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Canadian Literature, No. 241 (2020): Reading, Writing, Listening

Canadian Literature, No 217 (2013): Gendering the Archive

The emergence of reread podcasts – in which hosts revisit a favourite book or series, inviting listeners to reread alongside them – offers insight into new digital reading communities that often emerge around active fandoms. Focusing on the popular sub-genre of Harry Potter reread podcasts, this paper asks what lessons these new reading communities can teach us about the practice of rereading, the capacity of podcasts to create new kinds of interactive publics, the link between podcasts and fan communities, and the roles these podcasts play in readers’ lives. Interactive and participatory yet structured around the expertise of the host, reread podcasts have the potential to become pedagogical and thus transformative online spaces.

The conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 has initiated numerous conversations about Canada’s renewed relationship with Indigenous peoples, and elicited questions about what it means to ‘reconcile’. I use ethnographic methods to examine these issues in the context of language revitalization, at the nexus of government policy, university-community partnerships, and the experiences of individual language learners within the Oneida Nation of the Thames. This thesis re-evaluates the relationship between Indigenous language revitalization and the political process of reconciliation through the framework of Indigenous resurgence, an emerging theory and practice that seeks to regenerate Indigenous communities through self-recognition. By examining three different on-going language projects through a resurgence lens, this thesis argues that a politics of resurgence offers a necessary meta-framework for a new relationship between the Settler state and Indigenous peoples, by providing a common basis for Settler and Indigenous people together to work on resurgent projects.

Canadian Literature, No 223 (2014): Agency & Affect

Core genome phylogenetic tree for Salmonella sp. The tree is mid-point rooted. Strains noted to be in equivalence groups are similarly coloured. (PDF 39 kb)

Core genome phylogenetic tree for Escherichia/Shigella sp. The tree is mid-point rooted. Reference genomes representing previously published phylogroups are indicated. Strains noted to be in equivalence groups are similarly coloured. (PDF 40 kb)

Antimicrobial resistance genes in sequenced strains by genus. (DOCX 66 kb)

Core genome phylogenetic tree for Proteus sp. The tree is mid-point rooted. Strains noted to be in equivalence groups are similarly coloured. (PDF 23 kb)

Core genome phylogenetic tree for Klebsiella sp. The tree is mid-point rooted. Strains noted to be in equivalence groups are similarly coloured. (PDF 24 kb)

Complicit Witnessing: Distant Suffering in Contemporary White Canadian Women’s Writing examines twenty-first-century literature by white Canadian women that represents, or bears witness to, the lives of “distant others” (Boltanski). Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly and The Beauty of Humanity Movement, Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared, and Karen Connelly’s The Border Surrounds Us, The Lizard Cage, and Burmese Lessons: A Love Story can be read as examples of Canadian literature gone “global” and situated within the tradition of literature of sentiment that works to educate Western readers about the lives of distant others while also forging transnational affective bonds. In the context of globalization and the commodification of transnational empathy via neoliberal civilizing regimes, however, care for distant others is irrevocably complicit with a fantasy of distance that would produce the white Western woman as an innocent, rather than implicated, subject. These texts demand a rethinking of complicity beyond accusations of representational guilt based in Orientalist paradigms of power/knowledge. Through an understanding of Canadian literature as a middlebrow institution of national pedagogy, this project questions the discursive production of Canada as a benevolent middle power characterized by humanitarian outreach and white civility, and asks how Gibb, Echlin, and Connelly’s work both endorses and complicates this view. Through the articulation of an ethics of complicity, this project argues for an expansion of the term beyond accusations of criminal collusion to include the sense of enfoldment, implication, and complex affiliation that takes the form, in these texts, of affectively charged transnational (usually romantic) relationships. This focus on sentimental narratives and border-crossing affiliations complicates the ethics of reading that champions textual resistance. Instead, this project explores the tension between resistance and veracity through a methodological approach that heeds both textual complexity and paratextual framing. Complicity is a grounds for neither celebration nor outright dismissal, but provides a way to engage with books that expand the problem of distant suffering and responsibility for the other in the context of how discourses new and old both curtail and over-determine the possibilities of caring for distant others.