Book of Abstracts

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Canadian Landscapes Paysages canadiens
Budapest, Hungary
October 27-29, 2022
BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Nature-Centric Thinking among Canadian Modernist Artists: Bertram Brooker, Lyonel LeMoine FitzGerald, Arthur Lismer
Botár Olivér

Recent research has shown that prominent Canadian modernist artists of the first half of the 20th century, such as Bertram Brooker and Group of Seven members Arthur Lismer and L. L. FitzGerald (among others), espoused nature-centric thinking that fit the international pattern of what I have referred to as “the biocentric discourse intersection.” Such thinking was fairly common among better-known international artists and designers of the interwar and immediate post-war period, such as Alvar Aalto, Arthur Dove, Alexander Calder, Paul Klee, Barbara Hepworth, Franz Marc, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Isamu Noguchi, Georgia O’Keeffe and Eva Zeisel, among many others. Even artists usually seen as “esoteric” in their worldview, such as Emily Carr, Lawren Harris, Wassily Kandinsky and Frantisek Kupka, can, in my view, better be described as “nature-centric” or “biocentric.” Such a Weltanschauung often translated, among these modernists, into art that has been described as “biomorphic” or “biomorphic abstract” in form — a “new landscape,” as Gyorgy Kepes described it in his effort to aestheticize scientific photography. Whether it was abstracted landscapes or images that abstracted close-up views of natural forms, the artists diverged from the more traditional landscape idiom in their expressions of our place within “nature.” In this lecture, I will detail the discourses, authors and writings that mark these Canadians as “biocentric” in an attempt to better place them within an international context and to briefly see how these views translated into visual abstractions of the natural world.

La dichotomie nature/culture et la présence amérindienne dans la littérature québécoise
Kyloušek, Petr

Notre contribution tente de poser l’hypothèse d’une des sources possibles de la perception différente de la dichotomie nature/culture dans les cultures américaines, en l’occurrence la québécoise et d’y retracer l’apport des longs contacts entre les colons européens les amérindiens. Ce faisant nous entendons discuter la conception de Franco Moretti (Atlante del romanzo europeo, 1800-1900) et Pascale Casanova (La République mondiale des Lettres) qui accordent une place privilégiée au centre dans la circulation des biens symboliques. Si la périphérie s’approprie la forme romanesque « centrale », elle la transforme en même temps par la force même de la thématique locale qui impose une axiologie différente et partant une construction différente de la narration. Nous tenterons de montrer l’importance de la thématique amérindienne qui remonte aux écrits de la Nouvelle-France et qui, avec la pénétration des écrivains amérindiens dans la littérature québécoise, contribue à l’« ensauvagement » de celle-ci (Eva Voldřichová Beránková). Cet « ensauvagement » reconfigure le positionnement de l’humain face à l’animalité et semble imposer des structures narratives spécifiques, comme le montrent les romans récents de J.D. Kurtness (De Vengeance, Aquariums), Mireille Gagné (Le Lièvre d’Amérique) et de Christiane Vadnais (Faunes). Si les romans cités peuvent être classés sous la rubrique de l’écocritique, la conception même de l’effacement de l’humain vs. l’animal ani remonte aux expériences antérieures.

Central Bank Credibility and Institutional Resilience:
What It Means for Central and Eastern Europe
Siklos, Pierre L.

It is said that economic institutions, such as central banks, are under a great deal of stress because the combination of higher geopolitical uncertainty and greater economic policy uncertainty is creating a ‘perfect storm’ that is testing their credibility and the trust that the public places in them. After persistent declines over a two decades long period, inflation is rising around the world. Understandably, many are focused on the United States where inflation on annual basis is now exceeding 8 %. Governor Bullard of the St. Louis Fed, and a voting member on the FOMC, recently stated that: “So far I think we’re holding on to our credibility,…”. However, according to Stanford economist John Taylor, known for the famous Taylor rule, “Central Banks are Losing their Credibility”. The Canadian experience is the same as that of the US with many observers disagreeing with Bullard’s assessment. Indeed, the April 23rd The Economist’s headline “The Fed that Failed” is mirrored by Canadian headlines such as “The Bank of Canada Waited Too Long to Start Raising Interest Rates”. Time will soon tell who is on the correct side of the debate. Regardless of one’s view, it is difficult to disagree that central bank credibility is under threat. Central banks globally were heavily affected by the global financial crisis, including how they defined their mission and were perceived by the public. In the interim 15 years, the persistence of unconventional monetary policy has apparently diminished the credibility of central banks as measured, for example, by the gap between expectations and outturns in inflation. This talk asks whether this loss in confidence in central banks has had real institutional effects, hypothesizing that persistent short-term declines in central bank credibility may lead to a decline in the institutional resilience of an economy. Data and examples from several countries are used, with some focus on the experience in Central and Eastern Europe, to illustrate some of the findings of our research. I also explain what is meant by institutional resilience, and report a uniformly decreased trust in central banks is associated with a significant lowering of resilience. Why does this matter? A decline in central bank credibility is bound to have far-reaching ramifications on, first of all, short-term economic aggregates. With an overall decline in credibility, inflation targeting may be less effective as self-fulfilling prophecies take root and inflation expectations become unmoored from actual monetary policy. Central banks play a vital role in a country’s economic system, as they also are situated at the center of a web of economic institutions. Indeed, central banks in a modern economy exist within a network of other economic and political institutions but have assumed a role of being primus inter pares, driving financial and other institutional evolution while at the same time reigning as arbiter of incentive structures (a role wholly given to central banks during the global financial crisis). The expansion of instruments – and, some would say, mandates – since the global financial crisis has only reinforced their centrality to outcomes beyond merely economic aggregates for institutional change and especially the resilience in an economic system is highly predicated on the behavior of monetary institutions. The bottom line then is that what happens to central banks could well have much broader economic and political consequences than is usually imagined.

Tying One’s Hand in Monetary Policy: Changes in the Landscape in Monetary Stabilization. The case of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland from a Canadian Perspective
Ábel István – Siklos, Pierre L

The relationship between economic policy and the business cycle has been the focus of research for decades. We provide a theoretical background that serves to illustrate the main elements of the debate between rules and discretion in conduct of monetary policy and the choice of monetary policy strategy. We then rely on existing explanations to rationalize the adoption of inflation targeting. This strategy has been popular in emerging markets, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. A challenge in designing a suitable monetary policy strategy is that several of these economies already belong or intend to join the EU and, someday, EMU. We discuss the implications. We then provide some illustration of the main points made in the paper with data from the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland.
The GFC and the pandemic aftermath brought new considerations and called for a wither mandate (see Siklos 2017). Even if price stability is the correct goal the key question remains: what kind of monetary policy strategy is required to deliver price stability? Friedman [1948] early in his career still entertained the possibility that it was somehow feasible for monetary policy to counter the economic cycle and stabilize prices and the business cycle. But ten years later, he rejected this view (Friedman [1960]), concluding that such an outcome is not feasible. Indeed, he made famous the conclusion that monetary policy acts with long and variable lags. The lag is relatively long (up to two years). Second, an even bigger problem is that the length of the lag is variable and unpredictable.
In this paper a traditional macroeconomic monetary policy framework is discussed. One of the simplest and most intuitive forms was chosen for illustrative purposes. This permits us to rely on a framework where we can explore differences in approaches to the conduct of monetary policy independent of the policy framework actually in place.
We were primarily interested in how far the simple theoretical model of monetary policy can help us understand movements in economic activity, inflation and the exchange rate. In so doing, we have downplayed the overall economic and institutional environment in which the central banks we examine, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland operate.
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One of our conclusions is that monetary policy does have the power to stabilize the business cycle. Next, one of the errors of monetary policy in the years before the global financial crisis was its excessive rigor. The argument of excessive restrictiveness is supported by a wide range of criticisms, but it seems just an empirically unfounded fear.

Un paysage urbain patrimonialisé : le quartier Saint-Henri de Montréal
Ádám Anikó

Bonheur d’occasion de Gabrielle Roy (1945) marque un moment décisif dans l’histoire de la littérature québécoise, c’est le premier roman urbain où l’auteure dépeint un portrait à mille visages et réaliste du quartier Saint-Henri de Montréal. Un portrait, parce que ce quartier avait et a toujours un visage humain.
La communication, dans une première étape, vise à examiner ce paysage urbain à travers sa présence dans un texte littéraire, ayant une longue histoire économique, sociale, politique et culturelle. Une présence métonymique, puisque la description romanesque de ce lieu et de ses habitants attribue une forte valeur sémiotique à ce quartier, et soutient la stratégie narrative de l’auteure selon laquelle c’est ce lieu qui procure, comme un masque, une identité sociale et psychologique aux personnages.
Dans une deuxième étape, nous souhaitons examiner le procédé qui, sous l’influence de la diffusion du roman de Gabrielle Roy, esthétise d’abord le quartier, ensuite engendre les transformations réelles de cet espace urbain pour l’introduire finalement dans une catégorie du patrimoine culturelle où se met en oeuvre la mémoire collective. Ce paysage urbain, encore vivant, toujours très populaire, attire les touristes et devient sous leur regard un paysage muséifié.

Sixty (+) Years of Fear: Canada’s Widely Unacknowledged
Contribution to the Horror Filmscape
Andrei, Andreev – Diana, Yankova

“The paper will explore Canada’s contribution to the popularization of the horror movie genre.
Beginning with Canada’s first horror film, The Mask (1961), the research goes on to investigate the country’s involvement in the various subgenres of the horror movie, including the slasher movies of the 1970s and 1980s (which, according to critics, may have originated with the Canadian-made Black Christmas of 1974 before the US followed up with Halloween or Friday the 13th nearly a decade later), the still ongoing zombie-horror trend, and the body horror of David Cronenberg, probably Canada’s most popular horror film director and screenwriter, who gained worldwide fame with works such as Shivers, Videodrome and Crash. Various social, political and economical issues will be examined as well, such as the tax-shelter policies existing until the late 20th century which made it easier and cheaper for Hollywood studios to make their films in Canada with little acknowledgement, as well as the different approaches Canadian filmmakers have taken to horror cinema from Hollywood movie studios.

Métamorphoses identitaires et paysage dans Le poids de la neige de Christian Guay-Poliquin
Andrei, Carmen

Notre communication porte sur le second roman du jeune écrivain québécois Christian Guay-Poliquin, à savoir Le poids de la neige. Paru en 2016, il est lauréat des prix France-Québec, prix des libraires Libr’à Nous et prix des collégiens ce qui lui assure un grand succès auprès du public canadien francophone mais aussi en France. Le roman fait partie de par sa thématique de la littérature du néoterroir et de la nordicité. On nous propose un récit assumé par un narrateur accidenté qui est cloué dans un huis clos malgré lui et contre la volonté de son soignant. Dès la première page, il regarde le paysage hivernal. Construit donc sur les thèmes stéréotypés de la neige, du village avec ses chaumières, des personnages solitaires mais solidaires dans l’effort de survivre, etc., il s’inscrit dans une indétermination spatiale et une atmosphère d’apocalypse floue et dans un imaginaire hivernal où la neige est géante et meurtrière.
Munie des outils du littéraire (en étayant et en construisant progressivement nos propos avec des arguments pertinents), nous déclinons une thèse qui se présente comme suit: peu de variations sur le paysage auxquelles on ajoute l’immobilité, la douleur, les relations interhumaines compliquées et complexes et le non-dit, tout cela entraîne mais surtout favorise le repliement sur soi et les Autres. Les métamorphoses du sujet narrant sont en rapport direct avec celles du paysage, embelli et ultérieurement «défiguré», écrasé par la montée de la neige. Elles aboutissent à fleur de peau à une reconstruction identitaire intéressante à plus d’un titre.

Nature, paysages et identité. Perspectives symboliques et linguistiques
Andrei, Carmen – Oprea, Delia Andreea

Notre communication vise l’analyse sémiotique de la quête d’identité lors des randonnées et des errances à travers natures et paysage naturels du personnage central du roman Les ombres filantes. Après le succès international de son second roman, Poids de la neige (2016), traduit dans plus de quinze langues, Christian Guay-Poliquin revient en force narrative avec ce roman sensible et astucieux et clôt ainsi ce troisième volet. Incitant à l’aventure, Les ombres filantes questionnent le sens de la communauté et revisitent les classiques de la survie en nature, tout en décrivant des perspectives identitaires contextuelles. Dans la forêt, seul ou accompagné d’un ami, en quête/requête de soi ou de sa famille, le narrateur-personnage se sent menacé, mais en équipe il devient fort et se transforme face aux hostilités de la nature des contrées sauvages.
Dans la forêt, un homme seul marche en direction du camp de chasse où sa famille s’est réfugiée pour fuir les bouleversements provoqués par une panne d’électricité généralisée. Il se sait menacé et s’enfonce dans les montagnes en suivant les sentiers et les ruisseaux. Un jour d’égarement, un mystérieux garçon l’interpelle. Il a une douzaine d’années, semble n’avoir peur de rien et se joint à l’homme comme s’il l’avait toujours connu. L’insolite duo devra affronter l’hostilité et déjouer les manigances des groupes offensifs qui peuplent désormais les bois.

Environmental Art in the Korean Diaspora in Canada
Bánhegyi Mátyás – Nagy Judit

Environmental art works are “about and in places, and human relations within these places. Hence, the ‘voice’ of the place is in the work, whether foregrounded or not” (Carruthers, 2010)1. That is, the location where these works are conceived and produced forms an organic part of the work. At the same time, the human context of the location also lends it a special dimension or feel, summating in the ‘voice’ of the place. In accordance with this premise, our paper will reflect on Korean diaspora artists’ concept of this voice in the light of the environmental art works they have produced. After defining the notion of environmental art in a broader sense, as a collection of several environment-related art sub-genres, such as nature art, eco-art or earthworks, and providing some important details of the underlying philosophy from Smithson’s 1968 manifesto entitled “The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” to Beardsley’s Earthworks and Beyond. Contemporary Art in the Landscape (1998), Grande’s Balance: Art and Nature (2003) and Andrews’ Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (2006), this paper will analyse Korean Canadian artists’ environmental artwork. In the scope of the analysis, a number of works will be presented in order to uncover the ‘voice’ of the place. Emphasis will be given to the significance of the site where the artworks are exhibited or located, to the materials used for their creation, as well as to the context and philosophy behind the works. The artists discussed will include Khan Lee and Hyungmin Yoon.

1 Carruthers, Beth (2010). Ecoart in Canada: A Conversation and a Brief Survey of the Terrain, Women in Environmental Art Dialogue. Vol. 2010, No. 6. n.p. 

Changing spiritual ”landscapes” in the work of Douglas Coupland
Bernhardt Dóra

A search for meaning and identity is a central theme in the novels and stories of Douglas Coupland. This postmodern spiritual dissatisfaction takes many forms, and so do the ways the longed-for ”miraculous” – often in the form of minor epiphanies – appears. The ”landscapes” associated with the spiritual, however, seem to be changing as time and Coupland’s writing evolves; whereas in ”Generation X” it is in farmed fields and a circling bird, and in ”Life after God” in the wilderness of Vancouver Island that the moment of epiphany arrives, in ”Generation A” the beach of this same island has ”no sand or driftwood or shells;” and Coupland’s famous sculpture that represents Vancouver’s harbour culture is a digital orca.
It seems that, according to Coupland, technological society has abandoned natural „landscapes” as sites for the spiritual; in his later works it is objects and the sites of consumer culture that epitomize the search for meaning. In my paper I consider this change and try to analyse and evaluate its significance for Coupland’s work and for our 21st century culture. 

In-Between Spaces and Places in Tamas Dobozy’s Ghost Geographies
Blake, Jason

This paper looks at border-crossing, mapping and confinement in Tamas Dobozy’s Ghost Geographies (2021). Replete with characters who exist between Hungary and Canada, Dobozy’s collection is deeply concerned with maps, places, and landscapes. It is also deeply concerned with utopias and the longing for a better individual or collective existence. For example, one Canadian professor leaves Toronto for Budapest in 1950; one Hungarian wrestler flees Iron-Curtain-era Hungary by air balloon, with two friends; others, meanwhile, drift blithely across borders, seemingly untroubled by bureaucracy and papers. The thirteen stories in Ghost Geographies are thematically linked by belief in an ideal system or situation, though this generally cedes to disillusion. If utopia lies between “an ideal place” and “no place,” many of the characters in Dobozy’s collections are trapped in an in-between space that confines them. This paper considers the tension between space and confinement in the light of utopian thinking.

Literary Representations of the Far North through the Lens of a Canadian-Romanian Writer: Pineapple Kisses in Iqaluit by Felicia Mihali
Dobrovă, Corina

The Canadian North, close to the Arctic and the embodiment of the exotic faraway realm of ice and enigmatic inhabitants, is explored through the perspective of a Canadian writer of Romanian origin, Felicia Mihali, as depicted in her very recent novel Pineapple Kisses in Iqaluit (2021). Summarisable as the initiatic journey of a disabused French teacher in her thirties towards the happiness that she eventually finds in the least expected, most hostile environment imaginable, Iqaluit, the seat of the most northern French school in Nunavut, the case of this novel is quite interesting, as it was written in English and subsequently translated into French by its Romanian author. Thus, the issue of the linguistically and culturally filtered perception of an exotic, unfamiliar, unrelenting landscape bearing upon the evolution of the female protagonist becomes the centre of attention, giving rise to the question whether this code-switch affects the tone and meaning of the descriptive passages and their role in shaping the character’s evolution. These landscapes making up the corpus under study take the most varied forms, from the wilderness to the urban area, the school environment, or the inserts referring to the polar expeditions in search of the Northern Passage, and last but not least, the Inuit folk tales.

Yoik music and/as landscape. Thematic, formal and aesthetic aspects of a
Sámi performance in a Canadian context
Domokos Johanna

There is close cooperation between the Ingigenous Sámi people of Europe and the indigenous peoples of Canada. The successful political movement of both of them is largely the result of the global collaboration that began in the 1970s (e.g. the establishment of the WCIP). In the current presentation, we examine the latest concert performance of the Sámi author Niillas Holmberg (b. 1990), who also cultivates the Canadian and Scandinavian indigenous relations. In his trilingual yoik (Sámi, Finnish and English), performed with classical musicians, he asks questions that affect not only the mentioned two world zones, but the whole of our globe. 

Les tribulations d’un professeur de français de la Chine au Grand Nord. Étude de cas : Sweet, sweet China et Le tarot de Cheffersville de Felicia Mihali
Eiben, Ileana-Neli

Dans son docu-roman Sweet, sweet China (XYZ, 2007), Felicia Mihali présente l’expérience « chinoise » d’un professeur de FLE . Celui-ci enseigne cette langue à des adultes qui souhaitent émigrer au Canada. C’est pour lui l’occasion de découvrir l’image que ceux-ci s’en font, image qui souvent ne coïncident pas à la réalité. Pour eux, le pays d’accueil se résume, souvent, à la ville de Montréal. C’est un « ailleurs » vers lequel ils espèrent se diriger après l’obtention du visa et auquel ils associent des mots tels « réussite », « abondance », « études », etc. Douze ans plus tard, dans un autre docu-roman Le tarot de Cheffersville (Hashtag, 2019), on retrouve le même professeur de français qui, rentré au Canada, voyage cette fois-ci dans le Grand Nord pour enseigner le français à des élèves innus. Le paysage austère, pas très accueillant, offre le cadre dans lequel le personnage non seulement vit une nouvelle expérience professionnelle et de vie, mais rencontre aussi des personnages d’autres romans de Felicia Mihali (Dina, Le pays du fromage, Luc, le chinois et moi) grâce au personnage mythologique Tshakapesh. Dans cette communication, par l’aventure vécue par le professeur de français, nous nous proposons d’enquêter tant le paysage canadien (Montréal, le Grand Nord) que les mythes (avec les acceptions de « représentations » et de « récit relatant des faits imaginaires non consignés par l’histoire, transmis par la tradition et mettant en scène des êtres représentant symboliquement des forces physiques, des généralités d’ordre philosophique, métaphysique ou social. ») qui lui sont associés.

Shifting Canadian Identities in Climate Policy
Firtova, Magdalena

At a time of consensus on the climate crisis, climate protection issues are becoming a public issue in international relations. Climate policy has become a new issue in Canada, splitting the unity of the country. Comparing Canada’s last two prime ministers, Justin Trudeau and his Conservative predecessor Stephen Harper (2006-2015), the paper will attempt to analyze how different conceptions of identity have fed into the climate discourse. It will use Lene Hansen’s concept of identity as dynamic discursive process formulated and shaped in relation to or in differentiation from the other (Lene Hansen, Security as Practice, 2006). I will analyze both positive and negative identities through the process of linking and differentiating discursive signs in Canadian national and provincial newspapers.

“The Enemy of my Enemy: the making of Red Rose M.P.”
Froehling, Kenneth Alfred

At a very contentious time in Canadian political history, a by-election was set for August 9, 1943 in the Montreal federal riding of Cartier, whose population was very, but not exclusively, Jewish and working class. A normally safe Liberal seat, the political landscape was a perfect storm of the major political events of the time in Quebec: WWII and the second Conscription Crisis, the unpopularity of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, English vs French Canadian views of the war, anti-Semitism, the Communist vs anti-Communist battle on the Left, etc. In a bitter four-party battle, Fred Rose, the Labor-Progressive (i.e. Communist) candidate won the by-election, thus becoming (in)famous in the years ahead in Canadian history.
My paper will use one major primary source, the newspaper archive of The Gazette, a major Montreal newspaper, whose owner and editorial board was Conservative, but who took an interestingly passive view to a Communist being elected to Parliament. The events surrounding this by-election show that major historical events made strange political bedfellows then, as they still do today.

Eco-threnody and the Erosion of Optimism: Kroetsch, Atwood and After
Gadpaille, Michelle

During the extended European settlement of North America, wilderness went from obstacle, to opportunity to a cultural and commercial brand by the end of the 19th century. Having staked cultural identity on a relationship to wilderness (especially in Canada), how do people deal with the defeat, retreat and eventual destruction of literal wilderness? The paper will begin from Robert Kroetsch’s work on lost Ontario landscapes and extend to more recent works, both poetry and fiction, that evoke the loss of landscape, animals and climate phenomena, to identify the tropes that accompany eco-loss and the emergence of new generic forms to capture it. Before the environmentally-conscious novel splinters into movements like ecopunk, solarpunk, and ecotopia, we are invited to contemplate the loss of climate-action optimism in interdisciplinary modes that play with fantasy, science fiction and dystopia. The analysis begins Kroetsch’s The Ledger, moves to Margaret Atwood’s recent poetry, and places Canadian eco-threnody against the context of authors, such as Diane Cook (The New Wilderness), Michael Christie (Greenwood), Jess Greengrass, The High House and The Overstory by Richard Powers.

Modernist and Postmodernist Featurs of Short Fiction by Margaret Atwood
Gazdík, Marián

The author of the article wants to analyse short story production of Margaret Atwood published in her nine short story collections with an aim to classify her stories and divided into several categories. The author intends to recognize modernist and postmodernist features of Atwood’s short fiction with a special focus on intertextual and serial aspect of this genre. The author of this study divided Atwood into four basic categories according to modernist and postmodernist elements of poetics of this genre.
The first type of short story represents simple straight-forward narrated stories in a realistic tone, where the modernistic features are represented by signs pointing to contemporary events or by constant interrupting of the flow of narration.
The second type includes stories basically straightforward, where the main realistic plot line is complemented by secondary plot line/s: symbolical-fairy-tale plane, the plane of personal characteristics protagonists.
The third type represents intertextual stories, where their topic represents an intertextual continuation and referring to other texts such as Hamlet or Atwood’s novel The Robber Bride, or where the story is a subversive re-telling of a traditional fairy tale.
The last, most elusive, category is a kind of postmodern game with readers where the possibilities of interpretation are almost unrestricted (The Tent).
By offering this typology of Atwood’s short story writing the author wants to contribute to more detailed and thorough classification of this often overlooked genre from Atwood’s works.

Metafiction, Theatre Festivals, and Prison Art: Margaret Atwood’s Re-telling of The Tempest
Gheorghiu, Oana-Celia

Part of Hogarth Shakespeare, a collection of novels rewriting Shakespeare’s plays, Margaret Atwood’s take on The Tempest in Hag-Seed does more than just recreate the Shakespearean plotlines, revealing her endeavours to enhance her own art of metafiction. Structured as a play-within-a play-within a novel, Hag-Seed carries the reader through various Canadian cultural and social landscapes. The spectacular world of contemporary theatre, represented in the novel by the Makesheweg Festival, probably inspired by the notorious Stratford Festival, is soon replaced by a world where artistic expression seems to be the only freedom still available to its inhabitants: the (fictional) Fletcher correction facility. Just like the Duke of Milan, the main character, Felix Phillips, sees himself overthrown, exiled from the glamour of the artistic environment to the gloom of prison, which constitutes, for Atwood, an opportunity to cast light over two opposing ‘stages’ of the Canadian society. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a catalyst for both the fall of the theatre director at the hand of ‘brotherly’ machinations and his rise above manoeuvrings through art. The play is staged but also critically commented in the novel. Intertextuality is taken beyond the recreation of plot elements and characters to exercises of textual analysis and creative writing intended to arouse in ‘actors’ the desire to break free from the ‘prison house’ of language.

Negotiating Belonging: Tropes of Canadian Landscape in André Alexis’s Childhood
Grauzľová, Lucia

A preoccupation with space, place, and landscape is a signature feature of Canadian literature, as encapsulated in Northrop Frye’s famous question “Where is here?”. This tendency permeates Black Canadian writing as well. The reason is that Black Canadians often feel erased from the Canadian landscape and struggle to reinscribe their presence on it. In addition, as many of them are immigrants and their self needs to be “reconstituted in new regions and landscapes, both physical and intellectual,”2 their narratives are marked with an acute awareness of the landscapes they arrive in, particularly of their differences from the places they have left behind. The proposed paper aims to explore the tropes of Canadian landscape in André Alexis’s highly acclaimed debut novel Childhood (1998). It investigates the novel’s protagonist’s bond with Canadian landscapes and argues that their representation in the novel are a demonstration of his desire to belong.
2 Ralph J. Crane & Radhika Mohanram, “Introduction: Constructing the Diasporic Body,” in Shifting Continents / Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Ralph J. Crane & Radhika Mohanram (Cross / Cultures 42; Amster-dam & Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2000): ix.

When Physis meets Metropolis: Individual and collective/cultural memory in selected works of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro
Javorčíková, Jana

Cultural memory (or collective memory) was introduced into the literature by Maurice Halbwachs in his books The Social Frameworks of Memory (1992 and 1925) and On Collective Memory (1980 and 1950). His understanding of Cultural memory was founded on a differentiation between individual and collective memory (he described individual memory as ‘personal’ and ‘autobiographical’, while collective memory is ‘social ‘and ‘historical‘).
In the presented comparative study, we focus on the portrait of a city (metropolis) and Nature (physis) in the works of two notable Canadian authors as perceived by individuals and communities in their stories and novels. We will also identify the roots of “Anti-Americanism” in their works.

Diasporic Spaces in David Bezmozgis’s Immigrant City
Kenyeres János

Davis Bezmozgis’s fictional world reflects multiple, often conflicting identities: Latvian, Russian, Jewish and Canadian. Generally speaking, his characters are immigrants from Latvia in the old Soviet Union, where they used to belong to a Jewish community squished between a Latvian majority and a Russian minority. These characters choose Canada or the US as their new homeland, and the stories revolve around their lives and problems. While the narratives in Natasha and Other Stories (2004) are about an adolescent coming of age in Canada, and the novel The Free World (2011) depicts the journey of immigrants coming to Canada from the Soviet Union, with a long, five-month stopover in Italy, Bezmozgis’s 2014 novel The Betrayers is about a disgraced Israeli politician torn between memories of the past, the Soviet Union, his time in the Gulag and the various betrayals he has either suffered or committed. Immigrant City (2019), Bezmozgis’s most recent collection of short stories, also centres around the Canadian immigrant experience. This paper is intended to present the various diasporic spaces depicted in this work.

The Construction of Canadian Identity from Abroad: How Externality Impacts our Understanding of Canada
Kirkey, Christopher – Blake, Jason– Keppie, Christina – Sparling, Don

This roundtable panel workshop, comprised of editors and authors from the upcoming 2022 book volume, Constructing Canadian Identity from Abroad [Palgrave Macmillan], directly examines how spatial dislocation – i.e., being physically located beyond Canada’s borders – impacts Canadian expatriate scholars as they approach and construct Canadian identity. Panel participants will review the following inquiries in their respective paper presentations: What happens when that Canadian is a scholar whose teaching, research and scholarship, professional development, and/or community engagement focuses directly on Canada? How does being abroad affect how one interprets, constructs and present Canada in our professional work? Does being an expat impact how one relates to and understands Canada? What are our challenges? What are our opportunities? Collectively, the presenters argue that (1) the impacts of externality for scholarly expats are significant; (2) geographic location and time away from Canada matter; (3) material support for expat Canadianists is consequential; and, (4) Canadian identity should be understood to be fluid, transformative and contestable.

Indigenous Landscapes: Probing Native Humour through Arts and Literature
Kodó Krisztina

Humour is an effective tool for communication that breaks down cultural boundaries. Canadian Native culture is an oral culture hence storytelling is one of its basic characteristic features whether we speak of literary works or artistic creations. Within the present paper I wish to probe the dimensions of Indigenous landscapes, hence the symbolic understandings that define or circumscribe the works of Bill Powless, a self-taught Mohawk artist from the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve, near Brantford, Ont., and Drew Hayden Taylor, writer and dramatist. Through their realistic portrayal of everyday life, they manage to link history, spiritual symbolism, fantasy, and formulate a modern myth that fits intricately into present day multicultural, global society.

Cultural Genocide: The Indian Residential School System and Native Canadians
Kostov, Chris

The Indian Residential schools (IRS) are a very dark chapter of the Canadian Aboriginal history. IRS were federally financed boarding schools for Native children, which existed on and off Indian reserves between the 1850s to 1998 with mandatory attendance and the main goal to assimilate Native children and completely eradicate their languages and traditional cultures, essentially leading to a cultural genocide. These 139 schools, located across the country, were operated with the joint efforts of the Canadian federal government and the major Christian denominations in Canada. About 150,000 Native children were victims of this system. All of them were prohibited to use their languages or practice their traditional cultures and religions on the premises of the boarding schools. Some of them were physically or sexually abused by their teachers and supervisors. Since 2007, the Canadian federal government has tried to compensate financially the living victims and to silence the open debate about the IRS system. The author of this paper worked for 4 years as a consultant in the Canadian federal government processing compensation claims of IRS victims and hence, this paper will try to evaluate how adequate this compensation process has been so far. This paper will also tackle the following key questions: Why did the government decide to set these schools? Why did the government look for the collaboration of the churches? What were the conditions in these institutions? Could the reforms save these schools? What was their impact on the Aboriginal population? What should we do now?

Restoring Balance: Highlining as Collaborative Outdoor Artivism
Krasna, Denisa

In Canada, outdoor spaces are racialized and gendered landscapes and the “outdoorsy” culture remains restricted for minoritized people. This paper will introduce highlining (slacklining in the heights) as a new form of collaborative outdoor counternarrative that challenges the dominant notions about the outdoors and nature. Slacklining is a modern form of tightrope walking with roots in climbing. Slackline is a flat 2,5 cm wide webbing that is dynamic and light. Highlines are rigged in both natural and urban landscapes and can function as artivist pieces that redefine landscapes and contest settler colonialism, patriarchy, and white and human supremacy. As a community non-competitive but ultimately “extreme” outdoor activity, highlining fosters meaningful transcultural alliances and creates strong bonds between people of diverse backgrounds, effectively facilitating safe access to the so-called “great white outdoors”. Presenting selected outdoor highline projects from Canada creatively captured on photography and video, the paper will analyse how highlines function as collaborative artworks co-created by the photographers and highliners. It will argue that highline artworks underscore the connection between humans and nature when the highliner becomes part of the landscape and part of their artwork. Highliners walk spaces that have never been walked before but they are not conquering them but rather look at the world from an alterNative perspective as the sport requires complete surrender, humbleness, and connection with the surroundings. Highlining thus has a transformative effect on both the highliners and highline-afficionados as highline artworks highlight both human vulnerability in nature and our place in it.

„beyond earthly beauty”: Landscapes evoking memories – Memories evoking Landscapes in Tomson Highway’s Permanent Astonishment
Kürtösi Katalin

In 2021 Tomson Highway published his memoir of 320 pages; the paper will place it in the tradition of life writing/autobiography/memoir, popular forms of writing, particularly in the twentieth century. Together with the generic tradition and features, attention will be paid to the special elements such stories by Indigenous authors manifest in Canada.
In Permanent Astonishment, besides the author’s family members, his father’s fellow hunters and other members of the community, nature and lanscape play an equal role with human characters. In a prose style rich in musicality and humour, the reader gets initiated into a fascinating nomadic culture and the special rhythm of Highway’s mother tongue. As one review stated, „Permanent Astonishment is a work of transcendental, universalist power” – no wonder that it was awarded the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction in the year of its publication.

Méthodologies pour saisir la spécificité du paysage canadien.
Existe-t-il une théorie du paysage canadien?
Laberge, Yves

Au Canada, le paysage est fortement lié à l’identité nationale et à l’identité régionale, comme dans tous les pays. Mais plusieurs paysages existent et expriment des réalités différentes, selon les régions et les saisons. Le but de cette communication est de proposer une méthodologie pour bien saisir la spécificité du paysage canadien, et tenter d’élaborer une théorie du paysage canadien. Il s’agira d’abord de décrire le paysage canadien: le paysage réel et celui issu de l’imaginaire produit dans les romans, les films, les chansons et tous les médias. C’est un système de représentations sociales qui véhicule des stéréotypes, des clichés, mais aussi des réalités.
L’autre but de cette recherche est de montrer comment le paysage a désormais besoin d’être décodé par l’observateur du 21e siècle, ne pouvant plus reconnaître le nom des arbres et de la végétation, des types de cultures dans les champs. La vie urbaine nous a éloignés de la réalité du paysage.
Existe-t-il une théorie du paysage canadien? Sur le plan théorique, nous emprunterons à la sociologie des représentations, à l’épistémologie et aux études visuelles. L’approche méthodologique sera qualitative et comparative, selon une perspective transdisciplinaire.

Post-Apocalyptic Paradice: Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy
Labudova, Katarina

The paper discusses how Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy transgresses not only the opposition of rural/urban spaces but simultaneously also genre boundaries, human/alien, human/animal, nature/nurture and nature/culture oppositions. In her utopian-dystopian trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, Maddaddam), Atwood presents a post-apocalyptic landscape, a Paradice. The scientist Crake bioengineers a virus that causes the extermination of (almost all) humans. At the same time, he creates a posthuman species, Crakers, to survive and populate a devastated earth accompanied and mentored by Crake’s friend Jimmy/Snowman. However, what emerges in the aftermath of the Waterless flood, is a reconstituted social landscape: the surviving humans Maddaddamites and God’s Gardeners, chimeric nonhumans and the posthuman Crakers. In Atwood’s hybrid genre trilogy, opens up Crake’s vision as not just a cataclysm, but a new landscape, where humans and nonhumans can find a way to live together in harmony.
This paper focuses on exploring Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic landscape where survival is ensured through the art of language, and the power of words. Finally, the paper shows a link between Atwood’s strategy of ‘survival’ as the thematic focus of Canadian literature and the MaddAddam Trilogy as ‘ustopia,’ Atwood’s term that maps out a hybrid landscape.

The Land Of Freedom: Canada in the dystopian world of The Handmaid’s Tale
Laverycheva, Evgeniya

The dystopian world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) has been so efficiently expanded by both its literary sequel The Testaments (2019) and the highly successful MGM-Hulu TV adaptation (2017 – present) that these three can rightly be considered a transmedia universe. Both the TV series and The Testaments extend the original universe not only in terms of plotlines and character development but also in terms of space, introducing new locations in Gilead as well as Canada, which appears to be somewhat of a land of freedom, a place where the characters of the story seek to escape to. A network of secret routes has been established between the two countries, with goods, information and refugees constantly transported across the border. The complex relationship between Gilead and Canada, induced by their contiguous position, is reflected in the various locations and the spatial organization of the “Gileadverse”. This work is an attempt to examine the competing dystopian landscapes of the transmedia universe of The Handmaid’s Tale with the aim of investigating how the space is shaped and remodeled to sustain the theocratic dystopian state, and the role of Canada as the main spatial antagonist of Gilead.

Gendered Emotional Landscapes in Téa Mutonji’s Shut Up You’re Pretty
Lénárt-Muszka Zsuzsanna

Emerging Toronto author Téa Mutonji’s debut short story collection, Shut Up You’re Pretty (2019), follows the coming-of-age process of Loli, a Black Canadian woman from a Congolese immigrant family, who lives in Scarborough, a district of Toronto. As the linked pieces in the collection present brief, cinematic snapshots of Loli’s life, and she struggles to understand herself, her emotional geography remains hidden from the reader: there is no map of and with Loli. What counterbalances this lack is a heightened emphasis on places, which I define here in accordance with cultural geographer Jon Anderson’s terminology: places, to which humans have affective and experiential ties, can range from the skin and body to more substantial areas such as the city or country. While in much of multicultural Canadian writing, the characters grapple with split identity and divided loyalty between their homeland and Canada, for Loli, not only the Congo but Canada and even Toronto are abstract spaces. Instead, Loli looks to the grids of her district as something known and knowable; more specifically, she identifies—and is identified by her environment—as a Black woman from Scarborough. Relying on cultural geography and the work of Black feminist geographers such Katherine McKittrick, the presentation traces the collection’s dominant visual images—the skin, beds, and emblematic Scarborough intersections—to discuss how Loli’s racialized and gendered body interacts with the urban landscape, and what this process reveals about Mutonji’s treatment of her protagonist’s emotional geography.

A Martian Landscape between Disfiguration and Beauty. Cinematic Perspectives on a (Post-) Mining Area in New Quebec.
Luxenburger, Isis

In the early 1950s, the Iron Ore Company of Canada (IOC) rendered accessible a considerable iron ore deposit in New Quebec by constructing a railroad linking the resources in the wild North to the St. Lawrence River in the civilized South. The mining town of Schefferville emerged and iron ore was mined in open pits until the IOC decided to cease their activities around Schefferville in 1982. The open pits were left behind along with most equipment, tools and machines, to save on waste disposal costs and many of the mining town’s buildings were demolished to save on taxes. The IOC left, leaving behind a decaying ghost town in the middle of a disfigured wasteland.
From the early phase of planning and construction over the mining boom and the town’s decay to a recent second phase of iron ore exploitation, the Schefferville area has been used as a setting for films. Both documentary and fictional films were produced—out of different motives and perspectives, for different target audiences and with different goals. The resulting corpus offers visuals of the landscape’s diachronic development, on the one hand, and parallel perspectives and perceptions of the deeply altered, bare, red, craterous (post-)mining environment of Schefferville, on the other hand. The 2008 documentary UNE TENTE SUR MARS (A Tent on Mars) prominently places the (extraterrestrial) landscape in the title and on the poster. Since films are multi-layered mediators, those productions not explicitly addressing but still showing the landscape also contribute to the mosaic of its perception, which this paper will examine.

John Franklin’s First Arctic Land Expedition through a Double Lens: The Native Social and Geographic Contexts
Macura, Sergej Lazar

The presentation discusses two noticeably different views of pristine Canadian territory as perceived through the narratives of the first Franklin expedition into the Arctic wilderness. In the two-volume travelogue entitled The Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22 (1824), the expedition leader John Franklin demonstrates a broad range of knowledge in geography, cartography, botany and zoology, also with a keen eye for the details of Native life. While the landscape descriptions abound in qualifications of the country as frigid, savage, unfriendly and cruel, there are moments of deep appreciation of its staggering beauty: “The gifts of nature are disregarded and undervalued till they are withdrawn, and in the hideous regions of the Arctic Zone, she would make a convert of him for whom the gardens of Europe had no charms, or the mild beauties of a southern climate had bloomed in vain” (Vol. I, 274). A fictionalised version of one part of the journey, the love between midshipman Robert Hood and a 15-year-old Yellowknife girl named Greenstockings, functions as the central narrative in Rudy Wiebe’s novel A Discovery of Strangers (1994), and this text focalises the events more from the Native viewpoint, with attention paid to the tribal relationship with the unforgiving countryside, their group dynamic, customs and the inevitable mythopoeic grasp of history and destiny. It sheds much light on the possible background activities which helped the survival of the expedition and the birth of their seminal tale.

Diaspora as a “Stakeholder party” in Lobbying the Interests of the Homeland:
Ukrainian example in Canada
Makar, Vitaliy

With the strengthening of the political subjectivity of the diaspora in the modern system of international relations, they began to be characterized as an ethno-political phenomenon that affects the adoption of domestic and foreign policy decisions in the country of residence and country of origin. The formation of the diaspora is always transnational in nature, so the statement of its political subjectivity occurs according to the model of a transnational (non-state) subject of international relations, according to which non-state actors: belief in the ability to achieve changes; the use of perfect political strategies based on the principles of “soft power”; formation of alliances and coalitions with other political entities; creative use of means of communication both at the state level and at the level of interstate relations; focus on attracting professionals and moral authorities. We agree with the opinion, which points to the following characteristics of the political subjectivity of the diaspora itself, which allow it to use in bilateral relationships tools of “soft power”, such as: the existence of an institution recognized at the level of state structures; to promote the development of political relations with the country of origin; strategic vision of the formation of relations with the institutions of the host state (state of residence); the formation of an effective network of lobbying structures.
Consequently, the Ukrainian diaspora of Canada has had a representation in the system of Canadian authorities at all levels. The level and nature of the integration of representatives of the Ukrainian diaspora into the political elite point to its social maturity and reflect the ability to assert as a subject of interstate relations. Thus, the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada is a factor of bilateral relations, a means of realizing national interests.

Les paysages imaginaires dans le cycle romanesque de Sylvie Drapeau
Malinovská, Zuzana

Comédienne et écrivaine québecoise S. Drapeau construit son univers romanesque à partir des paysages réels: physique (l´environnement) et psychique (le vécu traumatisant). Cette démarche apparaît clairement dans sa tétralogie autobiographique (Le Fleuve,2015, Le Ciel,2017, L´Enfer,2018, La Terre,2019), agencée autour d´ une histoire de famille jalonnée de drames. Je propose une réflexion critique sur la tétralogie en question. Mon intention est d´interroger la mise en mots du vécu, la puissance esthétique de cette écriture concise et poétique, qui par le biais de la fiction et de la narration, transforme les paysages référentiels en paysages imaginaires.
Après une brève présentation de l´oeuvre qui, à ma connaissance, n´a pas fait l´objet d´ analyse à ce jour, comprenant aussi une interrogation sur le genre, j´essairai d´apporter quelques éléments de réponses aux questions ci-dessus (sans exhaustivité): Motif récurrent du fleuve, titre du premier volume, est-il une métaphore de l´existence, comme le titre du dernier volume, La Terre? Y-a-il des correspondances entre les titres qui renvoient à l´horizontalité (Le Fleuve, la Terre) et à la verticalité de l´espace (Le Ciel et L´Enfer)? L´évocation des paysages extérieurs, référentiels (la Côte-Nord avec les élements naturels, comme le fleuve et la forêt mais aussi l´usine d´aluminium) est-elle liée à la mise en relief des paysages intérieurs (les états d´âmes de la narratrice homodiégetique)?

Central European Association for Canadian Studies: Canadian Landscapes
Marr, Gemma E.

Trends in Newfoundland literature situate the province as a timeless, rural space rooted in ‘authentic’ masculinity (Roswell 2018, Fowler 2014). In contrast, Blaze Island (2018) by Catherine Bush and The Luminous Sea (2019) by Melissa Barbeau reconsider this positioning. In Blaze Island, Miranda and her father monitor changes in local weather patterns. While Miranda is somewhat content with her life, her father does not let her leave the island. In The Luminous Sea, Vivienne is working in a remote bay with a team of marine biologists when she encounters a never-before-seen creature. The push-pull between Vivienne and Dr. Isiah swirls around what to ‘do’ with this career-making discovery. Rather than “pander to [or] mock an idealization of rural identities,” The Luminous Sea aligns hunger for discovery and self-promotion with male dominance in a “recognizably Newfoundland space . . . that radiates a sense of lived-in authenticity” (Pope 2019). Similarly, Blaze Island aligns scientific study with patriarchal control through Miranda’s relationships in Bush’s fictional rendering of Fogo Island.
Building from concepts posed by Stacy Alaimo (2014) and Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker (2014), I argue that both texts challenge ideas of linear progress and male space by highlighting the damage of scientific inquiry as a patriarchal mechanism. Miranda’s and Vivienne’s complication of masculine realms (science and Newfoundland) leads to a sense of generative entanglement; ensnared in time, space, and normative gender strictures, their movement into, and connection with, the non-human troubles conventional understandings of Newfoundland landscapes. In turn, this shift underscores renewed depictions of Newfoundland space through localized responses to the climate crisis.

Transformer le paysage environnemental et économique : le vin ontarien part à la conquête du marché mondial, 1890-2000
Martel, Marcel

L’Ontario est associé à la production du vin depuis plus de 150 ans. Pourtant, la conquête des marchés internationaux a été difficile, car les vins ontariens étaient pratiquement inconnus jusqu’à la fin des années 1970. Cette communication porte sur la transformation du paysage environnemental et économique de l’Ontario en s’intéressant à la production du vin. Ce sont les immigrants, principalement ceux d’origine française, qui ont joué un rôle important dans le développement de la production du vin dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. Cette communication s’intéresse au transfert des connaissances de la part des premiers artisans du vin. En plus de leur savoir-faire, ces immigrants transforment l’environnement et rêvent de conquérir les marchés internationaux, ce qui est difficile. Les premiers producteurs ne bénéficient pas d’un appui de l’État ontarien. À ce moment-là, les discours favorables à la prohibition de l’alcool gagnent en popularité, en partie en raison des lobbys des églises protestantes, notamment celui des Baptistes et des Presbytériens. Le véritable démarrage de l’industrie du vin en Ontario survient dans les années 1970, grâce notamment à un intérêt de la part de l’État ontarien qui adopte des politiques favorables. Ce démarrage transforme encore plus le paysage environnemental du sud de l’Ontario et fait de Niagara la région par excellence de la production du vin.

Wine and cultural tourism as niche tourism offer in Niagara Region, Canada
Mazurek, Marica

The article will deal with new development in tourism, especially after the pandemic situation of COVID-19. In the period of economic crises and turmoil tourism places are able to benefit from the positive influence of so called soft and more sustainable values created by the improvement of image, reputation and the quality of destination services, using of local cultural resources and heritage. Only the tourism destinations, which will be able to explore new tourism product offer and cope a reality of the existing situation can be more competitive and successful. One good example of such development and offer is niche tourism. The objective of this study is wine tourism, which has become one of the growing niche attractors in specific regions all over the world. In the combination with culinary tourism and cultural tourism offers a specific tourism product not only to the segment of cultural tourists, but tends to be more attractive to the segments of seniors, which is a growing group of tourists in the world. The study will discuss a case of Niagara Region, Canada. .
The research will be focused at the segment of culture interwoven especially into the wine tourism routes in Canada, where will be studied the role of wine and cultural tourism in tourism development and creation of tourism and hospitality landscapes. The qualitative research has been prepared, especially focused on product development and the innovative promotion strategies. These two countries were chosen due to a personal experience and former research in Canada.

Quand l’espace arctique devient paysage : affect, corporalité et liminalité dans la mise en scène du Nunavik chez Juliana Léveillé-Trudel
Mistreanu, Diana

D’inspiration autobiographique, Nirliit (2015) traite d’une narratrice montréalaise qui passe ses étés dans le village de Salluit, situé dans la région du Nunavik, dans le nord du Québec, au-delà du 62e parallèle. Son contact avec le monde des Inuits exerce une influence déstabilisatrice sur sa cognition, qui est restituée à travers un langage poétique illustrant le caractère tumultueux et souvent contradictoire de l’activité mentale du personnage. Bien que l’espace joue un rôle central dans ce texte, celui-ci se décline rarement sous la forme du paysage. L’objectif de notre communication est d’explorer les ressorts de la transformation de l’espace en paysage. Nous analyserons les techniques narratives et stylistiques utilisées dans la représentation littéraire des paysages de Salluit et de l’Arctique québécois, ainsi que la dimension affective du rapport entre la narratrice et l’espace. Nous montrerons ainsi que la transformation de l’espace en paysage s’explique à travers la relation que le corps et l’activité mentale de la narratrice nouent avec le monde des autochtones et la géographie de la région habitée par ceux-ci, cette relation étant à son tour intégrée dans le réseau complexe de données historiques, sociologiques et politiques dans lequel s’inscrit le rapport entre le gouvernement canadien et les populations autochtones.

Literary Representations of Ethnic Churches in the Korean Diaspora in Canada
Nagy Judit

About 25% of the total population of the Republic of Korea are Christians “with [approximately] 35 000 churches, 50 000 pastors and a growth rate unsurpassed in the world” (Couto 18). Thus it is not surprising that the Korean diaspora living in Canada considers the church a major communal hub, “a locus around which people congregate, meet and develop community” (TKCWAC 4). There is a lot more taking place at Sunday gatherings than the pastor delivering a sermon and attending to the spiritual needs of the church members. The organizing of businesses, matchmaking and networking are equally characteristic of such occasions. Moreover, Korean ethnic churches foster the preservation of cultural traditions and the provision of fellowship, social status and positions (Min 1992). As for the prevalence of the church in the Korean immigrant experience in Canada, Song suggests that “[t]he growth of Korean churches has been because half of the immigrants already come prepared to join a church. […] Half of the remaining immigrants eventually call a church their ‘community centre’ where they seek support and assistance in adjusting to their new home” (24).
In accordance with the above, Korean diaspora literature produced in Canada boasts a cornucopia of church-related literary references. The paper aims to explore how the church is represented in selected works written by Jean Yoon, Ann Y. K. Choi, Christina Park and Ins Choi. I will argue that, while some members may find Korean ethnic churches confining, the strong community forming effect of the church is markedly present in these works at multiple levels.

Nunangat in Canada/Nunangat as Canada: Inuit Indigenous Identity
in the Canadian Cultural Landscape
Nándori Rita

Focusing on the Indigenous landscape in Canada, I address the complex issue of Indigeneity and what it means to be Inuit in Canada today and share a national identity with a culturally diverse population. By exploring how contact-induced enculturation affects lifestyle, customs, language, and literature; I assess the shift in Inuit cultural identity within the fabric of the Canadian multicultural ethos. As an investigative tool, I employ intercultural psychology, namely, John W. Berry’s fourfold model and Peter Weinreich’s identity structure analysis. Moreover, I consider Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of generational shift to examine the impact of enculturation and explain how a composite Canadian Inuit identity may emerge. Furthermore, I inspect the role of land in Inuit identity construction, especially focusing on the function of territoriality in establishing and asserting cultural identity. Furthermore, I assess the significance of the official recognition of Nunavut Territory in 1999, and later all four parts of Inuit Nunangat—Inuit homeland—in establishing a positive self-image and asserting a uniquely Inuit identity within the cultural context of Canada. Additionally, I examine the possibility of fostering Inuit identity and preserving tradition via storytelling, as well as recording and disseminating Inuit culture through literature. Finally, I deliberate if by more prominently featuring Inuit intellectual culture in the school curriculum, some of the crucial issues regarding the relative loss of tradition and the lack of compatibility between multiculturalism and Indigenous issues may be addressed.

Displaced: Canadian Mindscapes in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace
Necula, Lidia Mihaela

Simply put, hyperreality is used to denote something that does not yet exist in the sense of being undeniably demonstrable. According to Jean Baudrillard in his Simulacra and Simulation (1981), hyperreality is a state where reality has been replaced by simulacra, meaning that what is real and what is fiction is indistinguishable. Equally, hyperreality starts as soon as one replaces the question of “if” by “when” and, in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, it becomes quite difficult to establish whether Grace Marks is innocent, pure and wrongly accused of the horrible murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, or whether her memory (which, strangely enough, is referred to in terms of its absence rather than its presence since she is supposedly suffering from amnesia) is some sort of virtual reality, an entire world to itself where Grace can appear to be anything she wants to be. By constantly overlapping the Canadian landscape without, Grace’s subconscious enables us with a window into the world within, one of the past, the present and the future, some sort of interface between three different psychological entities with their corresponding and symbolic representations of the landscape.
The present paper looks into the novel from behind the lens of the Canadian landscape (although scarce in occurrences) as a metonymy of hyperreal mindscapes: doubly displaced both geographically (she is an Irish immigrant), and mentally (she seems to be manifesting a form of multiple personality disorder), Grace simultaneously exists in hyperreal mindscapes, mimicking and replicating, stating and questioning, challenging readers who are left adrift in a textual world where the boundaries between reality and representation become blurred.

Le cancer du village » – analyse écocritique des paysages ruraux de Lise Tremblay
Pál-Kovács Ramona

« […] la catastrophe qu’a été ma vie depuis que je suis revenu au village. Je n’arrive pas à m’enlever de la tête que c’est lui le responsable du cancer d’Aline. Elle a attrapé le cancer du village. »(H98-99)
À la frontière de nature et société se trouve le village de Lise Tremblay – au Bas-du-Fleuve dans La héronnière (2003) et au Saguenay dans l’Habitude des bêtes (2017) –. Espace liminal qui, par pur désir de survie, est en constant conflit avec les changements qu’apportent tous éléments extérieurs, les« étrangers », mais aussi les animaux (les bêtes), et même les femmes. Niant sa nature liminale, le village affirme son identité en créant des forces centripètes qui tendent vers le centre, le pareil, l’uniforme et qui engendrent des lois pour garder son homogénéité. Il s’apprête à combattre tout ce qui contredit à ses lois sociales:« Tu t’habitues ou tu t’en vas. »(H34). Les éléments perturbateurs en face du centre ne peuvent que subir leur sort, ainsi le village, par de multiples conflits et affrontements, éradique de son milieu la diversité et la multitude, et se veut en isolement total. Souvent, ces lois despotiques, non écrites, font fuir ceux qui ne veulent pas s’y soumettre: les étrangers, les femmes et les animaux. Ne restent que ceux qui veulent à tout pris être gardiens des« moeurs »du village, se bercer dans un passé idyllique où tout correspond à la volonté du groupe.
Dans notre communication, nous proposons d’étudier les paysages ruraux de Lise Tremblay dans son recueil de nouvelles La héronnière et dans son roman L’Habitude des bêtes en analysant d’un point de vue écocritique les structures du village, les lois de la nature et de la société qui régissent les personnages.

Liminal Spaces in Fictional Winnipeg Then and Now
Palla Mária

Studies of liminality have covered wide-ranging topics from various angles over time. The present proposal aims to focus on the fictional representation of liminality in three Canadian novels, all set in the city of Winnipeg in different periods of time starting with John Marlene’s Under the Ribs of Death (1957) through Adele Wiseman’s Crackpot (1974) to Katherena Vermette’s The Break (2016). It is the North End of the city where the differently marginalized characters find themselves at the beginning and later try to negotiate their way out of this confining space. They are limited to this place on the periphery due to their ethnicity as they are Hungarian and Jewish immigrants, respectively, or come from the Métis community. There are also social and cultural barriers that separate them from the mainstream society and that need to be dismantled if assimilation or integration is to be achieved and dialogue is to be established between members of their fractured society. Whether such endeavours providing a liminal space for the characters are successful or at all desirable is among the pivotal issues the proposed presentation aims to address.

The Landscape as a Character, a Characterizer and a remedy
in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables
Pardi-Oláh Roberta

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables is set on the picturesque Prince Edward Island of Canada. So it is not surprising that the idyllic scenery is an essential element of the novel, serving as a setting, a reflection of certain characters, a remedy, fantasy-land and as a character herself. In my presentation, I am going to expand on the complex functions of the landscape and Nature:
1. How she creates the idyllic background for the people of the island living a simple farm- or small town-life, following the traditional values of their ancestors and representing the pre-urbanized Canada.
2. How she reflects certain characters, e.g. how Marilla’s garden is the mirror of her personality. Moreover, how the landscape itself becomes a character with personifications and her illustrative reactions to the human characters’ actions.
3. Last, how Nature serves as a remedy for the sensitive and imaginative Anne Shirley, who looks for an emotional shelter and companion in certain situations of her life. Nature functions as a shelter before the young orphan finds her permanent safety at Matthew and Marilla’s home. However, the companionship between Anne and the trees, fields, waters and other natural creatures remains after the girl’s settling down, and her fantasy continues flourishing, creating a fairy-tale wonderland of Green Gables and the Island.

Gilead is within You
Pardi-Oláh Roberta

The Republic of Gilead is the fictional country created by Margaret Atwood in her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Ironically, the center of it is in Massachusetts which is considered to be one of the most liberal states of the United States with the prestigious Ivy League university, Harvard and the city of Boston with the surrounding territories where the Americans used to fight for their freedom approximately 200 years earlier.
The suburbs of Boston where the main character, Offred and several other handmaids are settled reflect purified elegance and wealth. The cultivated gradens and streets play a significant part in maintaining the order of the ”republic”. The iconic sights Boston reflect the distorted values of the once liberal city. The ”Colonies” where the rebels are transported are apocalyptic stone deserts and the beds of slow and painful deaths.
In my presentation, I am going to expand on the various forms of landscapes and their roles in strengthening the rules and regulations or hiding the secrets of Gilead. With their drastically restricted living capacities, women are allowed to occupy certain parts of the area: the garden is the territory of the Captain’s Wife; while following the precisely defined route, the Handmaids can walk down the streets once a day in pairs and discreetly look around under their wings. The restriction of seeing affects the captivation of the landscape and results in the fragmentation of the experience. Observing is banned, peeping can be risked.
In opposition with the flowery suburbs, the Colonies do not hide, but reflect the emptiness of the lives of the Unwomen working there, who are literally and metaphorically digging their own graves.
Gilead is a colorful dystopia, living inside and outside of its citizens. However, according to Margaret Atwood, everything she put down on paper had happened somewhere, sometime.

Raconter en français, traduire, réécrire, adapter en anglais: contes de tradition orale acadiens et langues en contact
Petraș, Anca Cristina

llustrant un paysage linguistique où langues et variétés se côtoient, le discours des contes de tradition orale acadiens se caractérise par l’utilisation, à côté de particularités régionales, d’emprunts à l’anglais. Déjà signalés par des marqueurs spécifiques dans les enregistrements proprement dits (du type ce qu’on appelle X; X, qu’il appelont), ceux-ci connaissent des traitements différents selon la modalité de leur transmission – traduction ou maintien dans la publication dans les magazines ou dans les volumes édités.
Dans ce travail nous nous arrêterons sur les contes acadiens publiés dans un magazine anglophone – Cape Breton’s Magazine. Trois situations se présentent : certains sont présentés avec la traduction en anglais (faite par quelqu’un d’autre que le conteur lui-même), d’autres sont racontés dans les deux langues par le même conteur, une troisième catégorie est représentée par des histoires qui sont re-contées en anglais par le conteur qui les avait contées aussi en français.
Nous proposons une comparaison des deux versions: version en français /vs/ version traduite (allographe ou autotraduction, adaptation) ; version en français /vs/ version racontée en anglais. Notre analyse portera tant sur les transformations qui se produisent d’une version à l’autre au niveau des emprunts à l’anglais et des particularités du français acadien, que sur les changements dictés par le passage d’une version transcrite, très proche de l’oral, à une version qui obéit aux règles d’un texte écrit. Cette démarche s’inscrit dans une réflexion plus large sur les modalités de passage de l’oral à l’écrit dans le conte de tradition orale acadien et interroge la signification des mécanismes de traduction / transposition à la lumière des rapports entre les deux langues en contact dans le contexte acadien.

Multiverse in Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility
Polic Jurkovic, Vanja

The paper will analyze the parallel and interconnecting landscapes in Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Sea of Tranquility (2022). The emphasis will be laid on the landscapes of chance and simulation which seem to be the persistent themes in this and Mandel’s other novels (especially Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel), and also the underlying principles that connect seemingly disparate worlds that her protagonists inhabit. The first storyline, concerning a remittance man, takes place in 1912 in the Canadian wilderness; the second, concerning a novelist, in 2203 on a moon colony; and the third starts in the 24th-century lunar slum and follows a time detective. Even though seemingly unconnected, the three chronotopes increasingly intersect and in this way create a synchronic horizontal discourse of this fictional multiverse. The notions of circular movement (of text, memory, tradition and progress), the palimpsest “with its contradictory play between presence and absence, present and past, here and there” (Onega and Ganteau, 2020), exteriority and alterity (Onega and Ganteau, 2020) among others, question ‘reality’ and its echoes. Characters from Mandel’s previous novels pop up in this one, creating a dose of intertextuality and dialogue among the novels that all together create a ‘Mandel Multiverse’ where humanity and post(?)humanity intersect and overlap, where the limits of known universes are stretched and probed, offering a glimpse into a possible present-future.

Cinematic Landscapes of Pain, Memory, and Revenge: Remember vs. Old-Timers
Pospíšil, Tomáš

The paper will present a comparative analysis of two unusual road movies: Atom Egoyan´s Remember (2015), directed by Atom Egoyan, and its strikingly similar Czech counterpart Old-timers (2019), co-written and co-directed by Ondřej Provazník and Martin Dusek.
Both films present an almost identical set of themes: the quest for revenge on the part of aging protagonists driving them across considerable distances despite both mental and physical decrepitude. During their journey across the landscapes in Canada and the Czech Republic, the finely drawn characters become painfully aware of their vanishing strength and the inevitable fact of their demise. While being on the move in prosperous and peaceful countries, in their memories, they return to other times and places marked by personal (as well as collective) suffering brought about by reckless perpetrators in the service of totalitarian regimes of the past: Nazism in Germany and Communism in Czechoslovakia. The desire to get even represents the primary motive of the journeys that the filmmakers portray as extremely taxing and even painful.
The heroes´ journeys reach their inevitable destinations at the moment of their confrontations with their respective nemesis. In these climactic moments, we see a radical thematic departure between both road movies. While the Canadian version disrupts the viewer´s expectations by positing the question of personal identity and guilt as tied to the problem of memory, the Czech variation on the same theme shocks the viewers with the merciless accomplishment of the long-overdue mission.

They know not what they do”
– TYA plays and the landscape of residential schools in Canada-
Rau, Albert

From the 1830s onwards Canada established a landscape of residential schools all across Canada. The last one of the more than 130 schools was closed as late as 1996 in Saskatchewan. The purpose of these schools was to educate and convert Indigenous youth and to assimilate them into Canadian society. They were removed from their homes and parents and were often separated from their siblings. The attempted assimilation left them disoriented and insecure as they were forced into a for them alien and foreign cultural landscape feeling that they belonged to neither Indigenous nor settler society and culture.
Many contemporary First Nations playwrights cover the broad scope of residential school experiences in their plays and tell the stories of people who survived. Increasingly, also plays for young audiences put these sad and painful hardships on stage. The presentation looks at examples of theses plays and how they make the often traumatic sufferings visible and palpable for their audiences.

Du « plat de lard et de pommes de terre bouillies » au restaurants internationaux : la nourriture comme élément du paysage culturel dans quelques ouvrages
québécois du XXe siècle
Panić, Marija

Il est notoire que la nourriture fait partie de l’identité culturelle (R. Brulotte, M. A. Di Giovine, Edible Identities, 2016), ce qui est visible surtout dans la littérature, où la description du quotidien des personnages contient les indices portant sur les habitudes alimentaires de leur communauté. Dès le début du XXe siècle déjà, la littérature québécoise incluait la description de la vie quotidienne des habitants du Canada francophone, afin de montrer au public les valeurs principales des personnages, surtout l’importance de leur identité francophone. Par exemple, Louis Hémon décrivait, pour le public français, le mode de vie des habitants de Péribonka : l’intérieur de leurs maisons, leur nourriture et coutumes, la technique du travail telle que la drave. Cet aspect a été représenté, de manière très pittoresque, également dans les versions cinématographiques du roman. En revanche, dans le recueil des nouvelles Aurores montréales de Monique Proulx, publié vers la fin du XXe siècle (en 1996), la représentation de la nourriture fait voir le melting pot qui s’opère dans la communauté francophone au Canada, vu que Montréal y est représenté comme une métropole moderne, incorporant le passé et le futur et abritant la population d’origines différentes. Notre communication vise à analyser la représentation de la nourriture en tant qu’élément du paysage culturel du Canada francophone dans les ouvrages de L. Hémon, de G. Roy et de M. Proulx, et de suivre ses transformations depuis le roman du terroir jusqu’à l’époque postmoderne dans la littérature québécoise au XXe siècle.

Every Czech Woman Will Survive? The Everyday Exile Landscapes in Canada
Schormová, Františka

Věra Rollerová emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Canada in 1979. Twenty years later, she captured her experiences in a memoir called How To Be a Homemaker aneb Každá česká žena může přežít, pokud jí nevadí vysavače [How to be a homemaker, or, every Czech woman will survive, as long as she isn’t afraid of hoovers, 2001]. This paper takes Rollerová’s memoir and her various roles in publishing and editing Czech and Czechoslovak literature in Canada as a point of departure for exploring the explores the everyday, multilingual landscapes of women in exile. More specifically, it follows the current critical interest in gendered exiles and looks at the notions of labor, domestic spaces, material conditions, and survival (mentioned in the title of Rollerová’s book) on the background of the urban landscape of the 1980s Toronto where part of
Rollerová’s memoir takes place. The paper also aims to raise broader questions about the notion of Central European exile in Canada with special attention to woman writers and cultural mediators.

‘Where the Land Speaks’: Ecofeminist Trajectories of Resistance and Reclamation Across Indigenous Landscapes of Canada
Sengupta, Urmi

The fundamental principle underlying ecofeminism harps upon the bonds of empathy that exist between the women and the natural world. Such bonds of empathy had traditionally been of paramount importance for the matrilineal and matrifocal Salish and Okanagan First Nations, who have looked upon their ancestral lands in British Columbia, Canada to be an integral part of their indigenous communal identity, since the pre-colonial times. Women, held in high esteem for their ability to create, nurture and sustain new life, had held the key to the survival secrets specific to these landscapes – acting with responsibility and ‘response-ability’ towards the plethora of biodiversity therein.
But colonization has spelt doom for both these lands and their ‘keepers’. While the former have been facing the onslaught of encroachment, urbanization and industrialization, the latter have suffered the impingement of patriarchy through sexual assaults, objectification and loss of social power and prestige. While the disempowerment of one has facilitated that of the other, the bond of empathy between them have been strengthened further by their lived experiences of exploitation. As two of the earliest voices of indigenous resistance and activism, Lee Maracle (Salish) and Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan), identify this intensified bond of empathy as a tour de force, which holds the potential to subvert colonial atrocities. This paper aims to look into two seminal works – Ravensong(1993) by Maracle and Whispering in Shadows(2000) by Armstrong – in order to trace such ecofeminist trajectories of interconnectedness that
might pave the path towards recuperation, reclamation and re-empowerment for the indigenous communities of Canada.
Keywords: indigenous landscapes, ecofeminism, empathy, interconnections, colonial atrocities, resistance, reclamation. re-empowerment

Women, Peace and Security: The Role of Women in Conflict Resolution
Shanker, Neelu

Women, men, girls and boys are each impacted by conflict differently and bring different perspectives to conflict prevention, resolution and peacebuilding. The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is a core element of Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy. Canada’s National Action Plan on WPS guides the government’s development, humanitarian and peace and security efforts to implement the agenda. Women have the right to participate equally with men in decision-making, including in matters of peace and security. Research also demonstrates a correlation between women’s meaningful participation and more sustainable peace. In partnership with other countries, including with EU Member States, and with civil society, Canada works to advance WPS in regional and international fora, to break down barriers to women’s full and meaningful participation, and to stand firmly against attempts to rollback gains.

The Colored American and the Problem of Canada
Siggelakis, Susan

This paper examines the views of the editors of The Colored American, a Black-owned, abolitionist newspaper published in New York City during the latter 1830’s. Using material published therein, the author attempts to discern their editors’ views on the Upper and Lower Canadian rebellions, whereby colonists attempted to overthrow British imperial rule. The paper’s stance on these revolts was influenced by Britain’s hostility to slavery within its territories as well as the legal equality it guaranteed to Blacks. The Colored American opposed the rebellions and supported American neutrality on the disruptive hostilities, despite the fact that rebel leaders drew on republican principles of the United States’ Declaration of Independence to legitimize their movements. Because many Black abolitionists revered those same principles, the newspaper’s stance posed a contradiction, one which the author attempts to resolve by examining the ideas of editor Charles B. R

Approches du territoire dans la poésie de Joséphine Bacon
Sindičić Sabljo, Mirna

Poète, réalisatrice, traductrice, parolière et enseignante innue Joséphine Bacon (1947), originaire de Pessamit, a publié trois recueils de poésie bilingue (innu-aimun/français) chez Mémoire d’encrier : Bâtons à message / Tshissinuashitakana (2009), Un thé dans la toundra / Nipishapui nete mushuat (2013) et Uiesh / Quelque part (2018). Sa poésie épurée et presque incantatoire rend hommage au territoire et aux ancêtres. À travers ses poèmes, Joséphine Bacon explore la culture, la tradition orale et l’histoire innues et y partage l’amour du territoire. Dans son dernier recueil Uiesh / Quelque part, qui lui a valu le Prix des libraires 2019, Bacon raconte 50 ans de vie à Montréal en rendant hommage à la ville où elle est devenue « l’Indienne qu’elle doit être ». Sa poésie souligne les conceptions d’interdépendance et de relations de parenté entre humains et éléments naturels et remet en question les oppositions binaires telles que vivant-non vivant et humain-animal.
L’objectif de ce travail sera d’analyser ses poèmes en s’appuyant sur l’écocritique. Les écrivains autochtones au Québec accordent une place privilégiée à la thématique territoriale dans leurs oeuvres. Ce thème participe à un discours valorisant les appartenances territoriales dans la construction des identités individuelles et collectives. La théorie postcoloniale s’avère pertinente pour l’étude de la littérature autochtone de langue française qui, à partir des années 2000, prend réellement son essor. L’approche écocritique, qui possède une dimension ouvertement politique, surtout en combinaison avec la critique postcoloniale, peut offrir aux chercheurs des outils théoriques pour interpréter et analyser des oeuvres littéraires autochtones.

Canadian Landscapes Abroad
Sparling, Don

The English poet Rupert Brooke ‘s “The Soldier” begins “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.” In this paper, I will be exploring some corners of foreign fields that are for ever Canada, but in a different sense. These are landscapes depicted in works of art that form part of Canada’s massive collections of war art – over 13,000 items in all – which provide a visual record of the engagement of Canada’s armed forces from the time of World War I and its aftermath, through World War II, and down to 1995. In particular, I will be focusing on how the artists dealt with the devastated scenes they encountered, the features they shared and the ways individuals had their own distinctive approaches, and the “message” they attempted to convey in their works. Attention will also be paid to how their war experience related to their later careers and, given the later prominence of many artists on the Canadian art scene, how this contributed to the development of Canadian art in general.

The Landscape as a Place of Entrapment and Liberation in
Margaret Laurence´s Manawaka Cycle
Studená, Pavlína

In her Manawaka cycle, Margaret Laurence created a vivid literary landscape, a microcosm of Canadian Prairie society in its unity and diversity. Through a comparative analysis of The Stone Angel (1964), A Bird in the House (1970), and The Diviners (1974), the paper explores how Laurence, by interweaving the region’s mythological past into the protagonists’ journeys towards independence and dignity, draws a parallel between the quest for personal and
national identity. The paper builds on the work of Laura K. Davis and argues further that Laurence not only participated in establishing Canadian national narratives but that she also played a crucial role in shaping them by telling the stories of Pioneers and settlers alongside those of the Métis as representatives of the marginalized Aboriginal population and bearers of their cultural heritage. Laurence challenges the Pioneer myths of conquering the landscape and sees the landscape as a means of transformation, a place where her heroines come “not to hide but to seek“ and repeatedly venture into their unconscious psychic landscapes to explore their inner Selves and search for their autonomous identities. Although the Prairie fiction of the 1960s and 1970s was dominated by a regionalist perspective, the paper demonstrates that with gender, class, and ethnicity in the spotlight, this perception of the region has shifted from the notions of physical landscape towards the individual people inhabiting that particular region and their inner landscapes.

The Impact of Landscape and Climate on the Denesuline’ Religion as described by
Samuel Hearne (1745-1792)
Suszta Laura

Samuel Hearne (1745-1792) is credited with exploring the Coppermine River and its countryside for the first time. He captured the experiences of his travels in his work – Journeys from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean in the years 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 (1795) – where he elaborates not only on the circumstances of the trip but also on the natural phenomena and lifestyles of the natives.
In the boreal and arctic regions of Canada, where these natives live from October to May, temperatures do not rise above freezing and the soil is constantly frozen (permafrost) for most of the year. In the coldest period, the average temperature can range from -25 to -30°C, and in the milder months, it can only be between +8 and 10°C. The Dene nation must find the modus vivendi in such circumstances. But how did this affect not only their daily lives but their beliefs and their religion? Could these harsh conditions have been the cause of the triggering factors of some religious phenomena? The explorer himself does not go into this quest, but his descriptions provide a perfect starting point to examine these questions, starting with the Dene’s rites for the dead, their complex and diverse taboo system.
In my presentation, based on Samuel Hearne’s notes, I shall try to outline my possible answers to these questions, proving that landscape and climate played a significant role in the formation of the 18th-century religious picture recorded by Hearne. Landscape and climate affected not only the Dene’s daily practice of religion, but also their worldview and universal thinking, and their relationship to their religion.

Uncanny Homes and Gardens in Three Stories by Alice Munro
Szabó F. Andrea

In my paper I discuss three short stories by Alice Munro that feature uncanny homes in Southwestern Ontario in the tradition of Ontario Gothic. Vandals (1994), Runaway (2004) and Dimensions (2010), instant classics by Munro, reiterate themes, characters, settings and plotlines familiar to readers: domestic abuse, intentional blindness, the haunting presence of the land in the Canadian Garden, the traces of the violence of colonization, the unease that comes with being positioned in a state of in-betweenness, the victimized heroine struggling to
break free from traumatic bonds yet intentionally blind to abuse, and a closure that opens new interpretations rather than closes plotlines. I will argue that the stories not only display patterns of continuity in Munro’s fiction but also show a change of vision for the female protagonists in the Canadian Garden.

Changing Land – Inuit LessonS Learned?
Takács Attila

The Inuit learn to witness their environment from their early childhood. The Elders vividly recall how they discovered nature and wildlife while playfully training their five senses for survival in the Canadian Arctic. Their ancient wisdom is adapting to the current changes surrounding them, as they have learned to embrace some modern lifestyle elements into their culture, without ceasing to co-exist with nature. Rising temperatures and pollution are disturbing their ecosystem and society in ways “southern” academics do not entirely grasp. These observations by Inuit elders are detailed in a groundbreaking documentary, Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, by acclaimed Nunavut filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk (The Fast Runner, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen) and environmental scientist Ian Mauro. The documentary – screening at Toronto’s imagine NATIVE film and media arts festival and streaming live at isuma.tv – is the first to ask Inuit elders to describe the severe environmental changes in the Arctic. In my presentation I try to highlight “lessons” that we should or should have learnt and I try to focus on Inuit knowledge on climate change, a narrative which seemingly missing from the mainstream western approach.

The Politics of Deindustrialization in the “Birthplace of New Scotland”
Thompson, Peter

This project considers the recently closed Northern Pulp paper mill in Pictou, Nova Scotia as monument to a particular way of life in the settler society of Canada. Located on the north shore of Nova Scotia, Pictou is an unlikely battleground for debates over public memory. Pictou has a population of about 3000 and is a sleepy town with a modest fishery, tourist shops, and a pleasant waterfront where visitors can stop by the Northumberland Fisheries Museum and the Hector Heritage Quay, an interpretive centre that tells the story of the Ship Hector, the boat that brought the first Scottish settlers to Nova Scotia. Pictou’s slogan is “Birthplace of New Scotland” and the town’s tourist and heritage strategies lean heavily on this theme. In the case of Pictou, public memorials of this kind are interpreted within another profound social and economic shift: the collapse of the industrial economy taking place in real time, most recently punctuated by the closure of the Northern Pulp paper mill in January 2021. Politicians and pundits have often focused on the role of “lieux de mémoire” in teaching citizens about the country’s history. Scholars have paid less attention to the role of vernacular landscapes such as industrial sites in communicating ideas about Canada’s past. Through an examination of its physical appearance, plans for its future, and news stories, documentaries, and archival documents, I investigate how the mill interacts with the other memorials and heritage sites that make up the Pictou waterfront.

Pierre Morency: l’art de voir et de vivre la nature
Tóth Ágnes

Pour le poète, dramaturge, auteur et chroniqueur radiophonique, Pierre Morency, le paysage accède au rang de locus poeticus. À travers des textes en situation, objectifs, subjectifs, l’auteur et animateur décrit les paysages tout en créant une connivence entre eux et le lecteur / auditeur. Dans sa trilogie des Histoires naturelles du Nouveau Monde (1989─1996), vaste entreprise de description de la nature d’Amérique, il fait oeuvre littéraire de ces paysages naturels, ainsi que dans Le Regard infini, Parcs, places et jardins publics de Québec (1999), livre créé en collaboration avec le photographe Luc-Antoine Couturier, de la nature urbaine de la ville de Québec. Dans cette communication nous nous intéressons aux différentes modalités de cette expérience du paysage mise en oeuvre par un art poétique. Les multiples ressources perceptives développées par Morency afin de mieux voir et comprendre le réel, favorisent l’expansion du registre poétique. Particulièrement la faculté qu’il désigne par l’expression « l’oeil américain », utilisée comme titre du premier volet de la trilogie, souligne l’importance de l’art de voir et de vivre la nature.

Far Beyond Geology: Landscape as a Focalizer in Alice Munro’s “Deep-Holes”
Tutek, Nikola

Alice Munro’s short fiction is abundant with examples of descriptions of natural landscapes and even their geological features. Descriptions of the land and nature are used in various functions in Munro’s short stories, from evoking foreign lands (in “Albanian Virigin”) to depicting the inner world of characters (in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”) and conveying the narrative conflict (in “Pictures of the Ice”), to mention just a few examples. Alice Munro’s story “Deep-Holes” stands out in that respect: The plot of the story is motivated by the idea of a scientific article on geology and the story takes place exactly in the landscape described in the article. The characters, amongst them the author of the article, find themselves in the well described and explained landscape in which they seem to be lost anyway. In this analyses, I will provide an explanation of how Alice Munro uses landscape as the focalizer of/in the narration. I will then explore how Alice Munro contrasts the descriptions of geological facts to the fickleness of reality in order to create literary illusions, hence making the idea of deep-holes one of the trademarks of her literary production.

The Sea, the Land, the Ore_Inuit and English Face Of as John Knight
Explores the Labrador Coast (1606)
Vassányi Miklós

In the contribution I am proposing here, I would like to tell and analyze the story of the disastrous exploration journey Captain John Knight started – and did not survive. Commissioned by a group of English merchants to find the Northwest Passage, Knight crossed the North Atlantic to make landfall on the Labrador coast somewhere south of today’s Nunatsiavut town, Nain, in the summer of 1606. Soon after anchoring, they lost life, including that of the Captain, under unclear circumstances; only to be attacked, a couple of days later, by a large group of Inuit. Since, however, the Inuit were interested in the Englishmen’s boat and not in an open conflict, the crew survived and even secured the much-coveted boat. After a sea of troubles, they made it back to Newfoundland where they found help and assistance. Finally, they reached England after an utterly disastrous journey where everything was lost and nothing was found. The proposed paper would delve into the question of why the crew was attacked and not killed; what role did natural environment play in what happened; and, most importantly, what ore was important to which group, and how each party wanted to get at it. By virtue of this investigation, we may pry into the motives for early modern colonial expansion and, vice versa, territorial defence. The paper would end with a more general historical anthropological evaluation of the story.

The Canadian Landscape and Hungarian Immigration
Venkovits Balázs

Besides the numerous quantifiable factors that contributed to Canada becoming one of the key destinations of Hungarian immigration in the early 20th century, the perceptions of the Canadian landscape, the images of Canada also influenced the decisions of Hungarians who left their home country and started a new life in North America. The sources of such images were manifold and included numerous publications that were closely associated with immigration or were targeted specifically at immigrants. This paper introduces the images of Canada available in Hungary at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in relation to the question of immigration. This includes the discussion of immigration booster materials that primarily emphasized the attractiveness of the Canadian West, immigrant accounts, newspaper articles
and other publications that depicted Canada from the perspective of immigration. It also highlights the emergence of a special discourse between two types of texts, those aimed at boosting immigration to the nation and those that were written for the purposes of discouraging emigration from Hungary to Canada (and thus emphasizing the hazards and challenges of the Canadian landscape).

Contemporary Indigenous women’s life writing: towards landscapes of futurity
Vincetic, Jelena

Canadian Indigenous women’s writing of the last decade has gained new popularity and a larger audience, producing a broader impact on learning, cultural imagery and knowledge production. Coinciding with the ‘decolonial turn’ in arts, humanities and social sciences, autobiographical writing and use of autobiographical elements in Indigenous women’s literary production in Canada has reached and influenced a new readership. Through a close reading of three recent autobiographical titles – A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliot, Northern Wildflower by Catherine Lafferty and In My Own Moccasins by Helen Knott – the paper considers, in each of the works, methods of self-narration and life history telling as multifaceted forms of life affirming knowledge transfer, healing practice and articulation of Indigenous feminisms. With the Canadian scholar Jo-Ann Episkenew’s concepts of the anticipated futures and alternate collective myths in mind, the abovementioned autobiographical works are engaged with as mediating traditional knowledge and methodologies, while contributing to a platform for collective learning and repair.
Keywords: autobiography, Indigenous feminism, life writing, traditional knowledges, reconciliation.

Le rôle des parcs nationaux pour répondre aux besoins actuels du tourisme et
sensibiliser à la durabilité
Vojtkó Anna

En créant plus de quarante parcs nationaux et réserves naturelles par l’association Park Canada, le pays vous propose une expérience unique et inimitable. Cependant, chaque parc national a sa propre fonction dans la préservation dans l’esprit de „pourvoir assurer ses conditions pour les générations futures”. Cette citation est un des principes les plus importants de durabilité et de tourisme durable aussi. La transformation touristique apparaît à travers des tendances de tourisme. Par exemple, de plus en plus de visiteurs désirent passer leur temps activement, mais encore se ressourcer. Ils cherchent les sites et les périodes moins encombrés. En devenant informés par Internet et les médias, en se cultivant progressivement, leurs attentes intellectuelles envers l’histoire, la culture et les sciences augmentent paralellèment. En raison du stress quotidien, le corps humain a besoin de repos, le rôle du temps de qualité est donc apprécié. Mais ce qui est le plus important, les visiteurs deviennent de plus en plus conscients de la question de la durabilité et la préservation. Le Canada et ses parcs nationaux, en soulignant les parcs d’Alberta, comme Jasper et Banff sont prêts à remplir tous ces besoins. Ce sont des sites représentants de plusieurs époques de l’histoire qui nous attendent. Ils maintiennent un environnement et écosystème intact et calme, offrant de grandes excursions. Enfin et surtout, par la vue de ces territoires exceptionnels et les solutions de conservation locales, nous sommes incités à faire notre possible pour garder ces valeurs.

Les paysages pré- et post-apocalyptiques de J. D. Kurtness
Voldřichová Beránková, Eva

Deux approches majeures de la mise en scène de l’apocalypse peuvent en général être distinguées dans la littérature et le cinéma: soit le moment spectaculaire de la catastrophe, ou bien son prolongement post-apocalyptique, souvent lié à des tentatives de reconstruction d’un monde perdu. J. D. Kurtness, une romancière canadienne d’origine innue, ne s’inscrit dans aucune de ces tendances, développant sa propre esthétique originale. Aucune boule de feu dans ses paysages infernaux, pas de lacs de soufre non plus, juste un effacement progressif de la distinction homme/animal (De Vengeance), l’abandon de l’anthropocentrisme au profit d’une logique«post-humaine» (Aquariums), voire un glissement de la vie réelle vers un virtuel faussement réconfortant (Les Saucisses). Cette fin du monde – si mise en valeur dans la production littéraire et cinématographique contemporaine –, on risquerait presque de ne pas s’en apercevoir. Elle a peut-être déjà eu lieu. En nous basant sur des écrits de certains sociologues de l’environnement (Anna Tsing), ainsi que sur des réflexions utopiques et dystopiques dans le domaine de l’écologie (Jean-Paul Déléage) ou sur des théoriciens de l’anthropocène (Pierre Fluck, Laurent Carpentier, Claude Lorius), nous allons essayer de saisir la spécificité des paysages kurtnessiens pour en dégager l’esthétique et l’éthique de l’auteure.

P(Post)apocalyptic landscapes in Christian Guay-Poliquin’s trilogy
Žíla, Dalibor

Les trois romans de Christian Guay-Poliquin, auteur contemporain québécois, Le Fil des kilomètres, Le poids de la neige et Les ombres filantes se servent du motif de la solitude d’un homme lors d’une panne d’électricité mystérieuse qui est exposé aux situations extrêmes et à l’hostilité de la nature dès son retour dans son village natal après une odyssée à travers un paysage apocalyptique, et plus tard, dans le troisième volet de la trilogie, dans la forêt. Dans les trois romans, une dichotomie prend lieu entre l’intérieur et l’extérieur. Nous observons l’intérieur de la voiture, de la cabane, et de la forêt ; espaces protégeant le héros anonyme contre le paysage hostile régnant dehors. C’est avant tout le village entouré par la forêt qui fournit à la narration un espace serré coupant l’univers du village du reste du monde, comme c’est également la forêt plus tard dans la suite romanesque. L’espace de la protection, la source du bois et du gibier, mais aussi du danger et de la menace de l’inconnu de l’autre côté, la forêt et son cadrage permet de construire un espace de tension. Dans notre contribution, nous analyserons comment la spatialité de ces oeuvres liée à l’abandon, l’isolement, l’écart, la peur, et au sentiment de menace pour en juger de sa spatialité (post)apocalyptique à travers l’optique de la littérature québécoise et de ses spécificités.

Paysages et identité culturelle: Wemindji Baie-James, Canada
Ziolko, Christine Caroline

Comment, en 1982, les élèves de l’école primaire de Wemindji (Cree: ᐐᒥᓂᒌ/Wîminicî), une municipalité de village cri implanté dans le territoire d’Eeyou Istchee dans le Nord-du-Québec sur une zone non urbanisée sans infrastructures publiques, représentaient-ils leur village – habitations, forêt – et leurs activités quotidiennes, familiales – activités domestiques, chasse et pèche – ? Comment ces dessins – réalisés spontanément, de mémoire, sur papier blanc à l’aide de simples crayons de couleur mais avec un grand sens de l’observation et du détail – traduisent-ils, en filigrane, l’identité culturelle d’une petite communauté qui entre tradition et modernité vit en relation étroite avec la biodiversité de son cadre de vie ; et une précoce implication dans un mode de vie en relation directe avec l’environnement extérieur ? En quoi ces dessins reflètent-ils de manière prémonitoire l’orientation adoptée aujourd’hui par ce village pour maintenir et développer le nombre de ses résidents, de leurs ressources économiques et de leur identité culturelles par la formation des jeunes, l’implication intergénérationnelle, et une politique touristique axée sur la découverte d’une culture locale vivante, la préservation de l’environnement, de sa faune et de sa végétation via le maintien et la qualité de son environnement?

Collectés par une universitaire française, initialement venue photographier les paysages de la Baie-James, cette collection de dessins a ultérieurement fait l’objet d’une analyse de contenu – dans le cadre d’études en anthropologie visuelle en France, à l’EHESS. Les constats de ces observations ciblent les questions mentionnées pour amorcer une plus large réflexion sur la relation entre la représentation spontanée du paysage et l’identité culturelle dans des territoires naturels encore préservés.

Landscapes of the mind in Tamas Dobozy, Ghost Geographies
Zsizsmann Éva

The present paper traces the concept of utopia as it appears in Tamas Dobozy’s latest short story collection, Ghost Geographies (2021). Utopia, most often considered a place, a no-place or a beautiful, idealistic place is rather conceived here as a process, a way of operating.
The relationship between story and history, the individual and the collective is another aspect I would like to explore. History haunts characters’s lives in these short stories. However, information about the past remains elusive. Dobozy experiments with the idea of nations, borders, hegemony and control.
Finally, I will address the issue of music and meaning as well as playing with form. Dobozy’s long sentences are controlled and musical, the music of the sentence being as important as the meaning. The stories in the collection do not follow the Checkovian pattern (short stories as a slice of life), but are a mixture of various other forms: essay, travelogue, memoir. I will argue that writing short stories seems to be here an obsessive-compulsive behaviour of sticking to a tiny piece of a world.

Organizing Committee of the Conference
Anikó Ádám (PPKE)
Mátyás Bánhegyi (BGE)
Dóra Bernhardt (KRE)
Tímea Nagyné Deák (KRE)
János Kenyeres (ELTE)
Judit Nagy (KRE)
Mária Palla (PPKE)
Ágnes Tóth (PPKE)
Dóra Tóth (KRE)
Miklós Vassányi (KRE)