Department of English

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14078/8

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Creative writing in post-secondary education: practice, pedagogy, and research
(2025) Martin, Lisa Anne
A blend of memoir and scholarly review, this book explores the kinds of thinking creative writing, a practical subject, makes possible within secondary education and how it can reimagine higher education in more equitable, diverse, and inclusive directions. Exploring how the subject gives permission to think specifically, locally, from one's own position, and in a necessarily limited way, it considers post-secondary creative writing in its three key aspects-artistic practice, pedagogical practice, and practice-led research. Braiding together disciplinary history, research-informed autobiographical analysis of artistic practice and idea from creativity studies and educational psychology, this is a timely and important discussions likely to spark spirited debate.
A story can be told about pain
(2025) Martin, Lisa Anne
When an accident upends their lives, fourteen-year-old Shiloh and her mother Ruth must leave their idyllic home to make a new life in the city. They find housing -- through an evangelical church operating out of a strip mall -- that backs onto the grounds of the abandoned Pacific Hospital for the Mind. Their lives begin to intersect with their new neighbours -- Raymond, a handyman whose painful past is coming to a head; Dave, the disillusioned pastor looking for a new wife; and Madeleine, a 90-year-old former nurse who worked at the hospital and continues to make pilgrimages to the graves of the patients she once cared for. As Shiloh becomes involved with an undercurrent of teenagers who frequent the grounds of the ruined asylum, her rebellion and grief push her towards choices she can never take back. With evocative, lyrical prose reminiscent of Emily Ruskovich and Marilynne Robinson, A Story Can Be Told About Pain is a profound meditation on care, grief, and survival, reveling in the beauty of language, finding solace in grief, and boldly confronting truth in order to heal.
Ukrainian crime fiction: trends, themes, traditions
(2025) Krys, Svitlana
This article traces the development of crime fiction in Ukraine: its origins in the gothic literary movement, main authors, historical memory and colonial traumas, role as an instrument of Ukraine’s cultural diplomacy, limited presence in the Soviet era, and proliferation following Ukraine’s independence.
Afterword to Marko the Damned
(2024) Krys, Svitlana; Storozhenko, Oleksa; Yakovenko, Svitlana
In the haunting and gothic landscape of 1640s Ukraine, Marko the Damned (1879) by Oleksa Storozhenko weaves a chilling tale of rebellion, betrayal, and the supernatural. Set against the backdrop of the kozak struggle for freedom, this gripping novel follows the harrowing journey of Marko, a kozak warrior ensnared by dark forces. As the kozaky rise up against their oppressors, Marko finds himself torn between loyalty to his comrades and a cursed destiny that threatens to consume him. With every step, he battles both the homeland’s enemies and the sinister powers that seek to claim his soul. Storozhenko’s masterful storytelling plunges readers into a world of eerie shadows and moral dilemmas, where the fight for freedom intertwines with a descent into the macabre. Marko the Damned is a captivating exploration of human resilience and the unyielding spirit of the kozaky, destined to leave readers both enthralled and unsettled.
The horror that won’t end: re-enactments of national trauma in Ukrainian neo-Gothic fiction
(2025) Krys, Svitlana; Jeżyk, Agnieszka
In the Western cultural production that puts individual or collective fear at its center, East/Central Europe has been portrayed as an othered space of horror – lawless, frightening zones where anything can happen. Incorporating articles on literature, film, visual arts, video games, music videos, and music festivals, Contemporary Slavic horror across media: Cursed zones is a pioneering anthology of academic essays devoted to Slavic horror fiction. The book focuses on works from the mid-20th century through the present, particularly the post-Soviet period. Assessing current trends in Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and East/Central European horror media, the book looks at similarities and idiosyncrasies of the genre in its Slavic variant. With this anthology we hope to tame'the Easterner Other'and start exorcising'monstrous'East/Central Europe.
Breakfast at the Armory Hotel in Bozeman, Montana
(2024) Hutchinson, Chris
Somewhere in the future from inside the antique armoire inside the Armory Hotel, the future is looking back at me.
What we talk about when we talk about gender-inclusive language: teaching and learning the singular “they” in the first-year writing classroom
(2025) Copland, Sarah
Over the past decade, interest in the singular “they” has burgeoned in scholarly venues and mainstream media, but writing studies scholars are surprisingly absent in these conversations. To contribute a writing studies perspective, I studied the impact, value, and challenges of teaching this gender-inclusive pronoun in three sections of my institution’s required first-year writing course. I found that, prior to instruction on gender-inclusive language, students used the singular “they” liberally and were not aware of how gender-inclusive they were in their writing and speaking. After learning multiple gender-inclusive writing strategies, students indicated increased awareness of their own use of gender-inclusive language, interest in using it, confidence in their ability to use it, and appreciation of its relevance to their own lives. They preferred the singular “they” over other gender-inclusive writing strategies. My study concludes that, in addition to students’ work, their self-assessments are a vital, complementary source of information for assessing the value, impact, and challenges of teaching gender-inclusive language, as the nexus of perceived use, interest, ability, and relevance drives whether students will transfer their learning to other contexts. These findings may also be relevant to teaching other forms of inclusive, bias-free language in writing courses.
The compleat cyclist: Izaak Walton’s influence on early cycling literature
(2024) Buchanan, Dave
It may seem a stretch to suggest that a seventeenth-century book about fishing had an influence on late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature about cycling, but that is precisely what I am proposing. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Izaak Walton's classic text The Compleat Angler: The Contemplative Man's Recreation (1653) was frequently mentioned as an inspiration and touchpoint by literary sporting writers, especially literary cyclists. Something about Walton's book clearly spoke to a certain kind of cycling writer at this time: its themes of idyllic ruralism, the contemplative life, and (mostly male) friendship, together with its argument for a civilized, genteel, sporting pastime, were instructive for those literary cyclists trying to foster a positive and sophisticated image of what I call "rambling" cycle travel.
Finding Nemo: Verne’s antihero as original steampunk
(2010) Perschon, Mike
In the foreword to his annotated translation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Walter James Miller suggests that Verne’s image was in need of rehabilitation due to the plethora of poor English translations his works have suffered. With the emergence of better translations, the same need for rehabilitation has emerged for Captain Nemo, the anti-hero of Verne’s underwater adventure tale. In the updated, post-colonial English translations of The Mysterious Island, Nemo is revealed to be the antithesis of the Caucasian pop-culture iteration made famous by James Mason and most recently continued by Patrick Stewart and Michael Caine: an Indian prince whose real name is Dakkar, a leader of the Sepoy rebellion against colonial rule in 1857. It is this Nemo, Verne’s original character, who embodies the essence of the Steampunk aesthetic of the instability of identity through his repeated death-and-rebirth cycle in both novels. Mixing one part recursive fantasy, one part historical criticism, and one part textual analysis, this paper will demonstrate how Captain Nemo is representative of one of the core elements of the Steampunk aesthetic, namely the redefining of identity.
Finding Nemo: Verne’s antihero as original steampunk
(2023) Perschon, Mike; Westfahl, Gary
This volume is a fresh examination of the works of Jules Verne, the pioneering and enduringly popular science fiction writer. Essays study Verne’s various novels—including Around the World in Eighty Days, The Mysterious Island and The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Included essays offer analyses of literary responses to Verne’s work, assessments of film adaptations of his novels and discussions of steampunk, the Verne-inspired science fiction subgenre that has influenced writers like Philip Jose Farmer, Caleb Carr and Adam Roberts.
“Steam Wars,” the special edition: steampunk on the move in Philip Reeve’s and Christian Rivers’s Mortal Engines
(2024) Perschon, Mike; Danahay, Martin A.; Howey, Ann F.
While steampunk continues to defy a fixed definition, certain features can be identified which appear in almost all steampunk cultural products. These features are technofantasy, retrofuturism, and vintage elements. This last feature is often represented as neo-Victorian. While it is undeniable that many steampunk works are set in worlds or alternate histories based upon the Victorian culture or period, there is a growing body of steampunk works set in other cultural spaces, temporal periods, or even secondary worlds. This article suggests that it’s time to leave the tacit conflation of steampunk and neo-Victorianism behind, in favor of vintage, a more dynamic term that points to a past that is decades distant, but not in the ancient past.
Theory in practice, or, CanLit is so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you 1
(2023) van der Marel, Lisa Camille
Unangax·scholar Eve Tuck observes that most, maybe all, research is guided by underlying assumptions about how it will help or improve or heal something in the world; these assumptions constitute, in Tuck's words, a "theory of change" (413). For all their meaningful differences, anticolonial, queer, and feminist approaches to cultural scholarship are predicated on a shared theory of change: careful analysis can be analeptic, bell hooks' characterization of theorizing as "a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently" pinpoints this reparative drive (2). Studying Black womanhood helped hooks heal from her experiences of Black womanhood. Here, theory, "'lived' experience of critical thinking, of reflection and analysis" (2), proved consolidating: "I worked at explaining the hurt and making it go away" (2). The academic field of literary studies is, I suspect, underwritten by similarly healing experiences, ones facilitated by narratives, texts, poetry. Reading helped readers, so they pursue it. This foundational, reparative theory of change may also be why the scandals and institutional failures known as the "CanLit dumpster fire," "CanLit firestorm," or "CanLit in ruins" remain derailing for the field's Black, queer, and feminist scholars.
‘Born in villages, roaming the world’: Diasporicity in Fateh’s Sikh Canadian hip hop
(2023) Grewal, Sara
This paper shows that various songs by Sikh Canadian rap artist Fateh represent engagements with essentialist discourses that neatly mirror Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s notion of “diasporicity”: the continual re-inscription of the origin in acts of embodied agency that retain their connection to tradition while also negotiating the body’s social meanings that exist outside of the subject’s selfpositioning. I argue through a reading of Fateh’s songs that the notion of diasporicity reveals how race, ethnicity, and religion overlap for Sikh Canadians—especially the ways in which bodily expressions of Sikh “religion” are simultaneously interpellated through the discourse of culture/ethnicity and religio-racialization.
Lives of the poet: seasonal affective market disorder
(2024) Hutchinson, Chris
The theme of this issue revolves around the tension between truth and deception in human relationships, particularly in the context of social interactions and personal dynamics. It reflects the ongoing debate about whether complete honesty or selective deception is more beneficial for individuals and society.
A case study on the value of humanities-based analysis, modes of presentation, and study designs for SoTL: close reading students’ pre-surveys on gender-inclusive language
(2023) Copland, Sarah
Close reading has long been heralded as a humanities-specific methodology with significant potential for SoTL. This essay fills a gap in SoTL literature with a full case study demonstrating what, exactly, close reading shows us about our data that social science-based quantitative and qualitative analyses may not. Close reading-based analysis of first-year writing students’ pre-surveys on gender-inclusive language entails attention to the interrelated form and content of students’ self-reflections. This analysis reveals nuances and complexities that, if overlooked, would result in inadvertent misrepresentation of the data. This case study responds not only to calls for humanities-specific SoTL methodologies but also to related calls for greater legitimation of diverse forms for SoTL dissemination, some of which originate in the humanities. It is therefore cast as a reflective essay based on its author’s scholarly personal narrative (SPN) as a new, humanities-based SoTL researcher. Finally, this case study demonstrates the value of flexible, deliberately unscientific study designs that are responsive to emergent conditions but foreign to SoTL’s dominant social science paradigm. As guides to instruction, pre-surveys are necessary complements to pre-quizzes: learning what students think they know about a concept or skill, their attitudes towards it, and their contexts of prior learning about it—not just their knowledge of it, which is all pre-quizzes can tell us—is an important precursor to effective instruction. But maximizing pre-surveys’ potential to guide instruction requires flexible study designs so we can change our pedagogy, including our study’s “intervention,” if necessary, on the fly.
'It […] cannot do any harm to anyone whatsoever’: fictionality, invention and knowledge creation in global notifications, Joseph Conrad’s prefaces and Chance
(2024) Copland, Sarah; Björninen, Samuli; Meyer, Pernille; Mäkelä, Maria; Zetterberg-Nielsen, Henrik
Chance explores the intersection of two of novelist Joseph Conrad’s life- long fascinations: fictional representations of nonfictional conversational storytelling and the relationship between truth, credibility and invention. The latter is also apparent throughout Conrad’s prefaces, in which he works through long- held anxieties about the truthfulness and credibility of his representations and about critics’ concerns on these fronts. To reconcile the relationship between invention and truth or credibility, he describes a process of constructing, via invention, fundamentally truthful and credible stories about real- world events and figures. In Chance, Conrad depicts a character narrator, Marlow, doing the same thing. There are, however, two salient differences between Marlow’s and Conrad’s undertakings: one is their distance from the events and figures they are telling about and telling to (Conrad very distant from them vs. Marlow literally living amidst them), and the other is the genre claims they make for their narratives (Conrad’s literary fictions vs. Marlow’s conversational nonfictions). Conrad depicts Marlow using invention (through fictionality and otherwise) to supplement the limitations of his knowledge about other people, their motivations and their relationships, so that he can narrate a credible and compelling nonfictional conversational tale for his narratee. But because Marlow lives amidst and communicates with the subjects of his tale and presents his communications as nonfictional, the knowledge he creates through invention is consequential for his own and others’ involvement in the unfolding action. Failure to signal must have beens and hypotheticals as invention contributes to significant outcomes for the people with whom Marlow communicates in the told. Conrad thus qualifies his portrait of the affordances of invention for knowledge creation in global nonfictions with a cautionary note related to narrating situations like Marlow’s: telling nonfictional conversational stories about and to our acquaintances.
Before borders: a legal and literary history of naturalization by Stephanie DeGooyer
(2024) Hollingshead, David
Let me begin with an unequivocal endorsement: anyone interested in the fields of novels studies or law and literature will find Before Borders deeply rewarding to read. It is historically rich, rigorously researched, and confidently polemical in ways I will elaborate below. But this monograph should be of interest to scholars, regardless of expertise, as a pedagogical document, one that expertly models the rhetorical move of the scholarly intervention, what we sometimes call the "so what?" question of research work. What begins, in the first chapter, as an exegesis of underexamined seventeenth-century juridical documents that reimagined political subjectivity following the Union of the English and Scottish Crowns quickly coalesces into a set of powerful claims that bear heavily on contemporary understandings of the novel, the nation, and the concept of naturalization in literary studies. Moving briskly between early modern legal theory (Blackstone, Locke, Bacon), canonical works of fiction (Richardson, Defoe, Burney, Mary Shelley), and contemporary criticism (Arendt, Barthes, Benedict Anderson, Jacques Rancière), Stephanie DeGooyer always keeps a keen eye on her study's high argumentative stakes.
What does reading do in the Anthropocene?
(2024) Hollingshead, David
Antoine Traisnel's Capture and Jennifer Wenzel's The Disposition of Nature are two new publications in animal studies and postcolonial ecocriticism respectively that chart very different paths for environmental scholarship in the wake of the nonhuman turn, yet they are both shaped by a context that exceeds their stated methodological frames. My aim here is to give short accounts of each work before addressing a broader shift in the field of literary studies, which I describe as a reconsideration of texts’ political and material efficacy in the face of anthropogenic climate change and species extinction. I suggest that a unique set of institutional factors, including neoliberal austerity measures underwriting the turn to “postcritique,” as well as the rise of environmental justice–oriented ecocriticism, have rendered the fields embracing the nonhuman turn newly uncertain about what texts (and the work of studying texts) do in the Anthropocene. The different tracks Traisnel and Wenzel take in addressing this uncertainty can nevertheless put them in a fruitful conversation with one another about the future of ecological approaches to literature despite their significant divergences in focus and method.
Research recast(ed): MacEwan celebrates month of scholarship - The broken hours with Jacqueline Baker
(2023) Miskiman, Megan; Schabert, Reinette; Baker, Jacqueline
In today’s episode, Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing here at MacEwan, Jacqueline Baker, shares her inspiration and process on her newest book - The Broken Hours - a ghost story about the final days of the infamous horror icon - HP Lovecraft.
Research recast(ed): S2E4 - Hip hop and the Urdu Ghazal, with Sara Grewal
(2022) Ekelund, Brittany; Cave, Dylan; Grewal, Sara
Today we sat down with Dr. Sara Grewal, to learn about the Urdu ghazal, the politics of hip hop and the importance of language. You can find Sara on Instagram and Twitter at @litmasterg. You can also learn more about her community work by visiting the Punjabi Community Health Services website. This episode is packed with extra to explore, like Ghazals you can check out by Parveen Shakir, Jagjit, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Sara also shares a bit of a hip hop song with a poignant message, so if you’d like to hear the whole thing go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub4jPZzSBe0.

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