Customer Reviews (1)

A Confession
Look, I am biased. I took his class in my freshman year of college. But I was a poor student who needed to fufill a humanities credit, and from the description of the course booklet, it seemed vaguely interesting.

But there are a few things you need to consider about me, the reviewer:

Due to my overwhelming and stupid class schedule, I was sleeping poorly and thus (since his class was in the morning) I either skipped it or slept in the back of the lecture hall. But I made sure to read this very book and attend the TA sessions.
Despite my lack of time spent on the class itself, I managed to learn quite a lot of things from this book and the professor, Richard Handler.

One, I learned about the contradictory nature of "perservation" and the use of assigning organic qualities to a "culture." I am sure other people can go into this with more eloquence than I can provide at the present time (particularly since I have not read the book in 6 years, but I will correct that.) I also learned about the Western chauvinism that leads people to paint "primitive cultures" as "Stone Age" and not as "Contemporary."

Anyhow, buy the darn book, people. Maybe you can learn something. Or if you are going to UVA, take his class. He's a great professor. Yeah, I slept through quite a bit of his lectures, but he always managed to wake me up when he started to get angry at the injustices of the world and then he would start to curse and rant and yell. Dang, I would think. This prof really believes in his stuff. He's passionate for one thing, and I think that's a good thing in a professor, a writer, and a thinker. ... Read more

Product Description
This study examines the ways in which two highly distinct social groups - Gaelic-speaking crofters from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides and French-speaking habitants from south of Quebec City - adapted to a common physical environment in the rugged Appalachian plateau of south-eastern Quebec. The author focuses on settlement patterns, population expansion and mobility, family structure and inheritance, farm production and labour, the role played by local merchants and millers, and the cultural significance of religion and education. He documents the differences which can be traced to ethnic origin, but also emphasizes the many similarities which characterized the adjustment of the two groups. Economic development in this geographical area was severely restricted by thin soil, rugged topography and a brutally short growing season, coupled with the government's favouritism towards monopolistic lumber companies. Two viable communities did, nevertheless, take root, each drawing heavily on traditional cultural values and a history of economic resourcefulness in order to survive in an era of emerging industrial capitalism. ... Read more

Product Description
Few studies of imposed social change and minority education have considered the effects of nationalist and self-initiated social change on schooling. This book explores the impact of 20 years of such efforts. Following an overview and analysis of the historical, socio-economic and political forces which have shaped Quebecois cultural identity and their educational system, the author presents an ethnographic case study of two secondary schools and the surrounding community in a predominantly French-speaking, lower-middle-class district of Montreal. The focus is on how socio-economic and educational changes have affected the classroom behavior, perceptions, and aspirations of Quebecois students-particularly in the light of the subtle yet persistant gap in school achievement between English and French-speaking students. ... Read more

Product Description
In his 1963 debut essay for the militant Quebec journal, Patri pris,André Brochu invoked the figure of the sixteenth century skeptic Michel de Montaigne in the name of what Ralph Waldo Emerson, responding to the same over a century early, had called, "an original relation to the universe"--"Écrire," wrote Brochu, "c'est redéfinir la relation originelle do l'homme à l'univers, c'est, comm émagnifquement Montaigne, 'faire l'homme'…" By tracing the idealism of 19th century American and 20th century Quebec writers back to Montaigne and his rejection of Aristotelian and Scholastic reason, The Renaissance of Impasse offers an alternate history to that found in much (Post) Romantic criticism, wherein modern skepticism tens to be identified with, and so in a sense confined to, the project of Enlightenment reason Rey works from Thomas Carlyle, Emerson and Herman Melville to Huber Aquin, Réjean Ducharme and Victory-Lévy Beasulieu serve to define and to refine the sense of an impasse--peronal, cultural, spiritual, historica,l and political--which accompanies the "modern" drive to renaissance. ... Read more

Product Description
Nationalist movements in Scotland and Quebec are enjoying a resurgence. "Hierarchies of Belonging" explores the construction of national identity and nationalism and its effect on how citizens of Scotland and Quebec understand their relationship to the nation and the state. Ailsa Henderson analyses each nation's linguistic, racial, cultural, economic, and political diversity within a historical and contemporary context. Challenging the assumption that nationalism in Scotland can be characterized as "civic" in contrast to an "ethnic" model in Quebec, Henderson adopts a more complex model of national identity that distinguishes between nationalistic rhetoric, which is invariably civic in form, and public understandings of belonging, which tend to rely on ethnic markers. In "Hierarchies of Belonging" she demonstrates that nationalist rhetoric and a sense of belonging affect how citizens feel about the state, the nation, and each other. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Dollars & Sense, published by Economic Affairs Bureau on July 1, 2001. The length of the article is 839 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: ACTIVE CULTURE.(Quebec free trade protest)(Brief Article)
Author: Jennifer C. Berkshire
Publication: Dollars & Sense (Newsletter)
Date: July 1, 2001
Publisher: Economic Affairs Bureau
Page: 6

Article Type: Brief Article

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
Screening Québec explores the connections between Québécois moving images, national identity and the role played by film, television and video practices in the construction and perpetuation of alternative public spheres in Québécois culture. Beginning with the groundbreaking work of Québécois silent film pioneer Léo-Ernest Ouimet, MacKenzie goes on to explore the influential Pathé's presence in Québec. He then looks at such elements as the first French language features in Canada, cinéma direct, the video activism of Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle and the "post-referendum" cinema of Denys Arcand and Robert Lepage.
... Read more