Symptomatic Elegies: Ideology and Melancholy in Dennis Lee and Eli Mandel

Abstract

The CanLit boom of the 1960s and 1970s involved the canonization of a cultural identity preoccupied with a perceived loss of political sovereignty to the United States and, more generally, to the dynamics of capitalist modernity. This article proposes that this emerging identity promoted an ideology that made the loss of sovereignty appear inevitable and concealed the possibility of political resistance. The article takes as case studies Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies and Eli Mandel’s “On the 25th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz Memorial Services, Toronto, January 25th, 1970 YMHA Bloor and Spadina.” Bringing together diverse fields of Canadian Studies (literature, history, and philosophy) and drawing from contemporary political and historical theory, this article explores how these poems, despite their differences in form and subject matter, partake in the same melancholic fantasy of powerlessness – a fantasy akin to the one that would come to hold sway over the global zeitgeist in the late twentieth century and beyond.