West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative

by Katherine Ann Roberts

Overview

The North American entertainment industry is rapidly consolidating, and new modes of technological delivery challenge Canadian content regulations. An understanding of how Canadian culture negotiates its rapport with American genres has never been more timely. West/Border/Road offers an interdisciplinary analysis of contemporary Canadian manifestations of three American genres: the western, the border, and the road. It situates close readings of literary, film, and television narratives from both English Canada and Quebec within a larger context of Canadian generic borrowing and innovation. Katherine Ann Roberts calls upon canonical works in Canadian studies, theories of genre, and a wide range of scholarship from border studies, cultural studies, and film studies to examine how genre is appropriated and sometimes reworked and how these cultural narratives engage with discourses of contemporary Canadian nationhood. The author elucidates Guy Vanderhaeghe’s rewriting of the codes of the historical western to include the trauma of Aboriginal peoples, Aritha van Herk’s playful spoof on American western iconography, the politics and perils of the representation of the Canada-US border in CBC-produced crime television, and how the road genre inspires and constrains the Québécois and Canadian road movie. A reminder of the power and limitations of American genres, West/Border/Road provides a nuanced perspective on Canadian engagement with cultural forms that may be imported but never foreign.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780773554405
Publisher:	McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date:	04/18/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Katherine Ann Roberts is associate professor of North American studies and French at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 3

1 West 1 Courage and Restraint in Guy Vanderhaeghe's Western Trilogy 24

2 West 2 Stampeding Together, Sundance Style, in Aritha van Herk's (New) West 84

3 Border 1 Post-9/11 Anxiety on the Small Screen in CBC'S Intelligence and the Border 130

4 Border 2 The Edge of America in Border Songs, Frozen River, and Canada 180

5 Road 1 Where the River Meets the Sea: The Politics of Memory in Quebec Road Narrative 231

6 Road 2 Updating the Canadian Road Movie with Hollywood Canucks 277

Conclusiona 330

Notes 339

References 369

Index 395

Editorial Reviews

"The author makes an engaging, cross-disciplinary, cross-genre, cross-cultural argument for the importance and interaction of the border genre, the road genre, and the American western (as a concept and construct) in cultural production in Canada. An extremely ambitious and innovative study." Jane M. Koustas, Brock University and author of Robert Lepage on the Toronto Stage

From the Publisher