West/Border/Road
Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative
A captivating look at how recent Canadian fiction, film, and television appropriate and redefine American genres.
Description
The North American entertainment industry is rapidly consolidating, and new modes of technological delivery challenge Canadian content regulations. An understanding of how Canadian culture negotiates its rapport with American genres has never been more timely. West/Border/Road offers an interdisciplinary analysis of contemporary Canadian manifestations of three American genres: the western, the border, and the road. It situates close readings of literary, film, and television narratives from both English Canada and Quebec within a larger context of Canadian generic borrowing and innovation. Katherine Ann Roberts calls upon canonical works in Canadian studies, theories of genre, and a wide range of scholarship from border studies, cultural studies, and film studies to examine how genre is appropriated and sometimes reworked and how these cultural narratives engage with discourses of contemporary Canadian nationhood. The author elucidates Guy Vanderhaeghe’s rewriting of the codes of the historical western to include the trauma of Aboriginal peoples, Aritha van Herk’s playful spoof on American western iconography, the politics and perils of the representation of the Canada-US border in CBC-produced crime television, and how the road genre inspires and constrains the Québécois and Canadian road movie. A reminder of the power and limitations of American genres, West/Border/Road provides a nuanced perspective on Canadian engagement with cultural forms that may be imported but never foreign.
Reviews
"West/Border/Road is a sharp and canny synthesis of the ongoing efficacies of the three most enduring stories that have defined both Canada and the United States. In taking them up, synthesizing the scholarship surrounding them effectively, and demonstrating their ongoing appeals so precisely, Roberts has made a major contribution." University of Toronto Quarterly
"Katherine Ann Roberts applies this practice [of North American cultural criticism] to a manageably large set of close readings of Canadian and American literature, television, and film. The interpretations are diligently explanatory. Roberts' chosen texts are not merely representations of a trans/national situation; they are also examples of genres evolving transnationally from American models that are economically incentivized (thus inevitable) but also subject to critique. West/Border/Road is a welcome and significant addition to the scholarly body of work that Roberts synthesizes and expands." Canadian Literature
"Through her nuanced awareness of the complexities of an asymmetrical relation between US and Canadian culture, Roberts goes beyond the few existing previous studies of the Western genre in Canada that worked largely contrastively and dismissed US culture as un- Canadian. Roberts begins to show that the engagement with US genres in Canadian culture, as in Vanderhaeghe's works, goes beyond a parodic rejection and warrants a more careful examination." Western American Literature
"The author makes an engaging, cross-disciplinary, cross-genre, cross-cultural argument for the importance and interaction of the border genre, the road genre, and the American western (as a concept and construct) in cultural production in Canada. An extremely ambitious and innovative study." Jane M. Koustas, Brock University and author of Robert Lepage on the Toronto Stage