Oct 28, 2016 | 1:10 PM - 2:40 PM | Studio Theatre

Dr. Caroline-Isabelle Caron, PhD

"Our True History": The Function of Errors and Invention in Québec and Acadian Genealogies

In North America, genealogies and family histories tend to construct ancestral pasts as the collective memories of their descendants. These narratives give us access to historic narratives about the historical past as imagined by genealogists. These amateur historians are eager to solve the mysteries of History, but are disinterested in scholarly history. Rather, genealogists want to know how their ancestors lived, where they walked and lived, what were their adventures. They are looking for heroes that bare the family name, to whom they can relate and who possess moral qualities they aspire to. Genealogical discourse about the past creates stories that feel close and familiar to the reader.

As such, genealogists have a desire to find their place in the space-time continuum, in which they are descendants of glorious ancestor worthy of praise. To varying degrees, therefore, genealogical pasts are the fabrications of genealogists, even if they are perfectly factual. Insofar as the goal of genealogies is to find one's roots, not the objective reality of the historical past, truth and factuality do not always coincide. In this paper, I will explore the nature and function of historical knowledge transmitted in the published genealogical writings of the real and self-proclaimed descendants of two Walloon brothers, Jesse (c1580-1624) and Gerard de Forest (1583-?), most of whom are Acadians and Quebeckers.

Dr. Blanca Schorcht, PhD

Truth or Lies: (Re)Membering Family Stories

Truth or Lies: (Re)Membering Family Stories or (Searching for Truth: A Conversation with the Granddaughter of Mayor Fritz Schorcht, Themar, Germany 1931-1945)

The author Joy Kogawa has written, “There is a silence that cannot speak, and there is a silence that will not speak.” For the past 70 plus years, the secrets and silences that surround the years from 1931-1945 continue to seep into the nooks and crannies of almost every household, every family, and every community narrative in Germany. And yet, like the “return of the repressed,” bits and pieces of the facts surrounding actual events of the past in which family and community members may have been players “want out” in one way or another.

Consequently, family and community stories are often elaborate constructs that blend fact and fiction, and even outright lies, with a veneer of truth. In these stories location is sometimes disguised; the narrative sometimes shifts to present a story that seems tangential to actual events but in fact turns out to be the story; and dates and players are sometimes disguised in complex and meaningful ways. On the one hand, these fragments of a larger history can be read as a confused record of an unspeakable time. Conversely, they can be read as “parts functioning as wholes” where a mediated individual, family, and community discourse bump up against a larger national discourse of truth and reconciliation. In this paper, I examine how silences, stories of “not-knowing,” and other storied distortions of past events complicate discussions of truth and lies.

Dr. Laura Fasick, Doctorate

When the Truth Isn't Good Enough: Literary Realism and Student Reactions

Ever since the birth of modernism in the early 20th century one of the most highly regarded literary values has been the honesty that shows ambiguity and even ugliness without glossing over it.  As we introduce our students to this truth-telling literature, however, it can be jolting to discover that students sometimes respond to unidealized writings of real-life tragedies in harshly negative ways. Wilfred Owen’s insistence on showing the realities of trench and gas warfare in World War One has struck some of my students as showing “disrespect” for the soldiers he describes.  “It’s as if he’s making fun of them,” one student complained when commenting on Owen’s lines about haggard, weary soldiers in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Not all my attempts to show that Owen’s poem is actually a passionate appeal on behalf of those soldiers could sway him.

Even more disturbingly, students responded with distaste to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s portrayal of Holocaust survivors in Enemies: A Love Story. Singer does not present his characters as heroic figures.   They are all deeply traumatized, living and yet irrevocably marked by their experiences. To my dismay, students judged these characters as “whiners,” as “losers,” as people who needed to “get over it” and “move on with their lives.”  Rather than applauding Singer’s refusal of easy sentimentality, the students complained bitterly about having to read a book with characters they couldn’t admire or respect.

In this paper I explore this clash between the psychological realism of most twentieth- and twenty-first century canonical literature and students’ hunger for larger-than-life heroic figures.  I will conclude by inviting discussion of how we can overcome student resistance to “truth-telling” literature.

Biographies

Dr. Caroline-Isabelle Caron

Caroline-Isabelle Caron is a historical anthropologist in Queen's University's Department of History. She specializes in the study of North American popular culture in the 19th and 20th-centuries. Her research projects have focussed on Francophone representations of the past, in the form of genealogies, legends and commemorations, and on representations of the future, in the form of science fiction and fan fiction. She is currently working on a book studying Acadian commemorations in 19th and 20th century Nova Scotia. Her next project will focus on how science fiction published in Québec since 1960 has mirrored societal anxieties. Her research on genealogies was published in the monograph _Se créer des ancêtres. Un parcours généalogique nord-américain_ (2006), as well as several articles.

Dr. Blanca Schorcht

Blanca Schorcht is an Associate Professor in the English department at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada, where she has been since 2004.  She is currently the Dean of Arts, Social and Health Sciences at the University of Northern British Columbia. Dr. Schorcht completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of British Columbia in 2000. Her research specialization lies in contemporary First Nations/Native American and Canadian literatures but her particular interest lies in the interface between oral and written traditions, and oral histories. Her book Storied Voices in Native American Texts explores the connections among contemporary Native literatures and older, indigenous oral storytelling traditions. Dr. Schorcht is currently shifting some of her focus to work on other oral histories and traditions, and is working on a project that examines the historical and social specificity of identity in terms of the (German) Canadian immigrant experience in Canada post-World War II. Her publications include “’One Good Story’: Storytelling and Orality in Thomas King’s Work (2012),” and “MacGyvering Pop Culture: Blending Traditions in Canada (2012).”

Dr. Laura Fasick

I received my B.A. from the University of Toronto and my doctorate from Indiana University, Bloomington.  I am currently a Professor in the English Department at Minnesota State University Moorhead. I have published two books and over a dozen articles.  I have also delivered conference papers at conferences ranging from the 2015 "Mapping Nations, Locating Citizens" conference to the Humanities Education and Research Conference (2011 and 2015) as well as others.