In In the Skin of a Lion , Michael Ondaatje explores mobile figures through the trope of nomadism... more In In the Skin of a Lion , Michael Ondaatje explores mobile figures through the trope of nomadism. Linking a series of the novel's mobile figures together and suggesting their equivalence as nomadic migrants, Ondaatje dissolves the distinction between native and foreign workers. He thus attempts to resist the essentialist links between people and place that are prevalent in the arborescent metaphors of belonging that poststructuralists like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari critique. Instead of what Liisa Malkki calls "sedentarist metaphysics," the novel subscribes to what Tim Cresswell refers to as "nomadic metaphysics" - an interest in the routes of travel and a concomitant dismissal of the fixity of rooted identity. Ondaatje's strategy of "nomadic metaphysics" obscures the material history of, and important differences among, specific migrations, routes, and/or patterns of mobility that his novel identifies. The novel seems to assert a citize...
Realism and regionalism are tightly coupled in critical analysis of Alistair MacLeod’s fiction, b... more Realism and regionalism are tightly coupled in critical analysis of Alistair MacLeod’s fiction, but Herb Wyile’s recent study Anne of Tim Hortons was the first to examine the ascendance of neoliberal ideologies and the effects of a globalized economy on the workers represented in his fiction. MacLeod’s novel No Great Mischief suggests that the underdevelopment of Atlantic Canada and migration of workers to other regions is a result of nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic and political changes. It traces the history of labour migration as embedded in the birth of neoliberalism, and MacLeod’s portrait of a migrant community acknowledges the effects of a longstanding history of economic globalization on workers from different corners of the world. No Great Mischief is visibly about clan, blood ties, race, and region, but its complex analogies create a kind of metaphorical family of migrant workers – a “family” that evokes the contours of, but is not identical with, the nation.
Although the history of Canada ’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of gre... more Although the history of Canada ’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of great relevance to labour studies, it has been more or less ignored by this field, largely because of its links to the early 20th-century social gospel movement and because of the difficulty of studying workers’ responses to the association. This article examines the first half-decade of Frontier College (known until 1919 as the Canadian Reading Camp Association) using a variety of methodologies – labour history, cultural and literary history, the history of education, and the history of reading – to understand how culture was used in the service of liberal government in the context of northern Ontario’s lumber camps at the turn of the century. The association’s promotion of literacy via fiction for frontier labourers signalled a new acceptance in Canada of the notion that workers might actually be improved through fiction. Alfred Fitzpatrick, the association’s founder, feared a state that ...
This paper analyzes how the "particular symbolic fortunes" of Canada's most widely ... more This paper analyzes how the "particular symbolic fortunes" of Canada's most widely recognized literary prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, undergo what James English calls "capital intraconversion"––how they are "culturally 'laundered'" through their association with Frontier College, Canada's longest-running adult literacy organization. While the Giller initially benefitted from fashioning itself as the private, industry-driven alternative to state-sponsored culture in Canada, increasing criticism of its corporate sponsorship has led, in the past decade, to a rebranding effort. This effort, I contend, seeks to benefit from two key terms––multiculturalism and literacy. Associated as the discourse of multiculturalism and the figure of the literate citizen are with the strong publics of the western, liberal-democratic nation-state, they possess a remarkable ability to accentuate the symbolic capital of Canada's most widely recognized literary prize.
Like much Depression-era writing in Canada, Irene Baird's 1939 novel Waste Heritage is out of pri... more Like much Depression-era writing in Canada, Irene Baird's 1939 novel Waste Heritage is out of print and, perhaps as a consequence, has not garnered much recent critical or scholarly attention. Fortunately, University of Ottawa Press is publishing a new edition of the novel in zoo7 (edited and with an introduction by Colin Hill), which will certainly bring the attention of a new generation of scholars to bear on the issue of women's authorship during the interwar years in Canada.I Existing criticism of the novel is largely influenced by leftist nationalist Robin Mathews, who argued that Baird's novel should be heralded as a classic of proletarian literature in Canada-a novel that sympathetically represents the inevitability of class revolution.2 Yet archival evidence regarding the publishing history of the novel has allowed me to reconsider its political commitments in a more nuanced way. Although Baird has no authors' papers and although the original manuscript for Waste Heritazge is no longer extant, her correspondence with her Canadian and American publishers, as well as her articles on the writing of Waste Heritage , are integral to the process of interpreting the novel's conflicted cultural and political meanmngs. t Jody Mason is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa. Her research on Irene Baird's Waste Heritage is part of a larger project on the politics of mobility in Canada. Mason has also published in Canadian Literature, Stu~dies in Canadian Literature,
Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études …, 2011
Anti-modernism is a term that historians and literary critics have employed in different ways: to... more Anti-modernism is a term that historians and literary critics have employed in different ways: to refer to the rejection of an “overcivilized” modernity and to describe the popular literary forms that are understood to be the antithesis of literary modernism. The author argues that both understandings of the term offer helpful frameworks for a materialist reading of Graphic Publishers—an Ottawa-based company devoted exclusively to the publication of Canadian books—and their most frequently published author, Madge Macbeth (1880-1965). The anti-modernist paradox that characterizes the material culture of Graphic Publishers emerges not just from the nationalist sentiment of the interwar period, but also from the company’s distance from Toronto, the traditional geographical centre of Canadian publishing; Macbeth’s similarly compromised position as an author is likewise a crucial factor in her employment of the paradoxical formulations of anti-modernism.
Though it has varied slightly in its telling, a standard narrative in the cultural and literary h... more Though it has varied slightly in its telling, a standard narrative in the cultural and literary history of English Canada is that literary culture was able to “develop” and “mature” in the wake of the 1951 Massey Report, finally “arriving” in the years between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s. This essay offers another view of this period, analyzing not the smooth developmental momentum but rather the contradiction and disavowal that attended one of the federal government’s first direct forms of support for the book. Anna Johnston and Allan Lawson theorize such contradiction as a “double inscription of authority and authenticity,” an authority originating at once in the Imperium and in Indigenous nations that settler cultures both desire and disavow (369). As the Imperium shifted across the Atlantic in the decade that followed the close of the Second World War, the settler nation struggled to locate itself anew in relation to these “origins of authority and authenticity.” The case e...
In In the Skin of a Lion , Michael Ondaatje explores mobile figures through the trope of nomadism... more In In the Skin of a Lion , Michael Ondaatje explores mobile figures through the trope of nomadism. Linking a series of the novel's mobile figures together and suggesting their equivalence as nomadic migrants, Ondaatje dissolves the distinction between native and foreign workers. He thus attempts to resist the essentialist links between people and place that are prevalent in the arborescent metaphors of belonging that poststructuralists like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari critique. Instead of what Liisa Malkki calls "sedentarist metaphysics," the novel subscribes to what Tim Cresswell refers to as "nomadic metaphysics" - an interest in the routes of travel and a concomitant dismissal of the fixity of rooted identity. Ondaatje's strategy of "nomadic metaphysics" obscures the material history of, and important differences among, specific migrations, routes, and/or patterns of mobility that his novel identifies. The novel seems to assert a citize...
Realism and regionalism are tightly coupled in critical analysis of Alistair MacLeod’s fiction, b... more Realism and regionalism are tightly coupled in critical analysis of Alistair MacLeod’s fiction, but Herb Wyile’s recent study Anne of Tim Hortons was the first to examine the ascendance of neoliberal ideologies and the effects of a globalized economy on the workers represented in his fiction. MacLeod’s novel No Great Mischief suggests that the underdevelopment of Atlantic Canada and migration of workers to other regions is a result of nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic and political changes. It traces the history of labour migration as embedded in the birth of neoliberalism, and MacLeod’s portrait of a migrant community acknowledges the effects of a longstanding history of economic globalization on workers from different corners of the world. No Great Mischief is visibly about clan, blood ties, race, and region, but its complex analogies create a kind of metaphorical family of migrant workers – a “family” that evokes the contours of, but is not identical with, the nation.
Although the history of Canada ’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of gre... more Although the history of Canada ’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of great relevance to labour studies, it has been more or less ignored by this field, largely because of its links to the early 20th-century social gospel movement and because of the difficulty of studying workers’ responses to the association. This article examines the first half-decade of Frontier College (known until 1919 as the Canadian Reading Camp Association) using a variety of methodologies – labour history, cultural and literary history, the history of education, and the history of reading – to understand how culture was used in the service of liberal government in the context of northern Ontario’s lumber camps at the turn of the century. The association’s promotion of literacy via fiction for frontier labourers signalled a new acceptance in Canada of the notion that workers might actually be improved through fiction. Alfred Fitzpatrick, the association’s founder, feared a state that ...
This paper analyzes how the "particular symbolic fortunes" of Canada's most widely ... more This paper analyzes how the "particular symbolic fortunes" of Canada's most widely recognized literary prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, undergo what James English calls "capital intraconversion"––how they are "culturally 'laundered'" through their association with Frontier College, Canada's longest-running adult literacy organization. While the Giller initially benefitted from fashioning itself as the private, industry-driven alternative to state-sponsored culture in Canada, increasing criticism of its corporate sponsorship has led, in the past decade, to a rebranding effort. This effort, I contend, seeks to benefit from two key terms––multiculturalism and literacy. Associated as the discourse of multiculturalism and the figure of the literate citizen are with the strong publics of the western, liberal-democratic nation-state, they possess a remarkable ability to accentuate the symbolic capital of Canada's most widely recognized literary prize.
Like much Depression-era writing in Canada, Irene Baird's 1939 novel Waste Heritage is out of pri... more Like much Depression-era writing in Canada, Irene Baird's 1939 novel Waste Heritage is out of print and, perhaps as a consequence, has not garnered much recent critical or scholarly attention. Fortunately, University of Ottawa Press is publishing a new edition of the novel in zoo7 (edited and with an introduction by Colin Hill), which will certainly bring the attention of a new generation of scholars to bear on the issue of women's authorship during the interwar years in Canada.I Existing criticism of the novel is largely influenced by leftist nationalist Robin Mathews, who argued that Baird's novel should be heralded as a classic of proletarian literature in Canada-a novel that sympathetically represents the inevitability of class revolution.2 Yet archival evidence regarding the publishing history of the novel has allowed me to reconsider its political commitments in a more nuanced way. Although Baird has no authors' papers and although the original manuscript for Waste Heritazge is no longer extant, her correspondence with her Canadian and American publishers, as well as her articles on the writing of Waste Heritage , are integral to the process of interpreting the novel's conflicted cultural and political meanmngs. t Jody Mason is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa. Her research on Irene Baird's Waste Heritage is part of a larger project on the politics of mobility in Canada. Mason has also published in Canadian Literature, Stu~dies in Canadian Literature,
Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études …, 2011
Anti-modernism is a term that historians and literary critics have employed in different ways: to... more Anti-modernism is a term that historians and literary critics have employed in different ways: to refer to the rejection of an “overcivilized” modernity and to describe the popular literary forms that are understood to be the antithesis of literary modernism. The author argues that both understandings of the term offer helpful frameworks for a materialist reading of Graphic Publishers—an Ottawa-based company devoted exclusively to the publication of Canadian books—and their most frequently published author, Madge Macbeth (1880-1965). The anti-modernist paradox that characterizes the material culture of Graphic Publishers emerges not just from the nationalist sentiment of the interwar period, but also from the company’s distance from Toronto, the traditional geographical centre of Canadian publishing; Macbeth’s similarly compromised position as an author is likewise a crucial factor in her employment of the paradoxical formulations of anti-modernism.
Though it has varied slightly in its telling, a standard narrative in the cultural and literary h... more Though it has varied slightly in its telling, a standard narrative in the cultural and literary history of English Canada is that literary culture was able to “develop” and “mature” in the wake of the 1951 Massey Report, finally “arriving” in the years between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s. This essay offers another view of this period, analyzing not the smooth developmental momentum but rather the contradiction and disavowal that attended one of the federal government’s first direct forms of support for the book. Anna Johnston and Allan Lawson theorize such contradiction as a “double inscription of authority and authenticity,” an authority originating at once in the Imperium and in Indigenous nations that settler cultures both desire and disavow (369). As the Imperium shifted across the Atlantic in the decade that followed the close of the Second World War, the settler nation struggled to locate itself anew in relation to these “origins of authority and authenticity.” The case e...
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