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Copyright of Comparative Literature / Primerjalna Književnost is the property of Slovenian Comparative Literature Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the complexities of shame within feminist critique, particularly in relation to Canadian literature and the broader cultural context of Canada's violent history. Topics include the distinction between being shamed and feeling shame, the productive nature of shame as an emotional response, and the challenges of engaging with cultural artifacts tied to problematic figures while maintaining a feminist perspective.

Abstract: As the strength of nation-states seems to have declined in the face of globalizing forces and modern discourses which disavow the fixity of their frontiers, the question emerges whether national identification is vanishing alongside the structures that support it. Certainly, the exclusivist restrictions and homogenizing tendencies inherent to nationalism must be redressed in order to accommodate the socio-cultural transformations that are taking place in an increasingly borderless world. In terms of emotional attachment, however, it cannot be denied that the nation provides one of the most salient contexts in which to locate notions of belonging and identity constructions. This paper offers a literary analysis of Jean McNeil’s novel The Interpreter of Silences, in order to illustrate the phenomenon I call “moments of nationalism”. I argue that, rather than disappearing altogether, national identification materializes temporarily in strategic individual and collective positionings. As overarching national narratives fail to incorporate the multiplicity of cultures and identities they intend to encompass, nationalism can no longer be read as a permanent, stable identity marker. Moments of nationalism are, on the contrary, ephemeral, and their articulation is mediated by intersections with the intranational context of the local-regional and the transnational context of the global.

This paper discusses experiences of teaching Canadian literature in the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi, Kenya. For a long time, the University of Nairobi syllabus required that teaching Canadian literature, or any foreign literature for that matter, should be related to an African experience. This paper explores a few possible but unworkable ways on how one could relate teaching Canadian literature to an African experience as a way of establishing its relationship to students in Nairobi, Kenya, which is over 10 000 kilometres away from Canada. On the whole, the paper argues that an effective approach to teaching the literature has been formalist that takes into account fidelity to the nature and function of literature, even as it reveals the universal in the particular that makes the form and content of Canadian literature relevant to Kenyan as well as to African experiences. In the end, the paper points out the past experience of teaching and learning Canadian literature must have been valuable to both student and teacher as two seminars held outside the university demonstrate that Kenyans can relate to it for — after all — literature is universal in the particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, the Quebecois writer Catherine Mavrikakis published Diamanda Galas, a tribute to the American artist performer of Greek origin, Diamanda Galas - at the Montreal Publishing House, Héliotrope, inaugurating a new collection, "Guerrières et Gorgones" (Warriors and Gorgons). At the same time and in the same collection, Martine Delvaux published a tribute to the American photographer Nan Goldin, in an eponymous essay. "What survives from/through artists who are prophets of the contemporary?", inquires Mavrikakis. Acting on the tragedy of history and transgressing it, how can literature and art play with experiences of memory transmission and "survival" without necessarily working "to fix" them? What is at the heart of this link between history and creativity, reaffirmed by Georges Didi-Huberman in Survivance des lucioles? Through reflections on transcultural transference, multiculturalism and the power of women to transgress traumatic experiences, this article explores the question of memory transmission in two contemporary narratives on art and the AIDS period of the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several accounts from women scholars including Judith McCombs, Sharon Rose Wilson, and Charlotte Templin, on their personal experiences and careers studying Canadian literature. Emphasis is given to topics such as schools of literary criticism, literary feminism, and professional development in academia.

This article draws on personal narrative, literary criticism, and multicultural Canadian literature to interrogate George Elliott Clarke's conceptualizations of a Black Canadian literature and a racialized African-Canadian literary canon in his 2002 essay collection Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literatures. Clarke's work is juxtaposed with my own experience as a bi-racial, multi-ethnic, Black, Negro, mulatto, half-caste, African-Canadian woman, and with those of non-Black scholars, to expose the shifting contours of ethnicity and the blurred and blurring boundaries of Canadian blackness in multi-, mixed-, and indeterminately racial Canada. Through these critical comparisons, I suggest that a racialized African-Canadian literary canon excludes the multiple Canadian cultures in which our literatures are formed, and supports racial constructs that no longer fit the shapes of our multi-ethnic, diasporic, postcolonial skins. I conclude that upon the fertile ground tended by Clarke's Black literary activism, a de-racialized African-Canadian literature may grow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Education / Revue Canadienne de l'Éducation is the property of Canadian Society for the Study of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)