The Interplay Between The Local and The Global in Douglas Coupland’s Shampoo Planet


Yazıcıoğlu S.

Pamukkale Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, sa.26, ss.406-418, 2017 (Hakemli Dergi)

Özet

Many scholars of contemporary Canadian literature have maintained that authors do not mark the elements of fiction with the Canadian national identity. Furthermore, they argue that contemporary authors employ predominantly American settings and characters rather than Canadian ones. As a result, they question the ‘Canadianness’ of contemporary Canadian fiction. This essay focuses on one of such authors, namely Douglas Coupland, and analyses his novel Shampoo Planet in order to demonstrate how it deconstructs the Canadian literary canon by the author’s use of local and global settings, which are illustrated with various locations in the United States, Canada and Europe. In contrast to this critical postulate, Coupland illustrates the possibilities of a highly porous space. Through the protagonist’s perspective, Coupland finally imagines a spatial representation of Canada in which national identity requires a new definition in the age of globalization.