Passages – Transitions – Intersections

This volume brings together a group of most highly acclaimed Canadian writers and distinguished international experts on Canadian literature to discuss what potential Janice Kulyk Keefer's concept of "historiographic ethnofiction" has for ethnic writing in Canada. The collection builds upon Kulyk Keefer's idea but also moves beyond it by discussing such realms of the concept as its ethics and aesthetics, multiple and multilayered sites, generic intersections, and diasporic (con-)texts. Thus, focusing on Canadian historiographic ethnofiction, "Land Deep in Time" is the first study to define and explore a type of writing which maintains a marked presence in Canadian literature but has not yet been recognized as a separately identifiable genre.

Serpent symbolism plays an important role in Keats's rich animal imagery both on a quantitative level and on a qualitative one. Through images of dazzling, twisted, suffocating snakes Keats gives form to some of his most important ideas as well as anxieties about poetic creation. In particular, snakes convey the tension between the more unconscious and the more conscious elements of the creative psyche, which is reflected in the linguistic texture of the poems. Besides, serpent symbolism shows how Keats's initial complete adhesion to the predominant Romantic view of the time was complicated and reinterpreted in highly personal terms. By recovering some Augustan notions, this young poet attempted a partial, problematic re-appropriation of the recent past Romanticism had utterly dismissed.

The concept of the "human" has been broadly re-visited and modified, and the term "posthuman" has now become a term of continuous inquiry. Gender (representations) play(s) a critical role in works of literature, culture, and art, and focusing on gender is crucial to uncovering the anthropocentrism or androcentrism that may underlie the work and the times to which it belongs. While maintaining a solid literary emphasis, the ten chapters included in this volume focus on feminist debates about women, technology, and the body, on gender representation and the posthuman, on post-gender figurations, on gender and trans/post/humanism, biotechnology/biopolitics/bioethics, on feminist posthumanism, on animals, the human-machine, and ecological posthumanism. The aim of the volume is to analyse how useful these concepts may be for thinking about the subject, its definition and identity in a changing society.

The intersection between literature and music is a major feature in Anglo-American cultural history. The present volume analyzes the transatlantic migration of European opera and its appropriation by some of the most important literary figures of the United States. The presence of opera in literary texts is always "operative" and results in artistic outputs possessing more articulated and tense vectors of meaning. The comparative method applied confirms the musical sensitivity of masters such as Poe, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Wharton, Cather, reveals the intriguing contradictions in the poetics of Emerson, Thoreau and James and vindicates the role of some minor figures who, through their involvement in the world of musical theater, contributed to the intercultural context.

Among the many examples of Russian-American émigré literature, a number of less known authors moved to the USA, following their predecessors' transnational and plurilingual experiences. The bilingual (and sometimes trilingual) expressions in their works written in English invite a contrastive analysis of their transition from their source language, Russian, to their target language, English. This book explores the linguistic structure of the autobiographies of four Russian-American writers (Cournos, Nabokov, Berberova and Shteyngart) bringing into focus the linguistic "geology" of their texts, as they record their passage from a Russian world to an English one. These linguistic passages are examined from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, by dwelling on the geographies of the émigrés' itineraries as well as on the process of linguistic transformation that such itineraries generated. By analyzing these writers' geographic and linguistic routes, this volume engages the reader in a metalinguistic discourse and highlights the influence of these first plurilingual experiments on modern theories concerning linguistic globalization.

The idea of desacralization has become almost commonplace, attributing to the word the rejection of what is sacred. One might think that it is strictly connected to theology and its system, or suppose that it implies the relationship human beings have with anything that can express a denial of the spiritual part of life. The concept of desacralization has numerous meanings, either from a philosophical or a literary viewpoint. The scholars' investigation of Dynamics of Desacralization has made this collection of essays rich and varied, revealing new worlds the different authors have created. What they do is to narrate various types of desacralization interrogating the nature of novels, poems or works of art; certain aspects of being are revealed through various expressions, engaging the multiple levels and the meaning of desacralization providing an articulation and interpretation of it.

Within art, society, culture, philosophy, literature and many other spheres, a constant issue being dealt with is that of sin. Reevaluation of this concept has proceeded down varied stimulating paths in relation to the multidisciplinary appraisal, although philosophical aesthetic and epistemic emphases commonly reflect issues present in literature. In certain instances, texts clearly refer to sin, while in other it is more of an ambiguous and obscured notion. Alongside the established understanding of sin, discourse, poetry and novels have responded to sin variously, due to the blossoming of ideas. French, American and British literature's responses to the notion of sin will be investigated through the academic studies included in this volume.

Fernando Liuzzi s'évertua à élargir les horizons de la musicologie italienne en introduisant des orientations issues de la tradition allemande. Il divulgua les théories de Hanslick, Lipps et Fiedler, alors presque inconnues en Italie. D'après Liuzzi, la fusion de la réflexion philosophique et de la musicologie était cruciale afin de suggérer une nouvelle approche aux études musicales visant à transmettre les théories de Benedetto Croce. L'œuvre de Liuzzi offre une perspective intéressante sur les origines de la musicologie italienne et sur les relations avec les autres domaines du savoir. Fernando Liuzzi strove to find a compromise between the historical/analytical musicology and the aesthetics of music. He tried to expand the Italian musicology perspectives, introducing some ideas coming from the German tradition. He spread theories from Hanslick, Lipps and Fiedler, at that time rather unknown in Italy. For Liuzzi it was crucial to blend philosophical thinking and musicology, expanding Benedetto Croce's ideas to create a new way to approach music studies. Liuzzi's work can provide a good insight about the early Italian musicology, its self-definition and its relationship with other cultural areas.