This bold new theoretical study explores dissident subjectivity, that is, the struggle for unique authorial identity in American literary discourse that has existed, according to David Jarraway, since the Romantics. From Emerson's Experience remarking upon the focal distance within the actual horizon of human life to Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize address sanctifying the artist's sophisticated privileged space, American literature has continuously recognized a necessary distance between culturally accepted ideas of selfhood and the intractable reality of the self's never-completed construction...

Over the past forty years, Canadian literature has found its way to the silver screen with increasing regularity. Beginning with the adaptation of Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God to the Hollywood film Rachel, Rachel in 1966, Canadian writing would appear to have found a doubly successful life for itself at the movies: from the critically acclaimed Kamouraska and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in the 1970s through to the award-winning Love and Human Remains and The English Patient in the 1990s. With the more recent notoriety surrounding the...