Call For Papers

This special issue will explore works of contemporary poetic experiment and the conditions within which they are produced. This can include digital/screen poetics; popular forms like hiphop or other “insurgent” music like punk/indie/heavy metal; spoken word/oral.

We are interested in research and criticism into the relationship between formal innovation and political claims. Should one make political claims at all for formally-motivated poetry? Much of this work professes to destabilize naturalized ideological forms, creating previously unarticulated spaces within larger dominant discourses. What can we make of these claims? Does such experimentation merely carry out the brainwork of late capitalism / neoliberalism? That is, do formal innovations in poetics advance the work of capitalism – 1980s disjunction becomes contemporary media streams, the “open” text becomes the digital “hot” link, 1960s poets’ lower-case “i” becomes the iPod/iPhone.

Concerns about the implications of formal experimentation are varied.  Narrowing their critique to the term and the concept of the avant-garde, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy argue that the avant-garde privileges young white male artists and “enacts progressive narratives of modernisms / capitalisms (Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (2006)). Leslie Scalapino, in “Letters to Poets,” Jacket 31 (2006), critiques the assumption that “the elimination of expressivity” is a sound definition for contemporary avant-garde work. She argues that such a conclusion excludes “feminist and Black art” and pushes “formalism to the point of a totalitarian construct.” Stephanie Young and Juliana Spahr address similar concerns in noulipian Analects (2009), questioning the gender politics of constraint poetics within the experimental Oulipo tradition of Anglophone writers.

Consider these discussions and the questions they raise. What constitutes an avant-garde, experimental or radical poetic? Can poetic innovation make any claim toward political activism? Are the terms currently in use (avant-garde, experimental, radical, conceptual) meaningful? Are some more fitting than others and how might these terms work with (or against) postcolonial, aboriginal, feminist, queer, communist, anarchist, or posthuman concerns? If the experimental is so easily plugged into the agendas of late capitalism (from i to iPod), might it be better, as Alan Badiou claims, “to do nothing . . . [rather than] contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which the Empire already recognizes as existent” (“15 theses on contemporary art” Lacanian Ink 23. 2004)? Or not?

Note: As this edition is dedicated to the study of structurally innovative texts, submissions that challenge the boundaries of the conventional paper will be considered as well as those taking more standard approaches.

Essays should follow the submission guidelines of the journal: canlit.ca/submit

Cover letters should indicate that the article is to be considered for this special issue.

By bringing together a multidisciplinary cast of scholars who work at the intersection of leftist and modernist studies, this special issue will negotiate between competing cultural discourses, allowing their coextensive narratives to engage in dialectical exchange and reanimating debates between leftists and modernists of the early to mid-twentieth century. This dialectical approach seeks to address the conjunctures and contradictions of modernist and leftist cultural formations in interwar, wartime, and Cold War Canada, a dialectic that recognizes the anti-modernism and social-political radicalism of the old left as mediating discourses in the formation of modernist aesthetic practices. Whatever the storied antagonisms between modernists and leftists, and however distorted the retellings by critics and historians of the late twentieth century, new scholarship on literature, theatre, and visual art in early to mid-twentieth-century Canada has shifted over the past decade toward more complex conceptions of the leftist social and political orientations of modernist cultural production.

Contributors to this special issue are invited to submit papers that address a wide dispersion of disciplinary and interdisciplinary interests related to modernisms in Canadian literature. Essays are welcome on the relationship between modernisms in Canadian literature and the social, political, economic, intellectual, and cultural histories of the left. Of particular interest are essays that address, but are not limited to, the following topics in the context of modernist literatures in Canada:

Modernisms and Modernities

• antimodernism, transmodernism, and alternative modernisms
• Anglo-American modernism and other national literatures
• modernisms in other arts

Cultural Formations, Institutions, and Practices

• avant gardes and après gardes
• realisms (social, socialist, proletarian, psychological, documentary)
• romanticisms (revolutionary, radical)
• reportage and journalism
• propaganda and agtiprop
• mass media and new media
• mass, popular, and people’s cultures
• theatres (workers, little, amateur, professional)
• materialist politics of the book
• radical print cultures

Modernism and Radicalism

• Marxism, post-Marxism, and neo-Marxism
• socialism, communism, and anarchism
• anticommunism
• labour movements and unions
• the Popular Front
• the New Left
• Stalinism, Trotskyism, anti-Stalinism
• fascism and anti-fascism
• pacifism and antiwar movements

Locations, Translocations, and Dislocations of Modernism

• geomodernisms
• nationalism and transnationalism
• colonialism, anti-colonialism, and postcolonialism
• diasporas and migrations
• expatriates, exile(s), and expatriation
• globalization and global modernities
• cosmopolitanism and new cosmopolitanisms
• cities, suburbia, and (sub)urbanization
• materialist and human geographies

Modernism and Radical Subjectivities

• classes and class struggles
• multitudes and masses
• races and racisms
• indigeneity and indigenization
• feminisms and masculinities
• New Men, New Women
• sexualities

Essays should follow the submission guidelines of the journal: canlit.ca/submit. Cover letters should indicate that the article is to be considered for the “Old Left, New Modernisms” special issue.

While prison writings from other national contexts have increasingly occupied the attention of critics, little scholarly attention has been paid to Canada’s own prison narratives.  This special issue of Canadian Literature responds to such a critical gap at a historical juncture when the number of those incarcerated in Canada continues to rise.  With the ascendance of the prison as an industrial complex, and with a disproportionately high number of Native people incarcerated by the state, we might consider the “new garrisons” by which the Canadian imaginary organizes itself.

We invite articles that address the lived experience of incarceration as well as the place of the prison in the literary and popular imagination.  From Miriam Waddington’s “The Women’s Jail” to Yvonne Johnson’s and Rudy Wiebe’s Stolen Life, textual versions of prison have served a range of representational goals from metaphorical to testimonial.   The outlaw has long held fascination for Canadian authors and audiences, as evident in Robert Kroetsch’s poetic reflection on Albert Johnson, or in the popularity of true crimes writing such as Roger Caron’s Go Boy!, Stephen Reid’s Jackrabbit Parole, and Micky McArthur’s I’d Rather Be Wanted Than Had.  While some prison writing has focussed on the life leading up to incarceration such as Thrasher: Skid Row Eskimo, Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance, and George and Rue, others reveal more philosophical inclinations, focussing on cultural politics in the genre of prison notebooks such as Nègres blancs d’Amérique and Louis Riel: journaux de guerre et de prison or psychodramas such as Alias Grace and Prochain Episode.  Many retrospective accounts of incriminated figures, such as Shirley Small’s and Afua Cooper’s poetic representations of Marie-Joseph Angélique, politicize the lives, crimes, and punishment of those individuals.

Papers might investigate works by and about political radicals who have been imprisoned, enemy aliens who were interned, migrants who are escaping and recalling prison, and convicted criminals and lifers; stories of halfway houses; residential school narratives; and poems and plays about incarceration.  In addition to examining the formal variants of prison writing and various constructions of the “carceral subject,” essays may focus on such issues as race, class, literacy, prison labour, the prisoner as embodied subject, and the prison as a transnational space.  We also solicit articles that examine the broader implications of theorizing prison literature, including the ethical and epistemological challenges that accompany the study of prisoners’ texts.

Essays should follow the submission guidelines of the journal: www.canlit.ca/submissions.php. Cover letters should indicate that the article is to be considered for this special issue.

Récits de prison/Figures de prison

Éditeurs invités:  Roxanne Rimstead (Université de Sherbrooke) and Deena Rymhs (St. Francis Xavier University)

Quoique les récits de prison provenant d’autres contextes nationaux attirent de plus en plus l’attention de critiques, peu de spécialistes accordent de l’intérêt pour les récits de prison au Canada. Ce numéro spécial de Littérature canadienne vise à combler cette lacune à un moment historique où le nombre de personnes incarcérées au Canada ne cesse d’augmenter. Étant donné que les prisons sont de plus en plus considérées comme des complexes industriels, et au regard du nombre trop élevé d’autochtones qui sont incarcérés par l’État, nous devrions examiner les « nouvelles garnisons » autour desquelles s’organise l’imaginaire canadien.

Nous vous invitons à soumettre des articles qui traitent de l’expérience vécue par les personnes incarcérées et du rôle de la prison dans l’imagination littéraire et populaire. Les récits de prison écrits, tels que « The Women’s Jail » de Miriam Waddington et Stolen Life de Yvonne Johnson et Rudy Wiebe, soulignent la portée représentative des objectifs qui reflètent la métaphore et le témoignage. Le cas des hors-la-loi a toujours fasciné  les écrivains et les lecteurs canadiens, comme le démontrent la réflexion poétique de Robert Kroetsch sur Albert Johnson, ou encore la popularité des récits fondés sur des crimes réels, dont Go Boy! de Roger Caron, Jackrabbit Parole de Stephen Reid et I’d Rather Be Wanted Than Had de Micky McArthur. Bien que certains récits de prison, par exemple Thrasher: Skid Row Eskimo, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance et George and Rue portent sur les expériences de vie qui ont abouti à l’incarcération d’un individu, d’autres révèlent une tendance philosophique, tout en mettant l’accent sur la politique culturelle décrite dans les carnets de prison, notamment Nègres blancs d’Amérique et Louis Riel : journaux de guerre et de prison, ou dans les psychodrames tels que Alias Grace et Prochain épisode. Plusieurs textes rétrospectifs relatifs à des personnes inculpées, et parmi lesquels figurent les portraits poétiques de Marie-Joseph Angélique peints par Shirley Small et Afua Cooper, instrumentalisent à des fins politiques la vie, les crimes et les châtiments de ces individus.

Les articles peuvent aborder des récits relatifs à et écrits par des opposants politiques qui ont été emprisonnés, des ennemis d’État qui ont été enfermés dans des camps d’internement, des migrants en fuite qui se remémorent la prison, des criminels reconnus coupables et des condamnés à perpétuité. Les articles se rapportant aux centres de réadaptation, aux récits sur les écoles résidentielles autochtones, aux poèmes et aux pièces de théâtre sur l’incarcération peuvent être également soumis. D’une part, les articles peuvent traiter de sujets connexes aux récits de prison et à la construction du « sujet carcéral ». D’autre part, ils peuvent étudier les thèmes suivants : la race, les classes sociales, l’alphabétisation, le travail en prison, les vécus de sujets carcéraux et la prison comme lieu transnational.

Nous sollicitons également des articles qui explorent les implications plus importantes de la théorie sur la littérature de prison, y compris les questions éthiques et épistémologiques qui sous-tendent l’analyse des récits de prisonniers.

Les articles doivent respecter les directives de la revue : http://www.canlit.ca/submissions.php.

Toute soumission d’article doit être accompagnée d’une lettre de motivation précisant que l’article doit être pris en compte pour ce numéro spécial sur les récits de prison.

“Queerly Canadian: Changing Narratives”—Special Issue of Canadian Literature—will highlight scholarship that explores fictional and non-fictional narratives that document individual, political, community and cultural change through the very act of enunciation. Specifically, we invite contributions to the special issue that ask how queer narratives have changed, not only the changes from l/g to l/g/b to l/g/b/t to queer, but broad shifts in codes, contexts and practices of complex identification in relation to society and to history.

We invite articles that address historical, contemporary and emergent forms of queer narrative—diverse genres, aesthetics, relevance and appeal. Contributions that explore narratives of identification from a wide range of different perspectives as well as representations and social constructions of sexual diversities through time and space are welcomed. Wide and diverse interpretations of the themes ranging from the predictable to the surprising are encouraged. Papers might address such topics as the cultural impact of Jane Rule’s fiction, the trope of desire in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, representations of alterity in Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen, or literary history in Billeh Nickerson and John Barton’s Seminal: Canada’s Gay Male Poets, queer poetics in Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child. Or, they could look at themes such as queer cultural production and globalization, queering ‘coming out’ narratives, queer readings of post-colonial Canadian narratives of (im)migration, queer representations of sexuality and censorship in Canada etc.

Essays should follow the submission guidelines of the journal: www.canlit.ca/submissions.php. Cover letters should indicate that the article is to be considered for this Special Issue.

In recognition of Vancouver 2010, the Winter Olympics and Paralympics, Canadian Literature proposes to publish a special issue devoted to Canadian Literature and Sport. We welcome any submissions that embrace the two elements of this topic. An Olympic or winter sport connection is not essential. Some topics might include:

• the narrative of particular team games as they structure novels, stories, plays, and poems
• sports heroes and antiheroes, past and present in Canadian writing
• gendered, ethnic, cultural, and racial aspects of sports as articulated in Canadian imaginative writing
• the poetics and languages of curling, cricket, synchronized swimming, etc.
• games and sports in First Nations cultures and writing
• athletics in general, or a specific sport, as a source of metaphor
• performance studies as they bear on sports
• literary interpretation of women in sports

Papers on sports other than hockey are particularly encouraged. We must find one publishable essay on soccer (aka football) or the issue will be abandoned. We also welcome original submissions of creative non-fiction, poetry, or short short fiction on related themes.

Pour fêter Vancouver 2010, les Jeux olympiques d’hiver et les Jeux paraolympiques, Littérature canadienne va publier une livraison spéciale consacrée à « La littérature canadienne et le sport ». Toutes les soumissions traitant des deux aspects de ce thème sont les bienvenues. Un rapport aux Jeux olympiques ou aux sports d’hiver n’est cependant pas essentiel. Parmi les thèmes, on peut aborder les sujets suivants :

• les récits appuyés sur des sport d’équipe et donnant lieu à des romans, des histoires, des pièces de théâtre et des poèmes
• les héros et antihéros du passé et du présent dans la littérature canadienne
• l’articulation dans la littérature canadienne des aspects du sport concernant le genre, les ethnies, les cultures et les races.
• la poétique et les langages du curling, du cricket, de la natation synchronisée, etc.
• les jeux et le sport dans la littérature aborigène du Canada
• le sport comme métaphore
• les mesures de performance et comment elles concernent le sport
• l’interprétation littéraire des femmes dans le sport

Les textes sur les sports autres que le hockey sont spécialement bienvenus. Il nous faut trouver au moins un bon essai sur le soccer (le football) ou nous serons forcés d’abandonner le projet. Les soumissions originales de non-fiction créative, poésie, ou fiction courte sur ces thèmes sont aussi bienvenues.

Canadian Literature and the TransCanada Institute (U of Guelph) invite submissions for a special issue on shifts in the field of Canadian literature. CanLit may play a major role in Canada’s cultural economies, but it has become apparent that its study can no longer take place in isolation from the larger forces that shape the nation, global relations and the corporatization of higher education. The task of identifying the implications of these shifts and, above all, of devising constructive ways of responding to them involves a long-term and multilateral project that can only be a shared endeavour, undertaken in interdisciplinary and collaborative terms. Current transnational forces have destabilized the “national myth” established in the 1960s and 1970s. Such questions as “is Canada post-colonial?” intersect with formulations such as “multicultural citizenship,” “white civility” or “recovering Canada” in ways that require new mappings of a shifting field. We invite submissions that critically examine the disciplinary and institutional frameworks within which Canadian literature is produced, disseminated and taught from an interdisciplinary perspective.

La revue publie des poèmes ainsi que des comptes rendus et des articles critiques en français portant sur des oeuvres littéraires canadiennes. Cependant nous ne publions pas de fiction narrative.

For most Quebeckers, Mordecai Richler was most memorable in the final decade of his life for his controversial statements, or for those he was claimed to have made. A number of critiques of varying quality, but for the most part predictable, followed in the wake of Oh Canada, Oh Quebec! Yet one must allow that in the tense pre-referendum atmosphere of the time, some rushed ahead of themselves in their efforts to respond to his barbs. Although Richler had garnered critical praise for his undeniable literary talent, for Quebec’s francophone intelligentsia his mastery of the novel was suddenly forgotten.

And what about the work? Now that the dust has finally settled on the historical polemic, it is perhaps time to return soberly to the works, fictional and non-fictional, of Mordecai Richler. This is a question raised by the workshop held at Carleton University on 13 April 2007, now to be further explored in a special bilingual issue of Canadian Literature. We invite reflections on the diverse interpretations inspired by Richler’s work from genres such as the novel, pamphlet, journalism, and screenplays that go beyond the humour and cynicism so often studied (although there is clearly seriousness even in the comical). What is the writer’s view of culture, art, and literature? What is to be made of this oeuvre and how it will be inscribed in Canadian literary histories? Further interdisciplinary studies may investigate the limits and possibilities of popular history, and reflections on intercultural encounters.

All non-Aboriginal Canadians and many Aboriginal Canadians can be categorized in some senses as “diasporic.” The degree to which we feel that this label applies to certain kinds of writing is complex. To be “québécois de vieille souche” (of deep roots), or to be of Acadian or Loyalist descent oen means that one is not categorized as “diasporic.” One’s family history here allows an exemption from such labels as “multicultural,” “immigrant,” or “diasporic.” Bearing these historical and theoretical questions in mind, Canadian Literature encourages papers on writers who might be viewed as “diasporic,” in their self-perceptions, style, themes, or theoretical concerns.

Some questions that might spark a response:

• Are Newfoundland writers living off the island diasporic?
• Are Aboriginal writers living outside their traditional territories diasporic?
• What are the nuances of sense reflectede in such terms as “diasporic,” “multicultural,” and “immigrant,” and how should we view them in literary discussions?
• What are the generational effects of diaspora? To what extent (and for how long) are writers burdened with conveying diasporic histories, representing diasporic communities?
• How have diaspora and related concepts been affected by cheap air travel, the internet, the relative wealth and privilege of at least some categories of new citizens, varying mainstream pressures to assimilate through time, racism, and other social forces?