Graphies and Grafts (New Comparative Poetics)

This study provides a close reading and a critical analysis of four novels by contemporary Canadian women writing in English: Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1983), Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990), Kristjana Gunnars's The Prowler (1989), and Aritha van Herk's No Fixed Address (1987). The analysis draws on a combination of post-structuralist, post-colonial and feminist working concepts and perspectives. It is predicated on the assumption of the fundamental interconnectedness of all aspects of human knowledge, and partakes of the process of intertextuality affecting our own contemporary experience of the world. Recent fiction by women, but also feminist and postcolonial theories of meaning and textuality, have had an important share in changing our views of the world/text from a closed structure to a constant process of cultural/textual interaction between two or more cultures/texts. The novels examined here provide rich sites for the exploration of these changing paradigms and their exegesis will offer alternative ways of dealing with language, history, gender, fiction, text and reality in Canada and elsewhere.