Volume 21, Number 2, Summer 1996

EN:

From a Lacanian poststructural perspective, narration in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion frames personal and collective experience. We as readers gain knowledge through narration by identifying our own position within the textual discourse. By initiating our identification with Patrick outside of a highly structured discursive community, we become dependent on his ability to provide us with the knowledge of the text. We imaginatively join with Patrick Lewis, the pivotal figure in the novel, in the quest for subjectivity.

EN:

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient attempts to depict the possibility of a truly differentiated self defined through particular relationships to others, rather than in isolation from them. Ondaatje links issues of ownership with the power of naming. Through the act of naming, creation of a sense of self can be a political act of empowerment. Ondaatje creates a sense of power by filling the novel with stories of the new man replacing the old.

EN:

Julia Kristeva's conception of "poetic language" can be useful in illustrating how the provisionality of language expands the poem into a dialogical poetics. Poetic language reveals the heterogeneity of not only desire but also the speaking/desiring subject. In the poetry of Daphne Marlatt, Robert Kroetsch, and Tim Lilburn, the heterogeneity of desire clearly propels the poem into what Kristeva describes as "metaphorical shifting" through which metaphors and episodes conflate and become "carnivalesque."

FR:

La littérature pour la jeunesse est un secteur de l'édition des plus rentables. Cette formule didactique se trouve particulièrement bien illustrée par la collection "Faubourg Saint-Rock" lancée en 1991. Nous nous proposons ici de dresser un portrait-type de la collection, telle qu'elle nous est apparue à la lecture des dix-sept premiers titres, publiés de 1991 à 1995. Dans un second temps, nous illustrerons ces observations d'ensemble par une étude plus approfondie du motif du pluralisme ethnoculturel du Faubourg.

EN:

Jean-Jules Richard fut l'un des premiers écrivains, après Bétand, à s'attaquer, entre autres, à la morale sexuelle puritaine de son temps. I traita surtout de cette problématique dans Journal d'un Hobo, l'autobiographie fictive d'un hermaphrodite. Entre les intentions de l'auteur engagé qu'est Richard et le mythe originel semble en effet exister une concordance à u point tel d'ailleurs que, malgré son projet de transformer les comportements conservateurs de la société à l'égard de la sexualité, nous verrons qu'il n'échappe pas entièrement à l'emprise de l'androgyne antique au substrat patriarcal.

EN:

Marie de l'Incarnation's Correspondence comprises the missives of a Touraine bourgeoise widow, mother, tradeswoman, mystic, and missionary educator. The unique circumstances of Marie's letters - the fact that her son became her editor - problematizes the distinction between male lettres and female ignorants that typically guided seventeenth-century thinking with regard to women's epistolary writing.

EN:

Maurice Maeterlinck, hailed in 1892 as "the Belgian Shakespeare," influenced Canadian artistic circles around the turn of the century. A Canadian writer who appears to have been particularly receptive to the influence of Maeterlinck is Duncan Campbell Scott. Evidence suggests Scott drew upon the mystical positivism of Maeterlinck's The Treasure of the Humble in writing "the Forsaken," "On the Way to the Mission" and "Labor and the Angel".

EN:

In both Duncan Campbell Scott's administration and his poetry, he showed that Native culture was obsolete, and the Native peoples' only hope for survival was to relinquish their culture and merge with dominant Canadian society. Characteristically, Scott portrays title characters as individuals caught in a transitional stage between Native and white cultures and unable to attain peace in either world.

EN:

Jeannette Armstrong speaks about the challenges that her different forms of discourse (the novel, poetry, visual art, music) present. Each work has a separate set of responsibilities, but she has trouble separating the disciplines because the creative process does not differentiate. Across all of her works, she finds ways to deliver information or to create a point of view which requires an emotional response as well as an intellectual response.

EN:

Because he is "living between cultures," Alootook Ipellie, the poet, cartoonist, columnist, and editor of Inuit Today, attempts to focus his work on the reality of the events that are happening in the Arctic, "speaking to both sides at the same time." Although he has moved from his Baffin Island homeland to larger cities such as Iqaluit and Ottawa, he always has an urge to go back to the land. In his poetry, the land helps to interpret some of the old ways of the people.