Neta Gordon

English Language & Literature

Associate Professor
PhD Queen's

2011 Brock University Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, Humanities

Areas of Specialization

Neta Gordon wrote her dissertation on Canadian women writing genealogical narratives, and has published on both Ann-Marie MacDonald and Barbara Gowdy's work within this context. Her current area of research is in Canadian literary responses to World War One as written by non-combatants, focusing on contemporary novels and plays. She is interested in theorizing how distance between the events of war and a literary response is dealt with, and the way this literature confronts the Canadian myth of the Great War as it evolves over time and interacts with notions of national identity. Her article on Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers, published in Studies in Canadian Literature, examines the links between processes of mourning and public acts of commemoration, while her article on Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road, examines how the time structures in that novel operate within theoretical frameworks of commemoration and redress.

Selected recent publications

 " 'Of inkling, of implication': John Gould's Kilter: 55 fictions as a short story cycle." The Journal of the Short Story in English, Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle 54 (2010).

"Intimate and Conditional: Artistic Gesture in Jane Urquhart's False Shuffles, The Underpainter and A Map of Glass." Resurgence in Jane Urquhart's Oeuvre. Eds. Heliane Daziron-Ventura and Marta Dvorak. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010.  

"Time Structures and the Healing Aesthetic of Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road." Studies in Canadian Literature 33.1 (2008).

"Sacrificial Pets and Maternal Instinct in Gloria Sawai's 'Mother's Day' and Barbara Gowdy's Falling Angels." Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal 33.1 (2008). 

"Charted Territory: Canadian Literature by Women, the Genealogical Plot, and SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe." Narrative 14.2 (2006).

"Barbara Gowdy and the Sanctity of Love." Descant 132 (2006).

"Symbol, Postmodern Allegory and the Sacred Witness in Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone." Canadian Literature 85 (2005) 

"Twin Tales: Narrative Profusion and Genealogy in Fall on Your Knees." Canadian Review of American Studies 35:2 (2005)

"The Artist and the Witness: Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers." Studies in Canadian Literature 28.2 (2003)