About Rohan Maitzen
Rohan Maitzen is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her main teaching and research interests are the Victorian novel, gender and historiography, and ethical criticism. Her academic career is mostly an excuse to keep rereading Middlemarch.
Email Address: Rohan.Maitzen@Dal.Ca
Website: http://maitzenreads.blogspot.com
Posts by Rohan Maitzen
Monday, November 17, 2008
The Remains of Our Days, Dear Readers!
Over at my other place I do a regular series of posts on my teaching. There are some explanations over there about why I started doing this and what I’ve gotten out of it so far. One thing that I particularly appreciate is the opportunity to write about the part of my job I like the best, and that takes up by far the majority of my time and thought at least eight months of the year. This past week was a particularly fulfilling one for me because in both of my classes I was teaching books I am really passionate about, so I thought I’d bring a little of that experience over here. In my first-year class, Introduction to Prose and Fiction, we started Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and in my upper-level class on 19th-Century Fiction, we were finishing up Bleak House. It’s hard to imagine books more stylistically different: Dickens offers a teeming overabundance of words, characters, and plots, while Ishiguro at once models and thematizes restraint and understatement. Yet both are immensely moving and humane; their artistry is both intellectually and emotionally demanding, and their beauties are at once aesthetic and ethical. If, as Leslie Stephen said, we “measure the worth of a book by the worth of the friend it reveals to [us],” both offer us companionship of an inspiring kind. Wayne Booth proposes we consider what “kind of desirer“ we become if we cooperate with the implied author of a text: “Is the pattern of life that this would-be friend offers one that friends might well pursue together?” The best literary “friends” are identified by “the irresistable invitation they extend to live during these moments a richer and fuller life than I could manage on my own.” (These quotations are from Booth’s The Company We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction, the only critical work I’ve read in a decade or more that I know has had a profound impact on how I imagine and articulate the task of criticism.) By these standards, I think both The Remains of the Day and Bleak House are among the very best.
More specifically, here’s what we’ve been working on in class.
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Book Rebranding Contest @ BookNinja
It’s too late to vote, but not too late for some laughs: BookNinja invites ... creative ... new spins on familiar titles. (Winners announced here.)
(via)
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Thursday, October 16, 2008
Pedagogy, Evaluation, and What We Look for in ‘the’ Novel
(cross-posted from Novel Readings)
Recent threads at The Reading Experience (including this acrimonious one launched by Dan’s blunt denunciation of Dostoevsky’s “cheap tricks” and “unrelenting tedium") have had me thinking (again, and see also these posts) about the problem of literary evaluation. In The Death of the Critic, Ronan McDonald declared that “The first step in reviving [the critic] is to bring the idea of artistic merit back to the heart of academic criticism. . . . [I]f criticism is to be valued, if it is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative.” As I’ve said before, I’m skeptical about this idea that aesthetic evaluation is the obvious fix for whatever ails academic criticism at the present time:
Once you’ve acknowledged the ‘problematics’ of literary judgment, how then are you supposed to answer what [McDonald] proposes is the common reader’s key question ("Is this book ... worth my attention and my time?")? For what it’s worth, I think most academic critics would in fact be quite happy to answer that question about any book, but first we would all want to develop the question further (along the lines I laid out here, for instance).
This time around, I’m particularly thinking about whether, or how far, my work as a teacher has committed me, not to relativism (which is where some people assume my reservations about ‘literary merit’ lead me) but to a kind of pluralism by which it’s not comparative measures of ‘worth’ that matter but seeking out the measures that fit the particular case. One of the key features of this approach is working with a text on its own terms--trying to understand how to read it so that it best fulfills its own potential. This means not holding it up to a particular, preconceived standard of excellence ("good novels do this“), whether that standard is formal or ideological. Now, depending on the occasion, there may be a second phase in which you move back from internally-generated norms and question them against external ideas; often, in teaching, this kind of questioning arises just from moving to the next book on the syllabus and discovering that its norms differ widely from--and thus, implicitly or explicitly, challenge--the ones we’ve just left behind (reading North and South right after Hard Times, or Jane Eyre soon after Pride and Prejudice, for instance, will certainly have this effect). But it’s difficult to see either a method or a reason for evaluating, say, Pride and Prejudice, as better or worse than Jane Eyre. It’s only if you have a set notion of what makes good fiction in general that you could fault either one for not measuring up.
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Happy Birthday, OED!
The OUPBlog alerts us to the 80th birthday of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary:
Eighty years ago, the “greatest work in dictionary-making ever undertaken” was completed. Begun in 1857, published in ten volumes in 1928, subsequently updated and expanded to 20 volumes in 1989, and now adapted to the electronic age, the OED has become the most venerated and most beloved English-language reference ever compiled.
Kirsty McHugh of OUP-UK (and the nice lit-blog ’Other Stories‘) takes this opportunity to let us know “some fascinating facts and figures about the OED“:
*There are currently over 600,000 words in the OED
*The OED costs over £4 million (or nearly $7 million) to run every year in editorial costs alone … and it has never, ever made OUP any money!
*As well as the addition of new words and senses to the Dictionary, the editors are also hard at work re-writing the historical information that is core to each OED entry for the first time
Those of you fortunate enough to be within reach of Oxford may wish to attend some of the festivities.
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Tuesday, September 30, 2008
CFP (ACCUTE 2009): LitCrit 2.0: Academic Blogging and Other New Forms of Scholarly Publication
The calls for papers for ACCUTE 2009 are now posted, including my own for a session on “LitCrit 2.o: Academic Blogging and Other New Forms of Scholarly Publishing” (scroll down this list). Panels like this are old news in other venues, but I haven’t seen much about it up here north of the 49th, at least not through ACCUTE (which, for any American readers who don’t know this, is our MLA-like thing). My own thinking about these issues was somewhat focused by the presentation I gave to my department on academic blogging last fall.
The version of the CFP I submitted actually had more apparatus, including hyperlinks that I had hoped would be retained in the posted version. For those who might be interested, here’s the full text with links.
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Monday, September 22, 2008
Vanity Fair: It’s All About You
I started work on Thackeray‘s Vanity Fair with my 19th-century fiction class today. There are many things I savor about this novel, from the brilliance of Becky “I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year” Sharp to the sharply satirical illustrations. I particularly enjoy the intrusive narrator:
[M]y kind reader will please to remember that this history has “Vanity Fair” for a title, and that Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. And while the moralist, who is holding forth on the cover ( an accurate portrait of your humble servant), professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation is arrayed: yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as far as one knows it, whether one mounts a cap and bells or a shovel hat; and a deal of disagreeable matter must come out in the course of such an undertaking. . . .
And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and a brother, not only to introduce them, but occasionally to step down from the platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to love them and shake them by the hand: if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader’s sleeve: if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits of.*
He’s everything you could wish for in a novelistic companion: wry, passionate, witty, acerbic--and surprisingly coy, considering he has every apparent reason to be, well, omniscient, seeing as how he is frank about having made it all up.
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Sunday, September 14, 2008
Book Order Bleg: If The Wire were a novel…
For some time I’ve been struggling with the question of what, if anything, to add to the reading list for my winter term course on ‘mystery and detective fiction’; it belatedly occurs to me that lots of smart, widely read people pass through The Valve who might be able to help me. Just to be clear, I know there are lots of good mystery novels out there, and I’m not asking for reading recommendations or names of people’s favourite authors (well, actually, I’m always happy to get these). I’ve been trying to bring my list more up to date and to see what type of novel I might assign that isn’t already represented on my list, what author or book models some kind of significant recent development rather than a modern twist on a familiar genre (such as the hard-boiled private eye, or the British police procedural). Here’s the core list (admittedly idiosyncratic, but also reasonably representative, I think, of key developments in the form):
The Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction (for short fiction including Poe, Conan Doyle, Hammett, etc.)
Collins, The Moonstone (first and best!)
Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Golden Age / puzzle fiction)
Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (hard-boiled, of course)
James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (English literary detection + feminist critique)
Grafton, ‘A’ is for Alibi (feminist revision of hard-boiled convention)
Ranking, Knots and Crosses (police procedural; Scots gothic / noir)
I’ve been reading around for new ideas, some old (Chester Himes), some new (Inger Ash Wolfe, The Calling), some international (Henning Mankell), but I haven’t been inspired by any of them. Here’s my most recent thought. I’ve just finished watching the last season of The Wire...
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Monday, September 08, 2008
Andrew Davies Interviewed
Laura Carroll writes up Jan Sardi’s interview with Andrew Davies here:
Jan Sardi asked just the right questions of Davies, drawing out his views and feelings about the novels he works with, his sense of exactly what his task is as an adaptor, and the cheerful confidence and aplomb with which he seems to make some extraordinarily difficult calls.
Before becoming a writer Davies taught English in schools and universities, and I got the sense that he still unashamedly thinks in terms of an educational mission – the basic value of opening up unfamiliar books for novice readers matters more to him than preserving all the superficially off-putting and remote dignity of books written hundreds of years ago in disused language.
It was extremely refreshing to hear him acknowledge the value of this unfashionable ideal, and he has done more than anyone alive to keep books like Middlemarch and Bleak House in front of readers. . . .
Asked why he does so many classic novel adaptations rather than modern ones, Davies gave an answer I liked: he simply prefers them. . . . In general, he suggested, modern fiction of the prize-winning, book-clubbing kind is thinly plotted, and airport novels have flimsy characters. The classics have both, and that’s why they have stuck around.
I’ve been OK with Davies’s adaptations most of the time, but I think he has yet to find an ingenious solution to the problem all screenwriters face when working with 19th-century novels: what to do about intrusive narration? In his Middlemarch there’s a short voice-over at the end, but of course that’s hardly enough, and stripped of the narrative commentary, even Middlemarch can seem a little “thinly plotted.” And I don’t think there’s anything in his Bleak House to compensate for the loss of either Esther’s own irritatingly coy voice or the prophetic third-person narrator who takes turns with her:
Then the active and intelligent, who has got into the morning papers as such, comes with his pauper company to Mr Krook’s, and bears off the body of our dear brother here departed, to a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed; while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about official backstairs--would to Heaven they had departed!--are very complacent and agreeable. Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed, to receive Christian burial. . . .
Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon, or stay too long, by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to every passer-by, ‘Look here!’
Or the best moment of all, because Dickens slips into iambic pentameter at the last, truly the poetic side of ‘familiar things’:
Dead, your majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day.
Take that, Andrew Davies!
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Monday, August 11, 2008
Adam Bede: Conclusions?
This is the final installment of our Adam Bede reading project. In case anyone is inspired to go back and read through the posts and comments in sequence, here they are:
June 16: Chapters I-V
June 23: Chapters VI-XI
July 1: Chapters XII-XVI
July 8: Chapters XVII-XXI
July 15: Chapters XXII-XXVI
July 22: Chapters XXVII-XXXV
July 29: Chapters XXXVI-XLVIII
August 5: The Whole Novel
Was Adam Bede the best choice for a project like this? I don’t know, but clearly some people enjoyed it, or at least persevered with it, and probably we all know things we didn’t know before, whether about George Eliot, Dutch painting, fanfic, or just ourselves as readers. I don’t have any sense of how many people were reading along but not commenting. If there are any of you still lurking out there, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to say a few words about you and your experience of reading Adam Bede this summer. I’m sure the people who have been commenting all along don’t need any special prompting from me to add their own last words!
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Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Book VI & Epilogue)
And so we reach our final installment. As usual, George Eliot is one step ahead of us: “But no story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.” There are, perhaps, no real surprises in the basic plot: ever since her telling blush in Chapter XI, we’ve known about Dinah’s suppressed passion for Adam, and it seemed only a matter of time before he learned to love a less kittenish model. His revelation is a bit sudden as a personal matter, I thought, but as a matter of plot and theme, it seems inevitable. What about Dinah’s initial reluctance to give in to their love? And what about Lisbeth’s role as go-between? Also of interest, among other things, are Dinah’s giving up preaching, Hetty’s death, and Arthur’s return from the wars. The final scene mimics very closely the ‘waiting for father to come home’ sequence from the first part of the novel; as has come up a few times in our discussion, the structure of the book seems cyclical or circular, and yet isn’t it also moving forward, towards a new kind of “Victorian” domesticity, for instance? These and any other points of interest are open for your comments! And congratulations, by the way, to all of us who persevered to the end, with both reading and posting.
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Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Chapters 36-48)
This week’s installment of our summer reading project brings us to the emotional and moral climax of Adam Bede. This is a section full of pathos, suspense, and melodrama as we follow Hetty on her journeys in hope and despair, as we see the painful process by which Adam and our other friends at Hayslope are brought into knowledge and suffering by “the terrible illumination which the present sheds back upon the past,” and as we go with Dinah into Hetty’s dark cell. How far do the lessons we have been offered about sympathy and forgiveness move us past the horror of this moment:
‘I hadn’t got far out of the road into one of the open places, before I heard a strange cry. I thought it didn’t come from any animal I knew, but I wasn’t for stopping to look about just then. But it went on, and seemed so strange to me in that place, I couldn’t help stopping to look. . . . And I looked about among them, but could find nothing; and at last the cry stopped. So I was for giving it up, and I went on about my business. But when I came back the same way pretty nigh an hour after, I couldn’t help laying down my stakes to have another look. And just as I was stooping and laying down the stakes, I saw something odd and round and whitish lying on the ground under a nut-bush by the side of me. And I stooped down on hands and knees to pick it up. And I saw it was a little baby’s hand.’
How far, also, is the dramatic turn of events at the end of Chapter XLVII a break from the novel’s program of realism? I’m also interested in Bartle Massey’s role in this section as well as Mr. Irwine’s, and in the structural symmetries of many of the scenes here to earlier ones. As always, everyone is welcome to pitch in on these or any other topics.
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Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Chapters 27-35)
First, in the serendipity category, today’s “Review-a-Day” from Powell’s is the Atlantic Monthly on George Eliot’s first published fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life:
Fiction represents the character of the age to which it belongs, not merely by actual delineations of its times, like those of Tom Jones and The Newcomes, but also in an indirect, though scarcely less positive manner, by its exhibition of the influence of the times upon its own form and general direction, whatever the scene or period it may have chosen for itself. The story of “Hypatia” is laid in Alexandria almost two thousand years ago, but the book reflects the crudities of modern English thought; and even Mr. Thackeray, the greatest living master of costume, succeeds in making his Esmond only a joint-production of the Addisonian age and our own. Thus the novels of the last few years exhibit very clearly the spirit that characterizes the period of regard for men and women as men and women, without reference to rank, beauty, fortune, or privilege. Novelists recognize that Nature is a better romance-maker than the fancy, and the public is learning that men and women are better than heroes and heroines, not only to live with, but also to read of. Now and then, therefore, we get a novel, like these Scenes of Clerical Life, in which the fictitious element is securely based upon a broad groundwork of actual truth, truth as well in detail as in general.
It is not often, however, even yet, that we find a writer wholly unembarrassed by and in revolt against the old theory of the necessity of perfection in some one at least of the characters of his story. “Neither Luther nor John Bunyan,” says the author of this book, “would have satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero, who believes nothing but what is true, feels nothing but what is excellent, and does nothing but what is graceful.”
The Atlantic Monthly’s review of Adam Bede was actually featured not that long ago:
We do not know where to look, in the whole range of contemporary fictitious literature, for pictures in which the sober and the brilliant tones of Nature blend with more exquisite harmony than in those which are set in every chapter of Adam Bede. Still life—the harvest-field, the polished kitchens, the dairies with a concentrated cool smell of all that is nourishing and sweet, the green, the porches that have vines about them and are pleasant late in the afternoon, and deep woods thrilling with birds—all these were never more vividly, and yet tenderly depicted. The characters are drawn with a free and impartial hand, and one of them is a creation for immortality. Mrs. Poyser is a woman with an incorrigible tongue, set firmly in opposition to the mandates of a heart the overflows of whose sympathy and love keep the circle of her influence in a state of continual irrigation. Her epigrams are aromatic, and she is strong in simile, but never ventures beyond her own depth into that of her author.
That brings us to today’s installment, which includes the immortal Mrs. Poyser having “her say out”:
“Yis, I know I’ve done it,” said Mrs Poyser, “but I’ve had my say out, and I shall be th’ easier for ‘t all my life. There’s no pleasure i’ living, if you’re to be corked up for iver, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel."
To which any one of us who has ever been accused of speaking out of turn (or just speaking too much) can say a hearty “hear, hear!”
Now, too, we’ve reached, not the crisis of the book, but a crisis at least, as Arthur’s guilty secret comes out and he and Adam face off “with the instinctive fierceness of panthers.”
One of the most compelling aspects of this volume for me is Arthur’s growing realization of one of GE’s most stringent moral laws--you cannot escape your deeds:
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man’s critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character. There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason--that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right. . . . Europe adjusts itself to a fait accompli, and so does an individual character,--until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution.
She returns to the fatality of action in Romola--
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.
and again in Middlemarch--
1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
2nd Gent. Ay, truly, but I think it is the world
That brings the iron.
How often, in George Eliot’s fiction, do past deeds return to haunt, confound, or indict those who seek to leave their pasts behind?
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Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Chapters 22-26)
This week’s installment of Adam Bede brings us to the birthday feast for Arthur Donnithorne, the ‘young squire,’ complete with speeches, drinking, and, of course, dancing:
Pity it was not a boarded floor! Then the rhythmic stamping of the thick shoes would have been better than any drums. That merry stamping, that gracious nodding of the head, that waving bestowal of the hand--where can we see them now? That simple dancing of well covered matrons, laying aside for an hour the cares of house and dairy, remembering but not affecting youth, not jealous but proud of the young maidens by their side--that holiday sprightliness of portly husbands paying little compliments to their wives, as if their courting days were come again--those lads and lasses a little confused and awkward with their partners, having nothing to say--it would be a pleasant variety to see all that sometimes, instead of low dresses and large skirts, and scanning glances exploring costumes, and languid men in lackered boots smiling with double meaning.
Wiry Ben’s hornpipe deserves notice as well:
Have you ever seen a real English rustic perform a solo dance? Perhaps you have only seen a ballet rustic, smiling like a merry countryman in crockery, with graceful turns of the haunch and insinuating movements of the head. That is as much like the real thing as the ‘Bird Waltz’ is like the song of birds. Wiry Ben never smiled: he looked as serious as a dancing monkey--as serious as if he had been an experimental philosopher ascertaining in his own person the amount of shaking and the varieties of angularity that could be given to the human limbs.
I wonder: can we take the varied reactions to Wiry Ben’s performance as indicative of some of the larger historical currents running through the feast more generally and through the novel as a whole? Most of his audience responds with “abundant laughter”; Mrs Poyser remarks that “the gentry” are “fit to die wi’ laughing,” while Arthur attempts to compensate by clapping and cheering. Only Martin Poyser sincerely appreciates his dancing: “I used to be a pretty good un at dancing myself when I was lighter, but I could niver ha’ hit it just to th’hair like that.” The whole birthday sequence seems to me to hum with tension between nostalgia and a Scott-like sense of the inevitability of historical change, between continuity and transformation, between sentiment and irony. At the center of it, of course, is Arthur himself: his consciousness of wrongdoing (and our knowledge of it) is rot at the heart of the community. Even without noticing that the first chapter in next week’s installment is called “A Crisis,” we can’t simply enjoy the party because we know too much.
As far as I can tell, there are about 7 stalwart souls who are both reading and commenting. If there are more of you out there reading along, please feel free to add your thoughts, questions, insights, curiosities, objections, perplexities, or anything else to the discussion. The more the merrier!
To review the overall plan and schedule, see here. Previous discussions have covered Chapters 1-5, Chapters 6-11, Chapters 12-16, and Chapters 17-21.
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Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Chapters 17-21)
Comments are now invited on this week’s installment of Adam Bede. Finally--the famous (infamous?) Chapter 17:
All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children--in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy.... [D]o not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world--those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have no picturesque, sentimental wretchedness! It is no needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things....
Also, Hetty goes to church, Adam goes to work, and Bartle Massey has been “such a fool as to let a woman into his house,” but he makes up for it by swearing and snarling at her.
Now may be a good time to take stock. Are you finding the installments reasonable, too short, too long? Are people happy to continue with the open-ended structure of the discussion? If not, are there specific alternatives people would like, such as focused discussion questions or topics, critical comments or posts to respond to, or something else? If you are reading along but have not posted a comment so far, can you suggest anything that would increase your willingness to go public? As I’ve said before, I don’t believe blogging is at its best as a spectator sport. Come on in--the water’s fine! And people are being good about respecting Rule 3 ("It’s summer; let’s have fun and not be snarky.")
To review the original plan and schedule of readings, see here. Previous discussions have covered Chapters 1-5, Chapters 6-11, and Chapters 12-16.
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Sunday, July 06, 2008
Best Canadian …
(cross-posted to Novel Readings)
There has been a lot of CanCon around this week, what with the holiday formerly known as ’Dominion Day‘ and all.* So, for instance, the Globe and Mail ran a story about revising the canon of great Canadian novels.
Thirty years ago dozens of scholars, critics, authors and publishing types gathered for four days in Calgary for what was billed as the National Conference on the Canadian Novel. Organized by the University of Calgary in association with publisher McClelland & Stewart and Dalhousie English professor Malcolm Ross, the conference, a raucous and controversial affair, became famous for two things. The first was the publication of the results of a ballot mailed earlier to participants in which they were invited to choose “the most important 100 works of Canadian fiction” according to three categories: “major,” “significant” and “secondary importance.” The second entailed the selection of “the 10 best Canadian novels yet written.” Critics decried (and continue to decry) its attempt to create a literary consensus as both a misguided nationalist holdover from the 19th century and a rank marketing/promotion stunt on behalf of M & S’s New Canadian Library, which Ross founded in 1958 and which, at the time of the Calgary conference, had more than 150 “classics” in print as paperbacks. (Ross later described Calgary as “the most painful experience” of his career.) The NCL still exists, winnowed down now to 110 titles. However, while the notion of “literary excellence” continues to hold sway, notions of a fixed canon or canons, of “shared literary values,” are pretty much in tatters. Even in 1978, as one participant in the Calgary conference observed, “we know that literary reputations are not built and perpetuated by any lists."
Still, lists are fun. Or they can be, if undertaken in a spirit of play and gamesmanship.
And so, with this in mind, The Globe and Mail thought it might be, well, fun, or at least interesting, 30 years on from the Calgary conference, 50 after the creation of the NCL, to come up with a new Cancon semi-canon - or should that be Can-on? - for the first decade of the 21st century.
My colleague Dean Irvine was among those consulted, and there has since been some spirited discussion on our DalNews site, with lots of further nominations.
I’m not about to volunteer a competing list--first, because I’m not nearly as well-informed or up-to-date about Canadian fiction as any of those called on, and second because, like them, I find the process of canon-formation more interesting than the end result in any case (there’s nothing like having to choose between unlike alternatives to focus the mind). Still, as some evidence of my citizenship, I’m pleased to say that I could name a handful of Canadian novels I particularly like that I didn’t spot on anyone else’s list (though I wouldn’t necessarily make a pitch for any of them as one of the 10 best):
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