At the outset of my thesis research this year, my exposure to Linda Hutcheon's concept of  historiographic metafiction really made me feel as though I would never ever come across a more shamelessly coined term of absolute emptiness. I know, ...Read More

The Slandering of Linda Hutcheon: How Electronic Literature Scholar Espen J. Aarseth managed to coin yet another convoluted Literary term while bashing Literary Studies

As a lover of contemporary cultural theory, I've made myself entirely incapable of functioning properly as a well-oiled cog in the system. Don't get me wrong, I'm just as much of a cog as everyone else, with my Facebook profile ...Read More

The Ultimate Narcissistic Telos of Debord’s Spectacle: Hal Niedzviecki’s The Peep Diaries, and why we’re all Perverts

"How did froth-head and barm evolve clouds overcast with winter's brume, moulding Man to primordial word-slime. Man the word-mime, jellied in woolpacks - gummed in hazes, scuds. Man the glue, cooked egg-white of hoots and cuckoo calls." ///Meredith Quartermain: Matter I love Bookthug, not only because their ...Read More

Roget’s Taxonomy, Deleuze and Darwin: Words as beings in Meredith Quartermain’s Matter

I'm a shameless litslut. I devour short fiction. There is nothing more intriguing to me than the immediacy of short prose; the narrative's directed focus and inherent sense of urgency within a limited space. In the same way, I've courted ...Read More

Who the Hell doesn’t love Prose Poetry? Kyle Buckley’s The Laundromat Essay

Born and raised in the GTA, I'm a public transit kid. I take it everywhere. Even when I moved out to the suburbs for the bulk of my childhood, my Mom didn't have a car and I shelled out my ...Read More

Terror on the TTC!!!! Crumbling Cities, Bodies and Minds in Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down

The word postmodern gets thrown around more than a cheap South-Korean hooker. Every now and then, a friend or acquaintance of mine recommends me some piece of art or literature, citing this word and the vague characteristics associated with it ...Read More

Post-POMO: The Bizarre Post-Millennium Anti-Movement

Every year, as the nominees for the Giller Prize are announced, I'm both intrigued by the choices of notable contemporary Canadian fiction, and saddened that Margaret Atwood, for another year, has exercised her hegemonic weight over the Canadian literary world. ...Read More

Contemporary Canadian Literature: The Giller Prize 2008 and How Hating Margaret Atwood Means You Actually Love Her (Yuck.)

When people ask me the obligatory "What's your major?" question in polite conversation, I reply with the obvious "English Lit" and dodge the requisite"So i guess you want to be a high-school teacher" by throwing out "...and I want to study postmodern ...Read More

In Pursuit of the Postmodern