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1. Introduction: Negotiating Meaning in Changing Times
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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1 How do readers negotiate meaning in contexts where norms of understanding diverge? What are the fictions that shape Canadian engagements with the global and how are they changing? These questions of audience, community , and the shifting forms of collective imaginaries emerged to challenge cultural commentators within various theoretical and political movements of the twentieth century. They are now shaping new directions for cultural theory with the rise of what we have come to call globalization. Our title seeks to capture the dynamic potential of this situation for reimagining the public spheres of engagement for creative work today. This collection contributes to recent interrogations of Canadian literature as an institutionalized structure of exchange between texts and readers, which is both unravelling and rearticulating itself within the contexts of a changing world system. It takes on this task within an international exchange of views among scholars who interpret Canadian literature from within different geopolitical and theoretical locations. We understand this emerging global system is one of friction and flows in which the previously assumed autonomies of literature and the nation, and the assumed relation of the one to the other, have come into question. Using the framing device of crosstalk as a metaphor for the ways in which audial and visual imaginaries interact to create complex forms of interference, the contributing authors analyze the ways in which Canadian imaginaries, the organizing structures of societal understanding within a nation-state, are shifting in response to 1 Introduction: Negotiating Meaning in Changing Times Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák 2 INTRODUCTION globalizing pressures. As our metaphor indicates, these challenge conventional assumptions about intelligibility in ways that may prove both productive and disturbing. In the evolving global scene, both sub-national and supra-national communities find renewed options for experimenting with communal voice and vision in ways that may complement and challenge established national imaginaries. The chapters in this volume develop different , and sometimes contradictory, views of the ways that these shifting relations between national and global imaginaries interact with cultural, theatrical, and literary imaginaries. Certainly the creative sphere may both sustain and challenge national imaginaries, but to what extent is it tied to the national and to what extent does it form an autonomous global system? This question has not yet been answered nor has it been reformulated in terms that might challenge its governing assumptions. This cross-cutting dynamic between old questions and new provides the focus of this volume. Crosstalk takes place in those “zones of awkward engagement,” identified by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “where words mean something different across a divide even as people agree to speak” (xi). Images also, we would add, are “sighted” differently in ways dependent in part on how the viewer is sited and interpellated within these zones. Our contributors have agreed to meet within the zone of engagement formed by this book in the hope of elaborating the productivity of such awkward spaces, where each of us is challenged to move beyond our usual comfort zones of nationality or sub-disciplinary specialization. While the chapters in this volume speak across the zones in which we have placed them, our three organizing sections draw attention to dimensions of the volume’s theme that require—and reward—sustained interrogation. Collaboration has emerged as a particular challenge in the humanities since the turn of the century, as expertly summarized by Mavis Reimer in her introduction to a 2009 issue of the journal Jeunesse. She posits that “What is at stake in the privileging of collaborative research, it appears, is nothing less than a redefinition of what is to count as knowledge” (4). The quest for a redefined vocabulary that can do justice to humanities-based collaborative work, we argue, will involve renewed attention to the productivity of what we call “crosstalk” (forms of discussion that can respect and learn from diversity ). Some of the key terms reshaping that vocabulary in this volume include improvisation, dialogism, polyphony, and circulation. While we accept, with Kit Dobson, that transnationalism provides one lens through which to understand the re-scaling of Canadian literary production in a [3.95.233.107] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:36 GMT) DIANA BRYDON AND MARTA DVOŘÁK 3 global era (Transnational Canadas xi), our turn to models of circulation and friction, crosstalk and cross-sightings, marks our effort to find a language that can accommodate the shifting and vexed dialogues between aesthetics and politics. These processes, in turn, necessitate an altered attention to voice, space, and...