University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
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Marianne Moore's "The Camperdown Elm" and the Revival of Brooklyn's Prospect Park
Get PDFA little-known poem of Marianne Moore's entitled “The Camperdown Elm” has recently been the recipient of more attention among scholars. Published in 1967 when Moore was nearly eighty years old, the poem is credited with bringing financial assistance to an ailing ornamental tree in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. The tree's history, and the story behind Moore's poem, have been sketchy. This article resuscitates the history of the tree, some of the history of the park, and some of the history of the financially troubled era in which Moore's poem was written. The poem provides a strong paradigm for eco-activist poetics, and yet is also so particular to its time and place that it may be unique. Moore herself was asked for several encores to save other trees and parks in the New York City area, but this one poem remains her only eco-activist effort, but one that was successful in bringing together many different agencies, and which continues to inspire Brooklynites to work for the park's survival
"Loud withe presence of plants and field life": The Ecology of Resistance in Toni Morison's _Tar Baby_
No full textTar Baby occupies a peculiar place in Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s oeuvre. Following the epic Song of Solomon and preceding her masterwork, Beloved, Tar Baby has received little critical engagement. This article posits that the critics’ discomfort with Tar Baby lies in the fact that the politics of the novel are largely encoded in, and voiced by, the nonhuman world. After reading the natural world as the primary, though not exclusive, vehicle of postcolonial resistance in the novel, this article maintains that given the current interest in ecocritical reading, Tar Baby deserves to be repositioned in Morrison’s cano
The 2005 and 2009 Referenda on Voting System Change in British Columbia
Get PDFBritish Columbia’s two referenda on its voting system produced dramatically different results. Conventional accounts of the events tend to rely on populism to explain the surprisingly high vote for the single transferable vote option in 2005 and public concern about the workings of this proposed alternative to explain the decline in its support in 2009. But as public knowledge about the referendum choices remained low in both cases it is hard to credit public reactions to the voting system options as a key factor influencing the results. A more critical reading of the events and existing academic survey work on both referenda suggest that elite manipulation of the process and changing levels of partisan insecurity between the two votes were more influential in producing these different outcomes
When North is South: the production of vertical and horizontal space in Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue and Birk Sproxton’s Phantom Lake
No full textRobert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue, an autobiographical long poem about growing up in Heisler, Alberta, and Birk Sproxton’s Phantom Lake, a narrative approach to growing up in Flin Flon, Manitoba, appear to have little in common, but when read as textualized geography are strikingly similar. Concerned with the nature of place/space, Seed Catalogue maps and reinvents the Canadian Prairie in terms of European history and memories. Sproxton’s Phantom Lake, also made of segmented autobiographical and fictional stories, hearsay, memories, and traces, presents space metonymically, constructing a multilayered and “deep” map of a mining town in Northern Manitoba’s Canadian Shield. As “deep” maps, both texts address questions of Canadian identity and culture, in particular, our identity as situated human beings
Deconstructing The New Federalism
Get PDFThe appearance or imminent arrival of a ‘new federalism’ has been a repeated theme in the study of federal-provincial relations in Canada and in the pronouncements of Canadian governments. At the same time, there clearly is a strong path dependency effect that acts as a check or limitation on the scope of change that federal governments can accomplish, leaving Canadian history littered with the corpses of ‘new federalisms’ that have never been realized. While there is much that separates recent scholarly interventions on the new federalism, all recognize the need to restore a greater measure of political legitimacy and functionality in federal-provincial relations by building consensus on rules and norms of behavior. This paper surveys the history of ‘the new federalism’ as a political strategy and program, and analyzes the competing interpretations of the concept that are currently on offer. I conclude that policy challenges looming on the horizon will demand a coordinated and multilevel response from governments, making it likely that whatever new federalism emerges will continue the trend toward shared jurisdiction and policy-making, rather than disentanglement
Electoral Bias in Quebec Since 1936
Get PDFIn the period since 1936, Quebec has gone through two eras of party politics, the first between the Liberals and the Union Nationale, the second and ongoing era between the Liberals and the Parti Québécois. This study examines elections in Quebec in terms of all relevant types of electoral bias. In both eras the overall electoral bias has clearly been against the Liberal Party. The nature of this bias has changed however. Malapportionment was crucial through 1970, and of minimal importance since the 1972 redistribution. In contrast gerrymandering, ultimately involving an ‘equivalent to gerrymandering effect’ due to the geographic nature of Liberal core support, has been not only a permanent phenomenon but indeed since 1972 the dominant effect. The one election where both gerrymandering and the overall bias were pro-Liberal — 1989 — is shown to be the ‘exception that proves the rule’. Finally, the erratic extent of electoral bias in the past four decades is shown to arise from very uneven patterns of swing in Quebec
Technology and the Fleshly Interface in Forster’s "The Machine Stops": An Ecocritical Appraisal of a One-Hundred Year Old Future
Get PDFAs a prescient critique of telepresence technologies like the Internet, “The Machine Stops” satirizes hypermediated contact and in its place valorizes contact made with the fleshly body—so much so, that it fantasizes the removal of all technological mediations between that body and the “real.” This move carries strong ecocritical implications in its suggestion that all authentic connection—whether between people themselves or between people and the earth—must be corporeal. The narrator’s apology on behalf of “beautiful naked man” (122) and his nostalgia for the robust, technology-free body are, however, both problematic. Forster appears to conflate nakedness and fleshly connection with unmediated contact or “full presence,” a view that raises many potential criticisms and questions. If the body proves to be but one kind of mediating interface itself, then on what grounds should the mode of fleshly connection be privileged over interactions mediated by motors, buttons, and video screens? If all contact must be mediated somehow, does it even make sense to consider one type of interface as “more authentic” than another? Is it right to equate nakedness with freedom from technology? In this paper I use an ecocritical perspective to explore such questions in the text, focusing in particular on Forster’s depiction of technology as devastating to both the human body and to the experience of space and place. The timeliness of such concerns suggests that “The Machine Stops” might prove even more significant in the hypermediated world of today than it was a hundred years ago for questioning the relationship between corporeality, representation, and nature
“The Base, Cursed Thing”: Panther Attacks, Ecotones, and Antebellum American Fiction
No full textThe panther attack scenes found in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), and Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835-1921) portray these animals as literary monsters indicative of a developing American environmental anxiety. Drawing on a selection of recent critical studies dealing with both antebellum American fiction and ecocriticism, I suggest that these scenes reveal, especially through their depiction of panther attacks in what ecologists now refer to as anthropogenic ecotones (human-made environmental edges), the beginnings of an American cultural recognition of environmental degradation. Ultimately these panther attack scenes prefigure an American environmental ethic, revealing an instructive early stage in the evolving cultural perception of the human devastation to the natural world
“Nature’s ‘Negative’ and the Production of Monstrosity in Frankenstein”
Get PDFDespite the lure of Alpine landscapes, Frankenstein hasn’t been taken up at length by many ecocritics. This article will examine monstrosity and acculturation in the context of Western culture’s objectification of nonhuman nature, circling back to bodies of water and the extraordinary environmental conditions of the novel’s production. Alongside explicit references to and representations of the natural world, human responses to nonhuman nature are often negatively inscribed, inversely articulated or unconscious, in culture. Reading dialectically foregrounds both types of inscription. A dialectical ecocriticism, what I am calling ecocultural materialism or an ecocultural approach, as a critical position and methodology, suggests that nonhuman nature not only encompasses and impacts human cultures, in ways that we can and cannot see, but that it also might serve as an intervention in human cultures, in ways that we both can and cannot understand
“Local Yearnings”: Re-Placing Nostalgia in Don DeLillo’s _Underworld_
Get PDFMany scholars have read DeLillo’s fiction as an illustration of “how conflicting postmodern practices collide” (Parrish 697). In this essay, I proceed from the recognition that the nature-culture binary is more fluid than ever and situate DeLillo as a theorist not only of postmodern culture but also of postmodern nature. I examine DeLillo’s most ambitious and complex novel, Underworld, through the lens of green cultural studies—a phrase I prefer to “ecocriticism” because it resonates with cultural studies’ interdisciplinarity, ideology critique, and attention to power. Combining a cultural studies methodology with more traditional ecocritical strategies, green cultural studies confronts networks of power while exploring the socio-environmental dimensions of a given text. A green cultural studies approach is particularly well-suited to addressing the novel’s compelling, often confounding, refractions of the postnatural condition. Using this critical framework, I suggest that this simultaneously nostalgic and ironic text, characterized by an alternately worshipful and irreverent treatment of nature, both maps and engenders a radicalized postmodern nostalgia—nostalgia with a critical edge. Unlike critics (such as Renato Rosaldo, William Cronon and others) who have theorized nostalgia’s limitations, Underworld shows how nostalgia can be harnessed and utilized in the service of social and environmental critique