“How a Girl from Canada Break the Bigtime”: Esi Edugyan and the Next Generation of Literary Celebrity in Canada
Abstract: Esi Edugyan’s experience with literary celebrity, prize culture, and publishing companies at home and abroad, has much to tell us about how new generations of literary celebrities are affected by the ascendancy of neoliberal economic policies that are shaking the publishing world. Unlike previous generations of Canadian literary celebrities such as Atwood and Ondaatje, who were drawn to alternative, small-scale modes of production (House of Anansi and Coach House Presses, respectively), Edugyan’s generation, beneficiaries of new social media and an explosion of alternative platforms for sharing their work, are, ironically, under greater pressure much earlier in their careers to leave smaller-scale outlets behind for mainstream success. As the story of Edugyan’s publishing history to date shows, the industry’s thirst for the kind of mainstream success that might keep their operations afloat (bestsellers bankrolling the production of more modest-selling books) has the effect of delegitimizing alternative modes of production. And when the winning of a major literary prize like the Giller or Man Booker opens the doors to lucrative publishing deals with major presses, this only serves to emphasize, by contrast, the conflicted positions out of which only a few of these new writers emerge. In the case of Esi Edugyan, this situation is complicated by the way in which her two novels to date—The Second Life of Samuel Tyne in 2004 and Half-Blood Blues in 2011—meditate on celebrity, greatness, giftedness and obscurity. Accordingly, my analysis will attend both to Edugyan’s experiences in the worlds of publishing, news media and prize culture and to her literary engagement with celebrity culture, for her novels open up spaces in which she may contemplate, even if indirectly, the complicated legacies of celebrity culture.
“I Carve My Stories Every Day”: An Interview with Richard Van Camp
Abstract: In this interview, the Dogrib author, storyteller, and educator from the Northwest Territories, Richard Van Camp, talks to a Belgian doctoral candidate, Sylvie Vranckx. The very first Dogrib author, Van Camp has been praised for bringing sophisticated new forms to contemporary Aboriginal, Arctic, and Canadian literatures. He talks extensively among other things about his comic book on sexual health, Kiss Me Deadly, and about his new collections of short stories, The Moon of Letting Go and the forthcoming Godless but Loyal to Heaven. By writing about the stories which break his heart, he highlights the impact of ongoing colonialism in the North, underlining the resilience of his characters and the complex moral issues surrounding evil and internalized violence in communities plagued by psychosocial despair. In striving to face “the hard issues” with words, he enlists the help of characters who walk into his life, such as his Dogrib Holden Caulfield Larry Sole and his “gladiators”: the philosophical thug Torchy and the ninja wannabe Bear. Van Camp compares his art to a process of carving which he practices every day, working on many different sculptures at the same time and polishing them with the help of tough editors. He stresses the ceremonial aspects of his narratives, by which he is “led into a field where anything could happen,” and reminds us that everybody’s words and actions carry good or bad medicine power. For him, stories can transform hardships and trauma into healing: they are “the best medicine” to teach, empower, and re-create.
“I diverge / you diverge / we diverge”: Scale, Occupation, and an Introduction to Stephen Collis’ The Barricades Project
Abstract: This essay examines the work of the contemporary, innovative Canadian poet Stephen Collis. This essay investigates Collis’s Anarchive (2005) and his later book The Commons (2008), works that when taken together comprise two parts of his Barricades Project. The correlated work of this Canadian poet points toward a current moment in Canadian art when the innovative writing practices have begun to examine the role of Canadian culture within the urban space of “globalized capitalism.” This essay points out how Collis has designed a poetry that enacts a hope for social change within the public, urban space. Taken together, this essay suggests the extent to which architecture impacts contemporary poetry’s aesthetic design, doing so in order to argue that the contemporary, innovative poetry makes use of an architectural sensibility in order to articulate poetry’s participation within the civic realm of the public space.
“I questioned authority and the question won”: Transnational Muscle Cars and the Neoliberal Order
Abstract: West Coast poet Jeff Derksen is a leading critic of the relationship between neoliberalism and culture and literature in Canada, but his engagement with neoliberalism extends to his creative work as well, particularly his 2003 poetry collection Transnational Muscle Cars. Drawing on examples from across the range of the collection, this article examines how—for all its hyper-referential elusiveness, ambivalence, and ambiguity—a key part of the texture of Transnational Muscle Cars is an incisive grappling with the economic, political, cultural and existential dimensions of the neoliberal order.
“Infiltrate as Cells”: The Biopolitically Ethical Subject of sybil unrest
Abstract:
In sybil unrest, Rita Wong and Larissa Lai bring the techniques of avant-garde formalism and the sensibility of the transnational subject together in their project to "re-subject" the "i." Their book-length poem is a sharp critique of twenty-first century local-global scales of capital flow that provocatively proposes the figure of the Asian female body as a more robust figure of humanist universality than, say, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. This playful provocation is not quite a call to a representational coup, but an illumination of the cultural specificity of wholisms underwriting discourses of species and interspecies interaction. In their pursuit of a strategy of ethical (self)-representation,Wong and Lai fortuitously produce a critique of “human” as the species and identity category whose ideological underpinnings inform and are informed by Euro- and androcentric post-Enlightenment humanist values. Ultimately, Wong and Lai propose political action as occurring at the moments where the subject literally composes herself—nutrionally, affectively and narratively—as living material.
“It is life you must write about”: Fixity and Refraction in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
Abstract: Though many discussions of diaspora emphasize metaphors of mobility, Brand’s Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging uses moments of fixity and excess to think through the epistemological and embodied effects of the history and ongoing effects of slavery and to challenge the limitations of dominant readings of these approaches. To make this argument, I read Map in relation to auto/biography studies to see the parallel ways in which it emphasizes the importance of “illegitimate” sites of knowledge, but I then move to emphasize the moments that the text exceeds the genre of auto/biography when Brand moves to write about larger scale histories and memories to which she would not have literal access, but to which she certainly has experiential access. Relatedly, I consider the ways that the text uses fixity to emphasize how histories are written on the body, whether they were directly experienced or not.
“Liv[ing] Poetically upon the Earth”: The Bioregional Child and Conservation in Monique Proulx’s Wildlives
Abstract: A child’s positive attitude towards his surrounding environment, as Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd express in their collection on children’s culture and ecocriticism, becomes crucial in the act of environmental planning and activism; and this paper will explore that very connection by following the Canadian child figure’s growth to maturity in Québécoise writer Monique Proulx’s Wildlives. By tracing the formative moments in young Jérémie’s environmental experience, the personal change and self-discovery he undergoes deeply informs the role he will be inspired to take up as an adult—to become a caretaker of nature through the act of conservation. In understanding his connection with his surrounding environment, Jérémie’s emergent feelings of responsibility towards the natural world accentuates the powerful hold the wild places of childhood can have on our sense of self, sense of place, and sense of duty to the very bioregion that shapes those ideas.
“Men break when things like that happen”: On Indigenous Masculinities in Katherena Vermette’s The Break
Abstract: Katherena Vermette’s award-winning debut novel, The Break, tells the story of the horrific rape of Emily Traverse, a young Métis ...
“Now, my Boy, Listen to Daddy”: William Arthur Deacon and His Influence on the Governor General’s Literary Awards
Abstract: The Governor General’s Literary Awards were created in 1936 and run by the Canadian Authors Association until 1959. During this period in Canadian literature, the concept of Canadian authorship was being heavily interrogated, with the C.A.A. often disagreeing with modernist writers. This essay argues that during these twenty-five years, the C.A.A.—and more specifically William Arthur Deacon—attempted to use the awards to encourage authors and literature that supported their ideology of authorship. Specifically, Deacon attempted to influence the judging of the awards to champion middlebrow writing, living wages for authors, and a national literary culture, and in doing so, attempted to discourage highbrow, modernist literature.
“Shifting Ground”: Breaking (from) Baudrillard’s “Code” in Autobiography of Red
Abstract: This paper reframes Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red in the context of Jean Baudrillard’s “Fetishism and Ideology” (1970) in order to locate the tensions experienced by her protagonist, Geryon, between interiority and exteriority, the self and the world. Carson’s anxiety about the link between representation and reality is expressed in Geryon’s relationship to writing, which simultaneously recognizes and denies the gap between a (potentially) resistant interiority and an ever-encroaching exterior reality. I trace how the imbrication of subject and object makes Geryon’s writing of his autobiography gradually impossible, leading him to turn to the photographic essay as a means of realizing a more productive synthesis of interior and exterior worlds.