Sustainable urban foragings in the Canadian metropolis: rummaging through Rita Wong's
            <i>Forage</i>
            and Nicholas Dickner's
            <i>Nikolski</i>

Bates, Catherine

doi:10.3828/bjcs.2013.11

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…While Christie's story focuses on the social and economic implications of "dumpster diving", the issue of foraging for a living also lends itself to relevant ecocritical readings in contemporary literary works. See, for instance, Bates (2013) for an analysis of the potential connections between "dumpster diving" and environmentally conscious choices that disrupt consumption patterns and promote local sustainability in the work of Rita Wong and Nicholas Dickner. 11.…”

Section: Creative Exposurementioning

confidence: 99%

Emergency contact: Compassion and precarious love in Michael Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden

Darias-Beautell

2020

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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This article examines the relation between affect and agency in Michael Christie’s short story collection The Beggar’s Garden (2011). It builds its argument on recent philosophical discussions about the oxymoronic nature of the relational subject. Many contemporary thinkers have emphasized the fundamental paradox that affective relations are as necessary as they are profoundly destabilizing of the subject’s supposed autonomy. Following this train of thought, a number of studies have appeared that explore the relation between vulnerability and agency. Would a focus on affective relations and the subsequently increased sense of vulnerability produce or foreclose action? The article takes this question to the field of the literary to provide a critical reading of the first two stories in Christie’s collection, “Emergency Contact” and “Discard”, both of which probe, in very different ways, the power of affect in the midst of highly precarious material conditions. Drawing on the work of feminist materialist scholars Sara Ahmed, Marianne Hirsch, Judith Butler, and Martha Nussbaum, who have explored how the experience of vulnerability may imply a radical openness toward surprising possibilities, I investigate how each of these two stories may produce unexpected spaces of human agency through the affective energy of compassion and love.

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Section: Creative Exposurementioning

confidence: 99%