UNIVERSITE DE SHERBROOKE FACULTE DES LETTRES ET SCIENCES HUMAINES DEPARTEMENT DES LETTRES ET COMMUNICATIONS The Rise and Demise of a Book-Review Magazine: Interpreting the Cultural Work of Books in Canada (1971-2008) par Michelle Ariss These presentee en vue de I'obtention du grade Philosophiae Doctor, Ph.D. Litterature canadienne comparee © Michelle Ariss 2011 L 3iSiO Library arid Archives Biblioth&que et Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-83286-8 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-83286-8 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lntemet, pr§ter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des th&ses partout dans le loan, distrbute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la th£se ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondares ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. Canada Cette these de doctorat intitulee The Rise and Demise of a Book-Review Magazine: Interpreting the Cultural Work of Books in Canada (1971-2008) par Michelle Ariss a ete evaluee par un jury compose des personnes suivantes : Roxanne Rimstead, directrice de recherche Departement des lettres et communications, Faculte des lettres et sciences humaines Francois Yelle, membre interne du jury Departement des lettres et communications, Faculte des lettres et sciences humaines Jacques Michon, membre interne du jury Nathalie Cooke, Associate Provost, McGill University, membre externe du jury i Abstract This interdisciplinary study examines the contribution that a book-review magazine makes to the cultural identity of its readers. It is the result of reflections on the cultural work of Books in Canada, on whether or not this periodical was a cultural worksite and if that is the case how it performed that cultural work. In addition, it interrogates factors that may have contributed to the magazine's demise. The study affirms that Books in Canada, a cultural enterprise from 1971 to 2008, mirrored and helped to shape book and literary culture in Canada through its circulation, through the personalities of its editors, through its front covers and through its reviewers and their reviews. Furthermore, it proposes that the demise of the enterprise was due to a combination of factors, among them editorial decisions, market forces and reader preferences. My use of the term "cultural work" is partly an adaptation of Jane Tompkins' reference to the cultural work of 19th century critics to acclaim certain American writers, not necessarily because their literary output exhibited exceptional talent, but rather because their writing "worked" to reflect and endorse social and cultural tenets held by the critics and by society in general at the time. This approach allows the appreciation and assessment of the magazine's presence in, and interaction with its milieu from several different angles in each chapter, for example by examining the cultural work of editors, of reviewers and of the front covers. Literary criticism is not passive. It works. It identifies and analyses what is read in a literary society and, through those processes, affects and contributes to the book and cultural milieu. That being the case, surely Books in Canada, a periodical devoted to ii reviewing books, worked too. How it worked, what it produced and how it affected its ambient cultural milieu are what I seek to understand better with this study. The study begins with an introduction to book reviewing and special-interest magazines. Chapter I examines the interplay between selected visual and textual contents published in Books in Canada in its founding years. These components reflected and helped to fuel the cultural nationalism that was sweeping Canada subsequent to the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal. There were also persistent rumours and comments about the magazine that caused certain 'cracks in the foundation' to appear. Chapter II compares the aims and editorial challenges of Val Clery, founder of Books in Canada, with those of Adrien Therio, founder of Lettres quebecoises, and of the editors of the magazines' twentieth-anniversary issues, Paul Stuewe in the case of the former and Andre Vanasse in the case of the latter. Evidence in the content of the magazine, editorial and otherwise, indicated that the "contracts" that the editors made with their readers over the years were similar, to reflect and shape a cultural identity, but the result of their "projects," that is, the nature of those identities, was distinctly different. Evidently then, personal aims, preferences and political leanings of editors can have a major impact on the content of a book-review magazine and thus on the cultural work that it does. Therefore, in Chapter III, I focus on selected contents published during the tenures of two of Books in Canada's key editors, Paul Stuewe and Olga Stein, in order to understand ways that their choices constituted a form of cultural work. I discuss innovations that Stuewe brought to the form and content of the magazine during his five- year editorial tenure and argue that such changes responded to the cultural moment by nurturing a national literary imaginary that was mature in its acknowledgment of regional concerns, Quebec's independence movement in particular. I contrast Stuewe's liberal iii nationalist and literary initiatives with the more conservative international identity encouraged by content published by Olga Stein, editor from May 2001 until the demise of the magazine in January 2008. Stein's choices fostered a near-nostalgic respect for traditional cultural values while responding to the end-of-century shift from national culture to cultural globalization. The second part of this chapter moves from an analysis of the cultural work of editors to an examination of the cultural work of reviewers. Here, through a close-reading of a selection of reviews published in Books in Canada, and in other periodicals, I argue that reviewers do cultural work in the way that they negotiate their presence in a review, and in how they signal that presence through lexical choices and through the degree of intellectual interaction that they invite. Intellectual interaction is at the core of Chapter IV. This chapter consists of close readings of some of the "billboards" of the enterprise, that is, the front covers of Books in Canada, in order to show how these important components do cultural work by requiring readers to make an intellectual leap from image to text. Chapter V suggests that book reviews, the company's "bills of goods," do cultural work in much the same way as the paratexts of a book. One of my own reviews is offered as a case-study along with a number of other reviews of how central components of a book-review magazine do cultural work through the illocutionary force of their sentences. The first part of Chapter VI, the final chapter, measures the legacy of the magazine, in particular, the annual Books in Canada First Novel Award. Created in 1976, this prize is awarded to the author of the novel judged by a Books in Canada prize committee to be the best first novel in English of the year. The second part of Chapter VI sheds light on factors that may have contributed to the closure of the enterprise, including the copyright iv uproar that accompanied the agreement that Adrian Stein, publisher of Books in Canada and Olga Stein's husband, made in 2001 with the online book merchant, Amazon.com. Furthermore, this penultimate section of the study suggests that one of the most important factors in the magazine's demise was the decision by the Steins to exploit their position as owners, publisher, and editor of a book-review periodical, a government-subsidized one at that, to publish their own lengthy pre-trial defense of Conrad Black. It suggests that their actions veered perilously close to the negative sense of "bill of goods," that is, an attempt to "sell" their readers on the controversial media mogul's innocence. The chapter then zooms back from the particular to the general with a broader consideration of the impact of technology and globalization on the book industry and on the ability of Books in Canada to survive in any form, print or digital. It finds that, just as the magazine was a product of a cultural moment, it became a victim of the current moment, a moment in which "thumbing through" pages of books has acquired a technological, iPaddian, tenor.