Browsing by Author "Rzepa, Agnieszka"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
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    Avant-propos / Introduction
    (Polskie Towarzystwo Badań Kanadyjskich, 2013) Bujnowska, Ewelina; Rzepa, Agnieszka
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    David Groulx (2013). Imagine Mercy
    (Polskie Towarzystwo Badań Kanadyjskich, 2013) Rzepa, Agnieszka
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    Feats and Defeats of Memory: Exploring Spaces of Canadian Magic Realism
    (Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2009) Rzepa, Agnieszka
    The present study situates the phenomenon of the flowering of Canadian magic realist prose in the context of Canadian literary tradition and discourses, and employs postcolonial approaches to literature to analyse different “spaces” of memory in selected examples of Canadian magic realist prose in English. Different dimensions of memory (individual and collective) are analysed as interlocking with other, variously conceived, physical, social and representational “spaces” of concern to magic realism. This approach is inspired by Edward Casey’s broad conceptualisation of memory that frees it from the mind and allows it to enter the world beyond it. While contemporary Canadian magic realism springs from a hugely diversified cultural background, and reconsiderations of memory it offers are geared to a variety of purposes not necessarily connected with Canada-specific issues, this book examines texts that specifically address the context of Canada and are rooted in the broadly conceived Euro-Canadian and Native Canadian cultural contexts. The novels and short stories, through their engagement with questions of remembering and forgetting, emerge as homecoming projects, though the “homes” they posit are not exactly the same, and the homecoming is not necessarily a viable option.
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    “Impossible to break into nice free stroll” Canadian Re-citations of Paris in Gail Scott’s My Paris
    (2011) Rzepa, Agnieszka
    The narrator/writer of Gail Scott’s novel My Paris (1999) finds herself in an overdetermined urban space of contemporary Paris. The space, already multiply written and rich in cultural associations, is re-worked again in the fragmented “diary,” in which the narrator both echoes and contests her literary guides, primarily Gertrude Stein’s work and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Her Paris emerges as a re-citation of the Paris inscribed in those and other texts, reconfigured from a perspective marked by temporal remove, which is stressed in the novel. Scott explores multiple, criss-crossing spaces of the city: those of architecture, culture, race, gender, nationality. While the text’s concern is to move to and fro “across comma of difference,” and to avoid binary oppositions without obliterating the all-important comma, it politicises its postmodern concerns. The article explores the postcolonial dimension of Scott’s novel, which, though not necessarily foregrounded, provides an important conceptual thread of the text. The narrator, a bilingual Québécoise, considers spaces of alterity and otherness of Paris, explicitly relating them to Canadian national experience. From this perspective the enticement and impossibility of the unitary construct of a nation symbolised by the republics of France and the United States are explored. The postcolonial reflection is closely related to the notion of a non-unitary, nomad subject that emerges from the novel.
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    “It is always darkest just before first dawn’s light”: The Social Project of Recent Native Canadian Prose
    (Polskie Towarzystwo Badań Kanadyjskich, 2013) Rzepa, Agnieszka
    Les littérature des Premières Nations écrites au Canada ont été toujours animées par un projet social. Tout en reconnaissant que, comme l’a démontré Emme LaRoque, les possibilités de ces littératures ne se limitent pas à des messages culturels et sociaux, l’auteure du présent article se concentre sur des textes choisis des écrivains autochtones canadiens qui manifestent très ouvertement des visions entrecroisées d’un projet social traité comme « le » principal projet contemporain des littérature des Premières Nations. Les textes récents écrits par des auteurs autochtones en établissant un diagnostic très pessimiste de la condition du monde, semblent en même temps viser leur propre objectif par la mise en valeur des éléments relevant des épistémologies et des ontologies indigènes. Ces dernières sont vues, dans ce contexte, comme une nécessité urgente mais aussi elles demeurent ouvertes aux discussions. Les ouvrages sont destinés aux lecteurs qui n’appartiennent pas à la communauté autochtone et qui ne sont pas issus de la société de colons canadiens. De plus en plus souvent les auteurs autochtones introduisent dans leurs textes une profonde conscience globale, en essayant d’agir contre ce qu’ils considèrent comme le mal causé par la globalisation en globalisant la portée et la thématique de leur littérature. Leurs ouvrages suggèrent que s’il y a encore un espoir de guérison et de survie globale, il ne peut être réalisé que par l’intermédiaire de l’éducation et d’une coopération importante de multiples communautés en interaction, tant sur le plan global que local.
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    “Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir”
    (De Gruyter, 2018) Rzepa, Agnieszka
    This article focuses on metaphoric structures in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir (2009). Crozier’s straightforward narrative of incidents from her past is structured around a series of poetic vignettes describing originary phenomena that have shaped her. The “first causes,” as she calls them metaphorically, add up to the familiar mix of parameters of origin and belonging: the intimate place/landscape, family, and discourse. My aim is to demonstrate how Crozier’s metaphors contribute to the world of interrelatedness she constructs in the memoir. In the process, Crozier continues to develop a broader project of the revisioning of patriarchal mythologies (e. g., the Canadian myth of the prairie West) from a female/feminist point of view.
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    Neither in nor out: A lover of witches. Androgyny in American popular culture. A case study
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 1999) Rzepa, Agnieszka
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    Recent (re)visions of CanLit: Partial stock-taking
    (2020) Rzepa, Agnieszka
    This article approaches recent discussions on the state of contemporary CanLit as a body of literary texts, an academic field, and an institution. The discussion is informed primarily by a number of recent or relatively recent publications, such as Trans.CanLit. Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (Kamboureli & Miki 2007), Refuse. CanLit in Ruins (McGregor, Rak & Wunker 2018), Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (McWatt, Maharaj & Brand 2018), and the discussions and/or controversies some of those generated – expressed through newspaper and magazine articles, scholarly essays, but also through tweets, etc. The texts have been written as a response to the current state and – in some cases – scandals of CanLit. Many constitute attempts at starting or contributing to a discussion aimed at not only taking stock of, but also re-interpreting and re-defining the field and the institution in view of the challenges of the globalising world. Perhaps more importantly, they address also the challenges resulting from the rift between CanLit as implicated in the (post)colonial nation-building project and rigid institutional structures, perpetuating the silencings, erasures, and hierarchies resulting from such entanglements, and actual literary texts produced by an increasingly diversified group of writers working with a widening range of topics and genres, and creating often intimate, autobiographically inspired art with a sense of responsibility to marginalised communities. The article concludes with the example of Indigenous writing and the position some young Indigenous writers take in the current discussions.
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    The concept of the self in "Come Walk With Me: A Memoir" by Beatrice Mosionier
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2015) Rzepa, Agnieszka
    Beatrice (Culleton) Mosionier is a Canadian Métis writer, whose first strongly autobiographical novel In Search of April Raintree (1983) has been recognized as a classic of contemporary Native Canadian literatures. Her memoir, Come Walk with Me (2009), describes her life story from 1949 till 1987, covering also the period between 1987 and 2001 in a brief epilogue. In the memoir, Mosionier uses fragments of the transcript of an interview conducted with her mother in 1984 by Alanis Obomsawin to preface the three parts of her book. Apart from constructing the two lives as parallel and in dialogue with one another, Mosionier frames and dialogises her story also through references to the process of writing, publication and the success of her novel; and reaches out to readers to induce them to “walk” with her. The aim of the present article is to examine the narrative presentation of the process of self-discovery focusing in particular on the relational aspects of the life story. Mosionier’s memoir demonstrates her growing into the realisation of the fact that her identity is relational—she recognizes herself as part of a larger ethnic and social group, and later also as shaped by familial relations. While depicting “the self [that] is dynamic, changing, and plural” (Eakin 1999: 98), she conceptualises it in reference to what she believes to be an essentially static core identity, and as “channelled” through a life that largely follows a predetermined pattern.
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    The concept of the self in Come Walk with Me: A Memoir by Beatrice Mosionier
    (2015-12) Rzepa, Agnieszka
    Beatrice (Culleton) Mosionier is a Canadian Métis writer, whose first strongly autobiographical novel In Search of April Raintree (1983) has been recognized as a classic of contemporary Native Canadian literatures. Her memoir, Come Walk with Me (2009), describes her life story from 1949 till 1987, covering also the period between 1987 and 2001 in a brief epilogue. In the memoir, Mosionier uses fragments of the transcript of an interview conducted with her mother in 1984 by Alanis Obomsawin to preface the three parts of her book. Apart from constructing the two lives as parallel and in dialogue with one another, Mosionier frames and dialogises her story also through references to the process of writing, publication and the success of her novel; and reaches out to readers to induce them to “walk” with her. The aim of the present article is to examine the narrative presentation of the process of self-discovery focusing in particular on the relational aspects of the life story. Mosionier’s memoir demonstrates her growing into the realisation of the fact that her identity is relational-she recognizes herself as part of a larger ethnic and social group, and later also as shaped by familial relations. While depicting “the self [that] is dynamic, changing, and plural” (Eakin 1999: 98), she conceptualises it in reference to what she believes to be an essentially static core identity, and as “channelled” through a life that largely follows a predetermined pattern.
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    The self and the world. Aspects of the aesthetics and politics of contemporary North American literary memoir by women
    (Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2018) Rzepa, Agnieszka; Drewniak, Dagmara; Macedulska, Katarzyna
    "The self and the world: aspects of the aesthetics and politics of contemporary North American literary memoir by women" constitutes an attempt at a selective, but far-ranging analysis of the aesthetics and politics of memoirs written by Canadian and US women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds since 1990. The study focuses on memoirs by experienced writers, consciously deploying in their texts a number of literary, visual and paratextual devices. The aim is to illuminate the ways in which they make sense of their experience and how they endow it with a particular narrative shape, with special focus on the implicit and explicit ideological baggage of the memoirs. An important aspect of the project is the critical reflection on the nature of memory that emerges from the selected texts in connection with both individual and collective history. Special focus falls on configurations of gender and race/ethnicity in the contexts of the two multicultural North American societies, and their influence on the process of self-fashioning.
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    The self and the world. Aspects of the aesthetics and politics of contemporary North American literary memoir by women
    (Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2018) Rzepa, Agnieszka; Drewniak, Dagmara; Macedulska, Katarzyna
    The book constitutes an attempt at a selective, but far-ranging analysis of the aesthetics and politics of memoirs written by Canadian and US women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds since 1990. The study focuses on memoirs by experienced writers, consciously deploying in their texts a number of literary, visual and paratextual devices. The aim is to illuminate the ways in which they make sense of their experience and how they endow it with a particular narrative shape, with special focus on the implicit and explicit ideological baggage of the memoirs. An important aspect of the project is the critical reflection on the nature of memory that emerges from the selected texts in connection with both individual and collective history. Special focus falls on configurations of gender and race/ethnicity in the contexts of the two multicultural North American societies, and their influence on the process of self-fashioning.
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    The ultimate America - Marge Piercy’s "Woman on the Edge of Time"
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 1997) Rzepa, Agnieszka