SOURCE: Hunter, Lynette. “Language Strategies: Personal Memory As Public History.” In Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology, Writers/Readers, and Publishing, pp. 231-71. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Hunter discusses issues of historical, linguistic, and national representation in postcolonial Canadian literature and provides analysis of Marlatt's feminist reinterpretation of women's sexuality, historical imagination, and personal memory in her poetry and in Ana Historic.

The three writers to whom I now turn are different because they focus on language rather than genre, although in no way exclusively. Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt and bpNichol are each concerned with a radical destabilizing of the representative media for ideology that encourages notions of a fixed identity and the private individual. At the same time they are also concerned with the construction of closeness that builds communication or communicative groups made up of interacting individuals with different grounds for action...