Christl Verduyn

... I would like to extend my thanks to all the members of the staff, and in particular to Dr KathyGaray, who cata-logued Engel's papers and whose remarkable knowledge of the archive led to hours and hours of conversation about the material. ... 10 Garay 34. ...

This collaborative autoethnography explores how a group of students and professors from across Canada came together following racial justice protests of 2020. Driven by a desire to pressure Canadian higher education organizations to act on statements and commitments they had made regarding anti-racism, the group embraces a students-as-partners framework in the creation of a list of demands for institutions. Despite claims by such organizations that they were addressing racism, the demands were largely ignored. The authors explore both phases of the project, from factors leading to the successful creation of the demands to experiencing dismissal by the institutions they were designed to help. Twin messages are drawn from this work: students-as-partners is a powerful and useful method for engaging in conversations and taking action regarding anti-racism in higher education, yet this has little bearing on the institutions and structures which participate in oppression.  

The story of Lot ' s wife is not unknown to contemporary Canadian women novelists nor to their female protagonists. Indeed one Quebec writer, M o n i q u e Bosco, shapes an entire novel, appropriately entitled Lot's Wife (La Femme de Loth), around this biblical character. As the protagonist Helene puts it, the statue of Lot ' s wife is " a fine image, a most telling symbol. A pil lar of petrified tears." (p. 142) In another Quebec novel, Whirlpool (L'eau est profonde) by Diane Giguere, the main character Nathalie has her eyes " f i rmly fixed on the past": " I kept thinking of that frightful second of time in which Lot ' s wife chose to look back ," says Nathalie. " I kept alive the memory of a person who had already been m e . " (p. 55) A lengthy reflection on Lo t ' s wife appears i n Adele Wiseman's Crackpot, when H o d a suddenly finds special meaning i n the figure:

En 1935 la pièce Cocktail d'Yvette Ollivier Mercier-Gouin a été réclamée sur la scène théâtrale québécoise. Le public de l'époque semblait y reconnaître sa première grande pièce nationale. Comment expliquer alors l'obscurité dans laquelle sont sombrées pièce et auteure à partir de 1940? Une lecture contemporaine de la pièce dégage une thématique qui devait attendre, pour être approfondie, une perspective littéraire et critique féministe.

This article looks at the use of the essay genre by Canadian and Québécois women writers since 2000, in particular essay writing by authors known primarily for their works of fiction and poetry. For many, the essay form has served as an ideal venue for combining new, innovative, experimental and “alternative” forms of writing with concerns of personal and political struggle for social, cultural, economic, and even psychological recognition and justice. The article begins with a brief overview of aspects of essay writing by Canadian and Québécois women writers at the end of the 20th century before turning to some comparative observations that suggest convergences and differences, as well as continuity and departures in essay writing by Canadian and Québécois women writers since the beginning of the 21st century. Convergences are seen in the combination of personal commentary on topics of social, political, national and global relevance with experimental use of the essay genre. They a...

... alongside the cover of Nicole Brossard's L'amer (1977), I would like to acknowledge Stoddart Publishing Com-pany Limited and Vlb Editeur. The cooperation of members of the Engel family throughout was most appreciated, and I would especially like to thank Charlotte En-gel ...

Les nouvelles théories féministes ont beaucoup apponé à la littérature féminine en remettant en question les idées reçues non seulement dans les domaines de la littérature et la linguistique mais dans ceux de la psychologie et la philosophie. Ainsi le concept de l’identité humaine et le discours qui y correspond se métamorphosent sous l’initiative des théoriciennes contemporaines. En cherchant à écrire le moi au féminin, les écrivaines d’aujourd’hui font éclater le langage et les formes littéraires établis et traditionnels.

Tout comme on le trouve chez des auteures “minoritaires” au Canada anglais (telles M. Nourbese Philip, Himani Bannerji, Claire Harris, Lee Maracle, pour ne nommer qu’elles), on peut observer un engagement littéraire politique dans le corpus “migrant” québécois. Toutefois, ce parallèle se manifeste de façon pins évidente dans les écrits d’auteurs noirs (Dany Laferrière, Jean Jonassaint, Gérard Etienne, Joel des Rosiers, etc,). Chez les femmes la production littéraire est tout aussi active mais l’engagement qu’elles reflètent semble s’exprimer de manière autre. Ainsi par exemple, le groupe croissant d’auteures d’origine arabe (Andrée Dahan, Nadia Ghalem, Mona Latif Ghattas, Nadine Ltaif) semble, au premier abord, favoriser l’exploration de la problématique culturelle. En cela, leurs écrits apparaissent peut-être moins “politisés.” Néanmoins, une analyse détaillée de certains de leurs textes peut apporter une ré-évaluation de cette perspective.

This essay examines The Diviners as an exploration of contra/diction in two senses. Protagonist Morag Gunn perceives contradiction between conventional and personal understandings of truth and knowledge. Language plays a contradictory role in this perception. It is involved in the construction and dictation of social norms, but it can be used to contradict convention and express difference. The exploration of questions of difference leads Laurence to consider the limits of language and the privilege of the centre and the visual in the apprehension and representation of reality. The limitations of language can be alleviated when faith is placed in the intuitive guess, a ‘contradictory’ attitude which allows for the possibility of writing.

Résumé En déclarant qu'*être est une activité de fiction", Suzanne Jacob dévoile les grands points de repère de son écriture. La triade être/agir/écrire constitue en effet un noeud de motifs qui structure son oeuvre, et qui fait l'objet du présent article. Par le biais de la fiction, Jacob témoigne de la nécessité, pour les femmes, d'agir. L'acte d'écrire s'avère extrêmement important, car il permet à la femme d'être présente au monde.

"Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word 'archive.'" So declared Jacques Derrida in his well-known address to the 1994 international conference on Memory: The Question of Archives. Fittingly, the conference took place in Sigmund Freud's last house in London, England, now the international centre of Freud studies and the repository-arkheion, the Greek word for domicile, address, and residence-of his archives. Derrida's lecture, "The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression," appeared the following year under the title Mal d'archive: Une impression freudienne (1995). Its English language translation, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996), has provided tremendous impetus to renewed, if not feverish, interest in archives, archival research, and archival theory, no less in Canada than throughout the world of scholarship. This collection of essays aims to contribute to the debates and discussions. Central to Derrida's discussion is the term archive itself, from the Greek arkhe-"the commencement and the commandment... there where things commence ... there where men and gods command" (Derrida 1996, 1). It is the place of inter section between commencement and commandment in archives that this collection proposes to explore. Notwithstanding Carolyn Steedman's contention that "nothing starts in the Archive, nothing ever at all" (2002, 45), archives mark the point where, among other commencements, scholars begin what can prove to be a lengthy, sometimes lifelong, attachment to the unpublished legacy of their research subject. The act of commandment is, at least in its earliest stage, the work of the archons, the archival professionals, the "guardians" under whose "house arrest" the archives "speak the law" (Derrida 1996,2). Our purpose here is to examine this "uncommon place, where law and singularity intersect in privilege" (3) from the points of view of its two most visible and most powerful inhabitants, the scholar and the archivist, and in particular, their shared enterprise as it relates to Canadian literature. There is a distinctly Canadian tradition of scholarly interest in the nature of communication, an area in which the archival record plays an essential part. Its most prominent trajectories have been traced by the work of Harold Innis, George Grant, and Marshall McLuhan. Innis, a historian and pioneering communications theorist, saw in Canada the representation of a balance between civilization and power. Grant, in contrast, found "a lack of morality and vision in this technological dynamo, which also incorporated technocratic bureaucracies," while McLuhan concerned himself with "the impact of technological media, which include the media of record, on the user" (Taylor 2003, 174).' Arthur Kroker, a more recent contributor to the discourse on communication technology, has described Canada's unique situation "midway between the future of the New World and the past of European culture" (1984, 7). He sees Canada "by virtue of historical circumstance and geographical accident to be forever marginal to the 'present mindedness' of American culture (a society which ... does not enjoy the recriminations of historical remembrance)" and as "incapable of being more than ambivalent on the cultural legacy of our European past" (8). We will be considering the archive here in the context both of cultural communication and of what Ursula Franklin has called "technology as practice" (1999, 2), involving "organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset" (3). This volume will also demonstrate that the ready availability of the more material elements of technology, particularly the Internet, has both illuminated and complicated the archival space for scholars and archivists alike. In a special issue of English Studies in Canada (ESC), "The Event of the Archive," (March 2004), co-editors Michael O'Driscoll and Edward Bishop commence with the necessary question: just what do we mean by the term "archive"? …

... In her novel Laure Clouet (1961). Adrienne Choquette delicately reveals Laure's humiliation about her body: ... she wants to rejoin her body, but she can't get down.” Out-of-body experiences occur in Audrey Thomas' Blown Figures (1974) as well. ...

Les nouvelles théories féministes ont beaucoup apponé à la littérature féminine en remettant en question les idées reçues non seulement dans les domaines de la littérature et la linguistique mais dans ceux de la psychologie et la philosophie. Ainsi le concept de l’identité humaine et le discours qui y correspond se métamorphosent sous l’initiative des théoriciennes contemporaines. En cherchant à écrire le moi au féminin, les écrivaines d’aujourd’hui font éclater le langage et les formes littéraires établis et traditionnels.