This note explores the subject of religion in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, including its importance in relation to Quentin and several clues that make an interpretation of his motives for suicide possible. Two subtexts, which are both alluded to in Quentin’s section, are central to the formation of my interpretation here: the biblical story of the demon-possessed man from the region of the Gerasenes1 and, to a lesser extent, the roughly analogous story of Eubuleus found in Greek mythology. In combination with Faulkner’s “Compson Appendix,” these subtexts emphasize key themes in the novel—including sexuality, death, and the self. I argue that although Quentin’s suicide is not easily interpreted as a symbolic Christian act per se, from an intertextual perspective it can at least be read as an act of self-sacrifice or purgation, an attempt to relinquish his demons and reunite with his sister Caddy in the afterlife.

The introduction to a special issue of Pop! Public. Open. Participatory, comprised of papers from Engaging Open Social Scholarship, a Canadian-Australian event held in December 2020.

Original publication information:

Alyssa Arbuckle, Graham Jensen, Tully Barnett, Ray Siemens, 2021. "Introduction: Engaging Open Scholarship." Pop! Public. Open. Participatory. no. 3 (2021-11-09). https://popjournal.ca/issue03/intro.

This essay argues that Le Guin radically reimagined the Künstlerroman (“artist’s novel”) through its intervention in contemporary debates about art and science. Leveraging the revolutionary, utopian potential linked to the figure of the Romantic artist but frequently denied art (e.g., by those theorists for whom art serves largely to reproduce ideology), The Dispossessed parlays science’s utilitarian function into an artistic process that imaginatively transcends its material and political origins, rehabilitating both science and art within a generic frame that is at once familiar and alien, conventional and revisionary. The essay concludes that the Künstlerroman form changes how we read Le Guin’s narrative and its relationship to the intellectual debates of its time, but that it also alters our understanding of the Künstlerroman tradition itself.

This article synthesizes the work of video game theorists such as Gonzalo Frasca (2003), Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2003), Ian Bogost (2008), and Steven E. Jones (2008) in order to build on academic and interdisciplinary discussions of play and its effect on PC- or console-based video games.  Examples are used to elucidate the potentially problematic categories of “paidic” and “ludic” games, as well as to explore further the ways in which uninhibited play, “metagaming,” and the inevitable influence of socio-cultural factors gradually transform—and become codified within—the landscape of digital games. Finally, the article offers Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of opposing “centripetal” and “centrifugal” forces as analytical tools according to which the connections between in-game activities and out-of-game social and cultural contexts can be usefully examined by future critics.

While Louis Dudek celebrated and promoted Canadian poetry through teaching, public lectures, personal letters, active involvement in the publication of other poets' work, and the publication of an incessant fusillade of his own poems, epigrams, essays, and newspaper articles, few critics have commented at length on Dudek's late poetry. This article addresses that gap by discussing the significance of Dudek's late meta-poetry in relation to his final long poem, Continuation (1961-2001)—an experimental multi-volume work whose self-reflexive narration of the poet's struggle to negotiate the boundary between the real and the transcendental, the visible and the invisible, and the known and the unknowable demonstrates a clear continuity between his early and late poetry.

This essay seeks to elucidate the tensions between the necessarily provisional categories of "reality" and "the imagination" in the Canadian poet-critic Louis Dudek's writings of the 1950s and 1960s in general, and in his self-reflexive and increasingly autobiographical poetry in particular. Examining Dudek's meta-poetry (poetry about poetry), it demonstrates how Dudek's earliest self-reflexive poems and privately recorded musings reveal a much more nuanced understanding of the phenomenal world and the imagination's role in poetry than his earliest polemics suggest.

A detailed bibliography of the Canadian poet Margaret Avison that serves as a companion piece to Francis Mansbridge's "Bibliography to Margaret Avison," picking up where Mansbridge, Avison, and Avison's critics left off in 1987. It features works by and about Avison, with detailed cross-referencing between entries. This bibliography was solicited for inclusion in The Avison Centenary in 2018, a special issue of Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews edited by David A. Kent.

This essay examines how James’s distinction between “personal” and “institutional” religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience informs modernist literature. Specifically, it points to the inescapably social dimensions of “personal” forms of religious experience, demonstrating how modernists such as E.J. Pratt –once Canada’s leading poet – extended James’s notion of personal religion in relation to his pragmatic philosophy. I place James in conversation with modernists such as Pratt to challenge scholars to consider anew not only the nature of James’s literary influence, but also the many forms of religious expression that shaped the cultural landscape of the twentieth century.