Tricks with a Glass: Writing Ethnicity in Canada

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Rocío G. Davis, Rosalía Baena
Rodopi, 2000 - 301 páginas
Studies of literary reflections on ethnicity are essential to the ever-renewed definition of Canadian literature. The essays in this collection explore the diverse ways of negotiating identity and the articulation of space in Canada, taking ethnicity as a driving force with ideological and cultural implications that lend public and literary discourse an urgent dynamism. While theorizing ethnicity is a valuable critical enterprise, these essays centre on the concrete realization of the problematics of ethnicity in creative writing, covering a wide range of Canada's mosaic. The creative inscription of ethnicity stimulates the evolution and expansion of Canada's literary heritage, the complexity of this cultural experience being the focus of the present collection. Fourteen essays, including a personal account by the Ukrainian-Canadian Janice Kulyk Keefer on the merging of private and public history, and two interviews - with the Chinese-Canadian writer Wayson Choy and the critic Linda Hutcheon - analyze the manifestations of the pluralism that has always characterized Canadian writers' consciousness of themselves, their engagement with the notion of the 'multicultural' and its significance in contemporary society and, in particular, its effect on creativity.

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Página 123 - No more of that. I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am ; nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice...
Página 71 - To have no national stamp has hitherto been a regret and a drawback, but I think it not unlikely that American writers may yet indicate that a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the various National tendencies of the world is the condition of more important achievements than any we have seen.
Página 168 - Canadjens, je pouvons pas en etre, nous autres. Par rapport qu'ils sont des Anglais, pis nous autres, je sons des Francais. Non, je sons pas tout a fait des Francais, je pouvons pas dire ca: les Francais, c'est les Francais de France.
Página 83 - American, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium and now you have fucking Harry Truman of the USA. You all learned it from the English.
Página 81 - Just the Bedouin and us, crisscrossing the Forty Days Road. There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful humans I've met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, African — all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states.
Página 128 - ... outside, at the flakes of falling snow. What thoughts is he thinking as he watches them? Of childhood days, perhaps, and snowmen with hats and pipes, and snowball fights, and white Christmases, and Christmas trees? What will I think of, old in this country, when I sit and watch the snow come down? For me, it is already too late for snowmen and snowball fights, and all I will have is thoughts about childhood thoughts and dreams, built around snowscapes and winter-wonderlands on the Christmas cards...
Página 120 - ... to the other islands, and to Europe, Africa and the Americas? This is not, however, merely a question of geography or landscape, but relates more to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin's idea of postcolonial place as a complex interaction of language, history and environment [...] characterized firstly by a sense of displacement in those who have moved to the colonies, or the more widespread sense of displacement from the imported language, of a gap between the "experienced...
Página 36 - In pushing the colonial world to the margins of experience, the 'centre' pushed consciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheres of thought could be accepted without question. In other words, the alienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonial world to the 'margin...

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