While reading and discussing Maus, Art Spiegelman’s comic about his father’s experiences as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust and Spiegelman’s own experiences interviewing his father, I thought about the way Spiegelman uses the combination of words and art to “approximate a ‘mental language’ that is closer to actual human thought than either words or […]
Whilst reading Maggie de Vries’s Missing Sarah and Wally Oppal’s Forsaken, two very different approaches to the subject of the missing women of the Downtown Eastside, I was troubled by ideas surrounding the depiction and representation of people, particularly marginalised groups, who had already died. Missing Sarah, Maggie de Vries’s life narrative about her sister […]
Fred Wah’s biotext, Diamond Grill, is a semi-fictional account of his life growing up mixed race in small-town BC in the 1950s. Wah’s grandfather is a Chinese man who moves to Canada in adulthood and marries a white woman; Wah’s father is half-Chinese and half-white, grew up in China, and lives his adult life in […]
In Eli Pariser’s TedTalk “Beware Filter Bubbles”, Pariser talks about his hopes, as a youth, for the internet and its ability to push democracy and society’s ability to connect. Ted.com’s description for the video emphasises Pariser’s theory of the “filter bubble”, his metaphor for the internet world that is tailored to each user’s presumed preferences […]