1923) as a text that renders in all its contradiction the problem of ethnicity and nation in Canada, arguing that Salverson combines (but does not synthesize) the twin forces of ethnicity and liberal pluralism that make up the Euro-Canadian imagination's split conception of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Karsten Heuer’s 2006 book Being Caribouin light of debates in ecocriticism and border studies about how to define the local in the context of environmental problems of vast range and uncertain temporality. It explores how Heuer’s book about following the Porcupine Caribou herd’s migration engages in multiple forms of boundary crossing—between countries, between hemispheric locations, and between species—and shows how insights from Indigenous storytelling complicate the book’s appeal to environmentalist readers by asserting a prior, transnational Indigenous presence in the transboundary landscapes of present-day Alaska and the Yukon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]