Kruk presenting at Nipissing University Research Talk event

Dr. Laurie Kruk will lead a presentation titledCarol’s “Others” and Some Others: Canadian Writers Double-Voice the Short Story as part of the Nipissing University Research Talk series on Thursday, April 5, from 4:30 – 5:30 p.m. in room H131.Refreshments will be available.Here’s an abstract on her presentation:
In my work on Canadian short stories, I have been struck by the ways that authors “double-voice,” or create fiction that enacts a dialogue between marginal and mainstream, by employing different narrative perspectives and performing this difference stylistically, linguistically, politically. In “Others,” from her ground-breaking collection Various Miracles (1985), Carol Shields “double-voices” by dramatizing the self as both grounded in domestic life and reconstructed in social discourse.  I would also like to place Shields in the company of literary “others” Jack Hodgins, Sandra Birdsell and Tom King.  In each case, the double-voicing plays upon different identities:  “region” for Hodgins in “Over Here” (Damage Done by the Storm, 2004); “ethnicity” for Birdsell (title story from The Two-Headed Calf, 1997), and “culture” for King (title story from A Short History of Indians in Canada, 2005). While each story differs in tone, character or conflict, all tackle the challenge of creating a narrative of selfhood that insists on, as well as performs, a typically Canadian doubleness/otherness.