English Studies in Canada Volume 43 Issue 2–3 June/September 2017
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esc An official publication of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English Volume 43 Issue 2–3 June/September 2017 English Studies in Canada Volume 43 Issue 2–3 June/September 2017 Special Issue Transition Edited by Michael O’Driscoll and Mark Simpson 1 Michael O’Driscoll and and Mark Simpson Introduction: In Transition: Passages 7 Allan Pero Transition: A Fugue 13 David W. Janzen Potential Unfettered: Narrative Transformation as Historical Transition in Ulysses 33 Carolyn Veldstra Transition as Impasse: Critical Neoliberal Realism and the Problem of Agency 51 Laura Schechter Not a Transition but a Pivot: Public Engagement and Claiming Space as an Alt-Ac 56 Ernst Logar Oil and Water 65 Craig Patterson Shoring up Fragments: Resisting “Change” 69 Aubrey Jean Hanson Reading for Reconciliation? Indigenous Literatures in a Post-trc Canada 91 Shama Rangwala Race and the Thickening of Mediation in Repetitions of The Great Gatsby 117 Evelyn Deshane A Trans Tipping Point 121 Cecily Devereux Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition”: The Cultural Logic of Reproductive Fetishism in the Representation of Erotic Dance 149 Adam Dickinson ∆ 163 Nandini Thiyagarajan Is Care Enough? 167 Lynn Wells Through a Glass, Darkly: An English Scholar’s Vision of University Transition 171 Heather Murray And All the Arts of Peace: Phonography, Simplified Speling, and the Spelling Reform Movement, Toronto 1883 to 1886 205 Joel Katelnikoff Fred Wah Remixed: “where you are is who you are” 215 Jason Camlot Robert Creeley in Transition 1967/1970: Changing Formats for the Public Poetry Reading In Transition: Passages Michael O’Driscoll Mark Simpson University of Alberta n 1 july 2017, esc: English Studies in Canada officially moved from Oits long-time home at the University of Alberta to its new residence at Western University, under the editorship of Allen Pero and his colleagues in the Department of English and Writing Studies. This move marked an historical moment for esc, which since its arrival at the University of Alberta in 2002, at that point under the keen guidance of Editor Jo-Ann Wallace, has gone through dramatic and successful changes in mandate, format, scope, and international reach that have brought the journal to a point of global prominence in the field of literary and cultural studies. The nine thousand or so pages produced by the journal’s contributing authors during those fifteen years bear witness to an evolving discipline, shifting institutional contexts, and changing academic priorities that are oft remarked in the journal, not only in its scholarly articles and reviews, but also in the Readers’ Forum section that so often has captured the spirit of the passing moment. Consider, for example, the Keywords Collective of issue 30.4 that, on the occasion of the journal’s thirtieth anniversary, re-examined the definitions of Raymond Williams’s landmark 1976 publi- cation in order to track the fate of concepts such as “community” (J. Hillis Miller), “equality” (Frank Davey), “individual” (Judith Scherer Herz), “lit- ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 1–6 erature” (George Elliot Clarke) and “taste” (Marjorie Perloff). Or consider the more recent foray of “The Forty on Forty Project” in issue 41.4 that asked prominent scholars from across Canada and around the world to Michael O’Driscoll “identify, in no more than 150 words, a work, idea, or event of the past forty is Professor in the years that has been key to the project of literary, cultural, and theoretical Department of English inquiry.” The result of that experiment was a free-form collective narra- and Film Studies at the tive that traced the ebb and flow of critical discourse from multiple and University of Alberta, sometimes competing vantage points. where he is also Vice- Such dynamic scholarly contributions exemplify as they situate the Dean in the Faculty place of esc at the leading edge of literary-cultural inquiry in Canada of Arts. He teaches and, increasingly, beyond. Thus the momentous occasion of its move and publishes in the from Alberta to Western provides a chance to celebrate the journal as a fields of critical and vibrantly transitional force within and across the capacious disciplinary cultural theories with formation of English Studies today. At the same time, the journal’s change a particular emphasis in address also invites engagement and reckoning with transition as a on deconstruction and concept of departure and change but also of continuity and sustenance. psychoanalysis, and his What transitional energies will esc conjure, at this threshold and against expertise in twentieth this horizon, as it continues to thrive in its fifth decade? century American In marking the occasion of esc’s geographical and institutional shift Literature focuses on in locale, the essays and creative works that follow likewise provide some poetry and poetics, answers to this question. They do so by reflecting on the concept of transi- material culture, and tion itself, the theme that we—the outgoing Co-Editors—decided to select archive theory. He served when, in a parting editorial gesture, we assumed the new and curious on the esc Editorial role of Guest Editors for this special issue. We were initially attracted to Board from 2002 to the idea of transition on multiple levels: as a theoretical problem, transi- 2017, the last ten years tion invites consideration of becoming, causality, the trace, and dialec- in the role of Editor and tical movement; as an historical category, transition invokes paradigm Co-Editor. shift, periodicity, disruption, and continuity; as a political goal, transition requires we think more carefully about agency, calculation, efficacies, and outcomes. Seemingly without limit, the concept of transition avails itself of multiple disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, cultural, political, historical, and other contextual investments. In recognizing such broad applicability, our capacious understanding of the term that shaped the call for papers was designed to invite widespread and diverse interest. The effect of that understanding follows in these pages in a manner that we predicted to some degree, but as we got into the project we became ever more aware of the volatility, density, and ambiguity of the concept of transition, in part from meditating more fully on the term and in part from engaging with the contributions we received, contributions that come at transition from diverse perspectives and along divergent paths. 2 | O’Driscoll and Simpson From the Latin transitus—meaning to cross or pass over—“transition” tends to connote gradual, smooth change. Think, for example, of the expected orderly transition of government in democratic societies. The synonyms of transition tell us much: changeover, conversion, develop- ment, evolution, growth, passage, progress, shift, transformation, altera- tion, metamorphosis, metastasis, passing, transit, transmutation, turn, Mark Simpson, realignment. The duration, speed, character, force, and torsion of transi- Co-Editor of esc: tion varies from, or is opposed to, other modalities of change. And further- English Studies in more, transition in all of its controlled progress implies agency, wilfulness, Canada from 2013 to purpose, and a teleological clarity of direction. The antonyms of transition 2017, teaches in English are thoroughly negative in value: decline, decrease, idleness, stagnation, and Film Studies at the stoppage, end. In this sense, transition is normative, and when it happens, University of Alberta. it is understood to happen for the better. Indeed, transition might be An energy humanist, thought of as a regulatory ideal within the larger category of change, and he specializes in U.S. if change is characterized by rupture or break (indeed, by revolution) it culture, particularly is understood to be other than transitional. Transition, in this sense, is a in the decades around state of exception: transition is a sovereign form of programmatic change 1900, and also in that in its self-regulating ipseity stands outside the everyday chaos of the material culture studies, quotidian. materialist theory, and At the same time, and somewhat against this definitional tendency, mobility studies. Recent transition as a problem and a motivation underwrites some of the most contributions include the pressing matters of cultural critique today. The politics of sexuality and multi-authored volume gender, social justice, revolution, climate change, the anthropocene, car- After Oil (West Virginia bon dependency, global migration, decolonization—the most critical up 2016), the collection intellectual commitments of the academy are predicated on the matter of (co-edited with Corrinne change. And however tradition-bound (and even politically conservative) Harol) Literary/ the university may be as an institution, the work of academics (research, Liberal Entanglements analysis, teaching, and, of course, professing in a public manner) as much (University of Toronto seeks to understand historical change as it looks forward to, even antici- Press 2017), and essays on pates, new and better futures of the students whose lives are transformed David Peace’s Red Riding by education and the collectives and communities with which we are in quartet (in Negative dialogue. Research and teaching are aspirational—they cannot be other- Cosmopolitanisms, wise. One does not enter a classroom or embark on the publication of an 2017), “Lubricity” (in article without the presumption that something, or someone,