Oct 29, 2016 | 10:40 AM - 12:10 PM | LOFT 2

Dr. Jeffrey Weingarten, Ph.D.

A "Literary and Human" Past: Rewriting Canadian History

Modern Canadian history has been shaken by a reinvention that has extended its scope in terms of content and methods. For much of the twentieth century, the predominant questions in that discourse have focused on national identity, the cultural past, present, and future of Canadian society. Questions about Canadian history have become more complicated in the decades since “multiculturalism” became an official policy, and historians’ methodologies in pursuing those questions have evolved. This reinvention has been marked by the declining popularity of “objective” grand narratives stressing national unity and the rise of more focused studies that value “subjective” insights into regional, social, and familial pasts that more culturally diverse. While it makes sense to assume that historians instigated this reinvention, it has been a creative endeavour as much as an academic one.

 My paper considers the ways in which creative writing, rather than scholarly writing, has guided the reinvention of Canadian history. In this paper, I will trace the development of an unorthodox method of writing history: whereas conservative historians have traditionally advocated for objectivity and distance as essential to the writing of history (an approach that has put limits on what qualifies as permissible evidence and content), Canadian poets have explored and embraced the cacophony that emerges when the past is read through subjective lenses. In other words, the creative writing of history as an intimate and personal experience, rather than as a distanced and objective set of event, has been an instrumental testing ground for the future of Canadian historical writing as a shared practice in which all voices, not just academic ones, are accepted. This, I argue, has democratized the writing of history and thus changed the way Canadians think about the past. History has consequently become, as the poet Al Purdy once said, more "literary and human."

Dr. Sarah Roger, DPhil (PhD)

Seeking Truth in Fiction: Alberto Manguel and the Distortions of Literature

In A Reader on Reading (2010), the Argentine-Canadian author and critic Alberto Manguel grapples with the question of how to assign meaning in ambiguous circumstances. Having learned that his favourite high school literature teacher was a member of one of Argentina’s oppressive political regimes—and therefore responsible for the torture and murder of Manguel’s friends and classmates—Manguel wonders whether he should (1) deny the truth to protect his memories, (2) embrace the truth and rewrite his past, or (3) try to hold his past experience and present knowledge in equilibrium. Manguel’s struggle is complicated by the fact that he credits this teacher with introducing him to fiction’s capacity for simultaneously promoting lies and preserving truths.

Manguel admires stories for being great revealers of truths despite consisting of falsehoods, yet his experiences have taught him that the inverse is also possible: “Words can be misused, can be forced to tell lies, to whitewash the guilty, to invent a nonexistent past in which we are told we must believe” (A Reader on Reading 100). Growing from this awareness is Manguel’s literary project, which celebrates and interrogates fiction’s truthful lies.

Drawing on Manguel’s non-fiction essays about readers and reading, this paper explores how the books we read uphold the truth and while also perpetuating lies. In particular, it looks at the hidden agendas that underpin our public and personal libraries, the overt and concealed factors that govern our reading choices, and the myriad ways we use reading to support our views—no matter how accurate or tenuous those views may be. In doing so, this paper argues for us to read carefully with an eye to recognizing and reconciling the many truths and lies held in balance by our books.

Ms. Adriana Pinegar, Masters

The Work of the Archive in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen

"Copenhagen," Michael Frayn’s 1998 play, takes as a subject a clandestine meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg during World War II. The implications of this meeting between the two great physicists were monumental: namely, the development of the atomic bomb that would determine victory or defeat during World War II and usher in the atomic age. While the stakes were indisputably high, the actual details of the meeting are highly contested. Throughout the play, Frayn explores not only the difficulties in remembering and the conflicted territory between memory and history, but the impossibility of recovering the event at all. In pursuing these issues, Frayn, as I will argue, navigates this tangle of historical events and individual memories by examining the role and function of the archive in creating rather than recovering history.

History is often thought of as more reliable and stable than individual memory. In this view, history is an archive of facts and artifacts that add up to a definitive truth. In "Copenhagen," Frayn problematizes this portrayal of the archive. Frayn is not concerned with casting judgment or revising history, though some have argued the contrary. Instead, he uses historical characters to point to the nature of the archive as incomplete and unstable. The past cannot be understood in terms of truths and untruths, facts and lies, because history is always already a belated narrative of the past; a construction that is made and remade in every telling. Frayn ends the play, however, not by giving up on the tensions between history and memory, but rather by exploring the possibility of what he calls a “quantum ethics,” where multiple truths exist and where the individual relationships to memory and history trump appeals to the facts alone.

Biographies

Dr. Jeffrey Weingarten

Dr. Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten is a Professor of Language and Liberal Studies at Fanshawe College and the recipient of the FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellowship Award. He is also the author of more than two dozen articles, interviews, and reviews that have appeared in magazines and journals across Canada, as well as the author of The Reinvention of History, a forthcoming book from the University of Toronto Press about the development of history and creative writing in Canada since 1960. Today he is talking about his work as the Co-Managing Editor and Co-founder of the internationally renowned magazine, The Bull Calf: Reviews of Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Criticism.

Dr. Sarah Roger

Sarah Roger is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.  Her current research is on Alberto Manguel and the ethics of reading. Previously, Sarah was a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh and a doctoral student and a research fellow at the University of Oxford, where she studied the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS -- Borges and Kafka: Sons and Writers. Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming 2016.

ARTICLES -- “Finding Franz Kafka in the Works of Jorge Luis Borges.” Oxford German Studies 43.2 (2014): 140-155. -- “A Metamorphosis? Rewriting in Borges’s Translations of Kafka.” Comparative Critical Studies 8.1 (2011): 81-94.

CHAPTERS -- “Borges and Mathematics.” Borges in Context. Ed. Robin Fiddian. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2016. -- “Borges and the Gauchesque.” Borges in Context. Ed. Robin Fiddian. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2016. -- “Magical Realism: Latin American Origins, Global Applications?” (co-authored with Kimberly Sasser). Latin America in the World. Eds. Antonia García-Rodriguez and Dan Greenberg. New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2016. -- “Apuntes sobre Jorge Guillermo Borges.” La Senda. By Jorge Guillermo Borges. Trans and ed. Maria Julia Rossi. Pittsburgh: Borges Center, 2015. -- “Tradition and Talent Abroad: T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, and Harold Bloom.” Bloomsbury: Inspirations and Influences. Ed. Elizabeth Wright. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. -- “Locating the Library: Libraries as Physical and Conceptual Spaces.” Spaces of (Dis)location. Eds. Rachael Hamilton, Allison Macleod, and Jenny Munro. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. -- “Translation and Identity in Borges’s ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’” The Limits of Literary Translation: Expanding Frontiers in Iberian Languages. Ed Javier Muñoz-Basols et al. Kassel: Reichenberger, 2012.

Adriana Pinegar

Adriana Pinegar earned a bachelor's degree in public relations from Brigham Young University in 2012. She returned to BYU to earn a master's degree in comparative studies, completing her thesis in 2015. Some of her research interests include memory, trauma, and Scandinavian studies. Currently, Adriana is an adjunct instructor in the English department at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah.