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By analyzing the works of Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich through the lenses of subjectivity, gender studies, and narratology, Caroline Rosenthal brings to light new perspectives on their writings. Although all three authors write metafictions that challenge literary realism and dominant views of gender, the forms of their counter-narratives vary. In her novel 'Intertidal Life', Thomas traces the disintegration of an identity through narrative devices that unearth ruptures and contradictions in stories of gender. In contrast, Marlatt, in 'Ana Historic', challenges the regulatory fiction of heterosexuality. She offers her protagonist a way out into a new order that breaks with the law of the father, creating a \"monstrous\" text that explores the possibilities of a lesbian identity. In her tetralogy of novels made up of 'Love Medicine', 'Tracks', 'The Beet Queen', and 'The Bingo Palace', Erdrich resists definite readings of femininity altogether. By drawing on trickster narratives, she creates an open system of gendered identities that is dynamic and unfinalizable, positing the most fragmented worldview as the most enduring. By applying gender and narrative theory to nuanced analysis of the texts, Rosenthal's study elucidates the correlation between gender identity formation and narrative. Caroline Rosenthal is Professor and Chair of American Literature at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her book 'Narrative Deconstructions of Gender' was published by Camden House in 2003.

Engaging current debates within the studies of life writing and of the nation-state,Writing the Roaming Subjectfocuses on a group of Canadian writers who pose questions about cultural difference and national identity while writing about their own lives and their own experiences of displacement. Joanne Saul uses the term 'biotext' to describe the unique form of writing that challenges critical practices regarding both life writing and immigrant and ethnic minority writing by blurring the borders of biography, autobiography, history, fiction and theory, as well as poetry, prose, and visual representation. In her readings of selected contemporary Canadian biotexts - including Michael Ondaatje'sRunning in the Family, Daphne Marlatt'sGhost Works, Roy Kiyooka'sMothertalk, and Fred Wah'sDiamond Grill- Saul suggests that by crossing generic boundaries, these works illuminate the complex relationships between language, place, and self as they are manifested in textual form.Writing the Roaming Subjectexplores issues of identity formation, representation, and resistance in Canada and suggests that these are particularly crucial questions during a period of Canadian literary history when so many writers are insisting on new, more diverse cultural performances that resist the pull of the national imaginary.

What does it mean to tell a story from a woman's point of view? How have Canadian anglophone and francophone writers translated feminist literary theory into practice? Avant-garde writers Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard answer these, and many more questions, in their two groundbreaking works, now made more accessible through the careful, narratological readings and theoretical background in Narrative in the Feminine. Susan Knutson begins her study with an analysis of the contributions made by Marlatt and Brossard to international feminist theory. Part Two presents a narratological reading of How Hug a Stone, arguing that at the deepest level of narrative, Marlatt constructs a gender-inclusive human subject which defaults not to the generic masculine but to the feminine. Part Three proposes a parallel reading of Picture Theory, Brossard's playful novel that draws us into (re-) readings of many other texts written by Brossard, Barnes, Wittig, Joyce, de Beauvoir, Homer...to name a few. Chapter 12 closes with a reflection on the expression <'e>criture au f<'e>minin — a Qu<'e>b<'e>cois contribution to an international theoretical debate. Readers who care about feminist writing and language theory, and students and teachers of Canadian literature and critical and queer studies, will find this book invaluable for its careful readings, its scholarly overview, and its extension of the feminist concept of the generic. Not least, the study is a guide to two important works of the leading experimental writers of Canada and Quebec, Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard.

This paper argues for “regionality” as a new term to address the intersection of geographical regions and writing from those regions. The limited applicability of traditionally conceived regionalism to the poetry of the Canadian West Coast demonstrates the need for this new term. The suffix “-ity” stands not for a faith in region or region as totality, but “an instance” or “a degree of” region. These “instances” accrue a processual and multiple version of region. Building on the idea of landscape as repository, this article briefly outlines the importance of institutions (the University of British Columbia’s English Department and Poetry Conference in the early 1960s in particular) and literary archives for this methodology. In order to trace a more fugitive regionality, especially one with transnational aesthetic affiliations, one must be able to locate a writer/work among a constellation of documented influences and documented perspectives. This article then argues that Daphne Marlatt’s work from the 1970s to 2013 offers a particularly compelling example of how theorizing regionality can open up perception of regions and the writing that emerges from them.

[...]despite the limitations of imaginative reconstruction, in this article we seek to engage the multi-artist process that led to the convening of the intercultural creative team, the training of the artists, the development of the play, and the performances of The Gull.4 Through its staged negotiation between Japanese, Japanese Canadian, and North American theatre artists; its bilingual production in Japanese and English; and its multiple modalities of stylized Noh and Western dramatic realism, the SNP as case study is suggestive of the contribution that intercultural theatre might make to unofficial redress practices \"from below\" in contemporary Canada.5 We see artistic contributions as essential to a multi-focal process that is often necessary long after official ceremonies, apologies, and reparations are over.

This essay examines the imprints of a feminist ethics in Daphne Marlatt’s novel Taken, a text that, drawing on the materiality/maternality of language, rethinks the (female) subject’s relation to territory, place and space, and puts forward a form of maternalism defined at the junction between feminism and ecology. Tracing lines of comparison and action between the two, ecofeminism could be defined as «feminism taken to its logical conclusion, because it theorizes the interrelations among self, societies, and nature» (Birkeland 1993, 17-18). My analysis will try to elucidate some of the implications contained in Marlatt’s radical proposal. Against a cartography of war, occupation, and violence, Marlatt’s text offers an escape by the landscape, a geography of the female body, maternalism, and the body’s fusion with the environment.

DM: Well, there was no Creative Writing program when I first started. I had some wonderful literature teachers, but during the time that I was there, Earle Birney managed to get the first creative writing program in Canada started, and we were extremely fortunate because we not only had Earle but we also had Robert Creeley from the States for a year, 1962 to '63. His workshop was the first writing workshop that I ever took from anybody, which was actually more like a reading and discussion workshop than a writing workshop. Ideas were flying all over the place, and he brought in very stimulating material for us to read. The time that I was at UBC was a very active time because young faculty like Warren Tallman were there. Warren would bring up people like Robert Duncan, Creeley, and Charles Olson -- we had a great writing school there the summer of '63 that featured these people. And Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, oh, and the one Canadian who was invited, Margaret Avison, who is a remarkable poet, and does not get the attention her work deserves. I ended up doing a double major in English Lit. and Creative Writing, but then I got married and went to the States with my then husband, and found myself at Indiana University. I wasn't very interested in taking English courses there, and there wasn't a Creative Writing program that I could see, but Willis Barnstone was there, a very good translator, who was teaching courses in translation, and he told me that if I took a Masters in Comparative Literature I could do translations for my thesis with a critical essay, so that's what I did. DM: Yeah, well people would keep telling me that I could get published when I was at UBC, and I did get poems published in the campus magazine, that kind of thing. But in Tish I actually became one of the second wave of editors at Tish Magazine, so a lot of my early poems were published in that second wave of issues. When I was in Earle Birney's fiction workshop, I started writing a novella and got totally absorbed in it, I mean, cut classes, day after day, to sit in that lonely corner in the library where I could sit uninterrupted and write, and the thing grew and grew. It was very exciting, my first experience of a sustained narrative pull. Earle suggested that I send it to Evidence Magazine in Toronto, which was edited by Alan Beran -- it was a new magazine at that point, and they were interested in new writing. I was astonished when they accepted the whole of the novella, so that was really my first, I guess, outside publication. And then later Ryerson Press approached me for a manuscript and they brought out my first book, Frames of a Story, which was mostly written in Indiana, and was partly looking back at my life in Vancouver. DM: I guess I'm a curious person, I want to know how a form affects the content. Because one of the things I learned as a very young writer was the inseparability of form and content. So, for instance, when you take that first experience of going to Steveston many years ago just after the last cannery camp had been closed down, seeing people's belongings just abandoned there, walking around through shack after shack and getting a sense of the lives of the people who had lived there, you take that experience and you enlarge it through oral history, so then you get Steveston Recollected, a series of interviews with, and verbal portraits of, people in the community, plus translations of historical documents, plus photographs, both historical and contemporary. And this is called non-fiction. Then you get a poetic take on it all, a series of long line poems. And then you get Salvage, a poetic feminist revision many years later, and in between you get a radio drama acted on location and broadcast on CBC. So, each time you work with that first fictionalized impression and all that it conjures, but each time you do it in a different form you get a slightly different take, and sometimes a quite radically different take on it.

in another loft, above a floor where walking occurs, i come and go in a rush, intent on what needs to be done within what constraints, that is, between the day's rapid numbers flicking up, while in the whiteness of not going, aloft, we could be lying, belying that train of requisites, hands under head, mine or yours (but that elbow), or cradling your skull that holds brain's synapses firing clutches of pain from your spine's disintegration - but the neck angle for your back, but the too fat pillow - we grow old on but's. two women stand in a cabin kitchen sip by sip tasting each other's story of prior love's anguish, tap dripping the minutes, wine lips, rain-slick leaves brush the window, stay, stay, as if minute by second strokes as they delay, tasting what is between them, not snow flake by flake on a sizzling burner, but this wave building its salt weight to sweep them, with some trepidation, up the stairs - as HD's lift, / know not what to do, a turn through mind's convolutions, body deceptive, I would seem at rest, yet electric in an old dilemma of thresholds, the other's skin blind to touch beside her now sleep has pressed/ night on your eyelids, distant as those Sappho sang into centuries of quote, a skin of inner song pulling where the anguish of indecision finds no rest, so poised between the rage that burns to turn the other's silence into likefire, or to turn (away) to lift this wave-line of not-yet across a page...