3,160 research outputs found
Interview: Anne-Marie Fortier
Full text linkThis paper is an edited version of an email interview conducted by Debra Ferreday and Adi Kuntsman with Anne-Marie Fortier, the author of Multicultural Horizons: Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation (Routledge, 2008). Fortier’s work has been informative in the development of some of the arguments explored in this special issue; in their conversation Ferreday and Kuntsman asked her to comment on the ideas of haunting, racial imaginaries, nostalgia, national anxieties, political feelings and hopes for the future
From Anne of Green Gables to Anne of the Suburbs: Lucy Maud Montgomery reimagines home in Anne of the Island
No full textL. M. Montgomery's work, including her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables, has been tied inextricably, in both scholarship and the popular imagination, to the rural worlds of Green Gables, Avonlea and Prince Edward Island. This article positions Montgomery as a writer offering insight into early Canadian suburban life. It does so via a reading of the third “Anne” book, Anne of the Island (1915), specifically its depiction of Patty's Place, where Anne lives while a student at Redmond College (Dalhousie College) in Kingsport (Halifax, Nova Scotia). For Montgomery, the suburb is a place that combines the best of the country and the city, while moving past the limitations of both. The suburb gives Anne a home and a place of belonging in a new, urban world. Patty's Place also offers the possibility of transformation and independence, especially for women, more than any other place in the novel. This article not only provides a new perspective on one of Canada's best-loved writers, but also contributes to a slowly growing but long overdue discussion of the city and suburbs in Canadian literary criticism, which is still largely preoccupied with notions of the wilderness and of the north
'The cracked mirror': Anne Sexton's poetics of self-representation
No full textThis thesis re-evaluates the work of the poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974), concentrating, in particular, on the indeterminacies, contradictions and aporia which it finds to be characteristic of her ostensibly frank and self-revelatory writing. The study is based on a close textual
analysis of Sexton's writing, is informed by oststructuralist theories, and is sustained by an
examination and discussion of archive collections of her previously unpublished papers. In seeking an understanding of Sexton's poetics, the thesis identifies and interrogates the strategies of denial and obfuscation apparent in her own explication of her work - principally, by scrutiny of the unpublished, and previously unresearched, drafts of a series of lectures
which she delivered in 1972. Chapters One and Two consider the origins of `confessional' or - Sexton's preferred term - 'personal' poetry and reassess her place within contemporary poetry. They suggest that
Sexton's writing is engaged in a process of negotiation and contestation, both with the boundaries and expectations of confessionalism, and with the strictures of T. S. Eliot's theory of `impersonality'. In support of these arguments, Chapter Two offer a reading of Sexton's
little-known poem, `Hurry Up Please It's Time', alongside its intertext, Eliot's The Waste Land. Chapter Three reassesses received views of the supposedly beneficial interrelationship between confessional speaker and reader. It examines Sexton's appropriation of dramatic
masks and personae and her use of metaphors of striptease and prostitution, and suggests that these are employed simultaneously to appease and to repel an intrusive audience. Similarly, Chapters Four and Five trace Sexton's problematisation of two previously-accepted tenets of confessional poetry: its status as autobiography and its truthfulness, drawing attention to the techniques employed in order to give the impression of both. Chapter Six considers Sexton's
problematic engagement with a language which is not malleable, transparent, and referential but, rather, is experienced as uncooperative and occlusive. Finally, the thesis recuperates Sexton from the common charge of narcissism, arguing that it is the writing, rather than the poet, which is self-reflexive and self-conscious. In this respect, it concludes that her work - perhaps unexpectedly - anticipates many of the tendencies of postmodernist writing
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