An Official Publication of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English Volume 42 Issue 3–4 Septe
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esc An official publication of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English Volume 42 Issue 3–4 September/December 2016 English Studies in Canada Volume 42 Issue 3–4 September/December 2016 Readers’ Forum: Proliferation 1 Cecily Devereux Introduction: A Large Number of Something: Proliferation, Now 7 A. C. Facundo Proliferations of Omniscience 10 Jason Haslam Proliferation’s Ends 15 Maureen Engel The Space of Simultaneity 18 Rachelle Ann Tan Tinderization of the Academy 22 Linda Quirk Proliferating Ephemera in Print and Digital Media 25 Christian Bök Virtually Nontoxic Articles Vigilance, Rebellion, Ethics 27 Sarah Banting If What We Do Matters: Motives of Research in Canadian Literature Scholarship 65 Erika Behrisch Elce “Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ”: The Ethics of Rebellion in The Outlaw Josey Wales Against the National Grain 81 Karina Vernon To the End of the Hyphen-Nation: Decolonizing Multiculturalism 99 Lindsay Diehl Disrupting the National Frame: A Postcolonial, Diasporic (Re)Reading of SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café and Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children Passionate Uncertainties 119 James McAdams “I did a nice thing”: David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy 135 Gregory Alan Phipps Breaking Down Creative Democracy: A Pragmatist Reading of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand Interview 159 Caitlin McIntyre and Dana Medoro Spokesvultures for Ecological Awareness: An Interview with Timothy Morton Reviews 175 Benjamin Authers reviews Anne Quéma’s Power and Legitimacy: Law, Culture, and Literature 178 Neale Barnholden reviews Bart Beaty’s Twelve-Cent Archie 182 Paul Chafe reviews María Jesús Hernáez Lerena’s, ed., Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador 186 Kyler Chittick reviews Elena Del Río’s The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas 190 Marissa Greenberg reviews Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams’s, eds., Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature 193 Sarah Krotz reviews Margery Fee’s Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat 197 Mary Elizabeth Leighton reviews Gage McWeeny’s The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form 200 Tanis MacDonald reviews Robert Zacharias’s, ed., After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America 203 Claudia Mills reviews Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer’s, eds., Girls, Texts, Cultures 207 Lisa Szabo-Jones reviews Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn’s, eds., Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies 210 Nora Foster Stovel reviews Anne Giardini’s, ed., Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing 214 Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze reviews Audrey Jaffe’s The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology A Large Number of Something: Proliferation, Now Cecily Devereux University of Alberta espite the ubiquity of the phrase “going forward” with its implicit Dcommitment to an idea of progress as an advance through time and space, contemporary North American culture is arguably increasingly character- ized not only by matters of propulsion and velocity (or, as was discussed in a 2016 forum in esc 41.2–3, “Fast Evil”) but of proliferation. Where North America’s earlier industrial capitalist settler discourse put to work tropes of mechanization, automobility, space travel, and, most recently, digital communication to account for changes to human experience in terms of the speed at which something could—and, often, should—be done, such tropes are becoming almost quaintly anachronistic in the face not only of technologies of speed but of the mass of what is moved at those speeds. For instance, according to a January 2017 report, an estimated three hundred new hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (“36 Mind Blowing [sic] YouTube Facts, Figures, and Statistics—2017”), a volume of text that is well beyond what can be watched by anyone in one lifetime. And of course YouTube is not the only site of such proliferation. Texts and data proliferate everywhere on the Internet. Since television shifted partially from broadcasting to streaming, that medium too has exploded as ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 1–6 an archive—or even a thing that can be intimately known by an individual viewer. The digitization of print continues to add more textual material to more fields of study, even as print culture itself proliferates. New genres Cecily Devereux such as blogs and podcasts are rapidly increasing in range and numbers. teaches in the “Keeping up” in any category has become virtually impossible. And if pro- Department of English liferation has affected data, texts, information, entertainment, and archives, and Film Studies it is also a factor in the academic workplace. Job descriptions in this con- at the University of text have become catalogic; tasks for individuals studying, teaching, and Alberta and is esc’s researching have multiplied. Like North American culture more broadly, Book Reviews Editor. workload at North American institutions is comprehensible less in terms Recent work focuses of pace (how fast you can go) than of volume (how much you can do). on the representation, For most people working in an academic context, or, indeed, perhaps performance, and most contexts, I suspect proliferation does not feel like a good thing. Pro- writings of skin-baring liferation is what your email does in your inbox when you do not check dancers in the context it for a few days, what student assignments do on your desk or on your of nineteenth- and early computer when you do not grade them quickly enough, what deadlines twentieth-century Euro- do when you cannot meet them, what tasks across the registers of aca- imperialism. demic service and professional and disciplinary volunteerism do when you open your email. Defined in the Oxford Living Dictionary (online) with a compelling expansiveness and indefinition as both “[a] large number of something” and “[r]apid increase in the number or amount of some- thing,” proliferation is the state of things behind the state of things in the everyday of the academic workplace and, I am guessing, in many others. That is, while you are attending to one thing, things are rapidly increasing somewhere else, and it is certain that you are aware of that rapid increase, your anxiety growing exponentially closer to panic as you recognize the certain proliferation of something somewhere else. For me, this condition of apprehending the uncontrollable reproduction of something that will in some way require time and attention once you have some of either of those things to direct toward it takes clarifying shape in the otherwise relatively undemanding video game “Candy Crush Saga,” in which a player does battle with sugary elements (chocolate, frosting, jelly, jam) whose effects on the psyche, as in “real life” on the teeth, is not benign. In some of the hundreds of levels (the levels themselves proliferate) of this and other “Candy Crush” games, a player is called upon to simultaneously eliminate one element (jelly, frosting) while also preventing the prolifera- tion of another (usually, I am very sad to say, chocolate). Although it might be expected that a game called “Candy Crush” would provide a relatively soothing occupation between other proliferating tasks or while waiting for a bus or a dentist’s appointment, the effect of the levels in which you 2 | Devereux are battling a foundational and systemic problem (jelly to be cleared! jam to be spread!) isn’t soothing at all: finding partway through that you will not only not be able to eliminate the one element but will also not be able to manage the simultaneous generation of the other thing makes it seem as if the game’s object is not to provide an escape from but to crystal- lize and affirm the world at large as a site of unmanageable proliferation. The psychical consequence is to leave you teetering between a sense of frustration that these impossible conditions have been imposed unfairly upon you and a growing uncertainty that you are not yourself to blame because you are incompetent and insufficiently strategic. That is, either you internalize the systemic problem and make it your own fault or you repress and thus leave festering your resentment of the heartless efficiency of the structure in which you find yourself always doing battle. Either way, you lose. And you are also aware that you have spent (“wasted”) time, the thing you never have in sufficient quantity, playing a game on your phone in which success comes when you save the virtual Gummi Bears trapped behind virtual frosting. The notion that proliferation does not feel like a good thing is, arguably, not simply perceptual but definitive: proliferation is a matter of apprehen- sion and a problem of control; it is a condition of recognizing the increase of something whose increase was not necessarily desirable with reference both to its numbers and its nature. In fact, the term’s eighteenth-century botanical origins (in English) with reference to “the condition of having an abnormal number or kind of floral organs” (oed) suggests a condition not only of unsustainable growth but proliferation as a state that is saliently aberrant: thus “the appearance of a bud or of a flower upon a part of the plant which has not been accustomed to bear such” (oed). This double connotation—“abnormal number” and perverse or even counterproduc- tive growth—obtains for the term’s use in the early twenty-first century with reference not only to plants, workload, and video games but to a range of undesirable things: a Google search of the term as it is used in North America (“proliferation north america”) turns up new religious move- ments, woody plants in drylands, parasites, and hypertension, as well, of course, as nuclear weapons.