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- Title
Sundance Style: Dancing with Cowboys in Aritha van Herk's (New) West.
- Authors
Roberts, Katherine Ann
- Abstract
Aritha van Herk's writing—fiction and non-fiction—constitutes one of the defining aspects of Canadian western letters of the last 20 years. Of the multiple Wests at work in her oeuvre, her playful reimaginings of the mythic West / American Wild West (e.g., the romancing of force and violence at the celebrated Calgary Stampede chuckwagon races or her "deconstruction" of the Marlboro Man) have, however, received scant attention from critics. This article will attempt to remedy this critical oversight by exploring the representation of this mythic West as it appears in four of her most recent performance pieces and short stories: "A Fondness for the Bay" (1998), "Washtub Westerns" (2004), "Shooting a Saskatoon (Whatever Happened to the Marlboro Man?)" (2005), and "Leading the Parade" (2006). The author's purpose here is thus to examine the intersection of gender and the West in these less-studied texts, but also to use them as an inspiration for "the poetics of the crossing"—that is, the development of a specifically North American approach to Canadian literature that posits the Canadian imaginary not in deference to but in relation to the American.
- Subjects
WESTERN Canada; WASHTUB Westerns (Short story); FONDNESS for the Bay, A (Short story); SHOOTING a Saskatoon (Whatever Happened to the Marlboro Man?) (Short story); LEADING the Parade (Short story); VAN Herk, Aritha, 1954-; CANADIAN fiction; CANADIAN literature; LITERARY criticism; 20TH century fiction
- Publication
Journal of Canadian Studies, 2010, Vol 44, Issue 3, p26
- ISSN
0021-9495
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.3138/jcs.44.3.26