Research Catalog

Title

Canadian literature and cultural memory / Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty.

Publication

Don Mills, Ontario : Oxford University Press, [2014]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

• Ty, Eleanor Rose, 1958-
• Sugars, Cynthia Conchita, 1963-

Description

xiv, 493 pages, 2 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color); 24 cm

Summary

• "Critics argue that contemporary western societies are immersed in a culture of memory," devoting resources to national histories and heritage, commemoration, public re-enactments, etc. We use these recollections of our national past to maintain a collective identity in the present, among other uses. These essays, edited by Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty, explore how Canadian literature draws on aspects of cultural memory, past and future. Exploring memory as a "vector of signification" involves a wide range such concepts of as heritage, antiquity, nostalgia, elegy, ancestry, haunting, trauma, affect, aging, authenticity, commemoration, public history. Contributors to this collection consider literary treatments of both mainstream and alternative uses of cultural memory, past and contemporary, urban and rural.^
• From well-known writers like Alice Munro, Al Purdy and Dionne Brand to recreations of Aboriginal pasts and less common topics like food and Mennonites, there is wide representation of Canada's literary diversity. And equally representative is the collection's historical spread, ranging across early explorer narratives to contemporary works. The collection digs into some of the darker moments in our past (immigrant experiences, recollections of interned Japanese-Canadians in World War 2, and memories of Native children in residential schools). The sheer ambition of this collection suggests the multifaceted ways that Canada's past is part of our collective culturalmemory now. A four-page colour insert - including Seth cartoons as well as unique, little known photography - provides a compelling visual context for the collection's treatment of the complex, multifaceted character of cultural memory in Canada.^
• The collection is divided into five parts (amnesia, postmemory, recovery work, trauma, and globalization), all areas of research in the emerging field of cultural memory. These thought-provoking essays reflect the many ways the past infuses the present, and the present adapts the past. Students and scholars will find this rich collection useful in upper-level courses in Canadian literature as well as in cultural studies"--amazon.com.

Subject

• Canadian literature > History and criticism
• History in literature
• Collective memory in literature
• Collective memory in literature
• Literatur
• Amerikanisches Englisch
• Kollektives Gedächtnis
• Canada
• Kanada

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (445-474) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

• Introduction: Thinking beyond nostalgia: Canadian literature and cultural memory / Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty -- Part I: Sites of memory: cultural amnesia and the demands of place -- Globalization and cultural memory: perspectives from the periphery on the post-national disassembly of place / Tony Tremblay -- Putting things in their place: the syncrude gallery of aboriginal culture and the idiom of majority history / Kimberly Mair -- Lieux d'oubli: the forgotten north of Canadian literature / Renée Hulan -- Design and disappearance: visual nostalgias and the Canadian company town / Candida Rifkind -- Preserving "the echoing rooms of yesterday": Al Purdy's A-Frame and the place of writers' houses in Canada / Brooke Pratt -- Part II: Memory transference: post memory, re-memory, and forgetting -- Learning sauerkraut: ethnic food, cultural memory, and traces of Mennonite identity in Alayna Munce's When I Was Young and In My Prime
• Robert Zacharias -- "Their dark cells": transference, memory, and postmemory in John Mighton's Half Life / Marlene Goldman -- Remembering poverty: Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea, a tale of two lives / Linda Warley -- Postmemory and Canadian poetry of the 1970s / J.A. Weingarten -- "Exhibit me buckskinned": Indigenous legacy and rememory in Joan Crate's Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson / Tanis Macdonald -- Scrapbooking: memory and memorabilia in Gail Anderson-Dargatz's The Cure for Death by Lightning and Turtle Valley / Cynthia Sugars -- Part III: Re-membering history: memory work as recovery -- Ethnography, law, and Aboriginal memory: collecting and recollecting Gitxsan histories in Canada / Marc Fortin -- Between elegy and taxidermy: Archibald Lampman's Golden Lady's Slippers / Peter Hodgins -- Under other skies: personal and cultural memory in E. Pauline Johnson's nature lyrics and memorial odes / Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber --
• Indigenous diasporas and the shape of cultural memory: reframing Anahareo's Devil in Deerskins / Sophie McCall -- Yours to recover: Mound burial in Alice Munro's "What do you want to know for?" / Shelly Hulan -- Romancing Canada in bestsellerdom: the case of Quebec's disappearance / Dennis Duffy -- Collective memory, cultural transmission, and the occupation(s) of Québec, Printemps 1918 / Marissa McHugh -- Part IV: Compulsion to remember: trauma and witnessing -- Under surveillance: memory, trauma, and genocide in Madeline Thien's Dogs at the Perimeter / Robyn Morris -- "I don't want to tell a story like this": cultural inheritance and the seond generation in David Chariandy's Soucouyant / Farah Moosa -- Confronting the legacy of Canada's Indian Residential School System: Cree cultural memory and the warrior spirit in David Alexander Robertson and Scott B. Henderson's 7 Generations Series / Doris Wolf --
• Recovering pedagogical space: trauma, education, and The Lesser Blessed / Robyn Green -- Part V: Cultural memory in a globalized age -- "I have nothing soothing to tell you": Dionne Brand's Inventory as global elegy / Alexis Motuz -- Now and then: Dionne Brand's What We All Long For, the Desire to Forget, and the Urban Archive / Joel Baetz -- Haunted/wanted in Jen Sookfong Lee's The End of East: Canada's cultural memory beyond nostalgia / Eva Darias-Beautell -- Rethinking postcolonialism and Canadian literature through diasporic memory: reading Helen Humphrey's Afterimage / Jennifer Andrews -- Transnational memory and haunted Black geographies: Esi Edugyan's The Second Life of Samuel Tyne / Pilar Cuder-Domínguez.

ISBN

• 9780199007592 (bound)
• 0199007594 (bound)

LCCN

^^2013497922

OCLC

• 870916784
• SCSB-12678712

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library