Books and worlds: A literary cartography of the Canadian North

Bringing together literary theory and geography, "Books and Worlds" is an examination of the process of writing place. This literary cartography of the Canadian North is structured as a series of readings; of representations of the Arctic by John Moss, Aritha van Herk and Rudy Wiebe; of Canadian literary criticism; and of literary theory. The primary narrative of "Books and Worlds" consists of a reading of the work of Moss, van Herk and Wiebe that investigates the authors' strategies and philosophies of writing, their literary mappings of Arctic spaces, places and landscapes, their reconstructions and deconstructions of Northern history, and their restructurings of the relationship between writing and the region. These are writers that refuse to let their readers read through their texts to the world beyond as they candidly investigate the relationship between themselves as writers, their written texts and the world of which they write. Interwoven with this narrative is a reading of literary criticism that maps the increasing attention of Canadian literary critics to the process of writing, specifically to the writing of Canadian space, of Canadian history and of the Canadian region. In traditional Canadian literary criticism, literature acted as a window through which one viewed Canada. However, literary critics, rather than looking through literature at Canada, are increasingly looking at literature as a place where Canadian spaces, histories and regions are constructed. Complementing these two narratives is a reading of post-structural and feminist theories of the text that greatly complicate the relationship between the text and the world. Theorists such as Derrida and Barthes argue that a text does not simply express the meaning of a world outside literature; instead, meaning is produced by the linguistic and literary systems in which the text is necessarily implicated as well as by multiple, positioned acts of reading. The subject of this study is theorists, critics and writers who draw attention to the process of writing; consequently my role in "Books and Worlds" is not as disinterested literary critic but as positioned reader of literature who is aware of her own acts of writing and reading.