Nation-states today are under pressure from opposite directions. In Western Europe, they are being challenged by the call of assimilation into a larger supra-national polity. Elsewhere, as in Southeastern Europe, nation-states are being challenged by separatist forces from within, demanding independence or self-determination for particular ethnic groups. In either instance, the ultimate aim is not simply the breaking of bonds but rather a realignment of belonging.
When the prospect of prosperity and the good life requires an adjustment of national identities and alliances, old myths and new tales alike are mobilized in the effort. People’s choices of belonging are flexible and often blatantly pragmatic. Some will never renounce their original ‘nation,’ while others gladly assume two or three national identities in a lifetime, all of them with a deeply felt commitment. In The Shifting Foundations of Modern Nation-States, Sima Godfrey and Frank Unger have gathered together a distinguished, multidisciplinary group of authors to discuss national myths from Europe, North America, and Asia. Just as the plurality of nations implies diverse voices and distinct narratives, the authors, coming from different disciplines and backgrounds, represent multiple discourses on the theme of nationhood.
Sima Godfrey and Frank Unger, The Shifting Foundations of Modern Nation-States: Realignments of Belonging, University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2004.
ISBN: 0802083943
Réjean Beaudoin, Annette Hayward et André Lamontagne —
Le lectorat anglophone témoigne depuis près d’un siècle et demi d’un intérêt soutenu pour la littérature québécoise. De tous les regards qui se posent sur l’écrivain québécois francophone, la perspective anglo-canadienne est celle qui représente le plus significativement la rencontre avec l’Autre. Sans être complètement occultée, cette réception n’a cependant pas suscité toute l’attention qu’elle commande.
Cet ouvrage rassemble la bibliographie de la critique savante qui s’est écrite au Canada anglais, entre 1939 et 1989, sur l’ensemble de la littérature québécoise. Il propose un corpus de 2 700 entrées qui révèle de manière chronologique l’intérêt croissant du Canada anglais pour la littérature québécoise depuis la Deuxième Guerre mondiale et mesure l’activité de ses critiques les plus influents.
Tout en constituant un ouvrage de référence unique, cette bibliographie, la première du genre par son exhaustivité, établit le canon de la littérature québécoise au Canada anglais et met en évidence tant les omissions significatives que les cas de surreprésentation. Elle invite également à aller voir si les lecteurs des autres provinces concrétisent un sens autre de la littérature québécoise et forment une communauté interprétative distincte.
Réjean Beaudoin, Annette Hayward et André Lamontagne. Bibliographie de la critique de la littérature québécoise au Canada anglais (1939-1989), Nota Bene, 2004.
ISBN: 2895181713
What difference does it make when a woman wields the camera? What is the relationship of the work and experience of women filmmakers to feminism and feminist theory? Have issues of gender in films by women been eclipsed by issues of race and class? How has the situation of women filmmakers changed over the past twenty years? Women Filmmakers: Refocusing casts a critical eye on the often-overlooked work of women filmmakers. It provides a rich sampling of the wealth of thought and experience of women in the film industry and brings together in a unique way the views of creators and critics from around the world. This wide-ranging volume includes contributions from prominent filmmakers and scholars, such as Helma Sanders Brahms, Deepa Mehta, Pratibha Parmar, Margarethe von Trotta, Ann Wheeler, and E. Ann Kaplan. Questions of history and theory, genre, creativity, funding and distribution, national and cultural identity, and class all come to the fore in this unparalleled contemporary study of women’s film culture. Equally accessible to non-specialists and researchers, this book will appeal to filmmakers, film studies faculty and students, film buffs, and those with an interest in women’s studies and cultural studies.
Valerie Raoul (co-ed. with J. Levitin and J. Plessis), Women Filmmakers : Refocusing, UBC Press, 2003.
ISBN: 0774809027
Il volo della mente indaga le implicazioni filosofiche, letterarie e artistiche della falconeria nel Medioevo in prospettiva mediterranea: accanto e insieme alle testimonianze del mondo romanzo, sono presi in considerazione anche alcuni tra i più significativi prodotti culturali della civiltà islamica. Tale scelta metodologica ha come scopo non di suggerire una (improbabile) dipendenza dell’una cultura dall’altra, quanto piuttosto di mostrare l’individualità di ciascuna all’interno di una prospettiva unitaria. Gli otto capitoli in cui è suddivisa l’opera affrontano diversi aspetti della storia delle idee, delle pratiche sociali, della simbologia politica, della letteratura e delle arti visive in relazione alla falconeria. Questa viene intesa come pratica sapienziale di ammaestramento e non, come generalmente s’intende, quale intrattenimento sportivo. Attraverso tale processo di educazione vòlto a condurre l’io “selvaggio” oltre se stesso, è sempre il potenziale di realizzazione dell’esistenza terrena, in prospettiva sia immanente sia trascendente, a essere indagato. Al centro del libro sta il triangolo, attualissimo perché ancora irrisolto, dei rapporti tra Federico II, il mondo islamico e Dante. L’orizzonte all’interno del quale questi rapporti si iscrivono è quello della diffusione dell’avicennismo (e pertanto del neoplatonismo) in area mediterranea, fenomeno alla divulgazione del quale i sovrani normanno-svevi diedero un contributo decisivo. Le illustrazioni incluse nell’apparato iconografico sono oggetto di analisi approfondita nel testo. Oltre a provvedere un supporto visivo concreto in relazione all’argomento trattato, esse intendono anche, e forse soprattutto, mostrare come immagini e parole siano le due inseparabili facce di ogni elaborazione culturale.
Daniela Boccassini, Il volo della mente. Falconeria e sofia nel monda mediterraneo. Islam, Frederico II, Dante, Longo, 2003.
The movie screen has been the forum for many star pairings: Bogart and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, and Fellini and Kafka. While this latter combination might seem slightly unexpected or improbable at first sight, Carlo Testa’s Masters of Two Arts demonstrates that pairings of famed directors and writers are commonplace in modern Italian cinema. Surprisingly, the study of the interrelation between Italian cinema and European literature has been almost completely neglected in film scholarship. Testa addresses and attempts to correct this oversight with nine in-depth analyses of the one-on-one rapport between an Italian filmmaker and a “classic” name in modern European literature. Looking at combinations such as Pasolini and Sade, Rossellini and Stendhal, and Visconti and Mann amongst others, Testa uses theoretical as well as historical methods, showing how the respective text undergoes not ‘adaptation’ but full ‘re-creation’ (as defined by Èizenshtein) in a different art form and, even more importantly, in a new cultural context.
Carlo Testa, Masters of Two Arts : re-creation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema, University of Toronto Press, 2002.
ISBN: 9780802084750
This collection is jointly published as a special issue of the electronic journal Computing in the Humanities Working Papers and the print publication Text Technology. These essays have evolved from papers given at conference sessions held during the 1998 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and jointly sponsored by the Consortium for Computers in the Humanities and the Association for Canadian College and University Teachers of English. These papers continue an exploration that the two associations have, over several years of aligned sessions, pursued together — an exploration that is given voice in earlier collections that we have had the pleasure of overseeing: Technologising the Humanities / Humanitising the Technologies (from the 1997 sessions, published in electronic form by Computing in the HumanitiesWorking Papers [September 1998] and, in print, by Text Technology 8.2 [1998]: 1-63 and 8.3 [1998]: 1-76) and Scholarly Discourse and Computing Technology: Perspectives on Pedagogy, Research, and Dissemination in the Humanities (from the 1996 sessions, a similar joint special issue of the print journal Text Technology 6.3 [1996]: 137-216 and the electronic journal Computing in the Humanities Working Papers [April 1997]).
William Winder and R.G. Siemens. Text Technology, Volume 2, 2001.
ISBN: 917058887
This book, written in Spanish, focuses on the literary and artistic works of such avant-garde figures as Ramon Gomez de la Serna, Benjamin Jarnes, Antonio de Obregon, Juan Chabas, Rosa Chacel, Claudio de la Torre, Almada Negreiros, Maruja Mallo, Mauricio Amster, Manuel Reinoso, Diego Rivera, and Angeles Santos y Victorio Macho. It identifies the attempt to integrate conflicting epistemological, ethical, and sociopolitical categories as the organizational principle driving the avant-garde novel and art. This principle manifests itself in the avant-garde on various levels: the theory of representation, the development of the protagonist, and the concept of history.
*** Best book published by a Canadian Hispanist between 2000-2002 awarded by la Asociación Canadiense de Hispanistas.
María Soledad Fernández Utrera, Visiones de estereoscopio. Paradigma de hibridación en el arte y la narrativa de la vanguardia española, The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
ISBN: 9780807892763
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) est sans conteste un de ceux qui ont le plus contribué au renouvellement du théâtre moderne. L’oeuvre de ce grand dramaturge et metteur en scène est aujourd’hui reconnue comme l’une des plus originales et des plus commentées du théâtre contemporain. C’est à une lecture originale de cette oeuvre gigantesque qu’Alain-Michel Rocheleau convie le lecteur. Tout en étant accessible à tous les passionnés de théâtre, ce livre propose une nouvelle façon d’envisager la dramaturgie de Brecht de même que les interactions qui se tissent entre les personnages de son oeuvre. Puisqu’à ce jour les principales études publiées sur le théâtre brechtien ne l’ont pas abordé sous l’angle spécifique de la Nouvelle communication, l’essai de Rocheleau emprunte donc une voie encore peu explorée dans les recherches sur le théâtre épique et, plus généralement encore, dans le domaine des études théâtrales.
Alain-Michel Rocheleau, Bertolt Brecht et la nouvelle communication, Nota Bene, 2000.
ISBN: 2895180482
Cet ouvrage est consacré à l’analyse des syntagmes Nom de Nom, large domaine multiforme qui s’est souvent retrouvé au centre des préoccupations des grammairiens et des linguistes. Longtemps on s’est interrogé sur la nature du mot de (préposition ou quantifieur?); récemment, c’est plutôt la recherche d’une “tête” syntaxique qui est à la vedette, dans le cadre des grammaires d’unification par exemple (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar notamment).
La présente étude apporte sur la question un jour nouveau: l’analyse distributionnelle de 1000 exemples réels (tirés de corpus oraux) aboutit à l’établissement de huit modèles syntaxiques distincts, eux-mêmes divisés en plusieurs sous-types. Les exemples ont été analysés dans leur contexte, et, selon les principes de l’approche pronominale, leur équivalence avec des pronoms et avec des formes semi-lexicales a été examinée systématiquement. L’éclatement de la description s’articule avec l’interprétation sémantique des différents exemples, laquelle s’en trouve précisée. Les principaux résultats s’inscrivent dans le domaine de la quantification (un verre de vin, un tas de problèmes), des constructions approximatives (un espèce de truc), des possessifs (la valeur des chiffres / leur valeur / ?la leur), des constructions à incluant (cette histoire de bracelet, la question de l’immigration) et des nominalisations (cette montée de l’homme vers lui-même).
Christine Rouget, Distribution sémantique des constructions Nom de Nom, Champion, 2000.
ISBN: 2745303945
Si la tradition herméneutique ne semble pas avoir joué un rôle de première importance dans la critique littéraire française au XXe siècle, les questions d’interprétation qui ont toujours à la fois hanté et fondé l’herméneutique se posent pour le lecteur du roman français du XXe siècle. L’étude de Miller revoit ces questions dans le cadre de l’herméneutique de Hans-Georg Gadamer et de la pratique herméneutique de quelques interprètes modernes (Szondi, Gadamer, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno).
À travers une lecture de huit romans français du milieu du siècle (Triolet, Bernanos, Malraux, Chabannes, Gary, Sartre, Blanchot) ces mêmes questions mènent le lecteur à une méditation sur les sens possibles (ou parfois impossibles) du discours littéraire moderne.
Robert Miller, Hermès et Aminadab: essai d’herméneutique littéraire, Toronto: Paratexte, 1999.
ISBN: 0920615449
Sima Godfrey and Frank Unger —
