Writing Athwart: Editing Roy K. Kiyooka
A TransCanada Institute Panel
Le Sorbonne, Paris, France, 2012
Chair: Kit Dobson (Mount Royal University)
Smaro Kamboureli (University of Guelph) Letters from the Other Side: On Editing and Editing Roy K. Kiyooka
Roy Miki (Simon Fraser University) Transforming inglish: Editing the Poetry of Roy K. Kiyooka
Glen Lowry (Emily Carr University) Roy Kiyooka’s ‘Wheels’: A Trip thru the Coach House Backcountry
TransCanada Institute, Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies
Nicosia, Cyprus, 2010
Len Findlay “Soft Sovereignties and Strokes of Genius: Situating the Indigenous Humanities within Canada as a Multilateralist State and Middling Cultural Power”
Smaro Kamboureli “From the ‘Commonwealth’ to the ‘Anti-anaesthetic’: CanLit Translated in Transnational Terms”
Ashok Mathur “The Trans(re)sistor: Performing Literary Reversals”
“Literary Knowledges and the Canadian Marketplace”
Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE)
Congress 2007, University of Saskachewan
Organized by Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli
Julie Rak (Alberta) “Genre in the Marketplace: The Scene of Book Selling in Canada”
Sabine Milz (Alberta) “TorLit vs. Literary Region? De/centering Canadian Neoliberalism”
Nicole Shukin (Victoria) “Transnatural Ecologies and Epistemologies of Global Capitalism: Rethinking ‘Resourcification’”
Call for Papers
The function of literary and cultural knowledge has been shifting for a while now, especially so if we see it in light of what George Yudíce has termed the “resourcification” of culture. That is, as knowledge is reorganized under global capitalism in order to serve more purely economic ends, its social function shifts, reducing the concept of “value” to the most banal, capitalist sense of the word. This reduction may well be at work in the production and dissemination of literature in Canada, but locating it requires making firmer links between text and context than we might normally allow. How does free trade, along with the rise of neo-liberalism, continue to affect the production of literature in Canada? What impact have recent shifts in retailing and in the “perilous trade” of publishing (Roy MacSkimming) had on the content and form of literary works? In what ways are the ideologies of Canada’s arts funding regimes inscribed in the books that we read? Can the literary culture of the Canadian marketplace be jammed? How do we transform Canada’s “white civility” into “wry civility” (Daniel Coleman) in the present-day economically determined cultural contexts? Given the bottom-line logic of the mainstream cultural industries, can there still be a space for radical poetics and politics in literatures produced in Canada? How, in short, are the material conditions of today’s cultural industries reflected in the literary works that we, as scholars, submit to our various reading strategies?
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on these and related questions for a panel at the 2007 meeting of ACCUTE at the University of Saskatchewan. Please send proposals (up to 500 words) and brief biographical statements (up to 100 words) by November 15 to the organizers:
Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli
School of English and Theatre Studies
4th floor, MacKinnon Building
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON N1G 2W1
Kit Dobson – kit.dobson@utoronto.ca
Smaro Kamboureli – smaro.kamboureli@utoronto.ca
Ethics: Research, Pedagogy, Academic Citizenship
Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE),
Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures (ACQL),
and Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literatures and Language Studies (CACLALS)
Congress 2006, York University
Organized by Smaro Kamboureli
Two Sessions—moderated by Smaro Kamboureli
Eva C. Karpinski (York) “Reading (as) the Other: Ethical Transformation of the Practice of Literary Criticism”
Aparna Nishra Tarc (York) “A Novel Approach to Ethics: Relearning Humanity”
Cynthia Quarrie (Toronto) “The Ethics of Failure: Productive Impasse in Ian McEwan’s Saturday”
Call for Papers
Ethics, as Marjorie Garber et. al. say, “is not only a praxis, but also a principle.” And, as recent calls for accountability and anxiety about the relevance of the Humanities show, practicing ethics is a process that is constantly being redefined.
Should scholarship be responsive to current conflicts? Do academics have an ethical responsibility to take a stance as academics on the political and social issues that concern them as citizens—in the arena of public affairs, in their research, and in the classroom? Or, conversely, is the ethics of the academic profession synonymous with objectivity and neutrality in research, and in the classroom?
Is the need to assert the social relevance of humanities an ethical responsibility? If yes, how should we go about this? What does academic citizenship (should) entail? How can humanists negotiate the presumed objectivity of their research and critical discourse with a political and ethical position they might feel compelled to take? To what extent is an academic’s praxis of ethics bounded by institutional structures? What principles and strategies should define a pedagogy that is mindful of ethics and political responsibilities? What are the dangers of transforming the classroom into a theatre of current political issues? What constitutes the political in the humanities, and how should it be practiced?
You are invited to submit papers (no more than 2500 words) or abstracts (300-500 words) that address the meaning and role of ethics in research, in the classroom, and in institutional contexts.