Counterblasting Canada

In 1914, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound—the founders of vorticism—undertook an unprecedented analysis of the present, its technologies, communication, politics, and architecture. The essays in Counterblasting Canada trace the influence of vorticism on Marshall McLuhan and Canadian Modernism. Building on the initial accomplishment of the magazine Blast, McLuhan’s subsequent Counterblast, and the network of artistic and intellectual relationships that flourished in Canadian vorticism, the contributors offer groundbreaking examinations of postwar Canadian literary culture, particularly the legacies of Sheila and Wilfred Watson. Intended primarily for scholars of literature and communications, Counterblasting Canada explores a crucial and long-overlooked strand in Canadian cultural and literary history. Contributors: Gregory Betts, Adam Hammond, Paul Hjartarson, Dean Irvine, Elena Lamberti, Philip Monk, Linda M. Morra, Kristine Smitka, Leon Surette, Paul Tiessen, Adam Welch, Darren Wershler.

An examination of the connections between modernist writers and editorial activities, Making Canada New draws links among new and old media, collaborative labour, emergent scholars and scholarships, and digital modernisms. In doing so, the collection reveals that renovating modernisms does not need to depend on the fabrication of completely new modes of scholarship. Rather, it is the repurposing of already existing practices and combining them with others – whether old or new, print or digital – that instigates a process of continuous renewal. Critical to this process of renewal is the intermingling of print and digital research methods and the coordination of more popular modes of literary scholarship with less frequented ones, such as bibliography, textual studies, and editing. Making Canada New tracks the editorial renovation of modernism as a digital phenomenon while speaking to the continued production of print editions.

This collection of essays focuses on the varied and complex roles that editors have played in the production of literary and scholarly texts in Canada. With contributions from a wide range of participants who have played seminal roles as editors of Canadian literatures—from nineteenth-century works to the contemporary avant-garde, from canonized texts to anthologies of so-called minority writers and the oral literatures of the First Nations—this collection is the first of its kind. Contributors offer incisive analyses of the cultural and publishing politics of editorial practices that question inherited paradigms of literary and scholarly values. They examine specific cases of editorial production as well as theoretical considerations of editing that interrogate such key issues as authorial intentionality, textual authority, historical contingencies of textual production, circumstances of publication and reception, the pedagogical uses of edited anthologies, the instrumentality of editorial projects in relation to canon formation and minoritized literatures, and the role of editors as interpreters, enablers, facilitators, and creators. Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada situates editing in the context of the growing number of collaborative projects in which Canadian scholars are engaged, which brings into relief not only those aspects of editorial work that entail collaborating, as it were, with existing texts and documents but also collaboration as a scholarly practice that perforce involves co-editing.

Avant Canada presents a rich collection of original essays and creative works on a representative array of avant-garde literary movements in Canada from the past fifty years. From the work of Leonard Cohen and bpNichol to that of Jordan Abel and Liz Howard, Avant Canada features twenty-eight of the best writers and critics in the field. The book proposes four dominant modes of avant-garde production: “Concrete Poetics,” which accentuates the visual and material aspects of language; “Language Writing,” which challenges the interconnection between words and things; “Identity Writing,” which interrogates the self and its sociopolitical position; and “Copyleft Poetics,” which undermines our habitual assumptions about the ownership of expression. A fifth section commemorates the importance of the Centennial in the 1960s at a time when avant-garde cultures in Canada began to emerge. Readers of this book will become familiar with some of the most challenging works of literature—and their creators—that this country has ever produced. From Concrete Poetry in the 1960s through to Indigenous Literature in the 2010s, Avant Canada offers the most sweeping study of the literary avant-garde in Canada to date.

Translocated Modernisms is a collection of ten chapters partitioned into sections and framed by an introduction by the editors and a coda by Kit Dobson, which is interested in those who thronged to the vibrant streets, cafés, and salons of Montparnasse, those who stayed such as Brion Gysin and Mavis Gallant, those who returned “home” such as Morley Callaghan, John Glassco, David Silverberg, and Sheila Watson, and those who galvanized local cultural practices by appropriating and translating them from elsewhere. While for some Paris becomes a permanent home, for others, it is simply a temporary excursion which can last for months, or for many years. The collection opens up the Lost Generation to include multiple generations and broadens its ambit to encompass modernist writers placed under erasure by dominant narratives of Anglo-American modernism. Instead of limiting the category to a single group based on a collective identity, this volume considers lost generations as a particular type of modernist identity attributable to multiple and disparate collectivities. These lost generations include those excluded from canonical narrativizations of expatriate modernisms, among which we spy the glimmer of other modernists living in the shadows of luminaries long recognized in the Anglo-American tradition.

"In 1914, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis--the founders of Vorticism--undertook an unprecedented analysis of the present, its technologies, communication, politics, and architecture. The essays in Counterblasting Canada trace the influence of Vorticism on Marshall McLuhan and Canadian Modernism. Building on the initial accomplishment of Blast, McLuhan's subsequent Counterblast, and the network of artistic and intellectual relationships that flourished in Canadian Vorticism, the contributors offer groundbreaking examinations of postwar Canadian literary culture, particularly the legacies of Sheila and Wilfred Watson. Intended primarily for scholars of literature and communications, Counterblasting Canada explores a crucial and long-overlooked strand in Canadian cultural and literary history. Contributors: Gregory Betts, Adam Hammond, Dean Irvine, Elena Lamberti, Philip Monk, Linda Morra, Kristine Smitka, Leon Surette, Paul Tiessen, Adam Welch, Darren Wershler."--

Fourteen essays map Canadian literary and cultural products via advances in digital humanities research methodologies.

Wyndham Lewis was both a serious proponent and forthright critic of modernism. His assault upon his contemporaries foreshadowed the twenty-first century scholarly interest in the networks, professions, and coteries – rather than the myths and heroics – of modernism. Lewis, after a long period of neglect, now sits increasingly at the heart of a revised field of modernist studies. This book explores Lewis’s cultural criticism as a valuable body of writing which posed questions that have yet to be answered about subsidy and the function of the artist, about professionalism and ethics, about who should pay for the arts, and what the artist’s obligations should be in return. It is the first book-length study of this body of critical writing, through which Lewis articulated the central and most lasting of his critical preoccupations: the question of how the work of the artist is to be valued, and the artist to be paid, in a professionalised society. This book makes an important contribution to the long overdue reassessment of a complex, contrarian figure, spanning the disciplines of literature and the visual arts, who asked pressing questions about the role and status of the artist, and ultimately about the value (economic, civic, political) of the work of art.