Van Gogh's writing can remind us of similar effects in the paintings, the differences in audience and intent notwithstanding. Though meant for public viewing, the paintings (like the letters) are often disturbingly confessional and personally revealing; though written for private purposes, the letters, (like the paintings) are often of broad human interest. Van Gogh's lack of finish, the roughness and imperfection that lie at the far side of technical skill (and are not to be mistaken for lack of technical skill) communicate something essential to his vision, his always unfinished search to know and communicate "what most makes me a human being."

Excerpt from The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film edited by Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty

From the Introduction

This collection (1) came about in response to the following question: How do changing ideas of memory affect how we think about texts, whether literary, filmic, or in some other medium? By framing an approach to memory informed by post-structuralist theories of the subject, language, and representation, we assert that memory, like history, is understood to be a discursive construct. This position, which in the twenty-first century sounds outdated, remains in our view the most radical and therefore the most valuable in terms of the insight it allows into the ontology and epistemology of memory today, insofar as this is not an understanding of memory as discursive-textual construct in a second-order sense, as in classical or early modern conceptions of an “art of memory” distinct from memory as a “natural” faculty or capacity of the mind. Classical theorists such as Cicero saw memory as a rhetorical category, and artificial memory therefore as something to be learned through the mental construction of a memory palace inside one's head. This pre-modern model is predicated upon the two longest-standing metaphors of memory as storage place and as system of inscription (see, e. g. , Yates, Carruthers, Frow), by which relatively complex assemblages of information can be deposited, recollected, reordered, and reproduced at will. Centuries of cultural and technological —not to speak of cognitive and neurological—development have resulted in a world in which it is now possible to walk around with a USB key or “flash drive” in one's pocket or briefcase, containing as much information as the Library of Congress—enough data, in short, to consume several lifetimes of learning or of practical application. For most of us today this is what memory is, in a first-order sense, or rather in a sense that transcends any “natural”-technical binary: an external, prosthetic storage tool, operating on its own or as part of another machine (camera, laptop, cellphone, tablet, e-reader), entirely distinct from the “natural” human sensorium, the physically embodied mental “self,” yet already indispensible, a crucial component in what is emerging as a wholly new kind of cyber- or post-human interface, yielding never-before-possible subjectivities and modalities of identity. This, at least, is the utopian scenario; a more cynical view sees in this tendency the colonization of memory as an always already artificial technology, but where, in a symptomatically postmodern irony, the loss of the distinction between “natural” and technically enhanced memory is to be nostalgically mourned. We would not be the first to point out that for many people today the “natural” memory is employed primarily in the second-order task of storing and retrieving (or not) the knowledge of how to retrieve the mind-bogglingly vast quantities of information now available via various digital media platforms.

Excerpt from the Introduction of The Newfoundland Diaspora: Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration by Jennifer Delisle

While many Canadian provinces, particularly other Atlantic provinces, have experienced out-migration for similar reasons, 1 Newfoundland's population loss stands out for its sheer numbers, at times reaching a net rate of more than 6 percent of Newfoundlanders aged five and older (Statistics Canada). Moreover, this statistic does not include the significant amount of seasonal migration that brings Newfoundland labourers back and forth several times a year. As of 2003, Newfoundland's expatriate community was estimated at a total of 220, 000 (Royal Commission i)—a staggering number considering that the province's population in that year was just 512, 500. This long period of population loss may finally be slowing; in 2008 and 2009 the province experienced a brief population increase for the first time in fifteen years (Statistics Canada). Yet census data since then again show an annual population loss to out-migration. The province's unemployment rate remains the highest in the country, at 13 percent as of June 2012 (Statistics Canada).

Out-migration has not been limited to former fishers or young blue-collar labourers. Professionals and artists have also left. Others have left in search of better education. Aging parents have followed their children to their new hometowns in Toronto or Fort McMurray in a “second wave” of out-migration (Royal Commission 39). While not every Newfoundlander's reasons for leaving are the same, together they have formed a culture of out-migration, in which leaving is often expected or considered inevitable, and in which returning is a powerful but often unfulfilled dream. Together, these migrants constitute a Newfoundland diaspora.

This book examines how this diaspora has impacted Newfoundland literature, both as the subject of much of the work and as a condition from which many writers write. In Newfoundland, critics have explicitly connected the development of a distinct literature to the massive change resulting from Confederation, the government resettlement program of the 1940s and '50s, and the collapse of the fishery (Gwyn; Rompkey,”Colonial”). This book argues that much of Newfoundland's current literary production is also a result of, or a response to, diaspora. The idea of a “Newfoundland diaspora” does not just refer to the post-cod-moratorium outflux, then, but to a larger social phenomenon that has shaped Newfoundland literature and culture. Malcolm Macleod's review of Helen M. Buss / Margaret Clarke's Memoirs from Away suggests the way in which the Newfoundland diaspora can be considered in terms of a broad literary history: “'Memoirs from away' is the title of this one book, but it is a fitting label for a whole category of writing about Newfoundland. While Newfoundlanders have been massively re-locating themselves in North America for 120 years, literary elements in the diaspora have often penned accounts of displacement, adjustment and nostalgia for a distant, past homeland” (98). This migrant literary tradition can be traced back to the early twentieth century and the poetry of E. J. Pratt and the stories and essays of the Montreal-based magazine The Atlantic Guardian. Contemporary narratives of out-migration also frequently locate themselves within a long historical diasporic trajectory, so that Wayne Johnston's memoir of family and displacement, Baltimore's Mansion, for example, looks back at the retreat of one of the colony's first settlers, Lord Baltimore, as the beginning of a social pattern. In this book, then, rather than moving chronologically through the texts, I take a comparative approach, examining how diaspora influences writers of diverse eras and genres, and how diasporic subjectivity intersects with the theoretical flashpoints of affect, authenticity, nationalism, and ethnicity.

No translation is an innocent, transparent rendering of the original.