Kit Dobson

When Kit Dobson's daughter looked at the field of stars on the screen at the beginning of a new Star Wars movie in the theatre and remarked to her father, "Yeah, right. There's not that many stars," Dobson suddenly realized his daughter had never truly seen the night sky. From then on Dobson began to think seriously about how little we, as humans, interact with the natural world and how that has changed our place within it. Field Notes on Listening is a response to our lack of connection to the land we call home, the difficult history of how many of us came to be here and what we could discover if we listened deeply to the world around us. Written in brief, elegant sections, Field Notes on Listening starts at Dobson's kitchen table, a family heirloom, and wends through time and space, looking at his family's lost farm, the slow violence of climate change, loss of habitat, the tensions of living in late-stage capitalism and through careful listening strives to find a way through it all, returning, in the end, to home and the same table.

Field Notes on Listening

Smaro Kamboureli

Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace brings to light the relationship between writers in Canada and the marketplace within which their work circulates. Through a series of conversations with both established and younger writers from across the country, Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli investigate how writers perceive their relationship to the cultural economy—and what that economy means for their creative processes. The interviews in Producing Canadian Literature focus, in particular, on how writers interact with the cultural institutions and bodies that surround them. Conversations pursue the impacts of arts funding on writers; show how agents, editors, and publishers affect writers’ works; examine the process of actually selling a book, both in Canada and abroad; and contemplate what literary awards mean to writers. Dialogues with Christian Bök, George Elliott Clarke, Daniel Heath Justice, Larissa Lai, Stephen Henighan, Roy Miki, Erín Moure, Ashok Mathur, Lee Maracle, Jane Urquhart, and Aritha van Herk testify to the broad range of experience that writers in Canada have when it comes to the conditions in which their work is produced. Original in its desire to directly explore the specific circumstances in which writers work—and how those conditions affect their writing itself—Producing Canadian Literature will be of interest to scholars, students, aspiring writers, and readers who have followed these authors and want to know more about how their books come into being.

Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace

Producing Canadian Literature

Transnational Canadas marks the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between globalization and Canadian literature written in English. Tracking developments in the literature and its study from the centennial period to the present, it shows how current work in transnational studies can provide new insights for researchers and students. Arguing first that the dichotomy of Canadian nationalism and globalization is no longer valid in today’s economic climate, Transnational Canadas explores the legacy of leftist nationalism in Canadian literature. It examines the interventions of multicultural writing in the 1980s and 1990s, investigating the cultural politics of the period and how they increasingly became part of Canada’s state structure. Under globalization, the book concludes, we need to understand new forms of subjectivity and mobility as sites for cultural politics and look beyond received notions of belonging and being. An original contribution to the study of Canadian literature, Transnational Canadas seeks to invigorate discussion by challenging students and researchers to understand the national and the global simultaneously, to look at the politics of identity beyond the rubric of multiculturalism, and to rethink the slippery notion of the political for the contemporary era.

Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization

Transnational Canadas

Ada S. Jaarsma

Dissonant Methods is an innovative collection that probes how, by teaching inventively, postsecondary instructors can resist the constrictions of neoliberalism. Taking up the call in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to understand teaching as scholarship, these essays offer concrete and practical meditations on resistant and sustainable teaching. The contributors seek to undermine forms of oppression frequently practised in higher education, and instead advance a vision of the university that upholds ideals such as critical thinking, creativity, and inclusivity. Essential reading for faculty and graduate students in the humanities, Dissonant Methods offers urgent, galvanizing ideas for anyone currently teaching in a college or university.Contributors: Kathy Cawsey, Kit Dobson, Ada S. Jaarsma, Rachel Jones, Kyle Kinaschuk, Namrata Mitra, Guy Obrecht, Katja Pettinen, Kaitlin Rothberger, Ely Shipley, Martin Shuster

Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom

Dissonant Methods

Marie Carrière

Ursula Mathis-Moser

All the Feels / Tous les sens presents research into emotion and cognition in Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois writings in English or French. Affect is both internal and external, private and public; with its fluid boundaries, it represents a productive dimension for literary analysis. The emerging field of affect studies makes vital claims about ethical impulses, social justice, and critical resistance, and thus much is at stake when we adopt affective reading practices. The contributors ask what we can learn from reading contemporary literatures through this lens. Unique and timely, readable and teachable, this collection is a welcome resource for scholars of literature, feminism, philosophy, and transnational studies as well as anyone who yearns to imagine the world differently. Contributors: Nicole Brossard, Marie Carrière, Matthew Cormier, Kit Dobson, Nicoletta Dolce, Louise Dupré, Margery Fee, Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Smaro Kamboureli, Aaron Kreuter, Daniel Laforest, Carmen Mata Barreiro, Ursula Mathis-Moser, Heather Milne, Eric Schmaltz, Maïté Snauwaert, Jeanette den Toonder

Affect and Writing in Canada / Affect et écriture au Canada

All the Feels / Tous les sens

Essays in French or English use affect as a lens for reading contemporary Canadian literatures.

Affect and Writing in Canada / Affect Et Écriture Au Canada

All the Feels / Tous Les Sens

Áine McGlynn

Banksy is known worldwide for his politically subversive works of art, but he is far from the only artist whose creations are infused with internationally relevant, activist themes. How else can the arts help activate citizen participation in social justice movements? Moreover, what is the role of culture in a globalizing world? Transnationalism, Activism, Art goes beyond Banksy by investigating how the three complementary political, social, and cultural phenomena listed in the title interact in the twenty-first century. Renowned and emerging critics use current theory on cultural production and politics to illuminate case studies of various media, including film, literature, visual art, and performance, in their multiple manifestations, from electronic dance music to Wikileaks to bestselling poetry collections. By addressing how these artistic media are used to enact citizen participation in social justice movements, the volume makes important connections between such participation and scholarly study of globalization and transnationalism.

Kit Dobson

Books

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