By Amy Donovan, Staff Contributor
Full of books, Macs and light, the McCain building’s Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) office, overlooks that big red abstract painting just behind the first-floor elevators.
It’s an appropriate view for a project aimed at promoting research in the more abstract literature produced during the Canadian modernist period.
“A lot of stuff was published during the modernist period in Canada,” says Vanessa Lent, project administrator at the international project’s Dal home base, and PhD student specializing in Canadian modernism. “And a lot of it just disappeared.”
Modernism, a period characterized by experimentation in form, started in Canada in about 1915 and faded out around the 1960s. For a long time after that, people looked back at the first half of the century saying, “Oh, there was nothing really happening there – just a bunch of flittering here and there, but nothing substantial,” Lent quips.
“There was quite a bit produced that was substantial, and for economic reasons and different political reasons didn’t get a fair shot.”
Surprise, surprise: many of the authors who didn’t get a fair shake from the publishing world were women or gay men. These people were writing in a style that was more abstract and less realist than “this idea of virile masculinity in Canadian modernism that was representative of our pioneering past” – an idea that was important to the public in Canada, if not to all modernists.
It’s the abstract, left out, “feminine” style of writing that EMiC editors at Dal are trying to gather before it’s lost forever. At the moment they’re mostly working with published, but unpopular works, some rare and some simply unknown. But the project is only in its second year, and will eventually start printing unpublished manuscripts.
Before EMiC’s completion in 2015, Lent and her co-researchers hope to have republished many pieces in both scholarly and non-scholarly editions, and to have established a digital research base for academics interested in the subject. Over the summer, they scoured used-book databases on the Internet and purchased about $15,000 worth of books.
All of those volumes will be “scanned for posterity” through the Dal libraries, and Lent says EMiC will probably make a couple more large-scale purchases over the next few years. Their grant, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, is approximately $3 million.
So why were so many of these volumes’ authors women, or gay?
Modernism as a movement didn’t start in Canada until 10 or 12 years after it started in Britain and the United States, Lent explains. And by that time, people were afraid of it—afraid of “all this experimentation with form and especially the idea of abstraction; taking a human form and breaking it apart, if you can imagine,” she says, citing Picasso’s work as a well-known example.
“People started worrying about what this did to the humanity of the piece … There was this weird alignment of modernist aesthetics and non-realism with dehumanization and fascism.”
It didn’t help, she adds, that a lot of modernism’s big names, such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, were attracted to fascism at the beginning, before it became a reality. “They backed away from it, but that alignment of modernism with fascism never went away.”
So at the time, women and gay male writers were thought to be fascist.
“The people who did tend towards abstraction were called feminine and were called decadent and were called degenerate,” says Lent. “The idea of art as needing to be representative, not abstract, was really important to Canadian modernism.
“As the years went on, the people who were aligned with the masculine camp happened to be the people who started teaching in universities and making the class syllabuses in what was then a really new discipline: Canadian literature.”
EMiC aims to show that Canadians “always had a thing to say” about issues such as feminism and gender. It aims to “level the playing field for what was actually being produced” as well as leveling the playing field of research resources in Canadian modernism. “The principal investigator, Dean Irvine, is really focused on changing the structure of who gets access to information,” says Lent.
And they’re hiring undergrads as research assistants.
“We want to make sure that we don’t recreate those weird systems of hierarchical power” with regards to where research money goes, like the ones happening in the publishing industry back in the day.
“That sounds sort of doomsday,” Lent says, laughing. “But that’s one of the things we’ve built into the project, to try to work between all these different groups of people, because the more experience you bring into a project, the richer it’s going to be.”
It’s a win-win situation. Ezra Pound would be proud.
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