Literature

For several years now the CBC has been running a competition called Canada Reads, in which a group of panelists (musicians, politicians, filmmakers, and occasionally, writers) decide which book Canadians should read. I’ve been avoiding it like the plague, afraid that, tongue in cheek though it is, the competition would fall victim to CanLit navel gazing. And it has, at least twice. This year the winner was Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing, which I haven’t read yet. Vanderhaeghe is a minor CanLit celebrity at the moment, which may explain his success. If this book is anything at all like his The Englishman’s Boy, then it’s a good, inoffensive read, but certainly not a powerhouse. Richler’s book should have mopped the floor with The Last Crossing, but alas old Mordecai was always a far cry from “inoffensive”. The first year Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion took the prize… Continue Reading →

I just found out today via The New Quarterly (I still like the version of the site I did better) that the poetry category for the National Magazine Awards had been dropped, and then, not five minutes later, found out that it had been re-instated after a public outcry. Kudos to all those who raised their voices.

Today I ran across this essay for the second time (this time via Bookslut). In it Dale Peck, book reviewer/novelist, bitches and moans that contemporary writers do not write to please him, or indeed any other common reader (Peck, who has earned both his reputation and his salary by being kind of a professional asshole, identifies his tastes with those of the common reader), and that James Joyce is to blame. His argument is perhaps a bit more complex than that, but not very. Peck gets points for not insisting on a return to Victorian realism (even he can see where that road goes), but offers no real alternative to the contemporary novel. Presumably we are to take his novels as an example, but I have never read one, have never encountered anyone who has read one, and have never even encountered one in a book store. Even The Telegraph,… Continue Reading →

The following is my proposal for a paper I will be writing shortly. I won’t bore you with my multi-page tentative bibliography. The question is: What is literature? Why write? To whom does one write? Why read? What is the significance of studying literature? Articulate your defence of literature in the context of our globalizing consumer culture. Papers are required to engange contemporary theories by making reference to such writers as Jeanette Winterson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, bell hooks, and Joseph Gold. And now my proposal: My paper will explore the issue of what motivates readers to read, and writers to write, rather than trying to determine the relevance of literature. To try and do so would be akin to demanding a Message in, or from, literature. As to that, I will let Robertson Davies speak for me, from his introduction to Fortune, My Foe & Eros at Breakfast: Canada was,… Continue Reading →

I recently finished reading a fine book called Humanism Betrayed, by Graham Good, an English professor at UBC. Good dissects what he calls Theory (and what Harold Bloom would call “the School of Resentment), easily and convincingly exposing the many contradictions and flaws in the various critical approaches that compose Theory, and carries the critique into the realm of university administration, where it is no less effective. The book is short, but it is so well written that it does not need to be long. I wanted to quote a short representative passage, but Good’s writing flows so well and his ideas are so tightly developed that cutting a soundbyte from the text is difficult (as it should be, since some of Good’s argument rests on the idea that the intellectual and critical soundbyte has pre-empted genuine critical understanding). So here is a rather long, but representative passage: The idea… Continue Reading →