CRYTC

“Otinawāsowin: Birthing the Stories of Kayasochi Kikawenow”

In 1993, two men from the community of South Indian Lake in Manitoba found the burial site at Nagami Bay of a woman who came to be known as Kayasochi Kikawenow. Among the objects found at the site were beads of seed, bone, and glass, and a variety of hand tools, which had been buried with the young woman, who, it was concluded, was buried about 1665 when she was in her mid-twenties...more

America through European Fairy Tales

Kevin Shortsleeve

I'd like to explore the notion that a certain set of fairy tales, myths and legends told to European children over thousands of years has affected the way America sees itself. I speak of the persistent and widespread legend in Europe--from ancient times to the recent past--that a magical land lay somewhere west in the Atlantic Ocean. The earliest of these rumors was of Atlantis, a land of advanced technology, sacred woods and astounding military might. Throughout Europe there have been other similar legends of magical lands to the west, from St. Brendan's magical adventures, to Avalon, an island of eternal youth, to the Spanish El Dorado, a city of gold, to the Irish legend of Hy Brasil, an earthly paradise...more

"The Construction of the Imperial Subject in/of Victorian Children's Literature"

Mavis Reimer

In the history of children's literature, it has been common to identify the second half of the nineteenth century in England as the "Golden Age" of children's literature and to claim the narrative patterns established during this period as determining many of the conventions of children's literature that endure into the twenty-first century. Much has been made critically of the new celebration of the imagination and the free play of childhood in the texts of this period. In this project,...more

Cultural Citizenship and the Represented Child in Canadian Fiction in English

Benjamin Lefebvre

Based on my doctoral dissertation, this book brings together discourses of "the child" as a cultural construct and the ideological functions of literary texts published in Canada between 1947 and 2007. It studies a range of novels in which child protagonists are depicted negotiating explicit lessons about selfhood and group identity, in the form of boundaries and taboos that surrounding adults have internalized as normative...more

"Discourses of Home in Canadian Children's Literature"

Mavis Reimer

Along with eleven other collaborators, I have been investigating the meanings of home that circulate in Canadian children's literature. "Home" is often the primary setting of children's books, is often the place from which young people leave for adventures and to which they return at the conclusion of their stories, and often signals the achievement of the kind of psychological comfort commonly associated with the phrase "at home." But "home" also signals the necessities of life widely assumed to be the obligations of adults to children, the ownership of property, a gendered space, a private place, the nation, and the notion of legitimate ancestry, among other things. In our studies,...more

The Making of Peace and War in Literatures

Deborah Schnitzer

With Kathleen Venema, I am developing an experimental, full course, The Making of Peace and War in Literatures, offered during the 2006-07 academic year. This course evolves out of my continuing interest in how diverse communities might intersect and partner. The course focuses on the tradition of literary and cultural representation of conflict, both the extensive tradition of war literature and the less well-known body of literature that examines peace as something other than the absence of war. It engages representations of violence, death, justice and hope in relation to...more

Nonsense Literature