University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
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“‘Pull Down Thy Vanity’: Post-Pastoral Subject in Ezra Pound’s Cantos”
Get PDFAnglophone modernism is often interpreted as reflecting a crisis of modernity brought about, among other factors, by the trauma of World War One. The parameters of the crisis include the perception that things are “falling apart,” i.e. a growing sense of the fragmentation of reality and of the exhaustion of traditional teleological narratives such as religion or the myth of progress. Poetry written in the face of this condition must necessarily be paradoxical in that it combines the profound skepticism of the times with an almost religious faith in the redemptive power of art. The paradoxes of modern poetry and its frequent recourse to silence in general have been discussed from a number of perspectives. Seldom, though, have critics taken into consideration the role played by the silence of nature in modernist poetry. In the work of Ezra Pound, it is possible to trace a progress from pastoral representations of nature to what Terry Gifford has defined as the “post-pastoral” mode. The latter mode is especially present in the Pisan section of Pound’s great epic poem Cantos and in its concluding parts. However, the earlier pastoral model is always already complicated by the tension between what, after Lacan, can be called the “énoncé” (statement) and the “énonciation” (enunciation) within Pound’s text. The pastoral and post-pastoral modes of nature representation correspond to two different subject positions. The pastoral setting involves a rigid subject/object dichotomy and the subject’s dominion over nature. The post-pastoral requires a reconfiguration of subjectivity to make space for the silent presence of nature, which no longer serves as a bearer of man-made meanings
Private Health Facilities in Saskatchewan: Marginalization through Legalization
Get PDFThis paper explores how the passage of Saskatchewan’s Health Facilities Licensing Act in 1996 created both a legal framework for private health facilities in the province as well as erecting significant barriers to virtually insure that no such facilities could effectively operate. This is done within the context of discovering how placing barriers to privatization has contributed to reform of the health care system and the conditions in which reform will be permitted. Data for the study were collected from a series of eleven key informant interviews including elected officials, civil servants, health care professionals, academics, members of key stakeholder organizations which both supported and opposed the legislation
“Investigating Media as a Deliberative Space: Newspaper Opinions about Voting Systems in the 2007 Ontario Provincial Referendum”
Get PDFThis paper seeks to contribute to discussions of deliberative democracy by developing tools to measure the deliberative quality of the media handling of the Ontario referendum debate. To that end, the paper will examine elite media discourse over voting systems in the major daily broadsheets in Ontario throughout the referendum campaign period. This will involve examining both the balance of views presented as well as assessing the rhetorical strategies employed in the debate. As will be demonstrated, the results tend to confirm previous negative assessments of media’s deliberative performance in referendum contexts, though in this case with more detailed evidence about the specifically deliberative failures
Hope and Fear Revisited: Did the Provincial Election of 2007 Mark the Transition to a Stable Two-Party System in Saskatchewan?
No full textThe Saskatchewan provincial election of November 2007 brought the new Saskatchewan Party to power, ending 16 years of NDP rule. Observers have been divided over the significance of the rise of the Saskatchewan Party between those who see provincial politics as continuing on its course of ideological polarization between parties of the left and the right and those who detect a convergence on the political centre. Arguing that polarized politics is best understood by a historical approach to party systems, and convergence politics by an institutional approach, this paper examines the evidence for polarization and convergence in Saskatchewan politics. It concludes that there is evidence for a new party system based on convergence, a system that first appears in 2003 after a transitional period in the 1990s
“‘I am not a Tree with My Root in the Soil’: Ecofeminist Revisions of Tree Symbolism in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry”
No full textDrawing on ecofeminist theories, the paper argues that Sylvia Plath’s poetic vision is often captured by the dialectics between the tree and its roots, a dialectics which encodes the integrative powers of the tree to unite opposites, and which thus embodies a potential for relocation of oppositional dualities that structure Western thought. The argument integrates a critical response to Ted Hughes’s vision of Plath’s poetic foliage, which he presents in terms of a hierarchical comparison to that of established male literary figures. It is claimed that such a phallocentric perspective on a woman poet’s relationship to the poetic tradition is embedded in envisioning woman’s relationship to culture in terms of the nature/culture dualism. Continuing this line of argument, it is highlighted that the lack of empowering models of female literary predecessors cause gender ambivalence in a woman creator, which in turn generates a self-depreciative attitude to the aesthetic value of her art. The analyzed poems reveal the intensity of depleting self-doubt and dependence on the approval on those who judge her art (or the muse). What emerges from Plath’s poetic exploration of the gender meanings of the tree metaphor is that the dialogue with Nature, which occurs within the context of the male-dominant literary tradition, contains an implicit negotiation with dominant discourses, which unavoidably shape woman’s self-identification within the nature/culture dualism, and instigates an effort to re-imagine conventional significations. It is maintained that a re-vision of Plath’s poetic elaborations of the tree and root in light of ecofeminist tenets offers a locus for the relocation of nature/culture hierarchies and a delineation of potentialities for alternative visions
“The Funny Side of Nature: Whitman, Ginsberg and America’s ‘Dark Poet’”
No full textMany American writers of the Romantic tradition have seen a unity between humanity, spirituality and nature, and strived to articulate it in language. The notion of Romantic interconnectedness expressed in the work of Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Whitman, for instance, also features in the mid-twentieth century writing of the Beats, most notably Allen Ginsberg. More recently, however, postmodernism/postructuralism has worked to undermine that project. Given the split between signifier and signified, the idea that language can have any kind of unifying function, or put us in touch with transcendent values, seems untenable, even laughable. This paper argues that the American stand-up comedian, Bill Hicks, reveals a passionate awareness of the link between humanity, spirituality and nature, and that he seeks to express it in routines which have strong affinities with American Romanticism. It constructs Hicks as a comedian who exhibits many of the characteristics of a postmodernist, but whose humor manages to transcend relativity in order to reclaim and embody the spirit of Romantic unity
Changing the Game Changes the Frame: The Media’s Use of Lesbian Stereotypes in Leadership versus Election Campaigns
Get PDFThis study examines how Allison Brewer, the openly lesbian leader of the New Brunswick New Democratic Party was reported on in the province’s newspapers. News values governing political reporting led the media to construct Brewer’s political persona during her leadership campaign using stereotypes of lesbians, activists and women in politics. This stereotypic treatment occurred at a point in her political career when impressions are most important. A year later, during the provincial election campaign her newsworthiness as a “new” or “contentious” presence in politics had diminished and her coverage became more typical of the average or ‘normal’ female politician
Call for Papers - "Tools of the Sacred, Techniques of the Secular" Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 4-7 May 2010
No full text‘Tools of the Sacred, Techniques of the Secular:
Awakening, Epiphany, Apocalypse and Doubt in
Contemporary English-Language Verse’
Université Libre de Bruxelles
First Call for Papers
(Brussels, 4 to 7 May 2010
Do Large-N Media Studies Bury the Lead, or Even Miss the Story?
Get PDFThis paper uses immigration as a case study to examine whether a qualitative approach to content analysis can offer a different perspective on policy discourse than that provided by quantitative analysis. In examining the Canadian elections of 2004, 2006 and 2008, it finds evidence that immigration was a much greater issue at both a riding-level and within certain communities than evidenced in a large-N study. It suggests that issues surrounding identity may be ‘permanent’ top-of-mind issues for some voters, and that the reason minor campaign incidents sometimes garner disproportionate attention is because they act as an ‘emotional heuristic’ for top-of-mind issues even when information is high
Reframing Campaigning: Communications, the Media and Elections in Canada
Get PDFThis article is a critical assessment of Canadian perspectives on the role of the media in electoral behaviour, notably on the roles media play in setting or responding to the agenda in the heat of election campaigns. Research into the role of the media in election campaigns has been conducted within the broadly behaviouralist tradition of political scientific research. The article begins with a brief contextualization of the behaviouralist research tradition in Canada. Within the specific context of Canadian history and its social structure, the introduction explains how the very questions that Canadians have posed regarding media/campaign interactions have been undertaken in a range of research traditions that problematize fields of causality with greater complexity than is possible in the largely positivist behaviouralist paradigm. Three such research traditions are those of “Culture, Ideology, and Discourse,” “Political Economy/Technology,” and “Legal-Institutional Analyses.” The second section of the article highlights important Canadian methodological and empirical contributions to behaviouralism. The general importance of campaign effects, the impact of leader-centred media priming, the methodological innovation of the rolling cross-section sample design, and advances in agenda setting research are identified in this section. The third section of the article, on Culture, Ideology, and Discourse, illustrates general patterns of contrast between the Canadian and American political cultures through an exploration of the comparative role of negative and attack advertisements in election campaigns. This section illustrates instances of how the limits established in the Canadian political culture influence media decisions and how the discourses of media coverage reflect cultural realities. The fourth section of the article illustrates how facets of the Political Economy of Canada exert an impact on media/ campaign interactions. This section explores the media/campaign interaction from both sides. First, the changing impact of campaign financing/campaign spending on media reportage is assessed, and then the implications of shifting patterns of media ownership on campaign coverage is considered. Do either set of changing relations affect the shaping of the media agenda? Finally, the political economy of the new Information and Communications Technologies is investigated in the context of the Toronto School of Communication. The fifth and final section of the article undertakes the task of situating media/campaign interactions within the Legal-Institutional regulatory context of the Canadian state. The impact of the Canada Elections Act and other legislation is undertaken around matters such as freedom of expression, access to information, advertising, spending, and public support for political parties and candidates