Download or read book Rudy Wiebe and the Historicity of the Word written by Penelope Van Toorn and published by University of Alberta. This book was released on 1995 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an entertaining re-examination of Rudy Wiebe's major novels, Penny van Toorn presents a completely new way of reading one of Canada's foremost contemporary writers. She analyzes Wiebe's struggle to control the "socially contested territory" of language, and identifies the principles that underlie his complex narrative structures.
Download or read book Sweeter Than All The World written by Rudy Wiebe and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-22 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rudy Wiebe’s latest novel is at once an enthralling saga of the Mennonite people and one man’s emotional voyage into his heritage and his own self-discovery. Ambitious in its historical sweep, tender and humane, Sweeter Than All the World takes us on an extraordinary odyssey never before fully related in a contemporary novel. The novel tells the story of the Mennonite people from the early days of persecution in sixteenth-century Netherlands, and follows their emigration to Danzig, London, Russia, and the Americas, through the horrors of World War II, to settlement in Paraguay and Canada. It is told episodically in a double-stranded narrative. The first strand consists of different voices of historical figures. The other narrative voice is that of Adam Wiebe, born in Saskatchewan in 1935, whom we encounter at telling stages of his life: as a small boy playing in the bush, as a student hunting caribou a week before his wedding, and as a middle-aged man carefully negotiating a temporary separation from his wife. As Adam faces the collapse of his marriage and the disappearance of his daughter, he becomes obsessed with understanding his ancestral past. Wiebe meshes the history of a people with the story of a modern family, laying bare the complexities of desire and family love, religious faith and human frailty. The past comes brilliantly alive, beginning with the horrors of the Reformation, when Weynken Claes Wybe is burned at the stake for heretical views on Communion. We are caught up in the great events of each century, as we follow in the footsteps of Adam’s forebears: the genius engineer who invented the cable-car system; the artist Enoch Seeman, who found acclamation at the royal court in London after having been forbidden to paint by the Elders; Anna, who endures the great wagon trek across the Volga in 1860, leaving behind her hopes of marriage so that her brothers will escape conscription in the Prussian army; and Elizabeth Katerina, caught in the Red Army’s advance into Germany when rape and pillage are the rewards given to soldiers. The title of the novel, taken from a hymn, reflects the beauty and sorrow of these stories of courage. In a startling act of invention, Sweeter Than All the World sets one man’s quest for family and love against centuries of turmoil. Rudy Wiebe first wrote of Mennonite resettlement in his 1970 epic novel The Blue Mountains of China. Since then, much of his work has focused on re-imagining the history of the Canadian Northwest. In Sweeter Than All the World, as in many of his most acclaimed novels, Wiebe has sought out real historical characters to tell an extraordinary story. William Keith, a University of Toronto professor and author of a book about Wiebe, writes: “Wiebe has a knack for divining wells of human feeling in historical sources.” Here, all the main characters share his name, and the history is one to which he belongs. Moreover, alongside those flashbacks into history is revealed an utterly compelling contemporary story of a man whose background is not totally unlike the author’s own. Wiebe sets his narrative against his two favourite backdrops: the northern Alberta landscape, and the shared memories of the Mennonite people. Sweeter Than All the World is a compassionate, erudite and stimulating work of fiction that shares the deep-rooted concerns of all of Wiebe’s work: how to make history live in our imagination, and how we can best live our lives.
Download or read book Rudy Wiebe written by Rudy Wiebe and published by Kitchener, Ont. : Sand Hills Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Of This Earth written by Rudy Wiebe and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-06-12 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful, moving memoir of a boy’s coming of age, infused with a deep love of the land, from one of Canada’s most cherished and acclaimed writers. In Of This Earth, Rudy Wiebe gives vivid life again to the vanished world of Speedwell, Saskatchewan, an isolated, poplar-forested, mostly Mennonite community – and Rudy’s first home. Too young to do heavy work, Rudy witnessed a way of life that was soon to disappear. And we experience with him the hard labour of clearing the stony, silty bushland; the digging out of precious wells one bucket of dirt at a time; sorrow at the death of a beloved sister; the disorienting searches for grazing cattle in the vast wilderness sloughs and the sweet discovery of the power of reading. Rare personal photographs (reproduced throughout the book) and the fragile memories of those who are left give shape to the story of Mennonite immigrants building a life in Canada, the growth and decline of the small Speedwell community, the sway of religion, and a young boy’s growing love of the extreme beauty of the aspen forests – as well as how all these elements came to inform his destiny as a writer. A hymn to a lost place and a distant time, Of This Earth follows the best of memoirs in the tradition of Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. It is an evocation of the Canadian west that only a writer of Rudy Wiebe’s powers could summon.
Download or read book The Literary History of Alberta Volume Two written by George Melnyk and published by University of Alberta. This book was released on 1998 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, the companion to the landmark volume The Literary History of Alberta, Volume One: From Writing-on-Stone to World War Two, George Melnyk examines Alberta literature in the second half of the twentieth century. At last, Melnyk argues, Alberta writers have found their voice—and their accomplishments have been remarkable. The contradictory landscape, the stereotypes of the Indian, the Mountie, and the Cowboy, and the language of the Other, speaking from the margins—these elements all left their impressions on the consciousness of early Alberta. But writers in the last few decades have turned this inheritance to their advantage, to create compelling stories about this place and its people. Today, Melnyk discovers, Alberta writers can appreciate not only this achievement, but also its essential source: the symbolic communication of Writing-on-Stone. The Literary History of Alberta, Volume Two extends the study of Alberta's cultural history to the present day. It is a vital text for anyone interested in Alberta's vibrant literary culture.
Download or read book Temptations Of Big Bear written by Rudy Wiebe and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-11-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in his writing career, Rudy Wiebe’s imagination was caught by a heroic character of Cree and Ojibwa ancestry whose birthplace was within twenty-five miles of where Wiebe himself was born 110 years later. The man’s name translated into English was Big Bear, and he came to be the subject of one of Wiebe’s most highly praised works of fiction. A modern classic, Wiebe’s fourth novel is a moving epic of the tumultuous history of the Canadian West. The book won the 1973 Governor General's Award, and in the 1990s was made into a CBC television miniseries based on a script co-written by Wiebe and Métis director Gil Cardinal, shot in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley. From the early days of North America, European settlers forced Natives aside, taking over their land on which they had lived for thousands of years. Big Bear envisioned a Northwest in which all peoples lived together peaceably, and in the 1880s made history by standing his ground to keep his Plains Cree nation from being forced onto reserves. The buffalo food supply was vanishing, but Big Bear led his people across the prairie, resisting pressure to cede rights to the land and give up freedom in exchange for temporary nourishment. The struggle brought starvation to his followers, tearing apart the community and eventually his own family. The story follows Big Bear’s life as he lives through the last buffalo hunt, the coming of the railway, the pacification of the Native tribes, and his own imprisonment. Wiebe’s magnificent interpretation of Western Canadian history encompasses not only his hero's struggle for integrity and justice but also the whole richness of the Plains culture.
Download or read book Speaking in the Past Tense written by Herb Wyile and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2009-10-22 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Speaking in the Past Tense participates in an expanding critical dialogue on the writing of historical fiction, providing a series of reflections on the process from the perspective of those souls intrepid enough to step onto what is, practically by definition, contested territory.” — Herb Wyile, from the Introduction The extermination of the Beothuk ... the exploration of the Arctic ... the experiences of soldiers in the trenches during World War I ... the foibles of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister ... the Ojibway sniper who is credited with 378 wartime kills—these are just some of the people and events discussed in these candid and wide-ranging interviews with eleven authors whose novels are based on events in Canadian history. These sometimes startling conversations take the reader behind the scenes of the novels and into the minds of their authors. Through them we explore the writers’ motives for writing, the challenges they faced in gathering information and presenting it in fictional form, the sometimes hostile reaction they faced after publication, and, perhaps most interestingly, the stories that didn’t make it into their novels. Speaking in the Past Tense provides fascinating insights into the construction of national historical narratives and myths, both those familiar to us and those that are still being written.
Download or read book Ethical Encounters written by Janne Korkka and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problems of knowing and representing the other are acute every time we encounter a text as writers or readers. Ethical Encounters engages with the representation of encounters with alterity in the writings of the Canadian author Rudy Wiebe. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy on the ethics of encountering the other, the book argues that Wiebe’s writings show that the self’s knowledge offers an inadequate basis for ethically valid representations of those encounters. In the search for ethical ways of engaging with alterity, Wiebe’s writings offer new ways of employing silence and the presence of the unknowable as means to explore encounters with alterity. Ethical Encounters shows that dividing Wiebe’s work into two sharply distinct categories of ‘Mennonite’ and ‘First Nations’ writings overlooks important connections between the author’s central works and may seriously hinder the interrogation of narrative engagement with alterity. While such human encounters resonate against ethical strategies of representation, the greatest challenge for the ethics of encounter in Wiebe’s texts arises in encounters with the alterity of space. Ethical Encounters engages with both physical and narrative spaces which are not permanently fixed in landscape or geography, or in human perceptions of place, arguing that the most radical expressions of alterity in Wiebe’s writings emerge in encounters with the spaces of the Canadian North. The study raises questions about the relationship between the self and the other as they concern knowing: what does the self know when it claims to know another person or space? How does the narrating self negotiate the seeming collapse of its own knowledge when it encounters others whose stories cannot be known? Ethical Encounters casts new light not just on Wiebe’s writings but also on how we as authors and readers engage with expressions of alterity which refuse to be transformed into familiar, knowable forms. Janne Korkka is post-doctoral researcher and coordinator of the North American Studies programme in the Department of English, University of Turku, Finland. His main research interests lie in the problems of representing space and encountering alterity in Canadian writing. He is co-editor of Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other: Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation (2008). He teaches Canadian and postcolonial literatures and North American Studies, and publishes mainly on Canadian writing.
Download or read book Decolonizing the Lens of Power written by Kerstin Knopf and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book that comprehensively examines Indigenous filmmaking in North America, as it analyzes in detail a variety of representative films by Canadian and US-American Indigenous filmmakers: two films that contextualize the oral tradition, three short films, and four dramatic films. The book explores how members of colonized groups use the medium of film as a means for cultural and political expression and thus enter the dominant colonial film discourse and create an answering discourse. The theoretical framework is developed as an interdisciplinary approach, combining postcolonialism, Indigenous studies, and film studies. As Indigenous people are gradually taking control over the imagemaking process in the area of film and video, they cease being studied and described objects and become subjects who create self-controlled images of Indigenous cultures. The book explores the translatability of Indigenous oral tradition into film, touching upon the changes the cultural knowledge is subject to in this process, including statements of Indigenous filmmakers on this issue. It also asks whether or not there is a definite Indigenous film practice and whether filmmakers tend to dissociate their work from dominant classical filmmaking, adapt to it, or create new film forms and styles through converging classical film conventions and their conscious violation. This approach presupposes that Indigenous filmmakers are constantly in some state of reaction to Western ethnographic filmmaking and to classical narrative filmmaking and its epitome, the Hollywood narrative cinema. The films analyzed are The Road Allowance People by Maria Campbell, Itam Hakim, Hopiit by Victor Masayesva, Talker by Lloyd Martell, Tenacity and Smoke Signals by Chris Eyre, Overweight With Crooked Teeth and Honey Moccasin by Shelley Niro, Big Bear by Gil Cardinal, and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner by Zacharias Kunuk.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction 3 Volume Set written by Brian W. Shaffer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 1581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile
Download or read book Writing in Dust written by Jenny Kerber and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing in Dust is the first sustained study of prairie Canadian literature from an ecocritical perspective. Drawing on recent scholarship in environmental theory and criticism, Jenny Kerber considers the ways in which prairie writers have negotiated processes of ecological and cultural change in the region from the early twentieth century to the present. The book begins by proposing that current environmental problems in the prairie region can be understood by examining the longstanding tendency to describe its diverse terrain in dualistic terms—either as an idyllic natural space or as an irredeemable wasteland. It inquires into the sources of stories that naturalize ecological prosperity and hardship and investigates how such narratives have been deployed from the period of colonial settlement to the present. It then considers the ways in which works by both canonical and more recent writers ranging from Robert Stead, W.O. Mitchell, and Margaret Laurence to Tim Lilburn, Louise Halfe, and Thomas King consistently challenge these dualistic landscape myths, proposing alternatives for the development of more ecologically just and sustainable relationships among people and between humans and their physical environments. Writing in Dust asserts that “reading environmentally” can help us to better understand a host of issues facing prairie inhabitants today, including the environmental impacts of industrial agriculture, resource extraction, climate change, shifting urban–rural demographics, the significance of Indigenous understandings of human–nature relationships, and the complex, often contradictory meanings of eco-cultural metaphors of alien/invasiveness, hybridity, and wildness.
Download or read book Peace Shall Destroy Many written by Rudy Wiebe and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1944, as war rages across Europe and Asia, famine, violence and fear are commonplace. But life appears tranquil in the isolated farming settlement of Wapiti in northern Saskatchewan, where the Mennonite community continues the agricultural lifestyle their ancestors have practised for centuries. Their Christian values of peace and love lead them to oppose war and military service, so they are hardly affected by the war – except for the fact that they are reaping the rewards of selling their increasingly valuable crops and livestock. Thom Wiens, a young farmer and earnest Christian, begins to ask questions. How can they claim to oppose the war when their livestock become meat to sustain soldiers? How can they enjoy this free country but rely on others to fight to preserve that freedom? Within the community, conflicts and broken relationships threaten the peace, as the Mennonite tradition of close community life manifests itself as racism toward their “half-breed” neighbours, and aspirations of holiness turn into condemnation of others. Perhaps the greatest hope for the future lies with children such as Hal Wiens, whose friendship with the Métis children and appreciation of the natural environment offer a positive vision of people living at peace with themselves and others. Wiebe’s groundbreaking first novel aroused great controversy among Mennonite communities when it was first published in 1962. Wiebe explains, “I guess it was a kind of bombshell because it was the first realistic novel ever written about Mennonites in western Canada. A lot of people had no clue how to read it. They got angry. I was talking from the inside and exposing things that shouldn't be exposed.” At the same time, other reviewers were unsure how to react to Wiebe’s explicitly religious themes, a view which Wiebe found absurd. “There are many, many people who feel that religious experience is the most vital thing that happens to them in their lives, and how many of these people actually ever get explored in modern novels?” The concept of peace is an important theme in Wiebe’s first three books. The attempt to live non-violently, one of the basic tenets of the Mennonite faith as taught by the sixteenth-century spiritual leader Menno Simons, is what has “caused the Mennonites the most difficulty in their relationship with everybody,” forcing them to move again and again. The theme of peace versus passivity is further explored in The Blue Mountains of China, where inner peace, a state of being, is contrasted with the earthly desire for a place of public order and tranquility where the church is “there for a few hours a Sunday and maybe a committee meeting during the week to keep our fire escape polished,” as Thom, the protagonist puts it.. Wiebe has said, “To be an Anabaptist is to be a radical follower of the person of Jesus Christ . . . and Jesus Christ had no use for the social and political structures of his day; he came to supplant them.” While Peace Shall Destroy Many takes place in a Mennonite community, its elements are universal, delineating the way young idealism rebels against staid tradition, as a son clashes with his father. In the face of violent confrontations between beliefs all over the world, the novel remains as compelling now as it was nearly forty years ago.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Post Colonial Literatures in English written by Eugene Benson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 1950 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " ... Documents the history and development of [Post-colonial literatures in English, together with English and American literature] and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories. In more than 1,600 entries written by more than 600 internationally recognized scholars, it explores the effect of the colonial and post-colonial experience on literatures in English worldwide.
Download or read book Canada Images D une Soci t Post nationale written by Nordic Association for Canadian Studies. International Conference and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has Canada moved beyond the nation state into the world of the post-national? To what extent have fixed notions of Canadian nationhood been replaced by a more global, decentralized sense of identification? Is nationhood (or post-nationhood) best expressed by statelessness and exile or by belonging? Or can Canadian national identity in fact fruitfully coexist with the post-national consciousness? These are some of the issues covered by this volume, issues seen from a range of perspectives - literary, cultural, political and economic. In the literary sphere the national/post-national debate is explored both through canonical writers, such as L. M. Montgomery, Stephen Leacock, and Marie-Claire Blais, and through recent First Nations, Asian-Canadian, African-Canadian, Ukrainian-Canadian and Quebec writing. The political and economic range is equally diverse, covering such topics as immigration policy, multiculturalism, Canadian-American relations, tourist imaginings of the Canadian North, the Canadian city, and Quebec nationalism. The book brings together 27 original articles from international scholars and creative writers, offering both European and Canadian perspectives. Six articles in French focus specifically on the francophone sphere.
Download or read book Peace Shall Destroy Many text large Print written by Rudy Wiebe and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conflicts between the disciplined, non-violent dedication of the thriving Mennonite community and the threats and challenges from the war-torn world they left behind reveal a lurking violence beneath the peaceful surface of settlement life.
Download or read book Seeking the Self Encountering the Other written by Tuomas Huttunen and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other offers new insights into diasporic experiences, encounters and representations. This collection of texts examines diaspora narratives and the ways in which different encounters with the other are represented, as well as how these encounters might be read and interpreted in ethical terms. The anthology explores questions of ethics in narratives of displacement or belonging, nationalist narratives of exclusion and borderline narratives, constructed on the foundation provided by encounters with the cultural, sexual, gendered and ethnic other. The contributors’ aim is to explore questions of responsibility and ethics in the study of diaspora, migration, and alterity from a wide range of perspectives. Following a Levinasian one, if the other is always ultimately transcendental and ungraspable through language, we are required to consider ethics every time we write, read or interpret an encounter with the other.
Download or read book The Blue Mountains of China written by Rudy Wiebe and published by New Canadian Library. This book was released on 2011-04-13 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of Wiebe's Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest and Sandra Birdsell's The Russländer comes an epic novel on the Mennonite experience, by a Governor General's Literary Award-winning author. The Blue Mountains of China tells the unforgettable story of a group of Russian Mennonites in search of a land that would give them religious freedom. Alive with the excitement of a journey that begins in the oppressive poverty of a Russian village and ends on the Canadian prairies and in the Chaco Boreal of Paraguay, this is the story of a remarkable group of men and women—all determined, above all else, to triumph in their quest. More than a saga of generations, The Blue Mountains of China is Rudy Wiebe's stirring testimony to the enduring human spirit.
