The City, Urban Cultures and Sustainable Literatures: Representations of the Anglo-Canadian Post-Metropolis
A project instigated by Eva Darias Beautell (La Laguna University, Spain)
Research Team Workshops
- Salamanca, Spain: June 4-6, 2011
- TransCanada Institute: June 4-5, 2012
- La Laguna, Spain: May 2013
Summary
This project will provide an interdisciplinary articulation of representations of the city in contemporary Canadian literatures, arts, and cultures in English. It is designed as a methodological continuation of the work conducted as part of the research project “El bordado de Penélope: tradición literaria, identidades culturales y discursos teóricos en la narrativa anglocanadiense de finales del siglo XX” (HUM2006-09288FIL, 2007-2009) (“Penelope’s Embroidery: Literary Tradition, Cultural Identities and Theoretical Discourses in the Anglo-Canadian Fiction of the Late 20th Century”), which we now mean to consolidate by means of three major strategic actions: a) giving it a finer methodological direction and more succinct focus at the thematic level; b) expanding the scope of the areas covered at the (inter)disciplinary level; and c) enlarging and strengthening both the national and the international dimensions of the research team.
In the course of our previous research work, we realized that almost every novel explored was in fact an urban novel, set in a Canadian city and/or narrating an urban experience. This finding was deemed especially relevant since the fact that Canada is an urban country (with more than 80% of its population living in cities) has been traditionally effaced from public discourses, national(ist) mythologies and sanctioned critical approaches to English Canadian culture until the 1990s, in favour of the wilderness tropes, the small-town imaginary and the metaphor of nordicity. The emphasis on the natural has not only created an important gap between the average Canadian reader (often an urbanite) and Canadian literature, but has also consistently ignored an important body of urban literature, culture and art produced in Canada since the beginning of the 20th century, and very prominently, after the 1960s. Therefore, we believe there is a large amount of research work to be done in that field.
This project proposes a study of the centrality of the city in Canadian literatures, arts and cultures after the 1960s from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, in the belief that this type of work can produce fresh articulations of the relationship among (Canadian) identity, citizenship and the nation. If, in the field of critical urban studies, scholars use the term “urban restructuring” to describe the drastic transformation that all metropolitan regions of the world have gone through since the 1960s (Soja), in Canada, we believe, this phenomenon has been accompanied by a “literary restructuring” of its canon, largely consisting of a gradual shift of focus from the wild or rural to the urban. The term “postmetropolis” in our title alludes to the nature of those changes in contemporary cities and locates our theoretical framework within a critical postmodern paradigm. “Sustainable literatures,” in its turn, intends to push that framework forward, suggesting the need for new tools of analysis and interpretation. It is our assumption that these new tools can be found in the intersection between disciplines such as literature and urban studies (as in planetarity studies and metropolitan postcolonialism), cultural studies and psychology (as in affect theory), gender studies and geography (as in geofeminism), or arts and ecology (as in ecocriticism).
Objectives
This project is designed as a methodological continuation of our previous research, (Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada. Ed. Eva Darias-Beautell. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012) in the course of which we have realized the fundamentally urban nature of contemporary Canadian cultures. This finding is deemed especially relevant since the fact that Canada is an urban country has been traditionally effaced from public discourses, national mythologies and sanctioned critical approaches to English Canadian culture until the 1990s, in favour of the wilderness tropes, the small-town imaginary and the metaphor of nordicity. The emphasis on the natural has not only created an important gap between the average Canadian reader (often an urbanite) and Canadian literature, but has also consistently ignored an important body of urban literature, culture and art produced in Canada since the beginning of the 20th century, and very prominently, after the 1960s. Therefore, we believe there is a large amount of research work to be done in that field. If, in the field of critical urban studies, scholars use the term “urban restructuring” to describe the drastic transformation that all metropolitan regions of the world have gone through since the 1960s (Soja), in Canada, we believe, this phenomenon has been accompanied by a “literary restructuring” of its canon, largely consisting of a gradual shift of focus from the wild or rural to the urban.
Participants
Coral Ann Howells (IES, U of London)
Jeff Derksen (Simon Fraser U)
Aritha van Herk (U of Calgary)
María Jesús Hernáez Lerena (U of La Rioja)
Silvia Caporale-Bizzini (U of Alicante)
Glen Lowry (Emily Carr U)
Eva Darias Beautell (U of La Laguna) – Project Leader
Michèle Lacombe (Trent U)
Ana Fraile-Marcos (U of Salamanca)
Smaro Kamboureli (TCI, U of Guelph)
Justin Edwards (U of Surrey)
Isabella Carerra (U of Oviedo)