Bøger af Claire Omhovere

Compares the cultural productions of Canada and the US - literature, but also film, opera, and even theme parks - providing a reassessment of Canadian Studies within a comparative framework.Since the elections of Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau, unprecedented international attention is being drawn to the differences between the United States and Canada. This timely volume takes a close comparative look at the national imaginaries of the two countries. In its analyses of the two countries' cultural productions - literature, but also film, opera, and even theme parks - it follows the approach of Comparative North American Studies, which has been significantly advanced by Reingard M. Nischik's work over recent decades. Featuring such illustrious contributors as Linda Hutcheon, Sherrill Grace, and Aritha van Herk, the volume considers the works of writers such as MargaretAtwood, whose concern with both countries' identities is well known, but also offers surprising new insights, for example by comparing writing by Edgar Allan Poe with Canadian Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi and Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro's work with that of the American graphic novelist Alison Bechdel. Contributors: Margaret Atwood, Shuli Barzilai, Julia Breitbach, Jutta Ernst, Florian Freitag, Marlene Goldman, Sherrill Grace, Michael and Linda Hutcheon, Bettina Mack, Silvia Mergenthal, Claire Omhovere, Katja Sarkowsky, Aritha van Herk. Eva Gruber is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Konstanz. Caroline Rosenthal is Professor of American Literature at the University of Jena.

This book enlarges the perspective of literary geography which tends to focus on the correspondence between the objective world the geographer addresses and its subjective rendering in art. Instead it considers how geography informs fresh aesthetic responses to space in contemporary Canadian literature, with specific attention to the writings of Alistair MacLeod, Jane Urquhart, Anne Michaels, Aritha van Herk, Rudy Wiebe, Robert Kroetsch and Thomas Wharton. This broadening leads to a series of interrogations: what blanks in conventional landscape writing does physical geography fill, and how? Where does the efficiency of geography lie beyond its scientific accuracy or descriptive relevance? Pondering the role of geography in a work of art therefore amounts to considering what makes geography work as art ¿ is there such a thing as a poetics of geography? Because the place of the writer and the representation of space remain two central concerns in Canadian writing, the texts under scrutiny help elucidate the critical role performed by the «geographical imagination,» a phrase used by theoreticians as diverse as Edward Said, Edward Soja or Derek Gregory, in the fabrication of symbolic ties between Canadians and the land they have come to share.