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Papers by Christa Zeller Thomas
Chilufim: ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR JÜDISCHE KULTURGESCHICHTE ∙ 17/2014
This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a G... more This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a German Holocaust document, Erica Fischer’s Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 (1994), in the context of the emergence of increasingly global gay and lesbian movements in the 1990s. Aimée & Jaguar invited collective identification as victims by tapping into the contemporary gay/lesbian discourse that used the Holocaust as a metaphor for the plight of homosexuals, further resonating with a series of AIDS dramas from the era that did the same. The text’s reception and selective (dis)identification by Fischer and audiences alike raise questions about the ownership and appropriation of Holocaust memory as well as about the impact of globalizing social movements and mass media on post-Holocaust identity politics.
This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a G... more This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a German Holocaust document, Erica Fischer’s Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 (1994), in the context of the emergence of increasingly global gay and lesbian movements in the 1990s. Aimée & Jaguar invited collective identification as victims by tapping into the contemporary gay/lesbian discourse that used the Holocaust as a metaphor for the plight of homosexuals, further resonating with a series of AIDS dramas from the era that did the same. The text’s reception and selective (dis)identification by Fischer and audiences alike raise questions about the ownership and appropriation of Holocaust memory as well as about the impact of globalizing social movements and mass media on post-Holocaust identity politics.
Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700-1900, 2007
Home Ground and Foreign Territory: Essays on Early Canadian Literature, 2014
Double Takes: Intersections between Canadian Literature and Film, Feb 2013
Mosaic: an Interdisciplinary Journal, 2012
H etty Dorval, Ethel Wilson's short first-published novel, has sparked some impassioned and sharp... more H etty Dorval, Ethel Wilson's short first-published novel, has sparked some impassioned and sharply oppositional critical opinions, focused wholly on the title character. The narrative, told from the perspective of the adolescent Frankie (Frances) Burnaby, who becomes enthralled with the beautiful and mysterious Hetty Dorval, follows the restless moves of the eponymous character to and from the small town of Lytton in the interior of British Columbia to Vancouver, London, and, finally, to Vienna just before the outbreak of World War II. In all these places, Hetty appears determined "not [to] have [her] life complicated" by emotional attachments and responsibilities for others (24), 1 and her single-minded pursuit of her own interests is at the core of the critical controversy about the novel. The dominant view, posited primarily (though not exclusively) by male critics, regards Hetty "almost unanimously," as David Stouck sums up, "as a negative presence in something like an allegory of good and evil, wherein an adolescent child is being tempted away from the values of her family and community by a mysterious woman's glamorous representation of beauty, Ethel Wilson's first novel, Hetty Dorval, is generally regarded as a story of the triumph of good over attractive, female evil. This essay analyzes the novel as a "screen" or "cover" for underlying anxieties in order to examine the unconscious linkages between cultural concepts of (maternal) femininity and death.
Studies in Canadian Literature
Canadian Literature journal
Conference Presentations by Christa Zeller Thomas
The paper considers some of the ways in which the female protagonists in a considerable number of... more The paper considers some of the ways in which the female protagonists in a considerable number of works of fiction by 20th-century Canadian and American women writers are haunted, or “possessed,” by the deaths of their mothers. In the texts, these deaths – or maternal losses – are transfigured into things, into items that have substance, but that, peculiarly, are also found wanting.
Blog Posts by Christa Zeller Thomas
The ways in which women participate in nation-building processes.
A Canadian type of woman, winter-hardy, good-looking, and sporty.
Mercy Ann Coles and socializing at the Confederation conferences.
Victorian hairstyles sported by the Women of Confederation.
Canadian Confederation and the role of women: who really were the women of Confederation? What mo... more Canadian Confederation and the role of women: who really were the women of Confederation? What motivated and energized, or disappointed and constrained them? What were the material things that made up their lives? What were the technological innovations that changed daily lives and routines? What were the ideas that inspired them, and the movements they resisted? The literature they read? The art they admired? The recipes they cooked and the housekeeping they practiced? Above all, how did their presence in 1867 and the decades thereafter help bring about the nation whose birthday we will celebrate soon?
Readying for Canada's 150th anniversary, but where are the women?
Book Reviews by Christa Zeller Thomas
Reviews of contemporary Canadian poetry by women.
Chilufim: ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR JÜDISCHE KULTURGESCHICHTE ∙ 17/2014
This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a G... more This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a German Holocaust document, Erica Fischer’s Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 (1994), in the context of the emergence of increasingly global gay and lesbian movements in the 1990s. Aimée & Jaguar invited collective identification as victims by tapping into the contemporary gay/lesbian discourse that used the Holocaust as a metaphor for the plight of homosexuals, further resonating with a series of AIDS dramas from the era that did the same. The text’s reception and selective (dis)identification by Fischer and audiences alike raise questions about the ownership and appropriation of Holocaust memory as well as about the impact of globalizing social movements and mass media on post-Holocaust identity politics.
This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a G... more This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a German Holocaust document, Erica Fischer’s Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 (1994), in the context of the emergence of increasingly global gay and lesbian movements in the 1990s. Aimée & Jaguar invited collective identification as victims by tapping into the contemporary gay/lesbian discourse that used the Holocaust as a metaphor for the plight of homosexuals, further resonating with a series of AIDS dramas from the era that did the same. The text’s reception and selective (dis)identification by Fischer and audiences alike raise questions about the ownership and appropriation of Holocaust memory as well as about the impact of globalizing social movements and mass media on post-Holocaust identity politics.
Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700-1900, 2007
Home Ground and Foreign Territory: Essays on Early Canadian Literature, 2014
Double Takes: Intersections between Canadian Literature and Film, Feb 2013
Mosaic: an Interdisciplinary Journal, 2012
H etty Dorval, Ethel Wilson's short first-published novel, has sparked some impassioned and sharp... more H etty Dorval, Ethel Wilson's short first-published novel, has sparked some impassioned and sharply oppositional critical opinions, focused wholly on the title character. The narrative, told from the perspective of the adolescent Frankie (Frances) Burnaby, who becomes enthralled with the beautiful and mysterious Hetty Dorval, follows the restless moves of the eponymous character to and from the small town of Lytton in the interior of British Columbia to Vancouver, London, and, finally, to Vienna just before the outbreak of World War II. In all these places, Hetty appears determined "not [to] have [her] life complicated" by emotional attachments and responsibilities for others (24), 1 and her single-minded pursuit of her own interests is at the core of the critical controversy about the novel. The dominant view, posited primarily (though not exclusively) by male critics, regards Hetty "almost unanimously," as David Stouck sums up, "as a negative presence in something like an allegory of good and evil, wherein an adolescent child is being tempted away from the values of her family and community by a mysterious woman's glamorous representation of beauty, Ethel Wilson's first novel, Hetty Dorval, is generally regarded as a story of the triumph of good over attractive, female evil. This essay analyzes the novel as a "screen" or "cover" for underlying anxieties in order to examine the unconscious linkages between cultural concepts of (maternal) femininity and death.
Studies in Canadian Literature
Canadian Literature journal
The paper considers some of the ways in which the female protagonists in a considerable number of... more The paper considers some of the ways in which the female protagonists in a considerable number of works of fiction by 20th-century Canadian and American women writers are haunted, or “possessed,” by the deaths of their mothers. In the texts, these deaths – or maternal losses – are transfigured into things, into items that have substance, but that, peculiarly, are also found wanting.
The ways in which women participate in nation-building processes.
A Canadian type of woman, winter-hardy, good-looking, and sporty.
Mercy Ann Coles and socializing at the Confederation conferences.
Victorian hairstyles sported by the Women of Confederation.
Canadian Confederation and the role of women: who really were the women of Confederation? What mo... more Canadian Confederation and the role of women: who really were the women of Confederation? What motivated and energized, or disappointed and constrained them? What were the material things that made up their lives? What were the technological innovations that changed daily lives and routines? What were the ideas that inspired them, and the movements they resisted? The literature they read? The art they admired? The recipes they cooked and the housekeeping they practiced? Above all, how did their presence in 1867 and the decades thereafter help bring about the nation whose birthday we will celebrate soon?
Readying for Canada's 150th anniversary, but where are the women?
Reviews of contemporary Canadian poetry by women.
Review of contemporary Canadian poetry.
Poetry reviews of contemporary Canadian poetry.
Poetry reviews of contemporary Canadian poetry
Canadian Literature journal, 2008
Review essay of Elizabeth Rollins Epperley, Through Lover's Lane: L.M. Montgomery's Photography a... more Review essay of Elizabeth Rollins Epperley, Through Lover's Lane: L.M. Montgomery's Photography and Visual Imagination
Canadian Literature journal, 2010
Review essay of Elizabeth Waterston, Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery
Review essay of Holding the Line: Borders in a Global World, University of British Columbia Press... more Review essay of Holding the Line: Borders in a Global World, University of British Columbia Press 2005 (Vancouver, Toronto), with contributions by 25 scholars and edited by Heather N. Nicol and Ian Townsend-Gault.
EU and Turkey negotiations about Turkey entering the EU.
This dissertation explores narrative strategies of self-identity in autobiographies by six pionee... more This dissertation explores narrative strategies of self-identity in autobiographies by six pioneering women writers, each of whom lost what has traditionally been woman’s place: her home. The accounts of emigration, expatriation, and exile by Anna Brownwell Jameson, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Ada Cambridge, Isak Dinesen, and Alyse Simpson illustrate the implications of this loss, as each woman struggled to recover a sense both of home and of grounded identity. The writings span more than a hundred years, from the 1830s to the 1950s, and tell of lives lived in locations as different as Canada, Australia, and British East Africa (now Kenya), places that variously proved to be confining and/or liberating. By narrating the ways in which identity adapts to and is transformed by a new environment, these texts provide access to the construction and alteration of the self in relation to place. This study probes this process by using the concept of place, rather than the more conventional one of time, as the dominant category of analysis.
My readings are both intertextual and interdisciplinary: they rely on theorizing by sociologists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between place and identity, studies on the same subject by literary scholars, and formulations by women’s autobiography theorists. My investigation reveals, among other discoveries, that the gender-specific aspects of the process of adaptation persistently centre on the notion of homecoming and that they are articulated with reference to the figure of the mother.