Siobhan Doody

To start this semester off, I thought I should introduce myself before pouring out my heart and soul to all those who are willing to read about the triumphs and troubles of a Carleton English student. My name is Siobhan (pronounced shuh-vahn, but I’ve heard a multitude of variations over the years, and am long over being offended by mispronunciations) and I am a fourth year English student here at Carleton. I was born and raised in Ottawa and unlike the majority of my friends and family, I chose to stay in my hometown—at least for the duration of my undergrad—and I have never once regretted that decision. To be fair, I did spend four months last fall living in Lyon, France, as an exchange student, but was happy to call Ottawa home after spending my summers’ savings eating and travelling my way through Europe.

For those of you who may be new to Carleton, I’m pleased to report that if my experience over the past three years has any validity, then Carleton’s English department will not disappoint. I started my first year intimidated by the notion of University life and all it could offer, but my experience at Carleton has taught me a few things that I wish I had known from the beginning. Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not all-knowing or full of wisdom after my short time at Carleton, but my experience as an English student here has taught me a few lessons that I’m willing to share (whether you’re willing to read them or not is a different question entirely).

Last year in my American Culture class, I came to the pleasant realization that no one ever really stops learning. Everyone says that you “learn something new every day,” but as I sat in a class of 60+ students and realized that it was as much a learning experience for the professor as it was for the students, I saw education in a whole new light. Your professors and TA’s are people too; don’t be afraid to go talk to them. Whether it is to talk about an assignment or just to bounce ideas back and forth, from my experience most professors would be more than happy to have you keep them company in what are otherwise potentially lonely and quiet office hours. They may even learn a thing or two from you (I have yet to prove the possibility of this occurring, but you may surprise yourself)!

Maybe it’s the feminist in me striving to stand out among a sea of men, or the fact that as the youngest of four children I’m constantly trying to get through life without aid from a sibling, but when it comes to being independent, I’m about as stubborn as they come. It took me a while to realize it, but throughout my past few years I’ve slowly come to appreciate that asking for help is never a bad idea. Whether it be about finding my way across campus, getting suggestions on which classes and professors to take, or getting inspiration and feedback on papers, asking for help has proven to be more than beneficial. At the end of the day you’ll still come out independent, just a little less lost and confused.

The quickest thing I learned during my time as a Carleton student is that you can’t get bogged down by all school, all the time. The English department often puts on events which are not only great opportunities to meet new people, but which more importantly almost always include free food (and sometimes alcohol)—I have also clearly learned the most effective ways of being a frugal student. Let yourself have fun once in a while, because the University experience is about more than what you’ll learn in the classroom (cheesy, but true).

So that’s me and some of what I’ve learned so far as an English student at Carleton. I’m looking forward to seeing what this last year has in store for me, and sharing what comes my way with those of you who care to read about it. I’m a pretty friendly person, so feel free to stop me in my tracks if you see me on campus; I’m always eager to meet new people.

Cheers,

Siobhan Doody

Focusing on the upcoming 2014 World Cup in Brazil, this research project aims to contribute to theoretical and empirical understandings of the intersections between major sporting events, moral panics and anti-prostitution/trafficking campaigns.  While the scholarly literature on this issue provides substantial evidence of the use of anti-trafficking campaigns to promote the abolition of prostitution, little is known of the ways in which these types of campaigns unfold locally through specific cultural contexts.  This project seeks to address this gap through an ethnographic analysis of the campaigns against sex tourism during the World Cup 2014 in Brazil, with a focus on the city of Natal, one of the twelve host cities.  Natal offers a unique case in point due to both its long history of anti-sex tourism campaigns and the processes of gentrification expressed through these campaigns.  The proposed investigation thus seek to analyse whether the campaigns linked to the 2014 World Cup might further stigmatize, criminalize and spatially marginalize the women engaging in practices of sex tourism.

Christine Duff (Department of French): Lire le zombi: Haïti et au-delà/ Reading the Zombie: Haiti and Beyond

The last few years have seen a resurgence of popular interest in the zombie in North America: witness the advent of Zombie Walks and the use of the zombie metaphor in the Occupy Movement.  There have been international conferences devoted to the subject, two recently taking place in Montreal: Autopsie du zombi in May 2012, and Invasion Montréal: colloque international sur le zombi in July of the same year.  In short, the undead are experiencing a renaissance.  While the zombie is a useful metaphor in contemporary debates regarding exploitation and oppression, its contemporary revival obscures its origins, along with much of its signifying potential.  Literature represents one of the richest arenas in which this signifying potential plays out.  In literary studies, however, work on the zombie has focused exclusively on Haitian literary production, extending only recently to writings of the Haitian diaspora.

The proposed project seeks to: 1) establish the extent to which the motif of zombification is present in the literatures of the Americas (in the hemispheric sense of the term); and 2) determine overarching tendencies in its use and explore their implications.  The trope of zombification undergirds a larger number of literary works than is currently acknowledged.  If, as Kaiama Glover maintains in her 2005 article on Haitian literature, the zombie is a particularly rich site of metaphorical potential and is “highly exploitable as a literary device”, it is my assertion that the full and myriad implications of the zombie and zombification as literary devices remain to be identified and articulated, especially with regard to literatures outside of Haiti.

Michel Hogue (Department of History): Empire of Possibilities: Isaac Cowie and the Making of the Prairie West

In putting his recollections to paper, former fur trader Isaac Cowie sought to preserve in print some of his experiences during a critical period in the Prairie West’s history.  “These papers may prove interesting,” Cowie suggested, “to anyone connected with the ‘days of auld lang syne’ in Western Canada, and perhaps to a few of the numerous newcomers who have come to build an empire of infinite possibilities therein.”  Born in the Shetland Islands, Cowie entered the Hudson’s Bay Company’s (HBC) service at Fort Qu’Appelle in 1867 at a critical moment in both the history of the fur trade and that of the Prairie West.  He was an active participant in the final days of the Plains fur trade and in the promotion of the economic and social order that displaced it.  When success in his business ventures eluded him, Cowie found a career as an advocate for “pioneers” seeking government recognition and as an amateur ethnographer and historian preserving and promoting aspects of the western past, particularly the exploits of its early settlers.  Cowie’s “empire of possibilities” evoked the enduring and cherished myth of the orderly and peaceful nature of the Canadian West’s settlement and embodied his own personal hopes and dreams.  It overlooked, however, the people for whom “settlement” meant dispossession or marginalization, not opportunity.  By narrating Cowie’s own version of his life alongside stories of the Metis and First Nations with whom he lived, worked, and traded, whose land he bought and sold, and whose histories and material culture he collected, this project will re-contextualize Cowie’s narrative of the West and interweave the stories of “pioneers” with those of Indigenous peoples.  In so doing, it will open a new window on the processes of dispossession and repossession that made the Prairie West.

Jody Mason (Department of English Language and Literature): Workers, Readers, Citizens: Canada’s Frontier College, 1899-1950

This project will study the vast archive of Canada’s most significant adult literacy initiative, Frontier College.  The College, founded as the Canadian Reading Camp Association in 1899 by Protestant minister Alfred Fitzpatrick, developed a labourer-teacher model that enabled its work among immigrant labourers in Canada’s resource frontier.  Frontier College is an organization with roots in the social gospel movement and, by the interwar period, it was actively involved in discouraging political radicalism in work camps through its promotion of democratic citizenship and naturalization.

While much is known about the institutional history of Frontier College, I aim to use the organization’s archive at Library and Archives Canada to learn more about the workers as learners, as readers, and as consumers of culture in the first half of the twentieth century.  This research has several main objectives: it will study, synthesize, and analyze a large body of largely unstudied archival material, while enriching nascent work on the history of reading in Canada and fostering important interdisciplinary links among literary and cultural studies, labour history, book history and print culture studies, and the study of immigration and ethnicity.

Mohammed Rustom (College of the Humanities): The Philosophical Mysticism of ‘Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani (d. 1131)

Rustom’s first book on the famous Persian philosopher Mulla Sadra (d. 1640) has afforded him with the ability to understand how a number of key figures’ ideas came together in Sadra’s own synthetic project, the most prominent example being the work of the controversial Andalusian Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240) and the immediate generations of his followers (somewhat misleadingly referred to as the “school of Ibn ‘Arabi”).  Yet what can be said about the phase immediately before Ibn ‘Arabi, that is, the twelfth century?  We admittedly have a great deal of information concerning the early development of Islamic theology and philosophy from the eighth century to the beginning of the twelfth century.  But when we come to the twelfth century proper, many important questions remain unanswered.

In other words, the one area of inquiry which has largely been neglected is the phase between the famous Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111) and Ibn ‘Arabi.  This period is particularly problematic owing to its indebtedness to the earlier Islamic philosophical tradition, particularly the work Avicenna (d. 1037).  Rustom’s background in Islamic theology and philosophy in general and the writings of Avicenna and al-Ghazali in particular, coupled with his work in Islamic thought from Ibn ‘Arabi onwards, has positioned him well in terms of grappling with the complexity of the twelfth century of Islamic thought, which, he argues, bears witness to a very unique shift in Islamic intellectual history.

Although there are a number of key authors who belong to the era in question, Rustom maintains that one of the most important is the great martyr ‘Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani (d. 1131).  This figure is famous for having been the student of Ahmad Ghazali (d. 1126) (the brother of the aforementioned al-Ghazali), and for having been put to death by the Seljuq government, ostensibly on charges of “heresy.”  Yet, to date, there is not a single, thorough presentation of ‘Ayn al-Qudat’s thought and influence.  Rustom’s project seeks to fill this lacuna by demonstrating ‘Ayn al-Qudat’s pivotal role in the development of the Persian poetic tradition on the one hand, and the Islamic intellectual tradition on the other.

Paul Mkandawire (Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies – Human Rights): Indigenous Knowledge Transfer and Adaptation to Climate Change Among Orphans in Malawi 

This research project aims at examining whether pathways for transmitting traditional ecological knowledge between the elderly and the youth are dissolving under the weight of heavy adult mortality in Malawi in a context where more than 1.3 million children live without one or both biological parents due to HIV/AIDS. While contributing the least amount of greenhouse gases, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will experience the vilest impacts of global warming in the foreseeable future.  Unfortunately, the region also doubles as home to the overwhelming majority of the world’s orphaned and vulnerable children. The prime focus accorded to vulnerable groups in the global agenda on combating the negative effects of global warming means that future efforts aimed at building social resilience in communities in SSA cannot proceed without considering the unique needs of this expanding group of youth coming of age without natal parents.

While orphans’ vulnerabilities in other domains such as healthcare, schooling, discrimination, stigma, and HIV/AIDS have largely been documented, not much is known as to whether this cohort is similarly disadvantaged with regard to access to indigenous ecological knowledge vital for mitigating and adapting to climate change.  This study draws upon an ecosystem approach and employs qualitative approaches to explore how heavy adult mortality being triggered by the AIDS epidemic in Malawi is affecting the transfer of indigenous climatic knowledge between elders and youth. Though often bypassed in scientific discourse, indigenous knowledge, rooted in African smallholder farming systems and longstanding familiarity with local climatological events, can significantly improve the ability of marginalized populations to adapt to climate change.

Julie Murray (Department of English Language and Literature): British Women Writers and the Forms of Life, 1790-1840

In this project, Murray argues that the life-writing produced in the early decades of the nineteenth century is intimately linked to the politicization of “bare life” that writers such as Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, and before them, Edmund Burke, argue is a result of the discourse of the “rights of man.”  The link is a sure sign of the chilling effect that a universalizing concept of rights has on life understood as bios.  Murray’s hypothesis is that writers’ desire to clothe a newly politicized (or, as Agamben puts it, formerly “creaturely”) “bare” or “naked” life motivates a range of experiments in life-writing in the early nineteenth century.  The texts that she examines replay a tension, however, already internal to 1790s political debates about the relationship between chivalry and rights, discussions of which are saturated with metaphors of the “naked” and the “clothed.”  Ultimately, this project examines the relationship between the biographical and the biopolitical at the turn of the nineteenth century, and takes seriously the “life” in life-writing in order to explore how literature is intimately bound up with the discursive terrain of life in this period and beyond.

David Wood (School of Linguistics and Language Studies): An Idiodynamic Investigation of the Relationship between Willingness to Communicate and Speech Fluency in a Second Language

Second language (L2) speech fluency has typically been identified as a set of observable temporal features of speech, but has not been analyzed in relation to learner factors in performance such as willingness to communicate (WTC), which can be defined as readiness to engage in communication at a specific time and with specific interlocutors.  With the exception of exploratory case study work by Wood (2012), focusing on general links between overall WTC and fluency gain over time, no researchers have examined  the relationship between WTC and L2 fluency.  A clearer, evidence-based perspective on the link between WTC and fluency can have significant implications for classroom teaching and assessment. Among other benefits, it can help in determining whether dysfluency influences WTC, and whether lowered WTC can lead to dysfluency, or whether the relationship between WTC and fluency development is more complex than that.

The proposed study is an exploratory, case-study attempt at answering the question of what the interrelationship is between L2 speech fluency and WTC. It presents an examination of the influence of WTC on fluency in monologic speech of for Chinese learners of English L2, with a non-Chinese interlocutor, in intensive English as a foreign language (EFL). Monologic narrative speech samples from the Chinese EFL learners in Canada will be analyzed for markers of fluency and interpreted in light of the learners’ WTC profiles and retrospective self-analysis of WTC in stimulated recall.  The results can potentially illuminate the relationship between dysfluency and WTC, particularly the directionality of the relationship, whether fluency breakdowns lead to lowered WTC or vice versa. This can serve to establish a research methodology foundation for a larger-scale study in future, focusing on larger groups of learners in several different learning contexts, such as EFL abroad, and part-time and full-time EFL intensive programs in their own country.

Book Cover

Professor in the Department of English, Jennifer Henderson has co-edited a new book entitled Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. The book is a multidisciplinary collection of essays that address a range of questions relating to movements for redress of historical injury in Canada.

Canada claims the title of the first liberal-democratic nation-state of the northern hemisphere to go through a truth and reconciliation process. This book puts that claim in a historical context by placing the 2008 Government apology for residential schooling and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process alongside previous redress movements in Canada, including the movement for acknowledgement and compensation relating to the war-time internment of Japanese Canadians.

Proposing the concept of a ‘culture of redress’ Reconciling Canada suggests that each of these attempts to reckon with the past influences and interacts with others. A ‘culture of redress’ might imply that inequities and group injuries have ended, but the contributors to Reconciling Canada maintain that redress and reconciliation are ongoing, unending processes.

The book includes essays by scholars in the fields of law, Indigenous studies, cultural studies, political science, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology. The essays are organized into sections on Settler Culture and the Terrain of Reconciliation; Citizenship, Nationhood, Law; Testimony and Truth Telling; Grieving and Grievance, Mourning and Memory; Performing Redress; and Redress and Transnationalism.

It has over 150 pages of appendices which are primary source documents related to a range of redress movements and cases, including injuries acknowledged by the federal government in recent decades as well as cases of discrimination that have yet to be recognized via official state apologies. With the recent limitations put on access to Library and Archives Canada materials, having these documents (like Duncan Campbell Scott’s 1920 testimony before a House of Commons Committee on legislation to implement residential schooling) readily accessible is all the more important.

Get Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress here.

The spring 2013 edition of the Ottawa International Writers Festival runs from Thursday April 25 to Tuesday, April 30 at a variety of locations. The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences has arranged that Carleton students need only show their student ID (subject of course to capacity limits at the venue) for free entry to the “main stage” events of the Festival. This includes all events, save for the lunch with Sarah Elton event on April 26 (tickets for this may be purchased on the Ottawa International Writers Festival website).

The Festival serves as an innovative and lively forum to exchange ideas. The spring edition of the festival features an interesting and highly varied assortment of speakers, including Sarah Elton, Lorraine Johnson, former Carleton Writer in Residence Ivan E. Coyote, Lee Smolin, Guy Gavriel Kay, media observant Douglas Rushkoff and graphic novelist Howard Chaykin, whose work has been banned in Canada. For full details on speakers, times, and locations please click here for the full schedule.

About the Writers Festival

The imagination is our most valuable renewable resource. So, twice a year, the Ottawa International Writers Festival convenes an international celebration of ideas to recharge our imaginations. From politics to poetry, science to music, history to thrillers, it is a celebration of the full diversity of the word and the gifted writers who guide us in our exploration of the world.  The year-round special events keep the ideas coming between Festivals.

As the country’s largest independent literary celebration, the Ottawa International Writers Festival believes that a love of reading and learning should be nurtured throughout our lives, and that literacy is a birthright. Whether offering writing workshops to the homeless, hosting a Nobel Laureate, organizing our biannual literary celebrations or bringing authors into area schools, the goal is the same: to create an environment that activates creativity and encourages the love of reading, learning and self-expression.

The Festival reached an audience of 22,893 during the 2011 season.  That’s roughly 800% audience growth since the first season in 1997.  As noted in Ottawa’s Metro newspaper, “Participation in the festival has exploded.”

But you also can’t discount how infinitely available we are as humans for the multiplicity of new performative roles. Eight years is a long time and, just speaking to my own experience, the person I was nearly a decade ago seems more like a wrestler, who duked it out in the ring before I mercifully tagged him out, than any kind of legitimate precursor. I get the sense that my double un-shellacked his ninth-round bruiser’s busted lip and pretzelled limbs off the ropes, tailed by a cherubic Danny DeVito-esque coach with a stubby thumb-sized cigar, saying soothingly: “You wanna’ go to McDonalds, buddy? Huh? Let’s go to McDonalds, buddy. Buy ya’ a shake, how bout it?”, while I strapped on the gloves and steadied the rolling dice of clacking knees to stare up at my lurching and unfazed opponent, the luchador: El Vida Loco.

Y’know, eight years ago I ran with a group of boys, because you couldn’t yet call them men (and probably still can’t), through the cool nights of the East Coast’s suburban summers. Pounding prophesies of our future selves out of the pavement with over-stylized sneakers. Skirting under street lamps in the early hours, like demons dodging holy water, clutching onto the desperate idea that this feeling might last. That the others would always be asleep while we ran: vibrant and alive down the corridors of a seemingly abandoned world. Those night streets echoed back to us our conviction that this environment, with it’s closely planned neighborhoods and trim, delineating hedgerows, was only a trap to those who couldn’t see it as such. That any member of the community willing to crouch, waiting for midnight, would see an archeology of the making and understand that the blueprint of the suburbs was all too obvious. It was a maze. And while other citizens of the labyrinth had long ago given up, and were now content to inhabit the confining passageways that they knew, the well-trodden paths that promised no surprises, we close-knit cosmonauts hit out upon a dreamy landscape, searching for that final corner, which when turned, leads out.

Having no time for water, two thirds of our bodies were made up of undiluted hope.

But like most people, by the time I reached Carleton that hope had transformed into something else. Your first year of university is so well advertised as a moment of radical change, as the first step towards an impending adulthood that parses through the weak and the strong with almost equal disdain. And the only real response you can offer is to parrot the world’s hardness back at itself. And so I, like many others before me, became calcified into a very specific idea of exactly what kind of person I was going to be when I entered these hallowed halls. And this sense of having been elevated, to a playing field on which there were shiny new rules of seriousness, was gratified when I met Gill, who came at me like the cryptically beautiful third numeral in a binary world. Waltzing out of a matrix-rain of zeros and ones, parting the waves of all the garbage I would claim to have outgrown, her political convictions and commitment to social justice, although of a completely different breed to my hardline on the value of art to radically transform individual experience, was equally unstinting and immediately recognizable as the exact kind of survival mechanism that I was engaged in. I might be painting the scene with too broad a brush stroke though. I wasn’t exactly a beret-wearing bohemian who’d toss his drunk-dry wine bottles off to Gill while she donned a balaclava and made Molotov cocktails out of the empty reds. But I think that we gravitated towards one another for the reason that we recognized that the roles we had picked up were, on a certain level, parodies of the way we thought the world was supposed to work. Which didn’t stop us from being completely dedicated to our ideals. We both had one foot permanently glued to the soap-box, ready to give a table-flipping speech at a moment’s notice, as well as a hairline trigger for argumentative cross-talk.

But, for me at least, seeing my neuroses played out in another person’s personality was absolutely crucial. Gill and I both had a tendency to be unforgiving with people that disagreed with us. But whereas I would take a more tough-luck attitude, she changed almost imperceptibly at the moment when she recognized that she’d gone too far. If Gill noticed that she’d hurt you, a new tone, completely unpracticed and flower-bloom fragile, would enter into her voice. Like when you hear on a summers day, when each and all are lazily unguarded, through a screen door that won’t ever shut up, the plinky notes of a piano played poorly. Her voice: nothing more than an aleatory flutter, became a raw, trembling desire to rearrange the broken pieces at her feet.

And from that — and only that — touch of sympathy, as if by awful movie flashback, you knew the whole tragic tale: of how you lost yourself to a fully outfitted memory of marvels. It instantly became clear that in all her moments unseen, stretching backwards and forwards she’s probably never done a damn thing that wouldn’t please you. Panning over her history you intuit a wild glitterati of quiet unseen acts of absolute beauty. Even her grief at the pain she’s caused suggests a higher standard. Even that thrill of misbehavior trills with her sense of universal harmony. And as I begin to realize how hokey this sounds, I still don’t think it’s so odd that a tone of voice should travel me through time. ‘Cause if we’re all made of the same atomic brick-and-mortar why shouldn’t each individual moment be superscripted with all the madness and wonder of the known world, in every clock-speech: past, present and future.

I learned to swim at the YMCA off Main Street in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Taught by Mrs. Kreitzer, a septuagenarian in a floral one-piece suit, who’d stand waist-deep in the shallow end with a lit cigarette and absolutely no patience for splashing. “Don’t worry the current will get rid of it”, she’d promise us as she tamped her Marlboros out into the filtration system, which didn’t stop us from inhaling ashy crudlets through our noses when we started diving. After lessons we’d gather in the locker rooms scanning each other’s’ bodies for the chemical residue of her nicotine addiction. And if you caught sight of any black marks on another boy’s bicep, you were to scream: “Kreitzer-itis!” as an announcement that we were all to flail our arms in the air and go bananas like Muppets who’d heard bad news. The tail end of this tradition was that the unfortunate victim, as his last will and testament in this life, was to thank profusely the person who had found his pustule, and endow that individual with all his most precious worldly belongings. One army man (green) with attachable parachute, only kinda’ torn; one Power Rangers® band-aid, slightly used, barely any blood; one self-portrait (crayon) once featured on the fridge door. What I understand of this ritual now is the inherent wisdom of being grateful to those that can point out your weaknesses for you.

I’ve always had an almost animal fear of somehow being caught outside myself, of being observed unmediated by some nebulous outer-audience. And to counteract this nervousness I’ve developed an expert sense of how to give as little of my inner world away as possible at any given moment. To earn my sincere affection is to get an unlimited free pass to one specific pane of glass in my mirror hall of multiple selves. Each individual person that I know and love is gifted with an infinite Marcus, full of opinions and jokes and secret intimacies that could probably last a lifetime without ever being repeated to anyone else. It is this skill — to commit entirely to a miniaturized and marginal piece of myself, to become more invested in this little part of the larger penumbra than some people ever get to the entire superstructure of their personality, and then after perfecting this little clay doll of a substitute, to breathe life into it and hand it off to you, as if such a thing were so easily given — that attracts people to me. But Gill was always incredibly adept at smashing these little Mini-Marcuses, calling my bullshit, and forcing me to engage with her in a more visceral, “real” way.

And if nothing else, her big-hearted brashness forced me to question the things about myself that I had become so invested in that I no longer perceived them to be what they really were: self-created caricatures of some artificial super-I, which might just be strong enough to face the world that scared me more than I could even understand. If the thing that I loved most about Gill were the cracks in her mask though, then how could I in good conscience keep my faceplate so perfectly polished and undisturbed? The goal isn’t to be Arnaud Du Tilh, inserting yourself into the situation that most appeals to you and then playing the part until you become an integral piece.  Instead maybe our home is in the space between the ideal and the identity. We are both what we are and what we fail to be. Two sides of the same coin that can’t ever be called but which when flipped, keeps our eyes to the air and our feet just barely off the ground.

Be it prose or poetry, we at The Coffee Shop Resume are looking for your submissions to be published in our next issue. We are accepting articles, poems, short stories, anything and everything, as long as it is under 1000 words.

Please send your submissions to TheCoffeeShopResume@hotmail.com before March 25 with your author name and contact email.  If you wish for your work to remain anonymous, please indicate so.  We can’t wait to read your work!

The Coffee Shop Resume is produced by first-year students in the ArtsOne cluster, “Writers and Writing in Canada,” taught by Prof. Collett Tracey of the Department of English Language and Literature. We have produced one volume already, with more to come!

In his book Unemployment and Government (2000), Carleton professor William Walters observes that in our current historical moment, unemployment has come to seem “obvious, mundane,” “self-evident”––the “eternal opposite of ‘work’” (1). How did this come to be, how might we understand this statement in relation to Canada, and what role does cultural activity play in shaping conceptions of worklessness? In Writing Unemployment: Worklessness, Mobility, and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literatures, a new release from University of Toronto Press, Jody Mason maps out responses to these questions.

Mason, an assistant professor in the Department of English at Carleton, asks how writers––activists of the radical left, social democrats, and reformists – participated in and protested against the discursive framing of unemployment and its normalization in everyday life during Canada’s twentieth century. Writing Unemployment argues that a distinct conception of the jobless emerged in the 1930s, when the cultural left appealed to the state as a benevolent protector of the deserving unemployed. This appeal subsequently shaped much of the discourse of unemployment in the latter half of the twentieth century, when the figure of the Depression-era, unemployed male assumed an important position within narratives of the nation’s coming-of-age. The keywords “mobility” and “citizenship” are important to this project: Mason argues that an appreciation of Canada’s history of itinerant labour complicates the dominant narrative of the pioneer settler in English-Canadian literature. The book also demonstrates how the mobility of the unemployed male accrued different meanings during the twentieth century; by the postwar period, for example, the antithesis of the settled national subject was often figured as a model national citizen who could allegorically represent the maturation of the welfare state. Yet New Leftists and socialist-feminists in the 1960s and ’70s were not uncritical of this postwar compact between state and labour, sealed as it was in the welfare state that promised to make a nation, and the fault lines of this postwar project became particularly apparent as unemployment rates escalated in the 1970s.

Mason examines novels, periodicals, short stories, poetry, manifestos, and agitprop, and considers the well-known Canadian writers Frederick Philip Grove, Dorothy Livesay, A.M. Klein, Hugh Garner, and Al Purdy alongside lesser-known figures such as Claudius Gregory, Jean-Jules Richard, and Helen Potrebenko. She situates the literary history of the cultural left in a broad context, often locating intriguing connections between reformist and radical discourses.

To learn more, and to purchase Mason’s book, please visit this website

Doctor Syntax and Bookseller – Thomas Rowlandson

Professor and Chair in the Department of English, Paul Keen will deliver the 2013 edition of the Davidson Dunton Research Lecture.

Established in 1983, the Davidson Dunton Research Lecture enables distinguished Carleton University faculty scholars to share their research findings with the academic community and the general public.

This lecture is named for Carleton’s fourth and longest-serving president, A. Davidson Dunton, who led the University from 1958 to 1972.

Keen’s talk is titled “Hanging by a Thread: Social Media and Literary Value in a London Field, August 1754.”  It will explore the ways that eighteenth-century writers responded to the pressures and possibilities of their day by forging a vision of literature that spoke directly to the challenges that were at the heart of their experience of modernity. As we struggle to redefine many of our most fundamental cultural assumptions in the face of a new information revolution driven by rapidly changing technologies of writing today, we have much to gain by considering the wit and insight with which these earlier writers responded to similar demands. In an age when humanities teaching and research face unprecedented pressures, knowing more about the long history of this struggle to define what we do in the context of broader social and political dynamics has become more important than ever.

The selection committee for the Davidson Dunton Research Lecture is chaired by the Vice-President (Research and International), and includes the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, and the Deans of Arts and Social Sciences, Engineering and Design, Public Affairs, the Sprott School of Business, and Science.

Paul Keen

 Paul Keen is the author of Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800 (Cambridge UP, 2012) and The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge UP, 1999). His edited books include The Radical Popular Press in Britain, 1817-1821 (Pickering & Chatto, 2003), Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780-1832 (Broadview Press, 2004), Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700-1900 (with Ina Ferris, Palgrave, 2009) and The Age of Authors: An Anthology of Eighteenth Century Print Culture (Broadview, forthcoming 2013).

The 2013 Davidson Dunton Research Lecture will be held in the conference room(s) on the second floor of the River Building on April 9^th at 4:00 p.m.

Clearly this was a tool of immense magical power, decked out as it was with all the levers and knobs that an autocratic audiophile would demand out of his weapon of choice. And it did take me to other worlds – weird ones at that. I assume my parents trolled some bargain bin for my soporifics because they ran the gamut from the story of some Polish immigrants’ adventures in turn of the century New York – set to the tune of Swan Lake, of course; to a time-travelling tour of the Paleolithic, narrated by none other than David Suzuki.

My most memorable adventure, though, came when my folks asked an unwitting neighbor to babysit me for the night while they rushed my older brother to the hospital (I can’t remember what for, let’s make it interesting: hyper-atrophied cerebral contusion). My hapless guardian’s only instructions: for the love of God bring a tape! And this wise man carried to the manger a bootlegged recording of Lenny Bruce’s legendary Carnegie Hall performance. That’s right, the dark comedian whose critical re-evaluation of the stand-up form had viciously spliced together politics, religion, sex and all things underground came knocking on the bedpost of a pre-pre-pubescent babe in the woods. And I was changed forever. First: The Voice. Like the devil’s advocate trying to sell Moses car insurance. Equal parts shoe polish and slightly sugarcoated obscenities. I maintain to this day that my need to make words dance to the music in my head is a direct product of my having heard, in my formative years, Bruce’s inbred Yid-rhythms and the jazzy intonations of his slang arsenal.

But maybe more importantly that tape inscribed in me a deep affinity for forms of expression which function as illicit act. A hunger for art as border-hopper, as flight of refugee thoughts from one beleaguered subjectivity-state to another, and not necessarily through traditional channels of dissemination. I have always been fascinated by the mythology of the found text. Namely: how we come into contact, almost haphazardly sometimes, with the artistic work that moves us most deeply. The writers that I respond to in the profoundest way are those that deal in emotional data as if it were a prison-yard shiv: carried secretly under baggy clothing until that fatal moment of impact. “Ooo you got me!” Those writers that disturb me in meaningful ways do so by sustaining a sweaty tone of impending revelation, distending previously unrecognized feelings of loss until they reach a clicking-point, in which our deep-gut, often-glanced-over pain is reinvented as a better understanding of one’s place in a larger schema. This process, in which the damage dealt to us becomes our greatest link back into the world, gestures towards some unseen method of being healed, if only because it proves that in some ways we can communicate those private insecurities which strive always towards silence.

Sidebar: One of the hardest parts about selling people on traditionally “difficult” art is that it’s not easy to talk about why it’s great in non-sadomasochistic terms. I swear you don’t need a whip-fetish or a sweet tooth for cherry red ball gags to enjoy Gravity’s Rainbow, but then again, it couldn’t hurt. In any case the art that cooks with me (thanks again to Lenny Bruce) helps to qualify our feelings of absence from this world as a friction between the self and everything else, because it goes without saying that life is always being lived elsewhere, elsewise and with else one. What changes is our ability to reconcile that gap. It is a particularly violent understanding of human creativity, and one that relies on a kind of barnstorming bravura from its artist figures. Bruce Springsteen once described first hearing Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” as the sound of someone kicking open the back door to your mind, and this is a close approximation of what I once thought artists were for — to shock us into our senses, to force a summit between our illusory conception of the world and some more essential, “real” experience. And my willingness to fall back on this argument got me into some deep shit, developmentally speaking. How, exactly, you might ask. Well…

By my senior year in high school, I was engaged in a Felix Baumgartnian style descent. Except that instead of free falling out of a Red Bull brand flight capsule, it’d be more accurate to say that I was plummeting back into space. Unrigged from gravity’s tender mercy and left to unspool myself out into the chilly draw of the dark universe’s dormant imagination. I’d gotten sick, like really sick, like: every morning; how could you; why me-type sick. I had an ongoing debate with the toilet bowl as to how long I could keep my food down. He usually won by betting low but I was always man enough to hug his pale porcelain sides as I drooped. To save myself from your pity I’ll just call this illness the unnamed. And under its influence I broke up with my girlfriend, quit my job, became the barest whisper of my former self and spiraled into a monstrous depression.

The overly-clichéd, but nonetheless ever-present and valid intra-psychic storms, less politely known as mental clusterchucks (which becomes even less polite if you spell it correctly) that attend any kid coming up in a world where your expectations skew jarringly away from the reality of the situation (qua the adult existence which you are ineluctably careening towards is not the stable well-oiled machine that it had always appeared to be, but instead just a vapid, less-passionate double of your already disconnected and transient lifestyle – essentially you + rent), is reason enough to lose your mind if the numbers don’t crunch quite right. And in any normal situation the ingestion of certain shady (why skirt the issue, exact status: illegal) substances would be the norm for curating these monstrous depress-ogres into some more tame natural exhibit.

But of course the unnamed requires significantly larger doses of neuro-dimming materials. Specifically an injudiciously prescribed major tranquilizer, which, relatively speaking, is the inter-continental ballistic missile to the child’s cap-gun of over the counter Advil. The overall effect of this pill being that instead of acting like a janitor, shutting off the lights of my brain room-by-room before going home to a warm meal and a lumpy bed, this megaton hammer (the pill) shut down the whole cerebral construct like that last scene in Fight Club, where a city block of commercial towers just instantly collapses, raining shards of glass onto the streets below.

It is probably one of those incredibly rare universal truths that any drug use is an act of role-playing, even down to the most domestic brands.” I’m a fully certified court-stenographer when I’m properly caffeinated, adding footnotes, with off-branching addendum to the bottoms of my notebook pages. And the crowd that’s asked to carry the weight when I crowd surf at concerts might be gratified to know that Marcus Creaghan, esquire, would never dream of imposing his body weight on other people without alcohol’s helping hand. But the danger comes from not knowing what role you are playing and why you feel this deep-set need to inhabit a character and a costume that you would otherwise never feel comfortable wearing. And to explain my situation to you I need first to say that you’ve been lied to. Because the traditional narrative of depression defines it as a kind of stasis, a scrunching up, a sitting still as the scary world storms by. But really the experience is more like an endless dynamic friction inside of you, like the deep note in Hans Zimmer’s Inception soundtrack, that wants out but which finds no avenue of escape. It is a roughshod plane of limits, and the worst part of it is the humiliating feeling that you have well and truly lost control.

In a sense it all comes down to movement. Depression creates a stark division between inner and outer worlds. And once the spaces of the outer world lose their context; once the constellatory logic, mapped out by the out flung positions of each individually lost star, drop out of the sky, leaving you with a black, suffocating drape, you’re left with no choice but to turn inwards. Which in itself forces you to redefine motion as a journey through self instead of space. But this interior motion, this tidal influx, can only be a dance of swords, in which you tear apart your insides looking for fertile earth to till.  What this pill allowed for then, was a kind of circumscribing of the borders of my existence. It let me draw a circle in the sand where I could call myself king — a place from which to take the power back. If the rest of the world was drifting away like dirt thrown into running river water, then at least I could control the motions of my dulled mind. But of course this left me in a quiet room, alone, with the unnamed.

And if my inclination when it came to art was to be critically distant, to connect only when the artist was able to bridge that gap with their own mad, bad and dangerous creativity, my habits as a sick man were even more defensive. Every morning I’d slip, almost out of panic, into some gross caricature of a former, stronger self. I became a person untouchable by kindness, or humor, or sympathy. And this is how I was when I started at Carleton. Completely isolated and scared out of my mind, but also incapable of really understanding how much I was imposing this upon myself.

One of my favorite things about 80s action movies (abrupt left turn, I know, but stick with me for a second) is that they portray cab drivers as, essentially, just wayward mercenaries. Throw them a wad of bills and they become an impressive jack-of-all-trades, playing the part of your arms dealer/getaway driver/all around good-time buddy. They apparently carry an indispensable and endless cache of skills just waiting for a dead president’s apathetic grin to awaken them. In fact, I have the sneaking suspicion that the team of marines that killed Bin Laden was actually just a group of highly paid cabbies, eagerly watching the meter as they flew over Pakistan. Swooping down with air fresheners and foam dice around their necks instead of dog tags. What I like about this film trope is that it assumes that at a moment’s notice we can reinvent ourselves. That if the camera pans over our idle frame, we have the chance to rise to the occasion.

In many ways our lives are lived as narratives that breathe in the telling. But, sometimes, there lies a small slit of opportunity to change ourselves before the account is codified into myth. There may not be any real way to exorcise love’s lost demon, or to repair the damage done by the blunt unfeeling motion of life’s moving plot. And looking back only helps us to define the moments in which we still had the chance to be otherwise. But there’s a kind of blitzed out and dazzling happiness that comes from knowing you’ve cheated history. That the pieces were all in place to have you play the part of the villain’s sniveling and chronically underappreciated sidekick, but that you slipped backstage to pull an eleventh hour costume change. Because there’s one thing that all the chaos of creation can’t account for, which is that you’re the author of this story.