Recent literary criticism, along with academic culture at large, has stressed collaboration as essential to textual creation and sociability as a literary and academic virtue. Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an alternative understanding of writing with a complementary mode of reading: literary engagement, it suggests, is the meeting of strangers, each in a state of isolation. The Renaissance authors discussed in this study did not necessarily work alone or without collaborators, but they were uncertain who would read their writings and whether those readers would understand them. These concerns are represented in their work through tropes, images, and characterizations of isolation. The figure of the isolated, misunderstood, or misjudged poet is a preoccupation that relies on imagining the lives of wandering and complaining youths, eloquent melancholics, exemplary hermits, homeless orphans, and retiring stoics; such figures acknowledge the isolation in literary experience. As a response to this isolation of literary connection, Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an interpretive mode it defines as strange reading: a reading that merges comprehension with indeterminacy and the imaginative work of interpretation with the recognition of historical difference.

In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter the erosion of humanistic education.

In her lifetime Elizabeth Bishop was appreciated as a writer’s writer (John Ashbery once called her “the writer’s writer’s writer”). But since her death in 1979 her reputation has grown, and today she is recognized as a major twentieth-century poet. Critics and biographers now habitually praise Bishop’s mastery of her art, but all too often they have little to say about how her poetry does its sublime work—in the ear and in the mind’s eye. Elizabeth Bishop at Work examines Bishop’s art in detail—her diction, syntax, rhythm, and meter, her acute sense of place, and her attention to the natural world. It is also a study of the poet working at something, challenging herself to try new things and to push boundaries. Eleanor Cook traces Bishop’s growing confidence and sense of freedom, from her first collection, North & South, to Questions of Travel, in which she fully realized her poetic powers, to Geography III and the breathtaking late poems, which—in individual ways—gather in and extend the poet’s earlier work. Cook shows how Bishop shapes each collection, putting to rest the notion that her published volumes are miscellanies. Elizabeth Bishop at Work is intended for readers and writers as well as teachers. In showing exactly how Bishop’s poems work, Cook suggests how we ourselves might become more attentive readers and better writers. Bishop has been compared to Vermeer, and as with his paintings, so with her poems. They create small worlds where every detail matters.

a href=http://prismmagazine.ca/2014/09/24/an-interview-with-daniel-scott-tysdal/"PRISM International magazine interview with Daniel Scott Tysdal/a This practical guide to composing original, evocative poetry explores all aspects of the writing process-including finding inspiration, organizing ideas on paper, revising first drafts, and sharing poems with others. Accessible and encouraging throughout, this invaluable resource helps beginner poets find their voice and master the tools of the trade."

Anyone who attended the University or who is interested in the growth of Canada's intellectual heritage will enjoy this compelling and magisterial history.

When the Constitution Act of 1867 was enacted, section 93 guaranteed certain educational rights to Catholics and Protestants in Quebec, but not to any others. Over the course of the next century, the Jewish community in Montreal carved out an often tenuous arrangement for public schooling as “honorary Protestants,” based on complex negotiations with the Protestant and Catholic school boards, the provincial government, and individual municipalities. In the face of the constitution’s exclusionary language, all parties gave their compromise a legal form which was frankly unconstitutional, but unavoidable if Jewish children were to have access to public schools. Bargaining in the shadow of the law, they made their own constitution long before the formal constitutional amendment of 1997 finally put an end to the issue. In Honorary Protestants, David Fraser presents the first legal history of the Jewish school question in Montreal. Based on extensive archival research, it highlights the complex evolution of concepts of rights, citizenship, and identity, negotiated outside the strict legal boundaries of the constitution.

The Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio has had a long and colourful history in English translation. This new interdisciplinary study presents the first exploration of the reception of Boccaccio’s writings in English literary culture, tracing his presence from the early fifteenth century to the 1930s. Guyda Armstrong tells this story through a wide-ranging journey through time and space – from the medieval reading communities of Naples and Avignon to the English court of Henry VIII, from the censorship of the Decameron to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, from the world of fine-press printing to the clandestine pornographers of 1920s New York, and much more. Drawing on the disciplines of book history, translation studies, comparative literature, and visual studies, the author focuses on the book as an object, examining how specific copies of manuscripts and printed books were presented to an English readership by a variety of translators. Armstrong is thereby able to reveal how the medieval text in translation is remade and re-authorized for every new generation of readers.

The Hotel: Occupied Space explores the hotel as both symbol and space through the concept of “occupancy.” By examining the various ways in which the hotel is manifested in art, photography, and film, this book offers a timely critique of a crucial modern space. As a site of occupancy, the hotel has provided continued creative inspiration for artists from Monet and Hopper, to genre filmmakers like Hitchcock and Sofia Coppola. While the rich symbolic importance of the hotel means that the visual arts and cinema are especially fruitful, the hotel’s varied structural purposes, as well as its historical and political uses, also provide ample ground for new and timely discussion. In addition to inspiring painters, photographers, and filmmakers, the hotel has played an important role during wartime, and more recently as a site of accommodation for displaced people, whether they be detainees or refugees seeking sanctuary. Shedding light on the diverse ways that the hotel functions as a structure, Robert A. Davidson argues that the hotel is both a fundamental modern space and a constantly adaptable structure, dependent on the circumstances in which it appears and plays a part.

In The Right Relationship, John Borrows and Michael Coyle bring together a group of renowned scholars, both indigenous and non-indigenous, to cast light on the magnitude of the challenges Canadians face in seeking a consensus on the nature of treaty partnership in the twenty-first century.

Learning Activism is designed to encourage a deeper engagement with the intellectual life of activists who organize for social, political, and ecological justice.