Tricks with a Glass: Writing Ethnicity in Canada

Capa
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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Páginas seleccionadas

Índice

Antonine Maillet and the Recognition of Acadian Identity
111
Canadian Writing and the Articulation of North
149
The Imaginary Ethnic
191
Intercultural Not Multicultural
269
Critical Perspectives on Writing Ethnicity in Canada
287
Contributors
299
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Passagens conhecidas

Página 83 - 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 252 - ... a book of short stories so linked to each other by their author that the reader's successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts ( 19).
Página 43 - 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 41 - 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 37 - 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 185 - I wonder. Maybe this is a chinese-in-Canada trait, a part of the great wall of silence and invisibility we have built around us. I have a misgiving that the telling of our history is forbidden. I have violated a secret code. There is power in silence, as this is the way we have always maintained strict control against the more disturbing aspects in our human nature. But what about speaking out for a change, despite its unpredictable...
Página 88 - ... 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 20 - In other words the alienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonial world to the 'margin' turned upon itself and acted to push that world through a kind of mental barrier into a position from which all experience could be viewed as uncentred, pluralistic, and multifarious. Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creative energy.
Página 83 - ... in. The others looked at him with admiration. Then Viraf asked what exactly he meant by that. Jehangir said that Nariman sometimes told a funny incident in a very serious way, or expressed a significant matter in a light and playful manner. And these were only two rough divisions, in between were lots...

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