- November 6, 2013
The University of Manitoba Press invites you to join us for the launch of Robert Zacharias’ Rewriting the Break Event. The event will also feature a reading by John Weier. Light refreshments will be served.
When: Wednesday, November 6, 7:00 pm
Where: McNally Robinson Booksellers Winnipeg, Atrium
Cost: FREE
About the Book
Despite the fact that Russian Mennonites began arriving in Canada en masse in the 1870s, much Canadian Mennonite literature has been characterized by a compulsive telling and retelling of the fall of the Mennonite Commonwealth of the 1920s and its subsequent migration of 20,000 Russian Mennonites to Canada. This privileging of a seminal dispersal, or “break event,” within the broader historic narrative has come to function as a mythological beginning or origin story for the Russian Mennonite community in Canada, and serves as a means of affirming a communal identity across national and generational boundaries.
Drawing on recent work in diaspora studies, Rewriting the Break Event offers close readings of five novels that retell the Mennonite break event through specific narrative strains, including religious narrative (Al Reimer’s My Harp is Turned to Mourning), ethnic narrative (Arnold Dyck’s Lost in the Steppe), trauma narrative (Sandra Birdsell’s The Russländer), and meta-narrative (Rudy Wiebe’s Blue Mountains of China). The result is an exciting new methodology through which to examine not only the shifting contours of Mennonite collective identity but also the discourse of migrant and minoritized writing in Canada.
About the Author
Robert Zacharias is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. He is the associate editor of the Journal of Mennonite Studies, and co-editor, with Smaro Kamboureli, of Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies.
John Weier was born on the broad prairie but grew up on a small peach farm in Southern Ontario. Recent Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence at the University of Winnipeg and the author of thirteen books in a variety of genres—poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, children’s; he’s still pushing out those small farm boundaries. John works in Winnipeg as a writer and luthier.
