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The article analyzes two versions of feminine nihilism in the French-speaking Canada: Nelly Arcan, especially in her posthumous book, Burqa de chair, and Catherine Mavrikakis, in two of her novels, Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques and La ballade d’Ali Baba. By emphasizing the terms mélanomanie and néantisme, the headliners of the “professors of despair” in the homonymous book by Nancy Huston, my text defends the idea that the story-telling operation specific to the search for the “great novel” in La ballade d’Ali Baba is capable, through its reiteration of nomadism, cosmopolitanism and a “poisoned narrative”, to overcome the nihilism inherent to the solipsistic writings of Nelly Arcan.

This article attends to non-human agency and plant communities in Martha Ostenso’s 1925 novel Wild Geese. As non-humans shape the novel’s setting and plot, they are entwined with human action but not subordinated to human agency or political systems; on the contrary, plant communities are political forces who ally, resist, and clash during the implementation of European agricultural practises in the early twentieth century. Thus, the setting details of this CanLit novel can be repurposed to think about the possibilities of community beyond colonial control. This article begins by drawing on Vanessa Watts’ articulation of ecosystems-as-societies as a framework for plant agency. It then follows Margret Boyce’s eco-critical engagement with Wild Geese to examine how the farm’s monocrops are connected to, but not determined by, the heteropatriarchal family and the colonial state. Further, by considering how homoeroticism emerges against colonial heteropatriarchy in non-agricultural settings, queerness is shown to pre-exist and resist the organizing tendencies of settler colonialism. Finally, this article turns to non-human alliances in the novel’s finale to demonstrate the ongoing struggle between political powers. To grapple with colonialism and its legacies, non-human agency and political power must also be recognized.

In 2012, the Mohawk saint Catherine Tekakwitha was finally canonized by the Catholic church. She has been the subject of many accounts and narratives —both historical and fictional—and figures as the main subject of Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers. While having been lauded for its post-modernist and presumably postcolonialism stance on Tekakwitha’s figure, Cohen’s novel remains controversial in its depiction and appropriation of Indigenous womanhood. Beautiful Losers relies heavily on missionaries’ accounts of Tekakwitha and is entrenched in the male protagonist’s sexual claim and fixation on her character. Given the significant status of women in Indigenous communities, I argue that Cohen’s novel not only participates in an ongoing violation of the Indigenous female body but also denies the integrity of Indigenous family structures and their social as well as narrative authority. It hinders, rather than encourages, a shift in narrative authority pertaining to Canada’s colonial heritage. While Cohen’s text remains a necessary testament to the shortcomings and failures of history and its criticism, what is required in forthcoming scholarship and narratives dealing with Tekakwitha and figures similar to her is a narration originating in Indigenous communities. An emergence of such narratives requires a definite reckoning with Canada’s violent history of mistreating Indigenous womanhood that continues to this day.

This article examines a number of practices of observation as represented in contemporary Canadian dystopias in light of technological developments as seen by transhumanist thought. It argues that the transhumanist scopic practices that underlie their science-fictional imaginaries are in fact dystopian, and, as such, it takes examples from dystopian literature to illustrate how the nature of sight and seeing in the techno- and image-mediated context presents dangerous pitfalls for subject formation, identity politics, and agency. The article distinguishes between “vision” as a body of ideas and “sight” as the actual ways of seeing that may be reciprocal and create bonds of affectivity or, in the case of the transhumanist predicament, be instead founded on watching as the one-sided commodifying alternative.

Over the course of less than a decade, Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing (2006), was translated into French three different times. The poetry collection of Cohen was first translated in Québec (Livre du constant désir, 2007) and then in France (Le livre du désir, 2008). In addition, seven poems published in Book of Longing previously appeared as songs on the studio album Ten New Songs (2001). The French release of this album was accompanied by a promotional booklet, in which French translations (made by Graeme Allwright) are printed. In this article, the question is raised whether these texts can be labeled as ‘retranslations’ or not. The three translations will first be compared in order to determine to what extent several power mechanisms have influenced the production of these translations, namely the dynamics between centre and periphery (Paris and Québec) and between highbrow-lowbrow cultural products (literature and music). These external factors will then be compared to a number of internal factors, i.e. a specific interpretation of Cohen’s poetry that may have influenced the adopted translation strategies of the three texts under consideration.

The subtitle of Daniel Coleman’s third book of non-fiction acknowledges in place the existence of a form of life and agency that the essay explores in exquisite detail. The living under scrutiny begins in the yard at the back of the Colemans’ house in Hamilton, the industrial city on the western tip of Lake Ontario where the Canadian critic and writer has made his home. The plasticity of the essay, a prospective, tentative form by definition, means that it is a most suited genre to try out new propositions regarding the practice of place in a vast area that used to be known as a “Dish With One Spoon” by the Indigenous populations who had agreed to preserve it as a neutral ground for their common use before the onset of colonisation. With the influx of European settlers, and the treaties that caused the morcelization of the region between the lakes, the area underwent profound transformations culminating with the industrial boom that boosted the development of the city of Hamilton in the twentieth century while causing great damage to its environment. The area is presently showing signs of ecological resilience that may lead to a renaissance with the waning of the industrial age. Although the timeline matters, Coleman is not writing a history of Hamilton. His approach is more geographical in spirit, looking at the languages, discourses and practices that have transformed a physical location into a place, i.e. portion of space imbued with signification for its human inhabitants, but also a milieu shared by myriad life-forms. This article will analyse the decentering Yardwork operates from the ego-centered genre of the biography to a form of writing which is eco-centered, by which I mean that it is rooted in an ontology where convivance serves as challenging model to help us rethink the borders that cut across life-giving places.

Margaret Atwood is the only Canadian author whose 80th birthday in 2019 was celebrated by the global academic community. This is not surprising, as she is the most famous Canadian writer, popular also outside literary circles. On this occasion, Slovene Canadianists organized a literary event at the Maribor University Library, which presented an outline of Atwood’s oeuvre and a selection of translated poems and excerpts of prose texts; some of these were translated especially for the event. Of Atwood’s rich and varied oeuvre, only eight novels, a few short fiction pieces and some thirty poems have been translated into Slovene. This article thus aims at presenting those aspects of Atwood’s work which are less know to Slovene readers. It is no secret that Atwood is often labelled a feminist writer, mostly on account of The Handmaid’s Tale and the TV series based on the novel. However, many Slovene readers may not know that she also writes poetry, short fiction, non-fiction and children’s literature, that she is a committed environmentalist, and that she discussed the problem of “Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth” in a prestigious lecture series. There are not many authors who master as many genres as Atwood and who are so well-received by readers and critics alike. The latter is true of Atwood also in Slovenia, and we can only hope that Slovene publishers will make more of Atwood’s work available to Slovene readers. All the more so since Atwood has no plans to end her career: just before her 80th birthday she was on a tour in Europe promoting her latest novel, The Testaments, and she would have continued touring in 2020 were it not for the COVID pandemic.

This paper examines the re-imagining of Chinese Canadian masculinity in Paul Yee’s novel, A Superior Man (2015). Unlike Yee’s previous writing, this novel does not describe Chinese Canadian men as Western Frontier heroes. Rather, it illustrates how Chinese immigration intersects with the oppression of Indigenous peoples, and how notions of masculinity are produced within settler colonialism. The novel thus provides an important entry point into discussions about how to make Indigenous presence and colonization foundational to anti-racist efforts. Yet, since it represents Indigenous peoples as largely peripheral, the novel also points to how much anti-colonial work remains to be done.

This article analyses the various connotations of the name of the protagonist in Jane Urquhart’s Irish-Canadian novel Away, first published in 1993. The heroine Mary changes her name to Moira at the start of the book, which leads the reader to ponder on the significance of these names. By exploring the classical, topographical, naval, linguistic and religious undertones of Mary/Moira, this study seeks to demonstrate how the Canadian author conveys notions of postcolonialism throughout her novel with the choice of a character’s name.

Canada and Japan share a history of industrial contamination that has resulted in mercury poisoning; the inhabitants of both Minamata, Japan and the Indigenous community of Grassy Narrows, Ontario have suffered from what would come to be known as Minamata disease. Environmental activists, proponents of industrial progress, individuals in the affected communities, and novelists Michiko Ishimure and Thomas King discuss and weigh the possibilities of economic and material progress against the problems of environmental degradation and industrial contamination leading to disease and death for humans and ecosystems. This paper will show how Ishimure and King discuss the possibility of hope and renewal through the tourist industry, but will also question the efficacy of “dark tourism.” Is it possible to balance an ethics of care and respect for those whose lives have been destroyed by industrial contamination with the need of those who remain to make a living through tourism? This paper will explore the fictional possibility offered by King alongside the actual recovery and tourist industry generated in the aftermath of the Minamata poisoning and subsequent clean up efforts. Is it possible to reimagine and reclaim industrial wreckage as sites of pleasure and recreation? Do these regenerated sites of industrial destruction promote the common good or further victimize the individuals and communities destroyed in the name of progress?

This essay considers the function of the grotesque mode in Rawi Hage’s novels Cockroach (2008) and Carnival (2012). The grotesque is an artistic form with which Hage draws attention to the predicament of the class of poor and disadvantaged new immigrants in contemporary Montreal. He thereby offers a recent immigrant’s unsettling, ex-centric perspective on the Canadian multicultural ideal that proclaims the acceptance of ethnic and racial difference.Formal aspects that generate a grotesque effect include the first-person narrator’s self-image, his disruptive discourse of resistance, his disorienting view of urban reality, and spatial metaphors in the context of the protagonist’s social alienation and marginalisation. Influential theories of the grotesque, introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser, help to describe recurrent shifts in the literary text from “the carnivalesque” to “the demonic grotesque”. In addition, Julia Kristeva’s related notions of “the abject” and “semiotic discourse” throw light on the sense of fear and repulsion felt towards the urban poor, and on the protagonist’s deliberate identification with vermin in the context of his discourse of resistance.Even though the underprivileged migrant is able to answer back, Hage’s novels are devoid of true regenerative and liberating power. As soon as the literary carnivalesque shifts towards the demonic grotesque, the narrative gives prominence to the migrant’s isolation and socio-economic outsider position. Nonetheless, the grotesque mode, being typically associated with flux and the rupturing of boundaries, does function as a powerful tool with which the author depicts the recent immigrant as an individual with an indomitable spirit.

Through the analysis of Monoceros (2011), a novel by Canadian contemporary writer Suzette Mayr, we examine the entanglement between concepts of violence and abjection in literature. Mayr presents several characters that come into contact as a result of a suicide committed by a previously bullied student of a Catholic school. With the narrative as a reference, we propose to discuss the growing violence inside the school system in contemporary times, in this case as a result of sexual intolerance. Works by Nan Stein and Melinda York, who address the imposition of too strict gender roles on female and male students as one of the causes for violent outcomes among youngsters, will be our main theoretical references. We also discuss the topic of desire and abjection, mainly developed by Kristeva and Kulzbach, as illuminating perspectives for the analysis of the selected novel. We suggest that in Monoceros bullying is performed to guarantee fixed and binary models of gender identity, which ends up by promoting low self-esteem and feelings of awkwardness on individuals defined as different from the norm.

In this essay I would like to examine the selection of African tales that Nelson Mandela took care to leave as heritage to the future generations, not only to children, and not only to African children. The fact that a political leader, ex freedom fighter and political prisoner dedicated his time to the collection and editing of stories from all over the African continent to be addressed to new readers as simple entertainment or as educational tools clearly testifies to the great humanity, culture, and open mindedness of one of the most important men of our times. In his most recent autobiographical writing Conversations With Myself, Mandela claimed his double affiliation to both his own indigenous culture as well as to western culture. Moreover, he recalled with affection a dear pastime of his childhood: After supper we would listen enthralled to my mother and sometimes my aunt telling us stories, legends, myths and fables which have come down from countless generations, and all of which tended to stimulate the imagination and contained some valuable moral lesson. (p. 10) Thus, it is not surprising that such a charismatic public figure, as Mandela has been, was also interested in- and worried about- the future survival of a cluster of traditional folktales with their lively, specific and “valuable moral lesson”. It is my intention to verify if there might be a dialogue between the western tradition of folktales where animals are protagonists and speak as anthropomorphic figures and the facets of the African traditions and cultures from which Mandela draws inspiration. Among the critical tools on this topic, Tess Cosslett’s Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction (2006) seems to provide a useful starting point, together with the latest studies in the volume Dall’ABC a Harry Potter (2011), among others. Moreover, aspects of “orature” will be discussed with reference to the stories chosen by Nelson Mandela. Finally, an attempt will be made to connect these types of animal tales to works of figurative art, particularly paintings, by African artists, which might share the same moral message and which might trigger similar narratives.

Buscou-se mostrar, através deste estudo, pela utilização da psicanálise, como se organiza o espaço em Godbout e como a aporia constituída por este espaço é pretensamente resolvida por uma espécie de auto-anulação representada pela imobilidade e pelo desejo de retorno ao útero.On a essayé, dans cette étude, par l'utilization de la psychanalyse, de montrer comment s'organise l'espace chez Godbout et comment l'aporie constituée par cet espace est faussement résolue par une sorte d'auto-anéantissement représenté par l'immobilité et par le désir de retour à l'utérus.

RESUMEN: La relación entre literatura y compromiso político es una preocupación central de la escritora canadiense Margaret Atwood (Ottawa, 1939) que no se limita a su obra literaria, sino que se completa y reafirma con su militancia en organizaciones como Amnistía Internacional. Desde su dimensión como autora comprometida con la defensa de los derechos humanos, este ensayo presenta una aproximación a la poética política de Margaret Atwood a través del comentario de sus colecciones de poemas publicadas en las décadas de los setenta y de los ochenta. Del análisis de dichos poemarios se desprende que la política, entendida como la organización humana del poder, es un aspecto esencial para comprender su obra, pese a que muchos críticos hayan ignorado el contenido socialista y democrático de su producción literaria. ABSTRACT: The relationship between literature and politics is a central preoccupation for the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, which is not restricted to her literary works, but is, rather, completed and reaffirmed by her belonging to organizations such as Amnesty International. Approaching Atwood as a writer who is engaged with the defence of human rights, this essay explores her collections of poetry published in the Seventies and Eighties. The analysis of these collections proves that, although critics have usually ignored the democratic-socialist content of Atwood’s writing, politics is an essential issue to understanding her works.

The article analyzes the work and especially the novels by the Canadian writer of Slovenian descent, Ted Kramolc. It places him within the context of other diasporic literary authors in Canada as well as the Slovenian cultural space and discusses the critical response to his work, particularly in the period after Slovenian independence.

This article deals with the kind of knowledge historically imposed upon the wilderness of the New World, with the threat that nonverbal reality poses for the human mind, and with the taxonomic fever that took over Natural Science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will look at these issues through two texts which cover the expedition of John James Audubon to Labrador (Canada) in the summer of 1833: one of them is a biographical document, Audubon and His Journals (1897), the other is a fictional work, the novel Creation (2002) written by Katherine Govier. I will draw from Audubon’s Journals and from Govier’s novel in order to discuss why Labrador was envisaged by both artists as challenging the ingrained human duty to draw lines and to separate one form of life from another. The uncharted territory of Labrador baffles Audubon’s usual power to name and to draw, and takes the reader back to the myth of creation, to Genesis, where it is clearly established that nothing really exists without the confirmation of language.

Mavis Gallant is a typical contemporary Canadian short story writer, who has strongly contributed to the formation and the proliferation of the contemporary Canadian short story. Her short story collection Home Truths (1981) is a good example of the exploration of time. Gallant has said on several occasions that she is not particularly interested in discovering typical Canadian elements, but she wishes, above all, to convey the truth. She does not get deeply engaged in the psychological development of her characters, but is interested in specific situations, in reconstructing the state of mind and heart, therefore, we find her writing on the edge of imagination and reality. Home Truths is about identity, alienation, and the importance of memory. These issues still are, 30 years after the publication of this collection, a matter of great concern among Canadians at home and abroad.