2010 Canadian Literature Symposium, University of Ottawa

Keynote speakers: D.M.R. Bentley, Professor of English, University of Western Ontario; Carole Gerson, Professor of English, Simon Fraser University

http://www.canlit-symposium.ca/

Students and teachers of Canadian literature in English are invited to a symposium at the University of Ottawa to share their scholarship on early Canadian writers, especially to explore new approaches, uncover neglected texts and genres, and assess writers’ and critics’ diverse achievements.

2010 marks the twentieth anniversary of Lorraine McMullen’s Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers, a volume of essays that emerged from an earlier University of Ottawa symposium. McMullen’s anthology implicitly assumed that male authors of fiction and poetry were already receiving the attention they deserved, and that female writers would soon join them in the spotlight—two assumptions that, despite some remarkable scholarly achievements, remain open to question. This symposium seeks to address why and how we study early Canadian literature, and to energize scholars of this rich and challenging area of research.

Proposals are welcomed on any aspect of early Canadian literature to 1918, including but not limited to the following:

• How adequate has been our research into the authors, texts, literary and publishing practices, cultural trends, and social texts of early Canada?
• What work remains to be done?
• Which texts and authors have been effectively recovered over the past few decades, and which have fallen into obscurity—and what criteria have governed recovery efforts?
• Have male writers lagged behind female authors in recent criticism?
• What new and traditional approaches, critical and editorial, best help us to read early Canadian texts in their historical and cultural contexts?
• How is early Canadian literature discussed internationally, if it is discussed at all?

Please send, by e-mail attachment, your 300-400 word proposal, with a 100-word abstract and a 50-word bio-blurb, to Janice Fiamengo, Symposium Chair, Department of English, at fiamengo@uottawa.ca. The deadline for proposals is September 25, 2009.