Intercultural Journeys / Parcours interculturels
Graduate students in the programme of Comparative Canadian Literature / Littérature canadienne comparée at the Université de Sherbrooke have organized annual conferences since 2000. The conference has grown significantly since its first meeting in a classroom where students in the programme could discuss literary questions to a forum where these issues could be discussed with grad students from other universities and with such prominent guest speakers as Patricia Smart, Antoine Sirois, and Jane Everett in 2001 (as part of the 69th Congrès de l’ACFAS), and Christl Verduyn and Hugh Hazelton in 2002 (Trans-Canadian Journeys / Parcours transcanadiens).
Intercultural Journeys / Parcours interculturels combines papers from the 2nd and 3rd Comparative Canadian Literature / Littérature canadienne comparée at the Université de herbrooke conferences and takes the reader on a journey through the Canadian literary/cultural landscape. These multi-faceted journeys include explorations of geographical travels, as well as theoretical journeys through space, gender, and language. The keynote addresses include a paper by Patricia Smart, who considers herself “une lectrice passionnée des deux littératures, spécialiste dans l’une des deux (la québécoise) et amateure de l’autre,” in which she embarks on a reflective journey through “the two literatures” of Canada. Christl Verduyn, in “Parcours transcanadiens,” explores the textual strategies used to map the geographical and spiritual journey of a young Black protagonist as he travels through Ontario. Hugh Hazelton, on the other hand, discusses the linguistic pathways of bilingual and multilingual writers when faced with the dilemma of whether or not to write in the language of their adopted homeland or in their mother tongue or “in both languages at once.”
Jo-Anne Elder’s “Putting Sherbrooke on the Map,” describes her personal and intellectual encounters in Comparative Canadian Literature and recounts a history of the programme at the Université de Sherbrooke. John O’Connor’s “Manitoba Migrants” compares the similarities between the lives and works of two immigrant writers, Frederick Philip Grove and Maurice Constantin-Weyer, in early 20th century Canadian literature. In “Deux héroïnes” Denis Beaudry compares two contemporary historical revisionings of female travellers in the 19th century. Sarah Karambiri, in “Hybridity and Mimicry in Two Novels,” examines postcolonial hybridity and mimicry in two realist novels, one an African text and the other a Canadian Métis one. MOVING THROUGH SPACE: NATIONS AND REGIONS / À TRAVERS L’ESPACE : NATIONS ET RÉGIONS opens with “Cankered Words and Colonial Dis/ease,” in which Robert Rembold analyzes motifs of the body and disease in colonial and national space in Dennis Lee’s “Cadence, Country, Silence.” In “Two Minutes for Roughing” Jolene Armstrong interrogates “national space” within Canadian popular culture and the relationship between hockey, music, and identity. Natasha Dagenais, in “L’espace migrant / l’espace de la mémoire,” defines migrant space as physical and social exile in Abla Farhoud’s Le bonheur a la queue glissante. While Dagenais focuses on migrant space, Annie Boivin examines transcultural regional space in two Québécois novels in “Transculture abitibienne.”
ISBN: 0-9698258-8-9
270 Pages, Paperback
Price $33.95 US
