The Department of Canadian Heritage, or simply Canadian Heritage (French: Patrimoine canadien), is the department of the Government of Canada that has roles and responsibilities related to initiatives that promote and support "Canadian identity and values, cultural development, and heritage."The department is administered by the Deputy Minister, currently Hélène Laurendeau, who is appointed by the Governor in Council, and it reports directly to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, who is currently Pablo Rodríguez.Under its current mandate, the jurisdiction of Canadian Heritage encompasses, but is not limited to, jurisdiction over: the promotion of human rights, fundamental freedoms and related values; multiculturalism; the arts; cultural heritage and industries, including performing arts, visual and audio-visual arts, publishing, sound recording, film, video, and literature; national battlefields; the encouragement, promotion, and development of sport; the advancement of official bilingualism; state ceremonial and Canadian symbols; broadcasting, except in regards to spectrum management and the technical aspects of broadcasting; the development of cultural policy, including such policy as it relates to foreign investment and copyright; the conservation, exportation and importation of cultural property; the organization, sponsorship, and promotion of public activities and events, in the National Capital Region, that will "enrich the cultural and social fabric of Canada;" and national museums, archives and libraries.To fulfill these tasks, the department coordinates a portfolio of several agencies and corporations that operate in a similar area of interest. While the roles and responsibilities of Canadian Heritage have remained relatively constant over the years, the department and composition of its portfolio remain in flux due to continuing structural changes.
Japanese crime fiction enjoyed a golden age in the 1920s and 1930s, with the emergence of a first generation of writers who established an “indigenous” genre while intense debates about its definition erupted. Yet this effervescence should not conceal a growing malaise: Shupio, the last specialist detective magazine, folded in 1938, and some writers turned to less politically problematic genres (espionage, adventure, science fiction). The Japanese detective genre is thus highly dependent on the political context in the archipelago. The birth of the detective fiction field at the end of the 19th century was symbolized by a very democratic freedom: authors created works that sometimes departed greatly from the literary canons of the genre. This effervescence was challenged by the rise of militarism from the 1930s onwards. But while the organisational structure disappeared at the same time as democracy in the early 1940s, examples show that some writers tried to get other messages across, going against the war-mongering and anti-democratic rhetoric.
Whether it is in the wake of a “Return to the Real” in visual arts” (Foster 1996), of “Reality Hunger” (Shields 2010), a number of novelists of the third millennium have shown an ever growing interest in accommodating the forms of the real into their fictions. For a certain category of novels, the fascination for the real translates into considerable changes brought to the novel’s inherent relation with time. As shown by Peter Boxall, the speed and instantaneity that are specific to our 21st century seems to be counterbalanced in a certain number of novels by an infinite attention to the slow passing moments of our everyday reality (2013, 1–18). This article focuses on three novels that revisit the forms of the Künstlerroman in the 21st century (Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station, 2011; Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life, 2012; Kate Zambreno, Drifts, 2020) and looks at the strategies used by their narrators to grasp the elusive nature of the transient real while in the process redefining the novel as a site where to explore formal possibilities rather than as a set of generic constraints.
