Search

There exists a preconceived notion that the works of Mordecai Richler have, in francophone Quebec, been tainted by his various essays and articles on linguistic issues and nationalism; however, a review of the history of Richlerian criticism in Quebec yields a better understanding of how existing argumentative mechanisms, articulating the relationships between "us" and the nation, were only strengthened by such polemics. The runaway criticism of the 1980s and 1990s had the paradoxical effect of projecting Richler to the forefront of debates as an antagonistic figure, a role that his defenders subsequently used to attack a restrictive vision of national membership. Rather than resulting from a hybridization or meeting of cultures, the reappropriation of Richler's work by a portion of Quebec critics serves to frame a new conception of what it means to be Québécois. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a reflection on the essays, articles, prefaces, and interviews of three contemporary anglophone writer-translators from Quebec: Philip Stratford, David Homel, and Gail Scott. Based on the premise that writer-translators maintain a privileged relationship with the space between languages and cultures, which they are bound to explore through translation and writing, the question is to determine the extent to which Stratford, Homel, and Scott have contributed to building an Anglo-Québécois identity and literature since the early 1980s. Their respective discourses on literature and translation, being symptomatic of three different intellectual approaches, reveal, on the one hand, the unstable, plurivocal, and evolving nature of this identity and literature and, on the other, a striking homology between these objects and the translation processes. It is this homology that the essay strives to emphasize. The accent is on the images of multiculturalism and forms of creativity that flow from writer-translators' knowledge of the languages-cultures with/between which they work and the modalities according to which they negotiate the difficult passage separating these two entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]