{"title":"Archives, Intimacy, Embodiment: Encountering the Sound Subject in the Literary Archive","authors":"Julia Polyck-O'Neill","doi":"10.1353/esc.2020.a903557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903557","url":null,"abstract":"It is february 2022. I am working in Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University (sfu), newly reopened after a long closure due to the global covid-19 pandemic. It is my first time physically in an archive since well before March 2020 when most physical institutional spaces were closed as part of widespread public health measures. The space is quiet and quite warm, as the entire floor is enclosed, externally enveloped in a white waterproof, protective membrane defending against the pervasive Vancouver rain. This makes the space feel even more alien and isolated from the rest of campus, which itself is much quieter than usual due to the pandemic. The microclimate is womblike and slightly oppressive in its lack of air circulation; a pervasive sense of stillness and envelopment heightens the experience of being in this space. These effects dramatize my activity in the chambers of the collections and allows for a sense of sharpened focus. I am looking at the Lisa Robertson fonds in person for the first time. More importantly, I am listening in the Lisa Robertson fonds for the first time. The addition of sonic, vocal layers in the form of sound recordings to an archival collection contributes meaningfully to what Linda Morra calls the “affective economies” (after Sara Ahmed) of the archive, which are Archives, Intimacy, Embodiment: Encountering the Sound Subject in the Literary Archive","PeriodicalId":384095,"journal":{"name":"ESC: English Studies in Canada","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114389754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Voice(ing) Appropriations: Sounding Found Poetry in 1960s Canada","authors":"J. Wiens","doi":"10.1353/esc.2020.a903560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903560","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":384095,"journal":{"name":"ESC: English Studies in Canada","volume":"528 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132386765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"That Men Might Listen Earnestly to It\": Hearing Blackness","authors":"K. Moriah","doi":"10.1353/esc.2020.a903566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903566","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":384095,"journal":{"name":"ESC: English Studies in Canada","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121478002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966 to 1971","authors":"Mathieu Aubin","doi":"10.1353/esc.2020.a903543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903543","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1960s and 1970s, the Royal Canadian Mounted Polic (RCMP) participated in and contributed to an international campaign to monitor queer people across North America. Part of this campaign involved tape recording queer people’s private conversations in Canada and creating archives of these audio data to build cases that would incriminate them and regulate their behaviours (Kinsman and Gentile 121). Conversely, in 1969, Canadian Justice Minister and Attorney General Pierre Elliot Trudeau passed Bill C-150 to decriminalize homosexual acts, which was followed by his now infamous public declaration, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” While the bill may have improved some of queer people’s lived conditions, the public declaration reinforced the closeting of homosexuality as a private matter. During the same period, queer and feminist writers participated in public literary readings during which they listened to, and recorded, each other read and discuss poetry. What may have begun as literary gatherings evolved into opportunities for these writers to discuss their lived experiences as queer people and their political concerns. For instance, during The Poetry Series held at Sir George Williams University (hereafter sgwu) in Montreal from 1964 to 1975, which featured performances by canonical writers such as Margaret Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966 to 1971","PeriodicalId":384095,"journal":{"name":"ESC: English Studies in Canada","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129832397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Listening Queerly to Teleny and Trilby","authors":"Victoria C Roskams","doi":"10.1353/esc.2020.a903558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903558","url":null,"abstract":"There is something queer about listening to music in late-nineteenthcentury literature. Scenes of public musical performance in two novels with very different publishing histories—one of the best-selling novels of the century, Trilby (George du Maurier, 1894), and the privately circulated erotic novel, Teleny (anonymous co-authorship, 1893)—have in common their identification of listening as a space of queer possibility. The ability of texts to disclose and enclose queerness gains particular resonance at this fin-de-siècle moment, with new understandings of identity producing the categories of heteroand homosexuality. Voicing homosexuality in the repressive legal atmosphere of late-nineteenth-century Britain required recourse to codes and circumlocutions: famously, it was “the love that dare not speak its name.”1 Authors turned to the expansive semiotic potentialities of music, then, to avoid naming in language desires, behaviours, or identities which might be suspect. Taking a sonic approach to texts revivifies these layers of meaning which were once muted. In thinking sonically about these novels, moreover, we can understand them as contemporary Listening Queerly to Teleny and Trilby","PeriodicalId":384095,"journal":{"name":"ESC: English Studies in Canada","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122187877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Source and Structure of Girl World: Tina Fey's Mean Girls and Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes","authors":"D. Bentley","doi":"10.1353/esc.2019.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2019.0021","url":null,"abstract":"The story of the loss and regaining of identity” may not be “the framework of all literature,” as Northrop Frye asserts in The Educated Imagination (21), but it is undeniably the frame within which Tina Fey weaves the fabric of Mean Girls. At the heart of the autobiographical tale that Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) tells in the movie’s retrospective voiceovers lies a comedic narrative of Bildung in which Cady loses her identity and moral compass and eventually regains them at a mature level of consciousness of the sort that scholars of William Blake usefully call “higher innocence.” From the outset, she is positioned as an innocent in the alien and hostile environment of North Shore High—Blake’s realm of “experience”—and by the end she is the wise overseer of a peaceable kingdom that she has been partly responsible for bringing into being. Most prominent of the various threads that Fey weaves into the intervening world of experience, “Girl World,” that Cady enters at North Shore is the book from which that phrase is taken and upon which Mean Girls is based: Queen Bees and Wannabes, a lively and commonsensical guide to “Helping Your Daughter Survive the Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of The Source and Structure of Girl World: Tina Fey’s Mean Girls and Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes","PeriodicalId":384095,"journal":{"name":"ESC: English Studies in Canada","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131133946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Philosopher's Wife to Feminist Autotheorist: Performing Phallic Mimesis as Parody in Chris Kraus's I Love Dick","authors":"Lauren Fournier","doi":"10.1353/esc.2019.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2019.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997) is a polarizing, genre-blurring book of contemporary feminist literature that continues to perplex and thrill readers with its weird modes of articulation. Brassily sharp yet self-consciously complicit in her critiques of theory and the art world, the protagonist Chris Kraus is a barely-fictionalized version of the author who writes through the end of her marriage to her then-husband Sylvère Lotringer— the French-American cultural critic and founding editor of Semiotext(e) press. The plot of I Love Dick centres around Kraus’s obsession with a man named Dick, a British writer and theorist whom she meets in the opening pages through Lotringer, but the book is not so much driven by plot as it is by political and discursive issues related to contemporary theory, art, writing, and feminism. Over the course of the book, Kraus pens self-reflexive letters to Dick (who she names her “ideal reader” [Dick 130]) about her coming-of-age as a woman and aspiring artist in an academic art scene From Philosopher’s Wife to Feminist Autotheorist: Performing Phallic Mimesis as Parody in Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick","PeriodicalId":384095,"journal":{"name":"ESC: English Studies in Canada","volume":"14 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133388208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Believe: Questions about Mennonites and Art by Magdalene Redekop (review)","authors":"Marlene Epp","doi":"10.1353/esc.2019.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2019.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":384095,"journal":{"name":"ESC: English Studies in Canada","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133438631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Politics of Memory: Digital Repositories, Settler Colonialism, and Jordan Abel's Un/inhabited","authors":"E. Schmaltz","doi":"10.1353/esc.2019.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2019.0020","url":null,"abstract":"The violent standoff between white supremacists and anti-racist counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 12 August 2017, galvanized a series of debates regarding the removal of Confederate symbols in the United States of America.1 Ten days later, groups in Canada, Colonialism No More and the Saskatchewan Coalition Against Racism, organized a rally and began circulating a petition for the removal of a statue of Canada’s First Prime Minister John A. Mcdonald in Victoria Park in Regina, Saskatchewan. The groups called for its removal on account of Macdonald’s role in the colonization of Indigenous lands and his involvePolitics of Memory: Digital Repositories, Settler Colonialism, and Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited","PeriodicalId":384095,"journal":{"name":"ESC: English Studies in Canada","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126006994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"P.K. Page's \"Inebriate\": A Gloss on a Glosa","authors":"R. Lecker","doi":"10.1353/esc.2019.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2019.0018","url":null,"abstract":"I am interested in poems about poems. What should we call them? They are obviously a kind of ekphrasis: art that comments on art. But the term ekphrasis is more commonly associated with poems about visual images than it is with poems about poems. In his frequently cited study of ekphrasis, James A.W. Heffernan stresses its pictorial focus. He says that ekphrastic literature can be understood as “the verbal representation of graphic representation” (299). It “typically delivers from the pregnant moment of graphic art” what Heffernan calls “its embryonically narrative impulse.” Through this kind of narrative deliverance, ekphrastic works “make explicit the story that graphic art tells only by implication” (301). In her commentary on John Ashbery’s iconic and ekphrastic “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Helen Vendler expands the conception of art about art:","PeriodicalId":384095,"journal":{"name":"ESC: English Studies in Canada","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130907237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}