• Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture

Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture

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978-1-897126-36-3 | 2008 November | 416 Pages

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture is the first book to gather together essays by Barbara Godard, one of the leading and most prolific figures in the field of Canadian studies.

Much of the force of Godard’s work comes from her meticulous and relentless attention to the networks that produce both the texts and events we study and the methods through which we read them. Whether she writes about feminist theory, orality and Native women writers, or the exigencies of the cultural field, she has been instrumental in interrogating the normative ways in which we think about Canadian culture. From the function of literature to the materiality of institutions and periodicals, from the theory and practice of translation to the interrelations between English- and French-Canadian literatures, her critical interventions have drastically reconceptualized our inherited understandings of Canadian culture as it relates to the world at large.

Edited by Smaro Kamboureli, and with an interview published here for the first time that offers a detailed look at the trajectories of Barbara Godard’s writing and teaching career, Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture is a groundbreaking collection of essays, spanning the period 1987–2003, that will continue to be necessary reading for years to come.

“The ‘Conversation’ [in Canadian Literature at the Crossroads] is essential—and accessible—reading for anyone wishing to delve into Godard’s essays, which are often complex, both theoretically and stylistically.... The volume is certainly successful in its presentation of Godard’s engagement with various literatures, languages, theories and issues. Ranging across the essays are ‘concerns’ about the discursive operations of power and desire within creative and critical texts, about the need to expose the ‘political stakes in the debates.’”
~ British Journal of Canadian Studies

“Barbara Godard has long been recognized as a leading literary and cultural theorist in Canada. She is one of those rare scholars from whom younger generations of scholars have learned and continue to learn—especially in the areas of feminist theory and cultural semiotics. In Godard we are blessed to have a humanist who has made a real difference to research, scholarship, and the dissemination of knowledge in Canada.”
~ Dr. Sherrill Grace, FRSC, Professor of English and UBC Distinguished University Scholar

“This is an enormously long-overdue book from a theorist who has been the most conscientious and informed voice in Canadian feminist and translation studies for nearly four lively decades.”
~ Frank Davey