Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature

by Amelia DeFalco

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

Sales Date: 2016-04-08

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Published: April 2016

Product Details

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

Page Count: 232 Pages

Dimensions: 6.00 x 9.00

232 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in

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CA$37.95

ISBN: 9781442637047

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Imagining Care brings literature and philosophy into dialogue by examining caregiving in literature by contemporary Canadian writers alongside ethics of care philosophy. Through close readings of fiction and memoirs by Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ignatieff, Ian Brown, and David Chariandy, Amelia DeFalco argues that these narratives expose the tangled particularities of relations of care, dependency, and responsibility, as well as issues of marginalisation on the basis of gender, race, and class.

DeFalco complicates the myth of Canada as an unwaveringly caring nation that is characterized by equality and compassion. Caregiving is unpredictable: one person’s altruism can be another’s narcissism; one’s compassion, another’s condescension or even cruelty. In a country that conceives of itself as a caring society, these texts depict in stark terms the ethical dilemmas that arise from our attempts to respond to the needs of others.

Amelia DeFalco is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University and the author of Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative. In 2009 she received the Polanyi Prize for literature from the Government of Ontario.

Introduction: Literature, Care, and Canada

Chapter 1. Embedded and Embodied: Caregiving, Life Writing and the Myth of the Autonomous Individual

Chapter 2. Moral Obligation, Disordered Care: The Ethics of Caregiving in Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder

Chapter 3. Caring for Relative Others: Alterity and Narrative in Michael Ignatieff’s Scar Tissue

Chapter 4. “Parodies of Love”: Demands of Care in Alice Munro

Chapter 5. Caregiving and Caretaking: Affective Economies in Alice Munro

Chapter 6. Forgetting and the Forgotten: Care at the Margins in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant

Conclusion: Imagining The Future of Care

‘It is a fine, thought-provoking, and eminently suggestive study… DeFalco undertakes important work in studying care and its effects – not only those effects necessary and desirable, but also those precarious and perilous-on the many who require care and the many others called on to be their caregivers.’
David Staines, Modern Fiction Studies vol 63:04:2017

"Imagining Care is a well-written and well-researched book that considers ethical dilemmas in Canadian literature and argues for a reconsideration of the notion that Canada is unquestionably benevolent…The book is an excellent addition to the corpus of critical work on Canadian literature. It points to ways in which writing in Canada addresses urgent questions on the complexities of ethics and care."
Laura K. Davis, Red Deer College, University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018

"DeFalco enacts a feminist critique that connects ethical philosophies of care to literary representations of caregiving."
Sirhiy Bilenky, David Eso, Canadian Literature 232 Spint 2017

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Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature

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