Week 4 Flashcards
(9 cards)
Ch.1
New, William Herbert, Dreams of Speech and Violence. The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand
3> It is not possible to categorize once and for all what Canadian literature is.
4> To understand the art of the short story in Canada requires the critic first of all to appreciate the limitations of existing theoretical attempts (developed in connection with American, British and continental European short stories) to describe the genre as a whole
20> “fragmentation thesis”: Canada, as other New World societies, is to be seen as fragment of a particular European culture.
> Split between egalitarian independent-mindedness and colonial identification-by-imperial-connection which divided and reshaped the old British dominions / nascent Commonwealth nations during the latter years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.
And it is in this period (late 19th c./early 20th c.) that / when:
- the short story in Canada came to take on its characteristic form.
- newspapers and magazines were developing
- Canadians were publishing in American magazines
- Canada was effectively divided between British and American copyright zones, which in practice limited both the Canadian literary market and the size of the local publishing industry
- Canada shaped a politically and culturally united society out of trading post and agricultural economy
- a stable and upwardly aspiring, largely Protestant, deeply Scots-influenced middle class was setting the mores of the new world
- educated women were influential on the literary scene during the nineteenth century.
The documentary mode prevailed and sometimes overlapped with the fictional narrative (up to World War I, then the narrative impulse became stronger)
It was not only the question whose story to tell and whom to tell it to, but also very much the question of how to tell it, how to reshape the language and the forms of literature to the needs of the new society.
24> In Canada some of the most exciting and ground-breaking writing has been done in the short story form. Many Canadian writers have rejected a variety of familiar conventions that were rooted in American and British cultures.
Five prose types or patterns
- documentary accounts of things seen and life lived,
- political and religious essays,
- romantic fictions with conventional plots borrowed from other traditions,
- romantic fictions set in local landscapes and
- dialect attempts (usually comic in intention) to record various kinds of character and ‘low life’ within the social structure
Sketch
the sketch became highly influential in shaping short prose
sketch = a brief prose work that usually describes a single scene or person, thus minimizing plot and emphasizing the documentary character of rendering (stress of the perceptible; the writer is present as an observer)
Stewart’s Quarterly in the 1860s was using the term “pen photographs” and “mental photographs” to describe the sketch (22)
Ch.2
New, William Herbert, Dreams of Speech and Violence. The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand
I. 1820–1890
33> Right from its beginnings (c. 1820s) there are several threads running though English-Canadian literary history:
(1) the importance of the documentary sketch
(2) the prevalence of a Protestant moral ethic
(3) a concurrent political conservatism and desire to take cultural advantage of the near American market
(4) the increasing rootedness of literature in regional experience and
(5) the widespread availability of local journals and newspapers which themselves served as monthly miscellanies of literature and politics, and as outlets for stories and poems by local authors.
43-44> Towards the end of the nineteenth century magazines paid attention to Canadian writers for patriotic reasons. They tried to help bringing about a true Canadian literature.
> In an essay published in The Week in 1886, Sara Jeannette Duncan satirizes the romantic indulgence that inhibits Canadian literary expectation and practice:
II. Country, War, and City, 1890–1940
49> 1895–1920: the growth and development of the Canadian Nation as a recurrent topic.
> An image of self and nation was being consciously cultivated.
> In literature a big change took place after WW I, when English models seemed no longer to be so attractive or so relevant to local conditions.
54> Writers wished to find a language commensurate with the size, space, and grandeur of the nation’s physical territory.
> Yet this literary effort to contend with the natural wilderness–– sketches of British Columbia, the North, and the new provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were a common feature in magazines during the early 1900s––was occurring at the same time as another literary movement was attempting to assert the sophistication of the cities.
55> Desirous of their own independence, and firm in the belief in their own sophistication, Canadian writers and critics by 1940 were unlikely to bend easily to the identification of Canada as a charming backwater of the United States.
III. The Tensions between Story and Word, 1930–1980
79> The Depression, WW II and the Holocaust made it evident that disparities between life and language continued to exist.
> In literature, fragmentation became an art.
80> the growth of radio in Canada, particularly after the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was established in 1932
-new opportunities for short story writers: the story became not just a written, but also an oral medium; many new voices.
6> 1960s: a new wave of cultural nationalism
> increased visibility of Canadian writers
> Canadian Council established in 1958
> new journals and university courses in Canadian fiction
> bookstores began to stock Canadian books
> Canadian writers and writing began to blossom on national scale
> anthologies of region and theme which showed the multiplicity and “fragmentation” of Canadian writing.
97> “a recognizable Canadian tradition” – the existence of which was and still is hotly debated.
cf. R. Nischik, ed., The Canadian Short Story. Interpretations
The English-Canadian short story is a relative recent literary development, spanning a little more than 100 years by now.
It began to coalesce as a national genre in the 1890s, some 70 years after the beginnings of the American short story around 1820.
The short story today is generally considered to be a particularly vital genre, if not the flagship genre of Canadian literature.
Canadian writers of short stories have produced internationally renowned collections of short stories.
>
Precursors of the short story in the 19th century: Early Canadian short prose
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The modernist short story: fully emerging as a distinct genre in Canada in the 1920s Raymond Knister Sinclair Ross Ethel Wilson Hugh Garner Joyce Marshall Sheila Watson
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explosive development of Canadian literature in the 1960s (new supportive cultural politics)
>
the short story after 1967: Alice Munro / Mavis Gallant /Margaret Atwood
>
contemporary English-Canadian short story and the challenges of Modernism, Postmodernism, and Neorealism
- precursors of the short story in the 19th century: early Canadian short prose
- At the time of Confederation in 1867, short fiction already existed in Canada.
- However, these early stories differed from the modern short story, often being closer in form and content to other prose genres such as the sketch, anecdote, the essay etc.
- Thomas McCulloch and Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s short prose tales: humorous tradition, local-color context
- > later further developed by Stephen Leacock at the beginning of the 20th c.
McCulloch and Haliburton’s stories were originally serialized and thereby forerunners of what later developed into the short-story cycle, still a popular form in Canada today.
The Canadian animal story is a major original 19th-c. contribution to the art of short story writing.
Charles G.D. Roberts ‘invented’ the genre ‘animal story’ in 1892 with “Do Seek Their Meat from God”, which proved very successful at the time, also with an international readership (it fit the image of Canada as a country of wilderness).
->unsentimental, psychological insight into the struggle of survival from the animal’s perspective
Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts (1860–1943)
> a poet and the first to express the new national feeling aroused by the Canadian confederation of 1867
He inspired a whole nationalist school of late 19th-century poets, the Confederation Group.
a prolific prose writer: Roberts wrote several volumes of animal short stories, a genre in which he became internationally famous.
Born near Fredericton, Douglas, NB.
Educated at the University of New Brunswick.
Taught for some years before becoming editor of The Week in Toronto, where he met and encouraged many young writers.
Professor of English at King’s College in Nova Scotia
In 1897, he moved to New York City where he worked as a journalist and in 1911 he established residence in London.
In 1925, he returned to Canada and embarked on a cross-Canada lecture tour and later settled in Toronto as the acknowledged dean of Canadian letters.
knighted in 1935
died in Toronto in 1943
Beginning with Orion, and Other Poems (1880), in which he expressed traditional themes in traditional poetic language and form, Roberts published about 12 volumes of verse.
Outstanding among his poetic works are In Divers Tones (1886), Songs of the Common Day (1893), The Vagrant of Time (1927), and The Iceberg, and Other Poems (1934).
Roberts’s most famous prose works are short stories in which his intimate knowledge of the woods and their animal inhabitants is displayed—e.g., Earth’s Enigmas (1896), The Kindred of the Wild (1902), The Watchers of the Trails (1904), Red Fox (1905), Kings in Exile (1909), and Neighbours Unknown (1910).
His other prose includes a pioneer History of Canada (1897) and several novels dealing with the Maritime Provinces.
Roberts’s “Do Take Their Meat from God” (1892)
… is one out of Roberts’s more than 200 animal short stories
first published by Harper’s Magazine in 1892 (and again in Earth’s Enigmas in 1896)
Animal stories mark an important step in the development of Realism in Canadian literature.
59> Roberts was a good stylist
> Roberts: “The animal story…is a potent emancipator. It frees us for a little from the world of shop-worn utilities, and from the mean tenement of self of which we do well to grow weary. It helps us to understand nature, without requiring that we at the same time return to barbarism. … The clear and candid life to which it reinitiates us, far behind though it lies in the long upward march of beings, holds for us this quality. It has ever the more significance, it has ever the richer gift of refreshment and renewal, the more humane the heart and spiritual the understanding which we bring to the intimacy of it.”
> The animal stories (‘documentaries’) are in some degree escapist, but give Roberts an opportunity to make a claim for the ‘natural’ (rather than the simply post-Edenic, hence cursed and ‘barbarous’) character of the wilderness, and therefore for the morality of the human response to it.
Yet for all their naturalist’s care, the animals are fundamentally anthropomorphic: ultimately extensions of observations of human behavior.
61> Roberts’s stories legitimized Canadian nature in literature, but in doing so they perpetuated a rural illusion of Canada.
Stephen Leacock (1869–1944)
> born in England at Swanmore, Hampshire.
taken to Canada when he was six
grew up in Ontario and was educated at the Universities of Toronto and Chicago
After graduating in 1891, he taught Modern Languages at Upper Canada College.
He subsequently studied political economy at the University of Chicago and lectured in political economics at McGill University from 1903 to 1936.
In 1906, he published his first book Elements of Political Science.
The first of his many humorous works, Literary Lapses, appeared in 1910.
Leacock subsequently published an average of one humorous book a year for the remainder of his life: Nonsense Novels (1911)
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914)
Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915)
Further Foolishness (1916) and Frenzied Fiction (1918)
Winnowed Wisdom (1926), My Remarkable Uncle (1942), and Last Leaves (1945).
successful lecture tours; My Discovery of England (1922) and My Discovery of the West (1937) grew out of such tours.
The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946) is an uncompleted autobiography.
He also published works such as Humor: Its Theory and Technique (1935) and Humor and Humanity (1937).
New on Leacock:
62> Leacock’s social and political writings display his conservatism. He was an enthusiast for the Empire, but not for colonial status, hence…championed the cause of Imperial Federation.
62-63> His humorous sketches are exercises in the analysis of social institutions.
> The real main characters are Mariposa and the City –, that is, the political attitudes of mind that take shape in political region and economic structure.
> The structures which Leacock championed were not stable ones – after World War I, a national pluralism began to replace Protestant imperialism as the dominant attitude in Canadian society – and to a post-war audience eager to loosen imperial connections and to find relief from social pressures, Leacock was out of phase.
63> Leacock’s attacks upon Mariposa’s provincialism … and his attacks upon ‘arcadian’ adventures of the urban bourgeoisie constitute ironic critiques. Irony rules. … He was not kindly disposed towards provincialism.
Stephen Leacock, “The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias” (1912)
> cf. Antor in Nischik:
the story is about human weaknesses which are foibles rather than vices;
the author’s bemused tolerance;
“sinking” and “raising” of the ‘Mariposa Belle’, the local steamer on the Lake Wissanotti which is far from the catastrophe it sounds like, because there are only six feet of water under the keel of the ship – no one can possibly come to harm;
What is significant is the way the reader is told about this ‘non-event.’
-The narrator creates a critical distance between himself and the reader.
-The reader’s double awareness of the narrator’s passionate admiration of Mariposa and the small town’s real status as a provincial backwater
-good-natured laughter: the narrator is constructed in a way that invites both sympathetic understanding and critical distance.
-Mariposa does not yet suffer from the negative effects of the social fragmentation of modernity. In Mariposa, the whole community shares woes and joys as an organic whole.
