Settler Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction

White Masculinity and Civility in Contemporary Canadian Short Stories

“…In other words—as with Coleman’s notion of “civility”—Lynch regards the short story cycle as “structurally ambivalent,” whereby the characterization of the genre depends on competing heuristics: short story cycles encourage both a sense of completion and a sense of fragmentation. The structural ambivalence embedded in the short story cycle, argues Lynch, is what accounts for the genre’s prevalence in Canadian literary history (Lynch 2001, 9), and as Kuttainen (2010, 1) notes, the association between what she refers to as “short story composites” and the history of a settler nation such as Canada emerges from a shared preoccupation with “boundary trouble.” Lynch further argues that the formal and thematic uncertainty embedded into short story cycles is most acutely reflected in what he calls “the return story,” for “As much as…return stories tempt with hints of comfortable closure, they often destabilize, resisting closure” (Lynch 2001, 31).…”

“…Further, the representation of masculine reterritorialization is paradoxically represented as a socially progressive response to crisis. Kuttainen (2010, 8) remarks that, in settler narratives, “settlers position themselves in shifting, and sometimes shifty ways alongside images of marginality or centrality, depending on what is at stake”. In representing images of masculine reterritorialization, MacLeod and Christie explore both the marginalization of the Canadian patriarch “in crisis,” and the apparent naturalness of his desire to control space.…”