Joan Barfoot's Exit Lines and the Pastoral of Old Age

This article traces the way in which Canadian author Joan Barfoot's novel Exit Lines draws upon the pastoral tradition in its representation of old age. Pastoral literature has traditionally encoded ideologies of age, and it is the inclusion of pastoral tropes that structures Barfoot's participation in the discussion of population aging currently taking place across disciplines and in the popular media. Pastoral writing is characterized by an acceptance of vulnerability and loss, and this provides Barfoot with an effective counterpoint to a contemporary culture of “positive” aging founded on an ethic of bodily control that alternately stigmatizes and masks the existence of decline and dependency in late life. The novel questions the way in which the rhetoric of crisis that characterizes discussions of population aging threatens to generate resentment against the dependent elderly, whom the novel depicts as vulnerable to exploitation by those who stand to profit from this “crisis.”     

“Hold This for Me”: Counter Memory and Trauma in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon

ABSTRACT

African Caribbean Canadian author Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon augments many African diasporic narratives’ efforts to counter and rewrite exclusive histories. While Brand’s novel challenges and nuances dominant historical narratives by offering counter memory of African diasporic experiences, particularly experiences of enslavement, it also simultaneously illuminates the conflicts that emerge when “holding” and passing on memories that are traumatic. Therefore, Brand’s text emphasizes both the importance of employing counter memory to revise hegemonic historical narratives and the necessity of assessing the impact of trauma on individual and collective remembrances.     

‘Time-twisted space’: an exploration of the synaesthetic continuum through the work of Vladimir Nabokov

ABSTRACT

The synaesthetic author Vladimir Nabokov undertakes extensive consideration of the relationship between time and space, and its manifestation in human perception, throughout his fictional and autobiographical writing. The following dissertation considers this in the light time–space synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon where time is visualized in a spatial form often external to the subject’s body. Using the idea that synaesthesia exists on a continuum alongside common constructs integral to cognitive perception such as cross-modality and metaphor, these three will be explored in detail in Nabokov’s work through a multidisciplinary lens incorporating literature, cognitive science, philosophy and anthropology.     

‘My precious books and instruments’: Jewish divorce strategies and self-fashioning in medieval Catalonia

The divorce case between David Bonjorn and Esther Caravita, which took place in Girona and Perpignan in 1337, is extraordinarily well documented. Hebrew and Latin documents shed light on the stages of the controversy, the wide range of personalities involved in the case and, most notably, the strategies mobilised by the two sides in their attempt to uphold or invalidate the divorce. The ways in which personal strengths and weaknesses were utilised in this legal battle enrich recent scholarly discussions about legal strategy in medieval Europe.     

In Search of an Invisible Culture in David Plante’s American Ghosts and Robert Cormier’s Fade

David Plante’s American Ghosts (2005) and Robert Cormier’s Fade (1988), autobiographical narratives about growing up in southern New England in French Catholic neighborhoods called Little Canadas, both employ the trope of invisibility to convey the ethnic community’s lack of presence, agency, or permanence within an englobing American culture that progressively erodes the foundations of its cultural otherness. Both texts hinge upon cultural erasure. In Plante’s memoir, in which he seeks to gain access to his cultural past, his childhood self is haunted by the ghosts of his Indian forebears and his adult self, by the ghosts of his parish. These supernatural beings who shuttle between absence and presence signal the loss of cultural memory and identity that assimilation engenders. Cormier’s novel chronicles the effects of invisibility on three “faders” representing first-, second-, and third-generation French Canadians in New England. A metaphor for the progressive loss of ancestral heritage in the adopted land, Fade offers a portrait of the gradual disintegration of Frenchtown from its heyday in the 1930s to its dissolution in the 1960s.     

Caribou,Petroleum, and the Limits of Locality in the Canada–US Borderlands

This article discusses Karsten Heuer’s 2006 book Being Caribou in light of debates in ecocriticism and border studies about how to define the local in the context of environmental problems of vast range and uncertain temporality. It explores how Heuer’s book about following the Porcupine Caribou herd’s migration engages in multiple forms of boundary crossing—between countries, between hemispheric locations, and between species—and shows how insights from Indigenous storytelling complicate the book’s appeal to environmentalist readers by asserting a prior, transnational Indigenous presence in the transboundary landscapes of present-day Alaska and the Yukon.     

Reflections of “Europe” and continental thinking? The language of inclusion in the Instrumenta Pacis Westphalicae (1648)

ABSTRACT

The Peace Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. While scholarship is still divided between sceptics and supporters regarding the actual impact of the Westphalian Peace on the international order in Europe, let alone the concept of continental community, this article seeks to tackle the issue from an original perspective. A close study of the language and rhetoric employed in the two Latin Instrumenta Pacis Westphalicae reveals the underlying ideas which can be seen in the discourse of Europe and continental identity.     

已刊俄藏西夏文献《天盛改旧新定律令》的编号系统

上海古籍出版社出版的《俄藏黑水城文献》(8、9册)所收西夏法典《天盛改旧新定律令》实为百衲本,其所系底本编号并未能真实、准确地在已刊《天盛改旧新定律令》中呈现出来,对照克恰诺夫所整理的俄藏叙录和已刊出的实际情况可以看出,已刊布《天盛改旧新定律令》的各章内容并不是按照文献编号一一拍摄刊布,而是由不同编号拼接而成,编者也没有给出各编号的起止。基于已刊布文献的这些问题,本文将对《俄藏黑水城文献》(8、9册)中已刊布的《天盛改旧新定律令》各编号进行系统地梳理和划分,并对缺页、少页、遗漏编号、页码错乱、编号重复出现等情况进行了订正和说明。     

章学诚的史学变革思想

章学诚的史学变革思想,涉及史意、历史编纂学、历史文学三个方面。章学诚的"史意"不仅具有著述宗旨、别识心裁之意,还包含撰述者关于历史和史学的体会、情感和价值取向,比"史义"内容更加丰富。其"圆而神"的撰述思想既有辩证法的思想因素,又有美学的意境。在历史文学上,章氏一方面强调史文应忠实地反映历史实际,另一方面又主张语言表达的神明变化。