Landscapes of Trauma and Transformation: Poems of Anne Michaels, Karen Shenfeld, and Miriam Waddington

Long before ecocriticism became a focus for textual analysis, poets articulated interconnection with the natural world. Not only green but vibrant colour across the spectrum has semiotically served poets as they sought to venture ever deeper into understanding the expanse of human experience and the anguish that all too often accompanies it. The idea of post-traumatic transformation is rooted in the Hebrew Bible and in the contextual stories with which it is intertextually connected. Casting out the idea that hardship is intentionally imposed for the express purpose of causing growth, the fact remains that suffering—sometimes unbearable suffering—is integral to human life and we must grapple with it. The colourful imagery and synesthesia of landscape can be leveraged descriptively and metaphorically to express pain, confusion, and questioning. Traversing the terrain of confounding events, poetic poesis of the works analyzed in this article demonstrates a wrestling to find, however provisionally, transformative trails through the wreckage.Bien avant que l’écocritique ne devienne un focus pour l’analyse textuelle, les poètes ont articulé l’interconnexion avec le monde naturel. Plus que la couleur verte, tous les tons à travers le spectre ont servi sémiotiquement les poètes alors qu’ils cherchaient à s’aventurer toujours plus profondément dans la compréhension de l’étendue de l’expérience humaine et de l’angoisse qui l’accompagne trop souvent. L’idée de transformation post-traumatique est enracinée dans la Torah et dans les histoires contextuelles avec lesquelles elle est intertextuellement connectée. En rejetant l’idée que la souffrance est intentionnellement imposée dans le but de provoquer la croissance, il n’en reste pas moins que la souffrance—parfois insupportable—fait partieintégrante de la vie humaine et nous devons la combattre. L’imagerie colorée et la synesthésie du paysage peuvent être exploitées de manière descriptive et métaphorique pour exprimer la douleur, la confusion, et le questionnement. Traversant le terrain d’événements déroutants, la poésie poétique des oeuvres analysées dans cet article démontre la lutte pour trouver, même provisoirement, des pistes transformatrices à travers les épaves.

A MEMÓRIA EM FUGITIVE PIECES, DE ANNE MICHAELS

A memória parece ser o tema central de Fugitive Pieces, primeiro romance da escritora canadense Anne Michaels, publicado em 1996. Seus dois narradores – Jakob Beer e Ben – são judeus que sofreram de maneiras diferentes as graves consequências da guerra. Jakob sobrevive à tomada de sua vila por soldados nazistas e é resgatado pelo arqueólogo grego Athos, enquanto Ben é filho de dois sobreviventes de campos de concentração. Neste trabalho, analisa-se esse romance a partir da associação do tema da memória com três eixos principais: individualidade e memória coletiva; linguagem, tempo e espaço; esquecimento, trauma e pós-memória. Para tanto, nos valemos principalmente do que foi postulado por autores como Halbwachs, Assman, Nora e Hirsch.

‘And Yet, What Would We Be Without Memory?’ Visualizing Memory in Two Canadian Graphic Texts

Since “we live in a culture of confession” (Gilmore 2001: 2; Rak 2005: 2) a rapidly growing popularity of various forms of life writing seems understandable. The question of memory is usually an important part of the majority of autobiographical texts. Taking into account both the popularity of life writing genres and their recent proliferation, it is interesting to see how the question “what would we be without memory?” (Sebald 1998 [1995]: 255) resonates within more experimental auto/biographical texts such as a graphic memoir/novel I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006) by Bernice Eisenstein and a volume of illustrated poetry and a biographical elegy published together as Correspondences (2013) by Anne Michaels and Bernice Eisenstein. These two experimental works, though representing disparate forms of writing, offer new stances on visualization of memory and correspondences between text and visual image. The aim of this paper is to analyze the ways in which the two authors discuss memory as a fluid concept yet, at the same time, one having its strong, ghostly presence. The discussion will also focus on the interplay between memory and postmemory as well as correspondences between the texts and the equally important visual forms accompanying them such as drawings, portraits, sketches, and the bookbinding itself.

Children Without Childhood: The Emotionality of Orphaned Children and Images of Their Rescuers in Selected Works of English and Canadian Literature

This article deals with literary depictions of social, political, cultural and religious circumstances in which children who have lost one or both parents at birth or at a later age have found themselves. The weakest members of society, the children looked at here are exposed to dangers, exploitation and violence, but are fortunate enough to be rescued by a relative or other sympathetic person acting out of benevolence. Recognizing that the relationship between the orphaned child, who is in mortal danger, and a rescuer, who most frequently appears unexpectedly in a relationship, has been portrayed in narratives throughout the ages and that we can therefore speak of it as being an archetypal one, the article focuses especially on three novels by Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist (1837–1839), David Copperfield (1849–1850) and Great Expectations (1860–1861) – and in Fugitive Pieces (1996) by Canadian writer Anne Michaels. Charles Dickens earned the reputation of a classic writer through his original literary figures of orphaned children in the context of the rough capitalism of the Victorian era of the 19th century. Such originality also distinguishes Anne Michaels, whose novel Fugitive Pieces portrays the utterly traumatic circumstances that a Jewish boy is exposed to after the Germans kill his parents during the Holocaust. All the central children’s lives in these extreme situations are saved by generous people, thus highlighting the central idea of both selected authors: that evil cannot overcome good. Rescuers experience their selfless resolve to save extremely powerless and unprotected child victims of violence from life-threatening situations as a self-evident moral imperative. Through their profound and deeply experienced descriptions of memories of traumas successfully overcome by central literary figures in a spirit of compassion and solidarity, Charles Dickens and Anne Michaels have left testaments of hope against hope for future generations.

Anthropocene Bodies, Geological Time and the Crisis of Natality

In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a ‘crisis of natality’. Engaging with two works of fiction – Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces – the article explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a ‘stratigraphic time’ associated primarily with maternal responsibility – involving a temporal give-and-take that passes between generations and across thresholds in the Earth itself. If this is a construction of inter-corporeality in which each life and every breath has utmost value, it is also a vision that exceeds the biopolitical prioritization of the organismic body – as evidenced in both McCarthy’s and Michaels’ gesturing beyond the bounds of the living to a forceful, sensate and enigmatic cosmos.

The Adventures of Miss Petitfour by A. Michaels

Michaels, Anne. The Adventures of Miss Petitfour, illustrated by Emma Block. Tundra Books, 2015. The winner of numerous awards, Anne Michaels has earned her place among Canada’s most talented wordsmiths. Long a respected Canadian poet, her brilliant debut novel—Fugitive Pieces (1996)—brought her international acclaim. The Adventures of Miss Petitfour is Michaels’ first book for children. Emma Block is a young freelance illustrator who has already established a reputation for delicately feminine and delightfully quirky illustrations. Her work can be seen in children’s books, Hallmark products, and in tableware. This book represents a nearly perfect partnership between the author and the illustrator.Among other things, this is a book about the stories we like to tell and read. The books in the village bookshop near Miss Petitfour’s house are divided into two sections: ho-hum and hum. The former are books in which nothing ever happens, but are “full of interesting facts that would never come in useful” and the latter are adventure books.This charming little book is certainly not ho-hum, but neither does it offer grand adventures. The adventures of the unconventional Miss Petitfour and her sixteen fun-loving cats—all of whom go everywhere with her, quite literally wherever the wind takes them—are adventures of "just the right size—fitting into a single, magical day." These little adventures demonstrate that sometimes “the best things happen” when “things work out differently than you expect.”Young bookworms and aspiring writers will be delighted to find that Michaels offers them a peak behind the curtain, one that reveals some of the key elements in the construction of a story, and explains how these elements function with clarity and wit. For example, in the midst of a major digression in a story about a trip to buy marmalade, we are told that a digression is “when the story wanders off the point and gets lost” and that it can be the best part of a story. Several digressions follow naturally and are clearly marked as such. In another story, we are told that a coincidence “is something that happens at just the right moment,” and that stories use them “to fix up tricky tangles”, following which, coincidentally, the story—about a confetti factory explosion—cleverly and humorously demonstrates the technique several times in rapid succession.The name of the main character—Miss Petitfour—is somewhat unexpected, but the delicate and ornate nature of the French pastry known as a petitfour makes it a suitable metaphor at the heart of a little book that celebrates little everyday adventures, decorative language, and fanciful illustrations in a way that is light and sweet and fun. This book is very highly recommended for children of all ages and is well suited for reading aloud.Highly recommended: four stars out of fourReviewer: Linda QuirkLinda taught courses in Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become a teaching librarian at University of Alberta’s Bruce Peel Special Collections. Her favourite children's book to teach is Hana's Suitcase, not only because Hana's story is so compelling, but because the format of this non-fiction book teaches students of all ages about historical investigation and reveals that it is possible to recover the stories of those who have long been forgotten by history.

Literature in Our Time, or, Loving Literature to Bits

In this essay Ivan Callus provides some reflections on literature in the present. He considers the tenability of the post-literary label and looks at works that might be posited as having some degree of countertextual affinity. The essay, while not setting itself up as a creative piece, deliberately structures itself unconventionally. It frames its argument within twenty-one sections that are self-contained but that also echo each other in their attempt to develop an overarching argument which draws out some of the challenges that lie before the countertextual and the post-literary. Punctuating the essay and contributing to its unconventional take on the practice of literary criticism is a series of exercises for the reader to complete, if so wished; the essay makes no attempt, however, to suggest that a countertextual criticism ought to make a routine of such devices. The separate sections contain reflections on a number of texts and writers, among them, and in order of appearance, Hamlet, Anthony Trollope, Jacques Derrida, The Time Machine, Don Quixote, Mark Z. Danielewski, Mark B. N. Hansen, Gunter Kress, Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses, W. B. Yeats, Kate Tempest, David Jones, Anne Michaels, Bernice Eisenstein, Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Billy Collins, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Tim Parks, Tom McCarthy – and Hamlet again. The essay's length fulfils a performative function but also facilitates as extensive a catalogue of aspects of the countertextual in literature and elsewhere as is feasible or as might be dared at this stage.