bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Resistance and Retreat: a Laclosian Primer for Women
Authors: Diaconoff Suellen
Published: March 2013

In the past ten or fifteen years the assessment of Choderlos de Laclos's treatment of women has undergone significant revision. For if during decades he was celebrated as the first feminist writer and continues to be so called by some critics, male especially, in recent years an increasing number of others have asserted new judgments. Various critics now suggest that, far from being feminist, Laclos's work in toto reveals a misogynist mentality (arising out of the imaginaire viril, a sort of ambivalence towards women best defined as 'reductive misogyny,)' the kind of writing that poses as femino-centric but whose ideological subscript is really that of female vulnerability and the re-establishment and ratification of the male order.
Reviews
Authors: Goffart Walter , Tolton  , Kerslake Lawrence , Blewett David , Rosenberg Aubrey , Woodruff James , Warner Janet , Grosskurth Phyllis , Gretlund Jan Nordby
Published: March 2013

Paul Veyne, ed., A History of Private Life, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, reviewed by Walter Goffart

A History of Private Life, Vol. 1, reviewed by Walter Goffart

Priscilla Parkhurst Clark, Literary France: The Making of a Culture, reviewed by C. D. E. Tolton

Josué V. Harari, Scenarios of the Imaginary: Theorizing the French Enlightenment, reviewed by Lawrence Kerslake

John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, reviewed by David Blewett

Christopher Kelly, Rousseau's Exemplary Life: The 'Confessions' as Political Philosophy, reviewed by Aubrey Rosenberg

Paul J. Korshin, ed., Johnson After Two Hundred Years, reviewed by James F. Woodruff

Prem Nath, ed., Fresh Reflections on Samuel Johnson: Essays in Criticism, reviewed by James F. Woodruff

G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records Supplement, reviewed by Janet Warner

Robert Elbaz, The Changing Nature of the Self: A Critical Study of the Autobiographical Discourse, reviewed by Phyllis Grosskurth

John Edward Hardy, The Fiction of Walker Percy, reviewed by Jan Nordby Gretlund
Fiction
Authors: Duffy Dennis
Published: March 2013

Reviews of fiction published in Canada in 1988.
Theatre
Authors: McEwan Barbera
Published: March 2013

Reviews of French-Canadian books on theatre published in 1988.
Isolation for Canada?
Authors: Corbett
Published: March 2013

The year 1936 has brought final proof that the Great Powers are not yet willing on the one hand to make the sacrifices, on the other to take the risks, which effective organization for the preservation of peace involves. Clearly, the Covenant of the League of Nations has in all its most essential aspects been scrapped. We now know that the League (unless it be revivified in sudden realization, scarcely to be expected, that it offers the only means of averting calamity) will not prevent the wars which threaten to break out at any momen t in Europe and Asia.
Three Kinds of Agreement
Authors: Wright
Published: March 2013

In the opinion of Dr. R. C. Cabot the most useful tool for deciding the puzzles of moral conduct and social relations is the question: What agreements were made in view of the facts of this situation? Such agreements, he points out, are sometimes explicit; they are promises to be kept, debts to be paid, contracts to be fulfilled, duties to be performed. But the great majority of agreements on which our orderly social life depends are, he holds, implicit or tacit-made to be carried out in action without explicit statement in words.
In Unknown Quebec
Authors: Lower
Published: March 2013

Everyone who has come up the St. Lawrence has been impressed by the beauty of that magnificent river. After the first landfall has been made, as the shores begin to close in from either side, the mountains throw their masses of blue into the sky, mile after mile of them beckoning the traveller on, into the heart of a great continent. Surely no other country has a more splendid ocean gateway than Canada. Over long distances the glistening shapes of houses reveal themselves, and sometimes the ship is close enough in to enable details to be seen. At such points dormer-windows or curved roofs or huge stone chimneys proclaim bits of the old world in the new. No wonder tourist literature has damned the province lying on either bank with the adjective “quaint.”
Contemporary Aesthetic Theory
Authors: MacCallum
Published: March 2013

The scandalous confusion of contemporary aesthetic theory is not without its honourable side: it rises largely from the stubborn attempt to do justice to all the facts. A carpet, a joke, a triumphal arch, a procession, a gown, a garden, a psalm, an aeroplane, a fairytale, as well as a statue, painting, poem, or symphony, are proper objects for aesthetic reflection. And how could any theory be stretched to include them all without splitting, or, alternatively, becoming harmlessly inane?
Art and Philistia
Authors: McInnes G. Campbell
Published: March 2013

Not the least disadvantage against which we have had to contend in the building up of reputable collections of works of art, and the foundation of a vigorous national art, has been the persistent disparagement of things Canadian, and the lag—accentuated by local snobbery, ignorance, and parochialism—between the recognition ofwhat was good thirty years ago, and what is good to-day. The assumption that nothing from so new and raw a country as Canada could possibly be aesthetically valuable, though unfortunate, was regrettably true, at least until the late eighties. But that this should have led to a flooding of the Canadian market with patently inferior European work, and later, on the basis of a misplaced patriotic fervour, to the praise of anything Canadian, irrespective of its aesthetic integrity, can only be a cause for self-reproach.
Fiction
Authors: Thorpe Michael
Published: March 2013

Reviews of fiction published in Canada in 1989.
Poesie
Authors: Yergeau Robert , Marquis Andre
Published: March 2013

Reviews of French-Canadian poetry published in Canada in 1989.
Drama
Authors: Wasserman Michael
Published: March 2013

Reviews of drama published in Canada in 1989.
Art, Nature, and the Written Word in Pericles
Authors: Kiefer Frederick
Published: March 2013

As a metaphor the book of nature elucidates the realms of art and nature in Shakespeare's late plays, especially Pericles. Although the metaphor may not explicitly appear in Pericles, the written word does, and it takes a variety of forms, including a riddle, an impresa, a message in a coffin, an inscription on a tomb. Each of these artful constructions describes or applies to one or another young woman who, by her appearance, evokes the personification of nature herself. Nature, then, is evoked both as a person and as an artifact evincing aesthetic design. Together, these two formulations reveal more than either alone. The juxtaposition of written material and nubile woman achieves what the debate over flowers in The Winter's Tale or the argument over painting and poetry in Timon of Athens achieves: it clarifies the subtle relationship between art and nature, suggesting that, here at least, co-operation rather than strife prevails.
'Mysteriousy Come Together': Dickens, Chaucer, and Little Dorrit
Authors: Flahiff
Published: March 2013

In the opening chapter of the second book of Little Dorrit, the narrator turns for a moment from those 'living travellers'—including the Dorrits, the Gowans, and Rigaud —who have just arrived at 'the great Saint Bernard' on their way to Italy, in order to reflect upon 'dead travellers' who will forever remain 'in a grated house' adjacent to the monastery: " The mother, storm-belated many winters ago, still standing in the corner with her baby at her breast; the man who had frozen with his arm raised to his mouth in fear or hunger, still pressing it with his dry lips after years and years. An awful company, mysteriously come together!" The tableau provides a vivid though grim variation upon Dickens's intention, stated in a letter written to John Forster when he was at work on the second number of Little Dorrit: 'to shew people corning together, in a chance way, as fellow-travellers, and being in the same place ignorant of one another, as happens in life; and to connect them afterwards, and to make the waiting for that connection a part of the interest.' No amount of waiting will see vital connections among this novel's 'dead travellers': they remain 'in the same place ignorant of one another,' as sometimes happens in death.
Introduction
Authors: Cook Eleanor
Published: March 2013

We hear it in news broadcasts, we use it ourselves. ('Not with a bang but a whimper.' 'The centre cannot hold.') And we all know about the man who complained of a performance of Hamlet: well acted, but the play was nothing but a tissue of quotations. Has anyone ever counted? Line for line, Hamlet must be the most quoted, alluded to, echoed—and what verb, by the way, should we use? Which is one way of starting to think about allusion.
Comus's Wood of Allusion
Authors: Kilgour Maggie
Published: March 2013

Analysing allusion seems a ready and easy way of understanding poetic relations, through the mapping of how and when one poet 'borrows' from another. Such maps are, however, difficult to chart: talking about allusion at all leads one into woods in which boundaries between different uses of language become difficult to differentiate precisely. To a certain extent all language is 'allusive,' if by that one means simply that it refers to something beyond itself, which is not present. Any work drawing upon tradition has to be allusive in another sense, as it refers to a previous body of knowledge it presumes to share with its readers. Studying allusion further raises a number of questions about the way in which poets conceive of themselves and their relation to their society and culture, as well as to both their literary tradition and an audience; it thus engages ideas of similitude and difference, continuity and discontinuity or change, the locus of authority, ownership and property rights in poetry.
Scriptural Allusion and Legal Argument
Authors: Weinrib Ernest
Published: March 2013

In law, as in literature, texts allude to other texts. And as in literature, the process is perplexing. Why is allusion necessary, and how is it possible? Why not simply settle each issue as it arises on its own merits without reference to a pre-existing formula? And how do words produced at one point in time assume subsequent relevance? What different forms does such relevance take? What room does the original text leave for legal creativity? What distinguishes legitimate from abusive allusion? How do the alluding jurists understand their own activity?
'Cutting Up Didoes'
Authors: Reaney James
Published: March 2013

My title is reference, in an oral situation, actually sitting at table with a hired man whose colourful speech owed much to an orphanage in Southwark, the London suburb where the innkeeper, Harry Bailey, in Chaucer kept his hostelry, and I'll explain it later on. But I give it here as a sample of the sort of thing that happens in conversation all the time, at least I hope it does. That is, you hear a phrase or word or expression that puzzles you, and you're eager to know, to be in the know, trusting that your cultivation will be thereby increased as well as your ability to communicate. 'Hype' was such a word two decades ago and parents, fondly thinking that the generation gap might thus be closed, inquired eagerly what 'hype' meant. Such acronyms, dreadful really, as 'aka' and 'asap' pose similar problems.
Art, Nature, and the Written Word in Pericles
Authors: Shapiro Marianne , Shapiro Michael
Published: March 2013

Dialogism in contemporary discussions of literary theory is a term associated with the writings of the Russian critic M.M. Bakhtin, and almost exclusively with prose fiction. The concentration on prose to the exclusion of poetry follows from Bakhtin's own identification of 'pure' poetry with the extreme opposite of dialogism, monologism. 'The poet is a poet insofar as he accepts the idea of a unitary, monologically sealedoff utterance,' writes Bakhtin. In Bakhtin's view, the poet achieves his aim partly by transcending the inherently dialogic nature of language; the lyric poet privileges a single voice—his own —and strives to situate his discourse in a 'utopian' realm purged of all external historical and social forces. In this essay we wish to show, on the contrary, how poetry remains importantly 'dialogistic' despite Bakhtin's own prejudices, derived, perhaps, from the residual Romanticism that tinges all Russian scholarly writing of the first half of the twentieth century. We will illustrate this point with a survey of several kinds of poetic texts that are to be analysed by examining the role of the (sometimes implied) addressee, the unheard 'other voice' that provides part of the poetic context. We argue further that there is a productive way of looking at Bakhtin by comparing dialogism with Charles Peirce's concept of semiosis, the production and interpretation of signs. Lyric poetry is a sign system in the same sense that any literary work is. To the extent that dialogism informs semiosis (as Peirce himself argued), the analysis of lyric—as well as lyric itself—will be simultaneously 'dialogistic' and semiotic.
Disciplining Art's History
Authors: Cheetham Mark
Published: March 2013

The nature and status of art historical knowledge is one of the most contested issues in the humanities today. Art history is a relatively young discipline—established in a systematic form by Gennan scholars such as Riegl and Wölfflin in the late nineteenth century but widely taught in universities only much more recently—and perhaps for this reason, its boundaries and methods seem to be in constant flux. Yet in certain constituencies within the discipline today, there is a premature self-confidence about the field's proper objects and its methods of inquiry, a confidence often adopted in reaction to the field's current spate of self-reflection and the ensuing calls for change. Because this confidence is maintained in many quarters now—and because many art historians would therefore question the picture of a discipline in flux that I will paint—the paradox arises that the field is contested not only by 'revisionist' scholars but also, however unwillingly, by those who must now defend their established methods as central to what they construe as a difficult but ultimately mature and stable discipline. If there is a unifying trend in art history today, it is this widespread attention to the discipline itself, to its historiography and proper methodology. But as I will show, the vision of the field—the answers to questions about what art is, how to write its history, and what we know when we do write it—depends to an extraordinary extent upon whose point of view is solicited. My aim here is to give an introduction to the methodological and epistemological questions being asked in the field of art history now, and to suggest their import for the future of the discipline. Let me begin with two examples that display the deep-set assumptions about knowledge that are typical of art history and that remind us of the boundaries and points of contention that exist between would-be traditional and would-be revisionist views.
The Construction of Ignorance and the Evolution of Knowldege
Authors: Bouissac Paul
Published: March 2013

During the last few decades, scientific research conceived as the empirical pursuit of truth and objectivity has been put on trial. For many, scientific knowledge has lost its prestige, integrity, and quasi-transcendence, and has come to be variously considered as a set of rival incommensurable theories similar to ideologies and religions, unstable configurations of power and authority prone to irrational changes, or even fictions generated by self-delusion, if not deliberate deception. Landmark works in this critical process include those of Kuhn (1970), Popper (1972), Feyerabend (1975), and Lakatos (1978). Their criticisms have triggered many debates (e.g. Suppe 1977; Serres 1989) and have permeated our 'épistémé' in more or less radical forms. Scholars from all fields have subsequently transferred these arguments from the natural to the social sciences (e.g. McCloskey 1986; White 1986), and, more generally, have questioned any intellectual endeavour inspired by the modern scientific ethos or modelled on the empirical method. The notion of knowledge as revealed or discovered truth has shifted towards a view which holds that knowledge is constructed, if not fabricated. Trivial versions of this new scepticism have filtered through to the general population via the media, and, according to some, explain the marked decline in government funding for scientific research which charac6terized the 1980s.
The 'Primitive,' the 'Real,' and the 'World System': Knowledge Producion in Comtemporary Anthropology
Authors: Lee Richard
Published: March 2013

That we are living in an age of crisis is taken for granted. Far more difficult to comprehend is how the crisis manifests itself across the disciplines. Anthropology has been particularly hard hit by the epochal and cataclysmic events of the late twentieth century. With the accelerating expansion of the capitalist world system into the remotest corners of the globe, Anthropology has had to witness its traditional objects of study, the so-called primitive peoples, disappearing with the speed of light. One after another, the world's tribal and peasant societies have been 'pacified,' settled, and put to work in the fields and sweatshops of the New World Order. As a result the question of what constitutes knowledge of the 'Other' and how it is produced has become particularly troubling for anthropologlsts.
Time's Department Store: A Polyphonic Score for Reading
Authors: McCracken Timothy
Published: March 2013

You have been invited to write on knowing; specifically the discovery / invention problem of musical knowing. Even though you are working with time, you must begin with this visual problem: how can you introduce the time of music only within a space? Your desk is a working metaphor for the promises and problems at hand. Straight ahead is your computer screen. The impatient cursor blinks on the empty blue field. You must etch in here what others will see. More questions emerge from the visual: are you discovering a hidden truth waiting in the circuits? Or will you be making a new truth? Or is all knowing a polyphonic theft, a fresh composition yet one tapped into the grammar of experience?
Reviews
Authors: Gerson Lloyd , McIntire
Published: March 2013

Leo Groarke, Greek Scepticism. Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought, reviewed by Lloyd Gerson

William H. Dray, On History and Philosophers of History, reviewed by C. T. McIntire
Reviews
Authors: Hutcheon Linda , Crosta Suzanne , Chambers Douglas
Published: March 2013

Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea, reviewed by Linda Hutcheon

Charles Altieri, Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals, reviewed by Hutcheon

Patrick Chamoiseau et Rapheël Confiant, Lettres créoles. Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature, reviewed by Suzanne Crosta

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, reviewed by Suzanne Crosta

Richard Ollard, Pepys A Biography, reviewed by Douglas Chambers
Prairie Jacobin: Carlyle King and Saskatchewan English
Authors: Findlay
Published: March 2013

This essay is structured in four parts. In the first of these, I offer a brief historical sketch of the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan, and use the theme of teaching to bring out some of the problems this department currently faces. In the second part I consider more general questions of autonomy, identity, and accountability with which university professors in most disciplines are currently coming to terms. In the third section, I discuss the career of one particular professor of English, Carlyle King, who was enormously influential in intellectual and social developments in Saskatchewan. And in the final brief section of the essay I make a plea for further historicizing of English Studies in Canada in both inspirational and cautionary ways.
Romans
Authors: Saint-Martin Lori
Published: March 2013

Reviews of French-Canadian novels published in Canada in 1993.
A Legacy of Reform
Authors: Murray Heather
Published: March 2013

This autumn marks the one hundredth anniversary of the University of Toronto strike of 1895, an event which capped a ten-year series of disciplinary and political struggles at Toronto. Pork-barrelled appointments and the university's anglophilic hiring bias had angered 'nativist' students and graduates and the 'Canada-Firsters' sitting on the Senate; at issue, too, was the university's relationship to the government (since appointments to the provincial university were government controlled). The intellectual and disciplinary terrain was also shifting: like other universities of the day, Toronto was registering the impact of disciplinary specialization within the humanities, the growth of social science studies, and the demand for honours degrees and new forms of professional training. These concerns repeatedly emerged during a chain of controversies over university appointments, of which the search for a first dedicated professor of English in the winter of 1888–9 was the most public, involving numerous letters to the papers in a contretemps sufficiently sustained to become itself the subject of analysis—and parody—in the press of the day.
Literary Ladies and The Calliopean: English Studies at the Burlington Ladies' Academy (1846–1851)
Authors: Sonser Anna
Published: March 2013

In August of 1847 the young women of the Burlington Ladies' Academy (BLA) in Hamilton set themselves an ambitious task, namely to write, edit, and publish a literary periodical which J. Scott, former editor of the Christian Guardian, would welcome as 'the first publication of the kind Canada has produced or rather, which the accomplished daughters of Canada have presented to the public' (Calliopean, 16). Intended as a vehicle to raise funds for the Library at the Burlington Academy, the semi-monthly Calliopean, which commanded a yearly subscription of one dollar to be paid in advance, published original combinations of essays, poetry, and fiction. Predating the onset of Arnoldian humanism or the debates of Huxley and Ruskin, the Academy endeavoured to deliver a 'literary and moral education' (Booker, 102), the combination of which stands to influence our own emerging perceptions of the evolutionary process of university level literary studies.
An Introduction to James DeMille's `Inaugural Discourse' of 1861
Authors: Davies Gwendolyn
Published: March 2013

In Stephen Leacock's 1914 Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, the president of Plutoria University, Dr Boomer, deplores the old classical Concordia College nestling among the elms, 'our original home, the fons et origo of our studies, the faculty of arts' (Leacock, 57), and celebrates instead the busy, student-filled towers of the faculties of industrial and mechanical science 'fronting full upon the street'(54). Comparing favourably with 'the best departmental stores or factories intheCity,' notes the narrator,the new side of the campus throbs with whirling machines that measure everything from wind to earthquakes, offers such a vast variety of themes, topics, and subjects to the students, that there was nothing that a student was compelled to learn,' and emits 'a shower of bulletins and monographs like driven snow from a rotary plough' (55). By contrast, Concordia, the liberal arts college, 'stands so quietly and modestly at the top end of the elm avenue, so hidden by the leaves of it, that no one could mistake it for a factory' (54). It is no wonder, then, that Dr Boomer wants 'to knock the building down and to build on its site a real facultas ten stories high, with elevators in it' (58).
`Inaugural Discourse,' Acadia College, 1861
Authors: DeMille James
Published: March 2013

Standing here with the past spread out before us it seems a fitting time to discuss in brief the subject of Collegiate Education, not with any intention of advocating its claims before those who have proved a thousand times their high appreciation of the cause; but with the desire of bringing clearly before our minds the true and central idea of a College; so that we may see whether originally it was engrafted upon our Institution, and afterwards whether it bore corresponding fruit.
'Inaugural Address,' Mount Allison Wesleyan College, 1888
Authors: Tweedie
Published: March 2013

... although the present position of English in colleges and universities is due somewhat to a reaction against the classics, I am far from wishing to see the classics thrust out of their proper place. All periods of transition when opinions and ideas are unsettled are times of debating, and wrangling, and confusion, and this century is to the history of education something as the reformation period of the church. But there is a danger that in the race after the practical and the useful, our view may not be wide enough, that what lies immediately before us may obstruct the view of what is distant, that we may forget the motto of the ancients to give up some present good, for the sake of a greater one in future. In education as in morals, there are many subtle influences which are among the most powerful and we need to guard against overlooking them for the sake of those which show themselves immediately in getting gain and power. There is little doubt that the position and favour which English has won within the past few years will be permanent, and I hope to show that it is worthy of this position, and favour, but there is nothing to be gained in exalting it to a false eminence by degrading other studies in comparison with it. Truth and fairness will prevail in the end and rather than ignore the objections of opponents, we should seek to understand them and give them their full weight; if we can then make good our position it will be doubly strong. The case against the study of English literature is summed up in one great objection—and a radical objection it would be, if it were unconquerable, viz., the difficulty of getting students to take the study of English literature seriously, and of preventing slipshod work, and the rehearsal of second-hand opinions. In many subjects we are compelled by their own nature to work hard or we know nothing whatever of them. In English literature—at least of more modern date—we start with the power of reading the work.
An Introduction to James Cappon's 1889 'Address'
Authors: Milton Paul
Published: March 2013

James Cappon's career, both as a pedagogue and as a critic in the late nineteenth century, encompasses a number of firsts in the history of the academy in Canada. He was both the first professor of English language and literature (appointed in 1888) and the first dean of arts (appointed in 1906) at Queen's University. He was also one of the founders of the Queen's Quarterly and an influential voice on its editorial policy from its inception in 1893 until his retirement in 1919. As a literary critic, Cappon produced the first monograph devoted to the work of a Canadian author, his Charles G. D. Roberts and the Influences of His Time (1905). Consistently through his critical writings, he promoted the civilizing values of the British Empire, philosophical idealism, and liberal humanistic education based on the study of literature.
Dwelling in the Ruins
Authors: Readings Bill
Published: March 2013

Those of us who, like me, have found the University a place where a critical function has in the past been possible, have to face up to the fact that our current gains in critical freedom (unimaginable shifts in the institutional face of new programs, etc.) are being achieved in direct proportion to the reduction in their general social significance. This is not in itself any reason to abandon projects for change or innovation. Far from it. But what is required is that we do not delude ourselves as to their significance, that we do not satisfy ourselves with rebuilding a ghost town. Energies directed exclusively towards University reform risk blinding us to the dimensions of the task that faces us—in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences—the task of rethinking the categories that have governed intellectual life for over two hundred years.
Readings: Purpose and Effect
Authors: Sirluck Ernest
Published: March 2013

The main thesis of Bill Readings's The University in Ruins is that the increasing globalization of capital is undermining the nation-state, and with it the national cultures which Readings declares to have been the university's integrating principle since the Enlightenment; further, that the contemporary University is itself becoming a transnational corporation, a development which must be resisted from within by a pedagogy based on justice, not knowledge.
Dissolution, Dissensus, and the Possibility of Community
Authors: Varadharajan Asha
Published: March 2013

Bill Readings's The University in Ruins is a wry and candid interpretation of a familiar crisis—the erosion of the social mission of the University as the `producer, protector, and inculcator of an idea of national culture' (3)—but, to my mind, it promises more than it delivers. If, as Readings argues, the future of the University is anybody's guess, and the unexamined and uncertain deployment of claims to excellence or of forms of accountability only serves to obscure what might be at stake in a serious redefinition of the institution as we know it, the ungrounded quality of his narrative and the paucity of viable alternatives that it offers seem curious, to say the least.
Angst amid the Ruins
Authors: Orwin Clifford
Published: March 2013

It is a challenge to discuss a book as serious, engaged, and stimulating as The University in Ruins. I'm surprised that some contributors to this symposium have responded so negatively to it. For all that is frustrating in the book, it offers much of value.
Théâtre
Authors: O'Neill-Karch Mariel
Published: March 2013

Reviews of French-Canadian books on theatre published in 1996.
True Confessions: Opera, Literature, History
Authors: Clark Caryl , Hepburn Allan
Published: March 2013

I have suffered through an execrable performance of a Vivaldi pastiche in Nice; the production was so pitiable, I have even forgotten the name of the work. On the other hand, I have exulted in performances of Dido and Aeneas in Toronto, Tosca at the Met in New York, and Der Rosenkavalier at the Staatsoper in Vienna. Like Oblomov, the protagonist in Gonchorov's novel who cannot get the aria `Casta diva' out of his mind, I can be `shattered' by a phrase from Mozart, Donizetti, or Puccini. Oblomov falls in love with Olga because she sings `Casta diva.' I spend days letting phrases from Le Nozze di Figaro, Madama Butterfly, or Eugene Onegin drift through my mind like a private soundtrack. I have learned from Oblomov that a single aria can give access to love. This is a productive fantasy for Oblomov, for it rouses him from lethargy. It is a productive fantasy for many opera lovers.
The Sea and the Stars and the Wastes of the Desert
Authors: Parker Roger
Published: March 2013

Imagine the following. You are fortunate enough to be able to attend performances of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera in London, Milan, and then New York. The performances are all different — different casts, conductors, orchestras, staging teams — but you of course have expectations of both difference and sameness.
Redemption Revalued in Tristan und Isolde: Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche
Authors: Kilbourn
Published: March 2013

This discussion of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde shares with the previous three papers the recognition of Wagner's propensity to invert and even subvert his materials: formally, logically, musically, and ideologically. And yet, in a seeming contradiction, the ultimate movement of Tristan is one of completion and resolution, in terms of the redemption Wagner sought to embody in the crucial conjunction of love and death. My aim is to address this apparent formal and thematic disjunction (on the basis of Wagner's professed intentions, rather than any specific production), through a close look at the opera's final tableau, Isolde's Verklärung, or `transfiguration' (Bailey, 41–43). In this final scene, the aesthetic and musical problem of the representation of death and its redemptive potential is inseparable from Wagner's peculiar relation to the philosophical assumptions underpinning this prototypically `modern' work. This reading of the closing scene will turn on the irony of its being informed by one of the key moments in the Synoptic Gospels: the spectacle of Christ's `transfiguration' (Trites, 13).
'Alles was ist, endet': Living with the Knowledge of Death in Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen
Authors: Hutcheon Linda , Hutcheon Michael
Published: March 2013

Richard Wagner's best-known work, Der Ring des Nibelungen, is famous for many reasons: its music, its Germanic mythic allegory, its sheer length. Called a stage-festival play for three days and a preliminary evening, the Ring `cycle' (as it is known) runs at least fifteen hours. In other words, it is a major investment of time and energy for audiences. But it is also an engrossing story of the struggle for a golden ring — and therefore for power — among giants, humans, Nibelung dwarfs, and the Teutonic gods. It contains several infamous love stories: that of the siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde, and also that of their offspring, Siegfried, and Brünnhilde, the Valkyrie (who happens to be his aunt). There are many stories in the Ring and, it goes without saying, there are many possible critical approaches to it.
Roman
Authors: Fortier Frances
Published: March 2013

Reivews of French-Canadian novels published in Canada in 1997.
Sciences humaines
Authors: Gaulin Michel , Imbert Patrick , Harel Simon
Published: March 2013

Reviews of French-Canadian social sciences published in Canada in 1997.
Poetry
Authors: Parsons Marnie
Published: March 2013

Reviews of poetry published in Canada in 1997.
Souveraineté et déournement du regard dans les nouvelles de Marguerite Andersen
Authors: Paré François
Published: March 2013

Activement impliquée depuis le milieu des années quatre-vingt dans la francophonie torontoise, à la fois romancière et nouvellière, Marguerite Andersen est certes l'une des figures de proue de la littérature francoontarienne actuelle. Immigrante d'origine allemande, écrivant en français dans le contexte du Canada anglais, Andersen fait de cette double étrangeté une des motivations les plus profondes de sa venue assez tardive à l'écriture. Son œuvre, génériquement très diversifiée (roman, théâtre, nouvelle, essai), est pourtant extrêmement serrée sur les plans thématique et formel. Depuis les Courts métrages et instantanés (1991) jusqu'aux tout récents Crus de l'Esplanade (1998), la forme et le sens du récit bref, par exemple, n'ont guère changé dans cette œuvre. Car la brièveté répond ici à des exigences extérieures au récit, comme s'il y avait dans cette narration qui coupe court un refus répété de tout épanchement devant les trahisons de l'histoire et une recherche de la netteté des rapports humains, y compris ceux qui lient forcément l'écrivaine et son lecteur dans les réseaux de l'écriture.
Le genre dominant du xxi⊇ sciècle
Authors: Brulotte Gaëtan
Published: March 2013

Depuis les années 1980, la nouvelle a connu un épanouissement sans précédent dans l'histoire du Québec et s'est imposée sur la scène littéraire tant par ses recherches formelles que par les renouvellements thématiques qu'elle a proposés. Son évolution au fil des ans a de mieux en mieux coïncidé avec les grands problèmes de la société moderne : la solitude, la fatigue, la dépression, la marginalité sociale, l'absurdité du monde, la non-maîtrise du réel, la montée de l'obscurantisme, la crise du couple, le désir déçu, l'éclatement de la famille, la recherche d'une identité personnelle (plus que collective), les redéfinitions de l'amour et de la relation à autrui, la quête désespérée du bonheur ou d'un sens à la vie. Voilà autant de thèmes qui préoccupent les nouvelliers actuels (puisqu'il faudrait désormais les nommer ainsi) qui ne cessent de s'adapter aux valeurs changeantes du monde actuel pour les décrire ou les critiquer. Nombre de ces auteurs sont des écrivains chevronnés. Plus instruits que jamais (et ils aiment bien le montrer à l'occasion en citant leur culture littéraire et artistique), ils ont de plus en plus le souci des problèmes formels. La nouvelle est désormais au Québec un genre qui a acquis ses lettres de noblesse : les auteurs qui la pratiquent l'assument à fond et ne la considèrent plus comme un exercice d'apprentissage en marge du roman. Au Québec, elle est en passe de devenir un genre majeur. Il faudra cependant que les éditeurs s'adaptent à cette émergence et qu'ils apprennent à mieux comprendre la ferveur créatrice que les auteurs y mettent.
Sur l'écriture de la nouvelle
Authors: Rioux Hélène
Published: March 2013

J'ai commencé par écrire de la poésie, forme privilégiée, chère à l'enfance timide, à l'adolescence idéaliste, si souvent proche du désespoir. J'en ai écrit pendant des années, puis, graduellement, du sonnet au poème en prose, puis à la prose poétique, je suis passée à la prose tout court. Quelques récits à saveur autobiographique m'ont menée au roman. Mais, encore une fois, l'autobiographie était proche, trop proche – je voulais m'en dégager. La nouvelle m'a sortie de l'impasse, elle me semblait moins exigeante. Parce que les personnages y vivent moins longtemps, que les situations y sont plus cernées, plus précises – c'est là son exigence. Sans que je considère le moins du monde la nouvelle comme un roman embryonnaire, voire un avatar du roman, une sorte de compromis ou de pis-aller, je dirais qu'elle m'a, à son tour, menée au roman, me permettant de sortir ces personnages, ces situations, de mon imaginaire.
Short Story vs Novel
Authors: Hollingshead Greg
Published: March 2013

A widespread conviction exists among fiction writers in English that sooner or later one moves on from the short story to the novel. When John Cheever described himself as the world's oldest living short story writer, we all knew what he meant. But with most writers, the move is more a market decision than an artistic one, because the demands and satisfactions of the two forms are in so many ways utterly different. A short story is far less like a novel than it is like a poem. The primary difference between a short story and a poem is line breaks. Think of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, and you think, Odd metrics, is it poetry? Of course. Even if she broke it up only after she finished writing it, it's poetry.
Reading Mavis Gallant's 1940s in the 1990s: 'The Fenton Child'
Authors: Besner Neil
Published: March 2013

Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro both published their Selected Stories in 1996. These handsome volumes, one largely jet black, the other mostly cream white, seem to stand like magisterial bookends on a long shelf capable of accommodating Gallant's and Munro's previous work – including, between the two of them, some seventeen books of stories – and held up at either end by the twinned supports of two of our major readings of the short fiction written in Canada from 1950 on.
Retour dans le moment de l'ange
Authors: Carpentier André
Published: March 2013

Il n'a jamais été une fois où j'ai pris la décision d'écrire de telle façon, et plus tard de telle autre – car comme pour chacun, ma manière a changé avec les années, allant surtout se complexifiant.En matière d'écriture,ou l'on suit les diktats de la mode, ou on va sans trop prendre en compte l'opinion du temps et du milieu, reconnaissant d'abord, dans le fatras des tentatives, ce qui n'est pas sa manière propre et, à force, ce qui l'est, procédant donc par intuitions et par impulsions, osant, outrant et n'obéissant qu'à ce qui se donne en soi comme manière incontournable, sans quoi l'expérience langagière, si laborieuse et si coûteuse ! ne vaudrait pas sa peine, qui est grande, comme tout un chacun le jure. (Cela dit sous l'angle dialectique, car on sait impalpable la nuance entre ce qui vient de soi et l'apport des influences.)
A Quick Eloquence
Authors: Ross Val
Published: March 2013

William Trevor, the Anglo-Irish master of the short fiction genre, has called the literary form he writes so well `the art of the glimpse.' Over the years, from Stephen Leacock on, Canadians have become notably proficient at writing glimpses-as-fiction. Perhaps it's a matter of climate — of having to poke your head out of the warmth and form a quick impression of what you see, stating your vision with all the quick eloquence you can muster, and then dodging back inside.
Deux volets sur le Même genre
Authors: Berthiaume André
Published: March 2013

Jusqu'à aujourd'hui, j'ai publié quatre recueils de nouvelles, chez quatre éditeurs différents (Contretemps, Le Cercle du livre de France, 1971 ; Le mot pour vivre, Parallèles / Parti pris, 1978 ; Incidents de frontière, Leméac, 1984 ; Presqu'îles dans la ville, XYZ, 1991) – ce qui signale certaines réticences institutionnelles.
Du formalisme ou des jeux formels
Authors: Corriveau Hugues
Published: March 2013

L'émotion de la forme. Dès le début, cette fascination pour le texte, sa structure, sa manière. Il faut que l'écriture même séduise, sa fabrique, le style dans son déploiement, son dépliement. Il faut un premier ravissement. Les Herbes rouges, La Barre du Jour, voilà des lieux qui donnent à jouir du texte, du « sexte » comme on disait alors car, ludique, le monde des mots valait bien – à ce moment-là – l'autre monde que les liens grammaticaux, les ellipses comme les genres, les trous, les béances, les traits d'union et la ponctuation imitent si bien. On plongeait dans les trames textuelles comme des explorateurs d'un monde syllabique. La forme... D'abord elle, pour dire le ça, là, qui se serait mieux dévoilé. Mais voilà, les textes ont, avec le recul, une telle opacité, un tel hermétisme, qu'ils restent élitistes et clos, du moins en partie. « L'illisible » a mangé tout le portrait. Mais cette époque dont je parle, qui durera quelque quinze ans et qu'on nommera (malgré les hésitations et les polémiques) la modernité québécoise, m'apparaît même aujourd'hui essentielle, fondamentale, exploratrice et jouissive. En ce sens capitale, après les poussées de l'Hexagone et du québécisme oral.
Le collectionneur de fragments. Notes sur un nouvellier baroque : Hugues Corrieavu
Authors: Lord Michael
Published: March 2013

Vouloir rendre compte de la nouvelle contemporaine au Québec et au Canada français, en cette fin de xx⊇ siècle,relève de la gageure, pour la simple raison que la production s'est démultipliée de manière phénoménale, passant de quelques dizaines de recueils par décennies avant la Révolution tranquille à quelques centaines dans les années 1980. Avec une moyenne de dix nouvelles par ouvrages publiés, nous nous retrouvons devant une masse textuelle telle qu'il faudra de nombreux ouvrages avant que l'on puisse prétendre avoir fait le tour de la question. Car cette question, elle est complexe, non seulement en raison du nombre de textes, mais surtout parce que les problématiques varient, selon que l'on veuille aborder la question du texte féminin ou féministe, des mouvements ou des courants, des « écoles » de Québec, de Montréal, des régions, du Canada français (ontarois, acadien, l'Ouest...), des écritures dites migrantes, des sous-genres (réaliste, fantastique, sf...), des thèmes, des formes, sans oublier ce qui se fait dans les revues, depuis la fondation de XYZ. La revue de la nouvelle en 1985 et autres périodiques spécialisés (Stop, Virages...), dans les anthologies, les recueils collectifs et chez les auteurs eux-mêmes, dans leur singularité, de plus en plus nombreux .
Humanities
Authors: Findlay  , Murray Heather , Vogt Erich
Published: March 2013

Reviews of books on the humanities published in Canada in 1998.
Roman
Authors: Lord Michel
Published: March 2013

Reviews of French-Canadian novels published in Canada in 1998.
Conte et nouvelle
Authors: Lord Michel
Published: March 2013

Reviews of French-Canadian stories and short stories published in Canada in 1998.
Théâtre
Authors: O'Neill-Karch Mariel
Published: March 2013

Reviews of French-Canadian books on theatre published in 1998.
Drama
Authors: Zimmerman Cynthia
Published: March 2013

Reviews of drama published in Canada in 1998.
The Short Story as Miniature: Barry Callaghan’s ‘The Black Queen’ and Gloria Sawai’s ‘The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts’
Authors: Trussler Michael
Published: March 2013

In The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode sympathetically refers to Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of the ‘impression-point,’ that incisive moment of a life or a text which ‘gives articulation to the whole’ (147n4). Concerned primarily with the ‘impression-point’ as an aspect of reading, Kermode is attentive to the provisional nature of such moments. He maintains that this particular exegetic approach may involve either ‘discovery or choice’ (16); that is, these openings need not be determined solely by textual guidance, but can instead be generated by the reader. While it is irresolvable whether a life or a text offers the unity necessary for an interpretation that relies upon the revelatory impression-point, it is readily apparent that the short story fundamentally solicits (and critiques) the hermeneutic examination of the relationship between part and whole. Traditionally, the genre has engaged the notion of the impression-point through its propensity for the epiphany, but one can expand this observation to say that short fiction generally activates a version of the hermeneutic circle. It is surprising that no short story theorist, to my knowledge, directly acknowledges hermeneutics as part of his or her methodology, since it is clear that the discipline’s early principles have generally influenced the scholarly and popular discourse surrounding the form.
Écrire des nouvelles fantastiques au Québec : écrire dans une triple marginalité
Authors: Carpentier André
Published: March 2013

Monologuer sur sa propre pratique d’écriture littéraire et sur ses contrariétés constitue une entreprise pour le moins hasardeuse, car chacun sait par avance que le sujet, mouvant s’il en est, ne comblera jamais sa béance. J’invite donc le lecteur à m’accompagner dans une pensée morcelée, une pensée en devenir, in progress.
Temporality and Margaret Atwood
Authors: Ridout Alice
Published: March 2013

Margaret Atwood’s attempt to define ‘What’s Canadian about Canadian Literature’ in Survival is a helpful starting point for considering the way the stories in Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), and Wilderness Tips (1992) relate to the short story genre and Canadian literature as broad, limiting categories. Atwood herself recognizes the personal nature of Survival, defining it as ‘a cross between a personal manifesto’ and ‘a political manifesto’ (Survival, 13). She also acknowledges that ‘several though by no means all of the patterns I’ve found myself dealing with here were first brought to my attention by my own work’ (14). As the title suggests, Atwood’s main thesis is that the recurring theme of Canadian literature is survival. Although Atwood identifies different types of survival (such as Canada’s cultural survival despite the influence of the United States), she believes that the most prevalent type of survival in ‘Canlit’ is simply that of ‘hanging on, staying alive’ (33). Survival was a difficult challenge for early settlers, and Atwood certainly seems correct in identifying it as a formative experience for early writers: