Showing papers in "British Journal of Canadian Studies in 2004"

Coyote as culprit: the coyote aesthetics of Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The cure for death by lightning.

Abstract: The relationships between non-Amerindian writers from postcolonial countries in the Americas and the Amerindian characters they create or recreate cannot always be reduced to a simplified self/other, centre/margin(alized) paradigm. Indeed, these dichotomies from postcolonial studies may perhaps hinder some serious reflection on the attempts of non-Aboriginal 'mainstream' writers . . . to open up textual space in which to explore various manifestations of differing cultural representations. (Vautier 1998: xviii)

A canadian modernism: the pre-group of seven 'algonquin school', 1912–17

Abstract: TOM THOMSON AND FUTURE GROUP OF SEVEN ARTISTS J.E.H. MacDonald, Lauren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer and F.H. Varley journeyed to the Ontario Northland 'to paint unequipped with the mental paraphernalia of academies and without any sense of the solemnity and importance of the rules or methods' (Housser: 24) - or so the long-held nationalist story goes. The description comes from F.B. Housser's 1926 A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven, a seminal and increasingly infamous work which described how the artists channelled the Canadian 'spirit' to produce a national art free from external influence. The Group of Seven mythology has become an important part of Canadian identity, a sign of national and cultural uniqueness taught to generations of Canadians. While the 'born of the palette' myth holds strong in the Canadian nationalist canon, academics have increasingly debunked it as good storytelling but poor history. The artists' European influences, including their training, use of modernist technique and colours, and break with traditional art have long been noted by art historians. Dennis Reid's 1970 Group of Seven exhibition catalogue was an early and still one of the best scholarly examinations of the Group of Seven 'story', including the artists' combination of European approaches and Canadian conservatism. Yet as recently as 1998 Ann Davis noted that 'Canadian analysts of the Group of Seven have chosen a selective, segmented approach in examining the Group's modernism. While generally labelling the Group modern, many insist that it has no links with European modernism' (p. 109). Since that time there has been a greater exploration of the artists' work as a response to Canadian modernity and placing it within modernist frameworks. Davis has shed new light on the spiritual, philosophic and mystical elements of the artists' work (1973, 1992) and has raised a number of comparisons between these artists and European modern artists (1998). Lynda Jessup (1998, 2001) and Ross D. Cameron (1998, 1999) have both insightfully placed the artists within an 'antimodern' reaction to Canadian modernity which involved the quest for an 'authentic' and 'real' experience through the outdoors and a landscape art. The complexity of the European modernist dimension has yet to be fully appreciated, however. In the 1912-17 pre-Group of Seven period, Thomson, MacDonald, Harris, Jackson, Lismer and Varley developed a nationalist 'Algonquin School' of painting by altering and adapting the European modernist fusion of aesthetics and ideology to Canadian circumstances.1 The Algonquin School's modernism was selective, in many ways a hybrid, sharing the European challenge to traditional art and linking aesthetics to an ideological platform, but rejecting European avant-guardism and socio-experimentalism in favour of socially and nationally constructive purposes. Powerful colour and brushstrokes, adopted from Impressionism, Expressionism, and even Fauvism, were not only used outside of their European ideological contexts, but their application to national and spiritual concerns - reinforcing a traditional conservative morality - ran counter to the original European intent. One finds, then, not a European 'art for art's sake' but a Canadian 'art for nation's sake'. The coming of modernity in Europe and North America in the decades before and following the turn of the twentieth century can be identified by the boom in new technologies, media and sciences which resulted in tremendous social, economic, cultural and political changes. From the discovery of X-Rays and electrons to the development of automobiles and air travel to the building of industrial factories and skyscrapers, modernity brought radical alterations to everyday life. Tremendous change and rapid development characterised this 'dimly understood, but manifestly real, historical shift'(Britt: 7). On the other hand, 'Modernism' was both a reaction to and an alternative to modernity, primarily developed amongst cultural producers in the large urban centres of Paris, Berlin, and London - there was a lag before it developed in New York and the rest of North America. …

Screening l.m. montgomery: heritage, nostalgia and national identity

Abstract: I don't know why I keep on going to see my favourite books screened. The result is always a disappointment. (Montgomery, Selected Journals, vol. 111: 26)

Public policy and the success and failure of new technology: the case of tree harvesting systems on the miramichi in new brunswick, canada

Abstract: CONSTITUTING A GENUINE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION in the woods, the technologies and work processes of woods work in Eastern North America underwent a dramatic (and largely unstudied) transformation in the period between 1960 and the late 1980s. Motivating that development was the effort of the owners and managers of mills and their contractors to increase wood production, to decrease the costs, and to do both with fewer and fewer workers (MacDonald and Clow 1999). Horses and muscles have been replaced by the noise and fumes of fellers, delimbers, slashers and skidders. A truly bewildering array of machines together with new tree-harvesting systems resulted, appearing in rapid succession in the forests (Drushka and Konttinen 1997; Silversides n.d.). The research on which we are reporting has been conducted on the Crown Land of the Miramichi Valley, in northeastern New Brunswick. We have conducted fifty in-depth, unstructured interviews during the summers of 1991- 93 with workers, contractors, company officials and forest engineers - some of whom provided us with company documents - connected with tree harvesting for Repap Pulp and Paper and its predecessor companies on the Miramichi. These interviews were transcribed and analysed with the aid of Ethnograph, a programme which permits the systematic analysis of qualitative data. Some more recent data are also presented. That work has presented a research puzzle. At the end of three decades of industrial development one would anticipate the successive replacement of numerous, diverse and less productive systems with a few, relatively homogeneous, highly productive ones. But when examining the woods on the Miramichi, one finds something unexpected: the latest, most productive and advanced tree-harvesting systems have not uniformly pushed out earlier, less productive systems (Clow and MacDonald 2001). Some older and less efficient systems remain in use decades after the introduction of the newer, more efficient systems devised to replace them. The explanation of this phenomenon requires more than the simple notion of developmental time lag, that the old systems are simply being run into the ground to recover their capital costs. This is especially the case for the older harvesting systems, given that one of their definitive features is relatively low capital investment. This paper will attempt to provide an explanation for their persistence, for this 'unfulfilled industrialisation'. The problem we perceive is certainly acknowledged by participants in the industry. They suggest that considerations of 'terrain', 'distance' and 'volume' militate against the utilisation of a few standard harvesting systems, thereby providing the rationale for the presence of a variety of systems - diverse in their technological development, heterogeneous in their productivity - as the optimum mix given the conditions of the Miramichi. But their answer itself needs to be explained. These factors, which appear to grant salience to the natural conditions of the area in the determination of the mix of harvesting systems, can only be understood by looking at the political and social conditions within which forestry operates in New Brunswick. And these conditions, we argue, are mediated by the fact of public ownership of the bulk of the land and the corresponding forest-management regime established by the Crown Lands and Forests Act (clfa) of the Province of New Brunswick. While the economic goal of the industrial revolution in the woods was clear and unambiguous, the success and failure of the technologies developed during the industrialisation of tree harvesting are subject to more complex and contingent social and political determination. Statement of the problem We turn to place (the Miramichi), to time (1991, at the close of industrialisation), and to the harvesting systems in use. Repap, the large integrated paper and lumber company in the region, acquired its wood fibre from the sources identified in Table 1. …