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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 →

Author Carol Shields passed away this summer, while I was unable to update. I wanted so very much to express to my readers how much of a loss her death really was to Canadian literature. Thanks to my site’s down time, I was able to give a lot of thought to what I want to say. Though I never got to meet her, Carol Shields taught me that literature, even if it isn’t always for everybody, is always for somebody. Her books were for me. They were about Canada, but not just that; they were about a Canada that I recognized. The Stone Diaries was the first Canadian book I read that did not take place either in Toronto, elsewhere in Southern Ontario, or in the Maritimes. It took place primarily in Manitoba and the United States, with Winnipeg holding a prominent place. You see, I had been to Toronto… Continue Reading →

I have managed, over the last two years or so, to acquire a copy of every issue of McSweeney’s published thus far. That makes eleven oddly formatted journals, of irregular size sitting all in a row on the shelf above my eMac. I have undertaken the project of reading them all, cover to cover, in order, with no other journals interrupting me in the meantime (I am currently a few pages into issue eight). This means several things. First, it means that I am going out of my mind trying to wrap my head around an astonishing number of bold, original, strange, and occassionally pretentious, works of fiction and journalism. I find it quite fun, actually. But it’s also intellectually taxing. Second, it means that I get to experience the evolution of the journal in a time significantly shorter than it actually took to happen. In the first few issues,… Continue Reading →

As I’ve been learning about the way in which literature is studied, my own work has focused on two things; the way in which history is incorporated into literature, and how subjectivities (for my purposes that means “identities”, although there several dozen other possible definitions) are formed. Lately I’ve been thinking a good deal about the problems of subjectivity. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two major schools of thought on the matter. I’ll call the first school essentialism. It’s often associated with liberal humanism and the Romantics, but it goes back significantly further, right to Plato. The idea is that deep down on some level we may not be able to identify (some might choose to use terms like “the soul”) we are all the same. This is an attractive idea for a writer because it gives us a sense that our work might potentially be understood… Continue Reading →