Canadian Criticism Research Articles

Critical Disengagement: The Epistemic and White Supremacist Violence of Theatre Criticism in Canada and the USA

This article examines recent controversies sparked by the critical reception of work by Global Majority theatre artists in Canada and the USA, including Yolanda Bonnell, Yvette Nolan, and Antoinette Nwandu. It argues that, when faced with works that fall outside of their presumed expertise and experience, critics commonly resort to a strategy of critical disengagement, which displaces the focus from the work and refuses to evaluate it on its own terms. Through an analysis of case studies, we elucidate the concept of critical disengagement and its three distinct categories, ‘othering,’ ‘imposing’, and ‘self-staging’. These acts are representative of larger patterns in dominant theatre criticism practices, which are descended from neoclassical and Enlightenment formulations of criticism, and centre around the ideals of fair judgement and critical objectivity. When applied to the work of Global Majority theatre artists by a largely white critical establishment, they enact, consolidate, and reproduce what Gayatri Spivak calls epistemic violence. During this pivotal moment, as theatre communities in the Global North respond to calls for racial justice and decolonization, this article sheds light on the often overlooked role of criticism in sustaining white supremacy within theatre production and reception, and stresses the urgent need to re-imagine critical practices. Signy Lynch is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto Mississauga and recipient of the Governor General’s Gold Medal (York University, 2022). She has published articles on theatre criticism and intercultural theatre in Contemporary Theatre Review, Canadian Theatre Review, and Theatre Research in Canada. Michelle MacArthur is associate professor at the University of Windsor’s School of Dramatic Art. She has published articles in Contemporary Theatre Review, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and several edited volumes. She is the editor of Voices of a Generation: Three Millennial Plays (Playwrights Canada Press, 2022).

Power, Perception, and Professionalism: An Empirical Study of Digital Theatre Criticism in Canada

Power, Perception, and Professionalism: An Empirical Study of Digital Theatre Criticism in Canada

Experiencing Indigenous Work—Developing Critical Voices: Three Views

Cole Alvis, Carol Greyeyes, and Brittany Johnston provide three perspectives on Experiencing Indigenous Work—Developing Critical Voices gathering held at the NAC in June 2017. They discuss the future of Indigenous critical practice, performance in the context of reconciliation, and challenges to the development of Indigenous criticism in Canada.

Theatre Criticism in Canada: A Round Table and Its Aftermath

The 2015 Canadian Association of Theatre Research and Société québécoise d’études théâtrales conferences at the University of Ottawa included a round table discussion on the intersection of theatre studies and theatre criticism in Canada, conducted in French and English. Here, its five participants (Hervé Guay, Laura Levin, Peter Dickinson, Alvina Ruprecht, and Alexandre Cadieux) revisit that lively and sometimes combustive event, repeating and expanding on points made, and reflecting on the discussion and thoughts arising from it.

The Pedagogy of Theatre Criticism in Canada

With declining print readership and job stability, the job of the theatre critic as we have known it is in danger, and this job scarcity is causing theatre criticism to disappear from Canadian theatre school curricula. Here several instructors and professors comment on how they’re keeping theatre criticism a foundational skill for theatre students, from combining criticism with dramaturgical practices to finding alternative platforms to add new voices to the existing critical landscape.

Mapping the New Critical Terrain: Rules, Ethics, Hierarchies

Ongoing changes in the media landscape have led to a greater diversity of forms for theatre criticism in Canada. Criticism now appears on personal blogs and group reviewing websites, on social media, and via online features supported by theatre companies, as well as in newspapers and specialist magazines. Through contributions from a range of Canadian theatre critics, including Richard Ouzounian, Megan Mooney, and Rodrigo Flores, this article responds to the diversification of critical forms, mapping the terms, expectations, and hierarchies that are defining English-language theatre criticism in twenty-first-century Canada.

Speaking Volumes about Auto/biography Studies in Canada

THE TWO VOLUMES, Autobiography in Canada: Critical Directions, edited by Julie Rak, and Tracing the Autobiographical, edited by Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan, demonstrate the vigour of contemporary auto/biography criticism in Canada. Published in Canada by Wilfred Laurier University Press in 2005, each book contains twelve essays by Canadian scholars, with an editorial introduction.' Although the only two authors to contribute to both collections are leading Canadian auto/biography scholar Susanna Egan and her respected younger colleague, the late Gabriele Helms, the citations and cross-references convey the sense of a lively and interactive scholarly community. While reading these essays on contemporary Canadian autobiography I attended a conference on Art and Authenticity, at which a fascinating discussion followed a paper on the recently discovered Mungo (School of Humanities, Australian National University, 2 November 2006). Traces of ancient people, men, women, and children, on the move, going about their daily life, were accidentally preserved they crossed a muddy area about twenty thousand years ago, in the form of four-hundred-and-fifty fossilized human footprints in the remote Lake Mungo region of Australia. Yet an art historian pointed out, the footprints are of a quite different order to ancient handprints on the walls of caves in Australia and elsewhere, where the hand was deliberately placed against the rock surface to make an imprint. The constitutes an act of communication with aesthetic implications, whereas the footprints are an incidental, though extraordinary, capturing of passing people with a quite different purpose, travel for hunting, ceremony, or some other reason. The autobiographical act is more like the than the fossilized footprint. The question, Footprint or handprint?; was on my mind I considered these Canadian essays, many which owe a strong debt to the collection edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Getting a Life: Everyday Uses ofAutobiography (1996). Smith and Watson themselves introduce the image of the fingerprint to indicate the vast possibilities of their project, without making a clear distinction between the print an accidental by-product of an individual going about daily life and the deliberate mark that an individual chooses to make upon a surface: We could have included discussions of bumper sticker subjects, of identity clothing, of hair. Once we got started on this project, almost everything presented itself implicated in the choosing, imposing, evading, or negotiating of an identity. Fingerprints were everywhere (18). Autobiography in Canada, edited by Julie Rak, examines how the field of auto/biography is developing specifically in Canada, discussing Canadian auto/biography only, whereas the essays in Tracing the Autobiographical range well beyond Canada's borders to consider life-writing from Palestine/Israel, works by Australian Aboriginal writers, and gypsy Holocaust texts, well emerging forms of life-writing on the internet. The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical all represent the work of female academics identifying feminist scholars. In introducing the essays in Autobiography in Canada, Julie Rak also gives prominence to feminist scholarship in autobiography criticism, although the critical perspective is somewhat broader and essayists include both male and female scholars. Rak leans more toward a footprint than a handprint conception of autobiography in that she sees more potential in cultural than in literary studies for productive development in Canadian autobiography studies. She also advocates continuing work in feminist autobiography criticism, work on trauma and culture, and on non-literary and mass-marketed texts. Rak sees the study of non-fiction discourse in auto/biography criticism as an effective way to engage with ideas about truth, representation and power in a broader social sense. …

Ethics, Spectres, and Formalism in Sheila Watson's The Double Hook

Aware of dangers of rationalism and moralism, this is a view that does not dream of mastering or eliminating undecidability and of establishing transparency. Chantal Mouffe NORTHROP FRYE BEGAN HIS 1963 MASSEY LECTURES, entitled Educated Imagination, by asking: What is study of literature? Does it help us to think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life? Such questions are currently of great concern to many literary scholars in United States, where there has been a tremendous surge of interest in the to ethics. Writers including Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, J. Hillis Miller, and Marjorie Garber, to name only a few, have charted connections among literature, literary theory, politics, and moral philosophy that have become increasingly apparent over last twenty years. At same time, critics have also identified troubling connections between legacy of modernist humanism and so-called turn to ethics. Gauri Viswanathan, for example, notes entanglement of roots of literary criticism with civilizing mission carried out in England's colonies through supposedly moral influence of English literature. In what follows, I to Sheila Watson's modernist classic Hook (1966) to trace this novel complicates any simplistic notions of literature's ethical engagement. By strategically introducing obstacles to communication, most obviously trope of spectre, I argue that Watson's narrative frustrates hermeneutical impulse to cross barriers and merge self and other, particularly when this impulse is directed at Native North Americans. Ironically, because Hook relies on tropes of obstruction and features of modernist drama that prompt readers to relinquish the exorbitant (and unethical) but usually unspoken assumption that we should know others enough to speak for them, this text might be for us (Sommer 206). In other words, literature is for us when it teaches us resistance of other. An exploration of relationship between and literature is both timely and valuable because debates that raged in U.S. about turn to ethics have instigated a resurgence of interest in ethical criticism in Canada. (1) In light of uncertain relationship between literature, imperialism, and ethics, however, it is worth asking whether a scholarly to in Canada would be for anyone. Leaving aside question of whether or not it makes sense to label recent interest in a turn, (2) what I want to consider in my reading of Hook are implications of recent critical attraction to idea that literature and literary criticism should be good for us. In using word good, I am invoking standard definitions of field of ethics, also known as moral philosophy, which involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behaviour. (3) Put somewhat differently, moral philosophy concerns how we ought to live and act so as to live a (variously conceived) life (Eskin, On Literature 574). Michael Eskin argues further that anything that goes by name of ethical criticism must be supported by skeleton of a minimum of abiding, fundamental concern that make it what it is--such as overall question of literature and its significance for moral potential of human being in a given community (Eskin, The Double 560). Contemporary ethical criticism, however, is not simply concerned with our relationship to literature and to but, more specifically, with our relationship to other: [I]t is singular encounter between reader and text-as-other, soliciting a singularly just response on reader's part that is at stake in 'ethics and literature' (Eskin, The Double 560). Indeed, is ultimately about otherness: the decentered center of . …

Culture as Resource? The Function of Literary Research and Criticism in Canada

THE SESSION at ACCUTE's 2007 conference that prompted this Readers' Forum was, I think, a unique one because of the combination of bombast and honest inquiry with which Stephen Slemon wrote the initial call for papers. I felt that I was included in that session in part as a representative of those students who have recently undergone what Slemon called in his CFP the bait-and-switch methods of graduate programs, having been promised the possibility of intellectual inquiry and pleasurable reading and then discovering the necessity of conforming to our rigid codes of academic conduct. I recently completed my PHD at the University of Toronto and am hence certified in what Slemon called the manufacture of tortured analytical documents. As I attempt to go on into an academic career via my current postdoctoral position at the University of Guelph, my hopes lie in institutional change, in the possibility of writing differently, and in the possibility of presenting challenges through my work. Myriad difficulties stand in the way, however, of mine and my colleagues' attempts to gain entry through the gatekeeping system of literary criticism. My goal here is to briefly consider some of what I see as the rising challenges to English Studies in Canada and to suggest where hope might lie for those of us entering the field. I argue that the economic rationalization of our academic work threatens our already compromised academic freedom, limiting us to writing the sorts of self-contained literary analyses with which we are so familiar and hindering our examinations of the material elements of textual production. I approach the nexus of competing academic and literary struggles by asking the perhaps obvious legal question of cui bono. That is, who benefits from literary criticism? Who benefits, moreover, from the particular forms that it has taken? The phrase cui bono carries with it a sense of hidden guilt, I think, or a slightly conspiratorial meaning that suggests that an act might be to the benefit of actors unseen or unsuspected. So, cui bono? In an obvious sense, I think, literary criticism is a circular process, benefiting those who write it, edit it, and circulate it. The benefits are often tangential: by writing a paper or an academic book, one might find oneself interviewed for a position, given a salary increase, or be successful in one's tenure review. Similarly for those who participate in the publishing process. In all of these senses, there is an economic benefit to literary criticism. There is, of course, an intellectual benefit as well, as our ideas circulate in order to create an abstract collective benefit, one that allows us to participate in academic discussions, furthering knowledge. But at this point we might begin to have new questions. What does it mean to further knowledge? Why do we want to do so? These questions link, for me, into the questions that I have for our funding bodies. Why should our research be funded? Why should a body like the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) give tax dollars to the tortured forms that literary criticism has taken? Without trying to sound like the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation or the Fraser Institute, I think that these are genuine questions. This questioning will readily come from those outside of the discipline, and it is, therefore, important that we consider these questions critically so that we can have good answers. The answers that I have so far come up with, however, do not particularly comfort me. Culture and knowledge are being seen in Canada--and the world over--as resources that can be mobilized for the creation of sustainable communities. The further beneficiaries of cultural work and production, in this model, become nation states or, more broadly, structures of governance. On the surface, such uses for culture do not seem to be much at odds with critical projects that seek to create an equitable world through cultural work. …

Irish Theatre: Conditions of Criticism

It is apposite that this collection of essays about (and of) Irish theatre criticism is appearing in the pages of a theatre journal published in Canada, for it was a work of Canadian theatre scholarship that inspired the conference at which these papers were first presented. In the titular essay of Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada, Toronto critic Robert Wallace places the practice of contemporary, mainstream theatre criticism in Canada in the larger context of Canadian society and cultural politics, exposing the implicit ideologies behind a critical practice that he judges to be far too determined by individual taste and a "common sense" approach. An honest and functional critical practice must start with an acknowledgement that ''judgment is relative and evaluation is political", argues Wallace, quoting John Leonard's call for a "Canadian theatre criticism that is partisan, subjective and interested - as it is now - but explicitly so," a criticism, Wallace continues, that "recognizes its symbiotic connection to Canadian theatre".

Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre, and: Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre, and: Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre Shelley Scott (bio) Alan Filewod. Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre Textual Studies in Canada, University College of the Cariboo 2002. xviii, 120. $12.00 Sherrill Grace and Albert-Reiner Glaap, editor. Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre Talonbooks. 320. $24.95 The University College of the Cariboo publishes Textual Studies in Canada, and in the spring of 2002, with issue 15, began what was to have been a [End Page 345] series of monographs under the title 'Critical Performances in Canada.' The monograph series has since been discontinued, but the Canadian scholarly community has Alan Filewod's Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre to remind us of the initiative. In the acknowledgments, we learn that editors Jim Hoffman and Kate Sutherland commissioned Filewod's contribution, and in their introduction we learn that, by doing so, they 'hope[d] to add significantly to Canadian theory.' The editors cite Robert Wallace's Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada (1990) and Ric Knowles's more recent The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning (1999) as work that has been 'willing to systematically tackle ... wider areas and issues of performance in their Canadian constructions.' Thus we understand from the outset that Filewod's work will inhabit an interdisciplinary terrain that draws as easily from the discourses of performance and cultural studies as theatre history. Winner of the 2003 Ann Saddlemyer Award from the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, Filewod's work maintains a careful balance between a 'big picture' thesis and close analysis of his case studies. He takes on the typical 'stages' in the 'meta-narrative' of Canadian theatre, from nineteenth-century closet drama to the alternative theatre movement to the controversy over Garth Drabinsky's Show Boat. But in each case he presents 'a counter-argument that relates historicized understandings of the theatre to the larger ideological narratives of Canadian nationhood.' Filewod's argument is that 'Canadian nationhood' and an 'imagined theatre' are regularly called upon to explain and describe each other, without any acknowledgment that 'theatre models social systems of production.' He writes: 'Theatre is not simply a matter of staged representation: it is an event both physical and symbolic; it transforms experience into a community narrative; and it materially constructs in the audience the community it addresses in its texts.' The result of Filewod's approach is a sort of radical textbook, an impression which is reinforced by the large format with double columns on each page, footnotes embedded in bold in the text, and copious illustrations on almost every page. But while this is an account of topics familiar to students of Canadian theatre history, it is a postcolonial, materialist, and highly theorized reworking that challenges the words 'Canadian,' 'theatre,' and 'history,' at every contested 'stage.' In her contribution to the anthology Performing National Identities, Erin Hurley takes up a related interrogation. Hurley criticizes the model of international play production that assigns theatre a representative function, as if Canadian plays are supposed to teach foreign audiences about Canada. It is a model nicely illustrated in the chapter by Jennifer Harvie, when she complains of British critics who discuss Judith Thompson's plays as realistic (and alarming) portraits of urban Canada. Hurley advocates instead that Canadian theatre be recast as a 'refracting mirror ... [that] [End Page 347] shows the world around itself, through itself.' Hurley's call for Canada to have a 'potentially deconstructive and performative role on the world stage' is answered by intriguing chapters about Canadian productions in Germany and Japan. Yoshinari Minami, for example, suggests that Japan looks to Canadian theatre in order to think about living in a multi-ethnic society, in turn confirming the editors' observation that 'Canadian plays outside Canada question the host country's assumptions about their own national identities as much as they question what it might mean to call a play Canadian.' Part 1 functions as an introduction to six Canadian playwrights by analysing specific aspects of their work. The collection is divided into three parts. Part...

Northern Exposure?: American Homeland Security and Canada

INTRODUCTIONIn the days and weeks following 11 September 2001, rumours spread that some of the terrorists had entered the United States from Canada. Although these proved be false, the view gained credence that American was dangerously exposed along its northern, undefended border. It was an assessment furthered and encouraged by widespread criticism in Canada that for years Ottawa had failed take the terrorist threat seriously, especially by its failure properly control and monitor its immigration policies.Whatever the validity of these arguments, with over 85 percent of its foreign trade dependent on access the US market, the Canadian government immediately realized that it now had a stake in American security. As Desmond Morton recently observed, Canada's priority today is as it has been throughout our history, to do what we must do make the Americans feel secure on their northern border. Americans may remember 9/11; we must remember 9/12, when American panic closed the US border and shook our prosperity its very core.1This article examines United States policy and its impact on Canada. It looks at nature of American defence policy with particular reference the role of the departments of and defence. It then examines Ottawa's response, including with regard the Canadian forces (CF). paper makes two related arguments. First, that despite the largest reorganization of the US government since the Second World War in order better defend the American people and economy at home, remain significant problems in implementing and some degree in even agreeing what is involved in the role of the military. Second, that in light of these difficulties, efforts north of the border compare favourably with those taking place the south. Indeed, in a number of significant respects, the government of Canada, in seeking reassure Americans that their is not threatened from the north, has also moved quickly and effectively secure the Canadian homeland.PROTECTING THE AMERICAN HOMELAND: BETWEEN SECURITY AND DEFENCEIn July 2002, President Bush stated that, there is an overriding and urgent mission here in America today, and that's protect our homeland. We have been called into action, and we've got act. 2002 homeland act created the Department of Homeland security, (DHS), involving the largest reorganization of the American government in US history. The national strategy for security lists three main goals: prevent terrorist attacks within the United States; reduce America's vulnerability terrorism; and minimize the damage and recover from attacks that do occur. For the fiscal year 2005, the DHS will have $40.7 billion available it, including $28.7 billion in net discretionary spending at a 6.6 percent increase over fiscal 2004.2 Overall spending on is now approximately equal the annual defence expenditures of both Russia and China.But according one assessment, setting up the Department of Homeland Security has been disastrous.Far from being greater than the sum of its parts, DHS is a bureaucratic Frankenstein, with clumsily stitched-together limbs and an inadequate, misfiring brain. No one says merging 170,000 employees from 22 different agencies should have been easy. But, even allowing for inevitable transition problems, DHS has been a disaster: under funded, undermanned, disorganized, and unforgivably slow-moving.3There have also been some problems with helping states and municipalities improve their emergency preparedness. Under the Patriot Act, is a complicated formula ensure that all states, regardless of population and regardless of whether they contain high profile targets likely attract terrorist attacks, receive a certain percentage of the funds allocated improve the capabilities of local and state first responders. …

The Practice and Theory of Canadian Thematic Criticism: A Reconsideration

In 1989 the authors of The Empire Writes Back suggested that the distinguishing feature of English-Canadian literary studies had been the way >these have often stressed thematic concerns considered central to the literature= (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 134), then added: >More recently, there has been a reaction in Canada against the dominance of thematic criticism, as in Frank Davey=s ASurviving the Paraphrase@ (1983), B.W. Powe=s A Climate Charged (1984), or the more positive Russell M. Brown=s ACritic, Culture, Text: Beyond Thematics@ (1978).= To anyone who=d been following the critical discourse in Canada at that point, this mild characterization of the hostility that had developed towards thematic criticism in Canada B as simply >a reaction= B must have seemed a distinct understatement. A more typical response was that of Louis MacKendrick, who, in a 1992 reference entry on Canadian fiction and poetry, characterized Canadian thematic criticism as >reductive= and >defensive,= as relying >on paraphrase and plot,= and as de-emphasizing interpretation. Recapitulating the thematic debate, he hung the blame for what he saw as this wrong turn squarely on Northrop Frye:

The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary Canadian Dramaturgies

The Theatre of Form is a welcome addition to the small library of books devoted to historical and critical analysis of contemporary English-Canadian theatre – books such as Diane Bessai’s Playwrights of Collective Creation, Alan Filewod’s Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada and Robert Wallace’s Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada. This book distills – potently – an argument about theatre that Knowles has been developing for a long time. This argument is about the relation of the arts to history and society, an argument that applies with special force to theatre. It goes roughly like this: the arts do not exist in a transcendent realm apart from society; there is always a complex relation between art and the social formation in which it is produced. Art is indeed not created out of the empyrean but produced out of the raw material of ideology and social practice. Art may reproduce and hence reinforce ideology, enhancing its aura of naturalness and inevitability; it may negotiate a place for a broader range of social realities than is normally permissible; it may render visible “the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes” (Althusser 204); it may subvert ideology from within its own terms; it may allude to counter-ideologies and thus actively produce certain elements of counter-hegemony with practical consequences in the social formation.

Pulling Together Canadian Literary Pluralities

Pulling Together Canadian Literary PluralitiesThe essays assembled here present some recent developments in cultural production in Canada. They offer a range of reflections and an array of styles. They are particularly interested in the impact on Canadian literary production of contemporary discussions concerning race and ethnicity. Like gender, class, or cultural identity, race and ethnicity are categories that require interrogation and analysis - in relation to the study of Canada in general and, in particular here, to the study of its literature.Over the past decade, Canadian literary criticism has paid increasing attention to the contributions of writers of ethnic and racial minority identifications.(f.1) This writing has a long - standing history and tradition in Canada, but only recently has it come to wider critical attention. The reasons for the shift in focus are multiple and complex, as Enoch Padolsky has noted.(f.2) They include immigration patterns and demographic change, the discursive impact of the highly racialized society of the United States, the influence of post - colonial theory, high profile debates on multiculturalism,(f.3) growing media attention to issues of race relations and concerns about representation and appropriation in writers' organizations such as PEN(f.4) and literary events such as the 1994 Writing Thru Race conference.(f.5) Together these developments have encouraged new ways of thinking about Canadian experience and cultural expression. New approaches to literature are offering alternatives to the critical modes that were popular in previous decades. This is especially the case with respect to what has been referred to as the mythopoeic or environmentalist tradition of criticism in the work of critics and writers such as Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood, Douglas Jones, Ronald Sutherland or John Moss.(f.6)The essays presented here speak to these developments. They were first read as papers at the Windy Pine Colloquium, 24 - 27 August 1995. The colloquium was organized to provide an opportunity for sustained, in - depth discussion amongst writers and researchers working in the broad field of racial and ethnic minority writing and criticism in Canada and Quebec. The project was conceived at Windy Pine in August 1993.(f.7) Bordering the shores of Lake Kushog in Ontario's Haliburton Highlands, Windy Pine is a 24 - acre property, given to the care of Trent's Canadian Studies Program in 1981 by Mary Northway.(f.8) The site takes its name from the towering white pines that are indigenous to the area. With its cluster of rustic cabins, Windy Pine serves as a place of retreat, research and reflection as well as recreation and relaxation. Theses and articles have been written there, and class excursions and meetings have been held on the premises. On these and other occasions, canoeing and hiking have been as much a part of the day's activities as debate and discussion. The idyllic setting and the activities it permits have become for some a metaphor of the Canadian Studies enterprise.In August 1993, I re - visited Windy Pine after a hiatus owing to a year's teaching at the University de Nantes, followed by sabbatical leave in Montreal. These urban sojourns stood in contract to Windy Pine's rural offerings, and as incoming chair of Trent's Canadian Studies Program, I was thinking about the significance of contemporary discussions around race and ethnicity to the study of Canada. These themes had been animating my research, in particular my work on writing by Canadian and Quebec women. In retreat at Windy Pine, the issues could appear more remote than they actually were. The idea developed of organizing a discussion about race, ethnicity, and Canadian culture to take place in the rural setting of Windy Pine.The concept evolved over the next year into the Windy Pine colloquium on ethnic and racial minority writing and criticism in Canada and Quebec. …

Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English by Helen M. Buss

Helen M. Buss, Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). x, 237. $19.95 paper, $39.95 cloth. In recent years, autobiography has enjoyed renewed interest as a field of lit­ erary research and criticism. Several factors account for this development, including the new perspectives of feminist scholarship and the emergence of life writing as both genre and critical practice. In Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English, Helen Buss draws on feminist theory and life writing alike to produce a valuable study on autobiography. A feminist analysis frames Buss’s focus on women’s (as opposed to men’s) autobiography, while a reflection on life writing allows her to inject new meaning into the word autobiography. For Buss, the term designates writ­ ten texts ranging from “diariesthat seemnaiveofanyliterary considerations, through accounts hardly distinguishable from novels, to sophisticated and subtle texts by women who have studied the productions of postmodern lit­ erary masters” (14). Life narratives, personal narratives, autogynographies, autographs, life writing, all terms used by other contemporary scholars, are embraced by Buss’s understanding of autobiography. Beyond its particular understanding of autobiography and its feminist framework, Buss’s study presents several additional distinguishing traits, each contributing in a unique way to literary criticism in Canada. To begin, the corpus under study is entirely Canadian. While comparisons are made to the personal documents ofinternationally-known writers such as Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson, Buss’s focus is on Canadian autobiographers. This comprises one of the major contributions of her study. Readers are in­ troduced to a wealth ofCanadian writers, many ofwhom are not well enough known given the interest or significance of their writings. To the reasonably familiar list of Susanna Moodie, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Simcoe, Anne Langton, and more recently, Margaret Laurence, Daphne Marlatt, Kristjana Gunnars, and Aritha van Herk, Buss adds new and welcome names such as Mary O’Brien, Mary Hiemstra, Susan Allison, Melinda McCracken, and others. By examining these writers’texts, Buss not only boosts the efforts of life writing to expand the boundaries ofthe literary domain; she also extends the list of Canadian women writers whose work researchers might justifiably investigate. Another distinctive feature ofBuss’sstudy is its central metaphor ofmap­ ping. Buss provides an in-depth and compelling explanation for choosing maps over other metaphors of self-reflexive writing, including the mirror, or its Irigarian version, the speculum. As a means of self-knowledge and selfexpression , Buss believes that mirrors are limited by their dependency on the sense ofsight. Maps, on the other hand, involve a complex ofintellectual 100 and practical skills, including language as well as the visual. Map making thus offers a dynamic metaphor preferable to passive mirror-gazing. Her mapping metaphor allows Buss to ground psychoanalytic models of identity firmly in cultural/historic contexts, and thereby to show “howmapping iden­ tity for females can partake of that [psychoanalytic] world of first language mappings in a way that culture does not encourage for men” (12). Mapping Our Selves is further distinguished by Buss’s unique reading model. Proceeding from reader response theory and its recognition of the reader’s role in the literary act, Buss proposes a reading wherein she in­ teracts with the texts from three varying positions, each arising out of the institution of the family. “Since this is the context in which my subjec­ tivity as reader was first formed,” Buss argues, “it is a suitable metaphor for my reading” (26). Buss’s critical reading moves between readerly po­ sitions of mother/daughter/sister to the texts under study. Clearly gen­ dered, Buss sees her reading as a highly responsible one as well, for as mother/sister/daughter, a reader shares “common cause with the text” (26). In theoretical terms, Buss locates her critical position “somewhere between the rock and hard place ofhumanism and poststructuralism” (28). She seeks neither a Barthesian romance of reading or erotics of the text, nor Adrienne Rich’s intimate but polite engagement. “I seek ‘(m)othering,’” Buss asserts. “By this bracketed version of mothering, I mean to imply the configuration of three relationships with significant others that I know in actual...

Canada's Hollywood: the Canadian state and feature films

CANADA'S HOLLYWOOD: THE CANADIAN STATE AND FEATURE FILMS. Ted Madger, Toronto 1993: University of Toronto Press.Rhetorics of Divided VoiceIn a provocative discussion in late 1994 of sterility of debates in film criticism (a discussion which, like debates themselves, seems to have been met with usual indifference), Bart Testa (University of Toronto) drew attention to consensual moralism that has underlain relatively limited critical analysis medium of film has received in context. In Testa's view, actors participating in elaboration of film industry - from critics and government officials in particular, to filmmakers occasionally - have all shared a belief that film should first serve a high moral purpose however this formula was to be understood by individual participants. Testa noted considerable extent to which critical discussion of film in context has been a discourse, preoccupied with defining what film ought to be at expense of whatever else it may actually have done or currently might be doing (see so - called Cinema We Need debate in Fetherling: n.d., 260 - 336). Testa traced this moralism to what he termed the social - reflection prescription, fundamental obligation that cultural production somehow must reflect Canadian conditions in a unique manner that would in turn constitute identity. Cultural production had to be distinctively Canadian; failing that, it would be nothing at all. In Testa's perspective, because film criticism in Canada had not amounted to much more than its moralism, its achievements were, for most part, insignificant and repetitious.Had Testa looked beyond film criticism, he would have perceived a more generalized phenomenon. The consensual moralism he found in film criticism was not restricted to it; rather, that consensual moralism formed sine qua non of cultural production in Canada, basis on which it received critical attention, articulation in public sphere and, last but not least, subsidy by state. The publicization of cultural production by consensual moralism has not, then, been limited to critical discussion of film, but broadly speaking has been historical burden of production of culture in twentieth - century context, in literature as in painting, especially in those hybrid art forms that derive to a greater extent from capital - intensive (or industrial) modes of organization - namely, cultural industries (in their classic incarnation in book and magazine publishing, sound - recording, film and television production in particular).But why this has been case was not a question Testa (1994a, 1994b), in his discussion of film criticism, dealt with other than drawing attention to determining (and still puzzling) legacy of John Grierson's influence since 1930s on film discourse and its contemporary critical avatars. The extent to which a prescriptive moralism has framed discussion of cultural production is worth dwelling upon further, however, since it would itself appear to have come to constitute a veritable medium of its own. Indeed, I would argue that it has been primary medium through which discourses of cultural production were to be publically conducted and given institutional form.The decades that followed Second World War saw extension, at public cost, of an increasingly elaborate legislative, administrative, fiscal - in a word, regulatory - apparatus of federal and also provincial agencies that have provided institutional framework for development of cultural production activities in a variety of domains, from traditional fine arts to media arts, in higher education, and select domains of mass media. In mass media of film and broadcasting, state had already established institutional precedents for intervention - in state - produced film as early as teens of century, and in state - owned broadcasting as of early 1930s. …

Hollywood's overseas campaign: the North Atlantic movie trade, 1920-1950

HOLLYWOOD'S OVERSEAS CAMPAIGN: THE NORTH ATLANTIC MOVIE TRADE, 1920 - 1950. Ian Jarvie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.Rhetorics of Divided VoiceIn a provocative discussion in late 1994 of sterility of debates in film criticism (a discussion which, like debates themselves, seems to have been met with usual indifference), Bart Testa (University of Toronto) drew attention to consensual moralism that has underlain relatively limited critical analysis medium of film has received in context. In Testa's view, actors participating in elaboration of film industry - from critics and government officials in particular, to filmmakers occasionally - have all shared a belief that film should first serve a high moral purpose however this formula was to be understood by individual participants. Testa noted considerable extent to which critical discussion of film in context has been a discourse, preoccupied with defining what film ought to be at expense of whatever else it may actually have done or currently might be doing (see so - called Cinema We Need debate in Fetherling: n.d., 260 - 336). Testa traced this moralism to what he termed the social - reflection prescription, fundamental obligation that cultural production somehow must reflect Canadian conditions in a unique manner that would in turn constitute identity. Cultural production had to be distinctively Canadian; failing that, it would be nothing at all. In Testa's perspective, because film criticism in Canada had not amounted to much more than its moralism, its achievements were, for most part, insignificant and repetitious.Had Testa looked beyond film criticism, he would have perceived a more generalized phenomenon. The consensual moralism he found in film criticism was not restricted to it; rather, that consensual moralism formed sine qua non of cultural production in Canada, basis on which it received critical attention, articulation in public sphere and, last but not least, subsidy by state. The publicization of cultural production by consensual moralism has not, then, been limited to critical discussion of film, but broadly speaking has been historical burden of production of culture in twentieth - century context, in literature as in painting, especially in those hybrid art forms that derive to a greater extent from capital - intensive (or industrial) modes of organization - namely, cultural industries (in their classic incarnation in book and magazine publishing, sound - recording, film and television production in particular).But why this has been case was not a question Testa (1994a, 1994b), in his discussion of film criticism, dealt with other than drawing attention to determining (and still puzzling) legacy of John Grierson's influence since 1930s on film discourse and its contemporary critical avatars. The extent to which a prescriptive moralism has framed discussion of cultural production is worth dwelling upon further, however, since it would itself appear to have come to constitute a veritable medium of its own. Indeed, I would argue that it has been primary medium through which discourses of cultural production were to be publically conducted and given institutional form.The decades that followed Second World War saw extension, at public cost, of an increasingly elaborate legislative, administrative, fiscal - in a word, regulatory - apparatus of federal and also provincial agencies that have provided institutional framework for development of cultural production activities in a variety of domains, from traditional fine arts to media arts, in higher education, and select domains of mass media. In mass media of film and broadcasting, state had already established institutional precedents for intervention - in state - produced film as early as teens of century, and in state - owned broadcasting as of early 1930s. …

Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada

Robert Wallace’s collection of essays, Producing Marginality, is a book to go back to again and again. It is deeply thought out, is built on a strong foundation of research, and is passionately committed. The positions Wallace maintains are bound to provoke long, hard thinking about the present state of theatre in Canada, the relation between theatre and political power and ideology, the relation between Quebec and the rest of Canada. It is frankly a polemic. Not only does Wallace make no claim to objectivity, he mounts an impressive argument against the very concept of objectivity and of universal critical values.

Robert Wallace. Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada

Robert Wallace. <i>Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada</i>