Critics argue that contemporary western societies are immersed in a "culture of memory," devoting resources to national histories and heritage, commemoration, public re-enactments, etc. We use these recollections of our national past to maintain a collective identity in the present, among other
uses. These essays, edited by Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty, explore how Canadian literature draws on aspects of cultural memory, past and future.
Exploring memory as a "vector of signification" involves a wide range such concepts of as heritage, antiquity, nostalgia, elegy, ancestry,
haunting, trauma, affect, aging, authenticity, commemoration, public history. Contributors to this collection consider literary treatments of both mainstream and alternative uses of cultural memory, past and contemporary, urban and rural. From well-known writers like Alice Munro, Al Purdy and Dionne
Brand to recreations of Aboriginal pasts and less common topics like food and Mennonites, there is wide representation of Canada's literary diversity. And equally representative is the collection's historical spread, ranging across early explorer narratives to contemporary works. The collection digs
into some of the darker moments in our past (immigrant experiences, recollections of interned Japanese-Canadians in World War 2, and memories of Native children in residential schools). The sheer ambition of this collection suggests the multifaceted ways that Canada's past is part of our collective
cultural memory now. A four-page colour insert - including Seth cartoons as well as unique, little known photography - provides a compelling visual context for the collection's treatment of the complex, multifaceted character of cultural memory in Canada.
The collection is divided into
five parts (amnesia, postmemory, recovery work, trauma, and globalization), all areas of research in the emerging field of cultural memory. These thought-provoking essays reflect the many ways the past infuses the present, and the present adapts the past. Students and scholars will find this rich
collection useful in upper-level courses in Canadian literature as well as in cultural studies.
Introduction
Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty: Thinking Beyond Nostalgia: Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory
PART I: Sites of Memory: Cultural Amnesia and the Demands of Place
1. Tony Tremblay: Globalization and Cultural Memory: Perspectives from the Periphery on the
Post-National Disassembly of Place
2. Kimberly Mair: Putting Things in Their Place: The Syncrude Gallery of Aboriginal Culture and the Idiom of Majority History
3. Renée Hulan: Lieux d'oubli: The Forgotten North of Canadian Literature
4. Candida Rifkind: Design and Disappearance: Visual
Nostalgias and the Canadian Company Town
5. Brooke Pratt: Preserving "the echoing rooms of yesterday": Al Purdy's A-frame and the Place of Writers' Houses in Canada
PART II: Memory Transference: Postmemory, Re-Memory, and Forgetting
6. Robert Zacharias: Learning Sauerkraut:
Ethnic Food, Cultural Memory, and Traces of Mennonite Identity in Alayna Munce's When I Was Young and In My Prime
7. Marlene Goldman: "Their Dark Cells": Transference, Memory, and Postmemory in John Mighton's Half Life
8. Linda Warley: Remembering Poverty: Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea, a
Tale of Two Lives
9. J.A. Weingarten: Postmemory and Canadian Poetry of the 1970s
10. Tanis Macdonald: "Exhibit me buckskinned": Indigenous Legacy and Rememory in Joan Crate's Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson
11. Cynthia Sugars: Scrapbooking: Memory and Memorabilia in Gail
Anderson-Dargatz's The Cure for Death by Lightning and Turtle Valley
Part III: Re-Membering History: Memory Work as Recovery
12. Marc Fortin: Ethnography, Law, and Aboriginal Memory: Collecting and Recollecting Gitxsan Histories in Canada
13. Peter Hodgins: Between Elegy and
Taxidermy: Archibald Lampman's Golden Lady's Slippers
14. Jess Archibald-Barber: Under Other Skies: Personal and Cultural Memory in E. Pauline Johnson's Nature Lyrics and Memorial Odes
15. Sophie McCall: Indigenous Diasporas and the Shape of Cultural Memory: Reframing Anahareo's Devil in
Deerskins
16. Shelley Hulan: Yours to Recover: Mound Burial in Alice Munro's "What Do You Want to Know For?"
17. Dennis Duffy: Romancing Canada in Best-Sellerdom: The Case of Quebec's Disappearance
18. Marissa McHugh: Collective Memory, Cultural Transmission, and the Occupation(s) of
Quebec: Jean Provencher and Gilles Lachance's Québec, Printemps 1918
PART IV: The Compulsion to Remember: Trauma and Witnessing
19. Robyn Morris: Under Surveillance: Memory, Trauma and Genocide in Madeleine Thien's Dogs at the Perimeter
20. Farah Moosa: "I didn't want to tell a
story like this": Cultural Inheritance and the Second Generation in David Chariandy's Soucouyant
21. Doris Wolf: Confronting the Legacy of Canada's Indian Residential School System: Cree Cultural Memory and the Warrior Spirit in David Alexander Robertson and Scott B. Henderson's 7 Generations
Series
22. Robyn Green: Recovering Pedagogical Space: Trauma, Education, and The Lesser Blessed
PART V: Cultural Memory in a Globalized Age
23. Alexis Motuz: "I have nothing soothing to tell you": Dionne Brand's Inventory as Global Elegy
24. Joel Baetz: Now and Then: Dionne
Brand's What We All Long For, the Desire to Forget, and the Urban Archive
25. Eva Darias-Beautell: Haunted/Wanted in Jen Sookfong Lee's The End of East: Canada's Cultural Memory Beyond Nostalgia
26. Jennifer Andrews: Rethinking Postcolonialism and Canadian Literature through Diasporic
Memory: Reading Helen Humphrey's Afterimage
27. Pilar Cuder-Domínguez: Transnational Memory and Haunted Black Geographies: Esi Edugyan's The Second Life of Samuel Tyne
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Cynthia Sugars is Professor in the Department of Literature, University of Ottawa. Her research and teaching focus on the links between national identities and cultural narratives, in the broad range of ways that Canadians, past and present, make sense of themselves as members of a national
community that is shaped by a multiplicity of contending perspectives.
Eleanor Ty is Professor in the Department of English, Wilfrid Laurier University. She works on Asian North American Literature and Film and on Eighteenth Century British Literature.
An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English - Daniel David Moses, Terry Goldie and Armand Garnet Ruffo
The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse - Edited by The late Wilfred Campbell
Introduction by Len Early
The Concise Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature - Edited by William Toye
An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English - Edited by Donna Bennett and Russell Brown
