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From the archives

Boundary Issues

Have Canadians and Americans become the same people?

Horror Undimmed

A feminist scholar investigates the place of the Montreal massacre in our collective memory

Who Controls North America?

Today, even the U.S. government is just one of many players

Noreen Golfman

Noreen Golfman is the provost and vice-president (academic) pro tem at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Articles by
Noreen Golfman

Celluloid Cities

The downtown visions of filmmakers from Arcand and Egoyan to Shum March 2015
Once upon a time the paradigm of Canadian film history located the documentary as the foundational genre, and the rural, whether dense wilderness or vast, largely unpeopled landscape, as the foundational subject. Funded at first by the Canadian Pacific Railway at the turn of the last century and then by the National Film Board just before and then during the Second World…

Glee in the Darkness

Wayne Johnston returns to St. John’s for a tour de force performance January–February 2014
Something outrageous is going on here. Perse Joyce, the narrator of Wayne Johnston’s powerful new novel, The Son of a Certain Woman, is literally a marked boy—stained purple by birth, with a swollen lower lip, and outsized hands and feet that not only brand him a freak of the town but also make him vulnerable to the taunts of young bullies and the disdain of their…

Beautiful Losers

How a Canadian film masterpiece got waylaid by cultural criticism … and then rediscovered January–February 2013
Two young guys with thick hair, dressed like extras in Rebel without a Cause, are roaring down the open road in a 1960 Chevy Impala convertible. Eager to see their Maritime home recede in their rear-view mirror, and with only $26 in their pockets, they are heading directly for the Toronto of…

Fairy Tales for Men

Winnipeg director Guy Maddin is one of Canada's most challenging auteurs January–February 2011
My library of Canadian film books is not much larger now than it was when I first started studying the subject more decades ago than I care to remember. At least in English Canada, the list of major works about Canadian filmmakers has been fairly modest. Shorter articles on the subject are more abundant, of course, and anyone working in a post-secondary film studies program would be able to track down a respectable number of essays about individual…

Bleak Island

L.M. Montgomery’s rediscovered “final” work is shot through with tragedy and loss. November 2009

An Outsider's Eye

Newfoundland culture as defined from without and within. October 2008
It was late May 1997 and Memorial University was hosting the annual Learneds congress for the humanities and social sciences. Over the course of a week, about 5,000 academics had gathered to listen to papers, reconnect with mentors and old friends and take in the sights. Typical of the time of year, massive icebergs floated down the Labrador seas in time to impress the…