Canadianization, Colonialism, and Decolonization: Investigating the Legacy of “Seventies Nationalism” in the Robin Mathews Fonds

The opening of the Robin Mathews Fonds at Library and Archives Canada in 2014 provides an opportunity to revisit Mathews’s role in the struggle to make Canadian literature a legitimate area of study in English departments. Mathews was instrumental in the founding of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures; he advocated for more courses and graduate programs, as well as expanded scholarship in the field -- goals which he argued could not be reached unless more Canadians were hired in university English departments. Inspired by the anti-colonial nationalisms of the sixties and seventies, Mathews saw Canadian nationalism as anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, and he argued that Canadian literature, rightly read, offered the materials for a collectivist counter-narrative to neoliberal capitalism. His work argued for the centrality of authors like Irene Baird, Earle Birney, Milton Acorn, and Dorothy Livesay to what he called “the tradition” of Canadian writing. While he was often accused of anti-Americanism, a more salient critique of his ideas targets his failure to grow beyond an “old left” view of race as a way to divide the working class. Mathews’s struggle to “Canadianize” English departments was a failure; Canadian literature consistently makes up just 8-10% of the course offerings in Canadian English departments, and in Canada the “English degree” is still a degree in English literature, instead of a degree in literatures in English

Voicing the Voiceless: Language and Genre in Nellie McClung's Fiction and Her Autobiography

While Nellie McClung is best known as an advocate for women's participation in public life, she gained much of her authority on the public stage from her popularity as a writer of sentimental "family fiction." Both her fiction and her autobiography adopt many of the conventions of the genre, but also challenge those conventions by emphasizing the violence of patriarchy and the resulting alienation of women from language and from concepts of unified selfhood. McClung's writings stretch the definitions of popular genres by stimulating the readers to question the conventions to which they adhere.Bien que Nellie McClung soit mieux connue comme défenseur de la participation des femmes à la vie publique, son autorité sur la scène publique était principalement due à sa popularité comme écrivaine de romans sentimentaux “de famille”. Dans son oeuvre de fiction aussi bien que dans son autobiographie, elle adopte les conventions de ce genre, mais en même temps elle les contraste en insistant sur la violence du patriarcat et sur ce que cette violence en traîne, c’est-à-dire l'isolement des femmes par rapport au langageet aux concepts d’une identité unifiée. Les écrits de McClung élargissent les définitions des genres populaires en incitant le lectrices ou les lecteurs à mettre en question les conventions auxquelles ils-elles souscrivent

Political Science: Realism In Roberts's Animal Stories

Charles G.D. Roberts's animal stories are regularly discussed as an attempt to create a new kind of animal character, one that is not an anthropomorphic copy of human psychology nor a one-dimensional allegory, but instead a "real" animal based on accurate observation and up-to-date science. However, since no realism is transparent, Roberts's stories cannot be expected to neutrally reproduce reality, despite their modernist techniques. Indeed, what Roberts's "animal biographies" choose to signify as "real" -- human, masculine selfhood concerned with hierarchical power structure, as well as a unified autonomous human personality as universal phenomenon -- is as important as the ways in which these notions are signified. The stories function as ideology and do the work of politics; they occupy a place in the critical narrative of the development of realism in Canadian fiction by constructing the reader as subject, "naturally predatory," material, and male

Thinking about Things in the Postcolonial Classroom

My father died two years ago, after a year-long illness with colon cancer. The doctors performed some palliative surgery at the time of his diagnosis, but as the cancer grew he could digest less and less of what he ate. So the year was spent, essentially, waiting for him to starve to death. It was a long time to wait. He was a person of great gifts, creative, intellectual, and personal; he played jazz trumpet, and is lauded in histories of Canadian jazz as one of the pioneers of the genre in ..

I Just Love Ethel Wilson: A Reparative Reading of The Innocent Traveller

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