Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future: Recent Generations of Canadian Women Writing

An apocalyptic vision of planetary self-destruction provided the context for many late twentieth-century narratives. Women writers from Quebec and English Canada, including Margaret Atwood, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine Gagnon, Betsy Warland, Marie-Claire Blais, and Nicole Brossard, redefined their relationship to time and narrative in order to tell a different, perhaps more hopeful, story. Using "archaeology" as a trope and a methodology, Karen McPherson's "critical excavations" of these women's writings pose questions about loss and mourning, survival and witnessing, devastation and writing, remembering and imagining. In "Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future", McPherson explores the memory work, alternative historiographies, and feminist aesthetics by which women writers revisit the past and re-imagine the future. Grounded within critical discourses across many disciplines, McPherson's analysis engages contemporary discussions about autobiographical genres, post-modern historiographies, memoirs, and literary genealogies.