Reconstructing National Identity

Karin Ikas is an Associate Professor of English, North American and Postcolonial Studies. She studied at the universities of Würzburg (Germany) and Texas (UT Austin) and was a visiting scholar at various universities in the USA, Canada, South Africa and Australia. She received her Ph.D. in English and North American Studies and Didactics at Würzburg University with overall excellence (summa cum laude). Her doctoral thesis on modern Chicana Literature won the Daimler Chrysler Foundation’s "Academy Award for Intercultural Studies 2001." Her Habilitation she obtained in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main (Germany). Homi K. Bhabha (Harvard) prefaced her co-edited book Communicating in the Third Space.

• What is a Nation? – The Construction of National Identity – (The Tradition of) Inventing the Canadian Nation – Inventing the Nation Forged in Fire – The World at War: The First World War as the Great War – Canada at War: The First World War as Hotbed for Inventing the Canadian Nation – The Nation Forged in Fire-Myth in Contemporary Memorial Culture – The Literary Reconstruction of the Canadian Nation Forged in Fire – Concussion and a Translocation of the Nation’s Birthplace: Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising – The Paradoxical Community of Isolated Individuals: Timothy Findley’s The Wars – The Returned Soldiers’ Need for Community: Jack Hodgins’ Broken Ground – The Canadian National Vimy Memorial and a New Epic Tale of the Birth of the Nation: Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers – The (Dis)Ability Issue: Frances Itani’s Deafening – The Native Point of View: Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road