Reading Mountains 2021

December 13, 7 pm CET, Zoom

“This memoir about a mother and daughter forging connections with the wilderness – and each other – is like going forest bathing: it will leave you feeling refreshed and restored, with a big smile on your face.”

– Marni Jackson, author of The Mother Zone

This One Wild Life – A Mother-Daughter Wilderness Memoir

Disillusioned with overly competitive organized sports and concerned about her lively daughter’s growing shyness, author and memoirist Angie Abdou takes on her next challenge: to hike a peak a week with Katie. They will bond in nature and discover together the glories of outdoor activity. What could go wrong? Well, among other things, it turns out that Angie loves hiking but Katie doesn’t.

About the Author

Angie Abdou is the author of five novels and a memoir of hockey parenting, Home Ice. Her first novel, The Bone Cage, was a CBC Canada Reads finalist and was awarded the 2011-12 MacEwan Book of the Year. Angie is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Athabasca University. She lives in Fernie, B.C., with her family and two beloved but unruly dogs.  

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December 2, noon, on MS Teams: https://bit.ly/LIT_BBR_1

Many contemporary novels (and films, graphic narratives, TV series) consist of more than one story. In such novels, various settings, characters, and time periods are set against each each other by an act of juxtaposition. The boundary between the local narratives is usually marked by gaps, asterisks or other paratextual markers, and its existence sets in motion a process by which readers need to make sense of the disruption performed in order to assess the meaning of the overall global narrative. The marked boundary initiates a process in which the distinct narrative units which are related to each other, a process in which parallels and contrasts come to fore. While this process to a certain degree works towards integration, it also foregrounds the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the overall text. In my talk, I will explore the affinity of such multi-narrative texts to a particular thematic preoccupation, namely that of representing identities constituted by the straddling of cultural borders in post-colonial contexts. By looking at individual test cases – such as Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For – I will discuss whether multi-narrative structures can be viewed as the ‘discursive articulation’ of a ‘universal humanism’ or to what extent they are used for the ‘opposite effect’, namely ‘fragmentation and division rather than unity” (Tiago de Luca).

The talk is part of a lecture series on Borders/Boundaries/Regions: Literary and Cultural  Perspectives on Space at the University of Szczecin (Programme below):

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You are warmly invited to an online-talk by Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene), Associate Professor at UBC.

The talk takes place online (Zoom) on December 15, 2021, 5 pm European Central Time. Tickets can be ordered here:

Eventbrite<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/glen-coulthard-presents-once-were-maoists-fourth-world-anti-colonialism-tickets-217539706117>

This presentation will provide a history of Red Power radicalization and Indigenous-Marxist cross-fertilization. It examines the political work undertaken by a small but dedicated cadre of Native organizers going by the name Native Alliance for Red Power (or NARP) in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), from 1967 to the 1975. It argues that their political organizing and theory-building borrowed substantively and productively from a Third World-adapted Marxism which provided an appealing international language of political contestation that they not only inherited but sought to radically transform through a critical engagement with their own cultural traditions and land-based struggles. Not unlike many radicalized communities of color during this period, NARP molded and adapted the insights they gleaned from Third World Marxism abroad into their own critiques of racial capitalism, patriarchy, and internal colonialism at home.

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Cette séance du séminaire EMMA aura lieu le 23 novembre à 18h00 en salle 126, campus Saint Charles, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 et en ligne (zoom).

Registration: fiona.mcmahon@univ-montp3.fr

Vous êtes cordialement invité.e.s à la séance de séminaire de l’EA741-EMMA qui se déroulera le mardi 23 novembre et dont vous trouverez les détails ci-dessous.

En lien avec le Thème 2 „L'(inter)agir“ de l’équipe de recherche (EA741) EMMA, nous sommes heureux.euses d’accueillir Shannon Wells-Lassagne (Pr Université de Bourgogne), spécialiste de l’adaptation filmique et des séries télévisées. Professeure Wells-Lassagne est invitée à présenter l’ouvrage qu’elle co-dirige avec Fiona McMahon (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3): Adapting Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond. L’ouvrage paraît chez l’éditeur Palgrave, dans la collection dirigée par Julie Grossman et R. Barton Palmer : „Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture series“.

Résumé

This book engages with Margaret Atwood’s work and its adaptations. Atwood has long been appreciated for her ardent defense of Canadian authors and her genre-bending fiction, essays, and poetry. However, a lesser-studied aspect of her work is Atwood’s role both as adaptor and as source for adaptation in media as varied as opera, television, film, or comic books. Recent critically acclaimed television adaptations of the novels The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu) and Alias Grace (Amazon) have rightfully focused attention on these works, but Atwood’s fiction has long been a source of inspiration for artists of various media, aseeming corollary to Atwood’s own tendency to explore the possibilities of previously undervalued media (graphic novels), genres (science-fiction), and narratives (testimonial and historical modes). This collection hopes to expand on other studies of Atwood’s work or on their adaptations to focus on the interplay between the two, providing an interdisciplinary approach that highlights the protean nature of the author and of adaptation.

Shannon Wells-Lassagne is Professor of Film and Literature at the Université de Bourgogne, France. She is the author of Television and Serial Adaptation (2017), and the co-editor of Adapting Endings (2019), and Screening Text (2013). Her work has appeared in Screen, The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Critical Studies in Television, and The Journal of Popular Film and Television.

Fiona McMahon is Professor of American Literature at the Université Paul Valéry- Montpellier 3, France, and editor of the series Profils Américains. She is the author of Charles Reznikoff: une poétique du témoignage (2010), H.D. Trilogy (2013) and co-editor of Penser le genre en poésie contemporaine (2019).