Showing papers in "University of Toronto Quarterly in 1993"

Disclosure as cover-up': the discourse of madness in Lady Audley's Secret

Abstract: For a work that addresses itself in many ways to the question of madness, Lady Audley's Secret broaches the topic only as it nears its conclusion. In terms of the mechanics of this sensation novel, madness is the most melodramatic of a series of scandalous disclosures. Other revelations may have been anticipated, but this one, conventional as it is, startles even the canniest reader, since Lady Audley appears throughout the novel to be perfectly sane. This last secret is also the means by which the novel effects closure. After she has been certified, Lady Audley can be handily dispatched to a homelike asylum. On the face of it, madness is the secret now told, but it functions in significant ways more as 'cover-up' than disclosure.

The Modern/Postmodern Divide and Urban Planning

Abstract: One way of trying to establish connections between the humanities and urban planning is to explore some of the meanings of planning within the philosophical and cultural contexts of modernity and postmodernity. Modernists call it urban planning; postmodernists call it urban design. The difference signifies a transition, from the twentieth-century modernist ideal of large-scale, technical, and efficient city plans, and the International Style of functionalist, no-frills architecture, guided by the 'less-is-more' and 'form follows function' aesthetic of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to a late twentieth-century postmodernist conception of urban life as being highly resistant to this approach. Urban design is preoccupied instead with a collage or pastiche of past styles within a fragmented, ephemeral, diverse environment. Derrida, for example, sees collage/montage as the essential form of postmodern discourse.

Writing in Books and Other Marginal Activities

Abstract: Margins and the marginal are, as we paradoxically say, so central to academic writing these days that we are liable to forget that when we use these words we are trading in metaphors. There can be no doubt that bringing forward the socially or historically neglected and disadvantaged has been a welcome development in literary criticism. It gratifies the liberal politics of most academic readers and at the same time it enlarges their field of study; it is worthy and interesting, or as tradition puts it, useful and pleasing. It is therefore surely peculiar that there should have been no public discussion of texts that are literally marginal, those words that readers write on the edges of the pages of manuscripts or printed books. This essay aims to initiate such discussion. The first section proposes a description of the typical features of marginalia, drawing on examples from the last two centuries or so and distinguishing marginalia from related kinds of writing; the second considers the specific case of ...

Reformed Eloquence: Inability, Questioning, and Correction in Paradise Lost

Abstract: Milton's attitude towards rhetoric and humanist rhetorical education is a subject of continuing critical debate. Irene Samuel, for instance, insists that 'when Milton compared Satan-in-the-Serpent ... to "some orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome, where eloquence / Flourished, since mute" (PL 9.670–72), he was hardly equating eloquence with trickery.' According to Samuel, '[Milton's] supposed distrust of rhetoric has been foisted on him by those unwilling to make distinctions such as he himself habitually made' (177), distinctions between the art itself, and its abuses and misuses. Thomas O. Sloane, on the other hand, resurrects the anti-rhetorical Milton when he associates 'Miltonic Form' with 'The Disintegration of Humanist Rhetoric' (209, 211), and suggests that the rhetorical mode of thinking, 'revelling in ambiguity and skepticism,' is 'exemplified by the character of Milton's Satan' (249). I propose here to mediate between these views by describing the ways in which Paradise Lost attempts both t...

After Modernism: Alternative Voices in the Writings of Dionne Brand, Claire Harris, and Marlene Philip

Abstract: As Lorris Elliott notes in the introduction to Literary Writing by Blacks in Canada, there has been an 'outburst of literary activity by Blacks in Canada' since the 1970s, and the three writers discussed here are part of that 'outburst.' Some of this recent activity comes from Canadian-born writers such as Maxine Tynes and George Elliott Clarke, part comes from immigrants from the United States, England, South America, and Africa, and part comes from the community arriving from the Caribbean. Dionne Brand, Claire Harris, and Marlene Philip, whose work I approach in this essay, all come from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago,and each develops a writing that raises three tightly associated issues: race, access, and the appropriateness of the verbal tradition, literary or linguistic, to their writing.

Inhumanities of Planning Revisited

Abstract: Twenty-five years ago, 'UTQ' published my essay 'Inhumanities of Urban Planning.' The question probed was whether the contemporary planning of cities and regions focused on the humane goal of ensuring 'free, varied, and unwasteful life' for the individual citizen, or whether it largely flouted the values of that Western tradition described as 'the humanities.' The essay offered eleven perspectives along which it seemed actual plans— and their implementations—could only dubiously be said to be honouring humane values. Some of the matters examined along these perspectives, such as the lack of self-criticism from a humanities viewpoint and poverty of contact with the visual arts and literature, were seen as simply deficient. Others were seen as active agents of damage. The subversions included submitting to a narrow technological rationality and overemphasizing utility. Overall, there was felt to be an aggregation of dangerous tendencies leading to the 'destruction of humane values ... a serious absence ... ...

On Samuel Pepys

Abstract: Coming to the end of Richard Ollard's biography of Samuel Pepys is almost as disappointing as coming to the end of the great Diary itself. That there is very much more to Pepys than is in the Diary is an observation not only on how early in his life he abandoned it but also on the enormous amount of his life's business (with the navy especially) that is not contained within it. It is a brave man who ventures in the steps of Sir Arthur Bryant and yet Ollard, while generously acknowledging Bryant's contribution, makes luminous and concise sense of the significance of much of that naval material. . In so doing, he is most successful in placing Pepys's achivement within a series of contexts: the legacy of the reorganized navy of the Interregnum; the ascendancy of utility over beauty of design in naval construction; the struggle between captains ('frocks') and masters ('tarpaulins'); the internecine warfare between admirals of different political stripesi the importance of regular supplies, hospital ships, and indeed the founding of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich itself. In all of this Ollard writes with an ease that is occasionally journalistic, but more often refreshing. One could do without paragraphs that begin 'Jealous. Rivalry. Or rather a double rivalry,' but not without Ollard's ability to see the connection between Restoration naval polities and, on the one hand, Alice in Wonderland and, on the other, the First World War. The book, moreover, is larded with amusing asides. The campaign against Pepys in the late 16705 was engineered in a world of low criminality where Colonel Blood, the Popish Plot, the Great Fire, and High Treason could easily be run together in the machinations of such shabby villains as Colonel John Scott, who was one of Pepys's accusers. OUard makes short work of him: 'the military title, mandatory for ruffians With social pretensions in every age of English history ... ' If one hears perhaps more of the navy than one cares to in Ollard's biography, one hears surprisingly less (because it is so well known?) of the Fire and the Plague. One also hears less of Pepys the scholar: what Ollard refers to as the 'voluminous correspondence\"be~een Pepys and John Evelyn, Richard Southwell,

Othello’s Suicide

Abstract: Othello’s suicide engages a knotty complex of social, political and cultural issues. Far from resolving the political and cultural dilemmas of the drama, it exacerbates them and raises more questions than it answers. In that extended moment, his dagger poised to strike himself, Othello drags into the play a memory buried deep in his pre-play past that is of such brutality and hate-filled violence as to link this so-called ‘restored’ Othello with the crude, tortured brute who struck his wife in Act IV, scene 1 rather than with the noble Roman he exhorts his audience to remember.

Planning, the Humanities, and the Circulation of Ideas

Abstract: In his essay 'Inhumanities of Planning Revisited,' John Dakin says, first, that planners do not pay enough attention to the humanities and, second, that planners would do a better job if they incorporated more of the 'new humanities' into their thinking and practice. Thirdly, the way forward requires a change in the knower in order to change the value weight given to things known.

Colonization and Decolonization in The Blithedale Romance

Abstract: In what follows I offer a reading of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance under a postcolonial perspective. Before beginning, however, I should like to situate my reading critically, and sketch out a certain difficulty entailed by it, namely that of being caught between two apparently conflicting discourses: the established and familiar ones we designate as 'American Studies'; and the novel, trialling one that now accompanies the prodigious body of writing in English outside the Anglo-American sphere, and that comprises what has come to be called 'post-colonial study.'

Urban Planning in Twentieth-Century North America: From Success to Irrelevancy?

Abstract: The Liveable Metropolis, a colourful brochure from the Metropolitan Toronto Planning Department, slid last fall through my mail slot, announcing yet another proposed plan. It follows on the heels of the City of Toronto's Cityplan '91. Again, Metro has produced a mountain of paper after hours and hours of talk, though probably no more than yet another planning exercise such as resulted in the recent Regeneration on Toronto's waterfront. Like Vancouverites, or at least those active in the urban political scene in what have been rapidly growing cities, Torontonians love to dream about rearranging the environment. The planning 'industry' just keeps going endlessly, operating more smoothly, if less conspicuously, than that other great intellectual enterprise of recent times, the redrawing of the Constitution

The Confidence Man in Modern Film

Abstract: Although his literary origins can be traced at least as far back as Chaucer's Pardoner, the confidence man has generally been regarded as a modern character type, a development of the trickster figure reflecting and ultimately subverting the growing diversity, literacy, and self-assurance of a new urban culture. His history, in this regard, rather neatly parallels the development of the movies during the past century. Certainly,Georges Melies may stand as cinema's first great confidence man, both as an actor transforming his own image on the screen and as a director exploiting his audience's faith in that image. While an affinity with the confidence man has stirred the imagination of numerous writers including Melville, Twain, Nathanael West, Mann, and Fowles, filmmakers following in the expressionist tradition of Melies may have sensed this identification even more strongly.

Northrop Frye as a Canadian Critic

Abstract: Northrop Frye was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec in 1912, raised in Moncton, New Brunswick, and educated at the University of Toronto, where he lectured from 1939 until his death in 1991. Except for several years as an undergraduate at Oxford, and extended lecturing appointments in other countries, chiefly the United States, he resisted living elsewhere because, he said, 'I found, as I grew older, that my roots were going deeper and deeper into the Canadian society and that I couldn't really pull out of that' (WGS, 273). Although Canadian literature occupies a comparatively minor place in his twenty-seven books, he opens The Bush Garden, a collection of his writings on the Canadian imagination, with the remark that they are 'episodes in a writing career which has been mainly concerned with world literature and has addressed an international reading public, and yet has always been rooted in Canada and has drawn its essential characteristics from there.'

'Of Plain Signification': Darwin's World in the First Edition of The Origin of Species

Abstract: William James, at the end of his Psychology: Briefer Course, says 'from the common sense point of view (which is that of all the natural sciences) knowledge is an ultimate relation between two mutually external realities, the knower and the known.' And he writes elsewhere in the same volume [that] 'Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger) always comes out of our own mind.' James's remarks point the way that my paper will take: Darwin in the Origin shows that his science establishes no exception to James's observation that the point of view of the natural sciences is that of common sense. Darwin oes not use the term 'common sense' to describe his approach to his subject, but he does put his faith in what he calls the 'plain signification' of facts. His view is that facts seen clearly—their plain meaning of significance recognized—speak for themselves, and make, we infer, common sense.

Loading the Canon

Abstract: Loading, not to say firing, the canon has become a major academic growth industry in the last decade: hardly a critic or theorist of note has failed to pronounce on the implications positive or negative of the nature of canons and the processes of canonization. At the risk of over-using the obvious pun, this industry has been fuelled by a variety of challenges to humanistic assumptions of the universality and timelessness of 'great art,' challenges launched by the rise of theory in general and of critiques based on gender, race, and class in particular. After a dozen years of discussion, perhaps the time has now come to assess both the terms of the debate itself and its multi pIe consequences. The seeming innocence of the idea of the canon as a set of texts having the authority of 'perennial classics'1 has been challenged. If, instead, the canon is seen as a 'body of texts which best performs in the sphere of culture the work of legitimating the prevailing social order' and if entry to such a canon is determined by conformity (and I deliberately use a 'loaded' term here) to some dominant political ideology, the recent media coverage of the 'political correctness' debates raises the stakes of the debate considerably for us in the academy, faced as we are not only with challenges to the notion of canonicity but also with the formation of new canons reflecting new cultural dominants. The danger, as Edward Said has noted, is that new canons can (though need not) mean 'a new history and, less happily, a new parochialism.'2 In the continuing attempt to articulate 'a new history' for the discipline of literary studies, it is incumbent upon us all to avoid the rather too tempting trap of 'a new parochialism.' One of the ways of side-stepping such a trap would be to examine what the process of canonization entails in alternative as well as mainstream canons and to study the complexity of both the seemingly simultaneous need for and suspicion of canoniZing. Both books under review here do this, though in very different ways,

Du silence à l'écriture: Les lieux d'être de l'imaginaire créole

Abstract: Qu' est-ce que les lettres creoles? QueUes sont leurs origines, leurs expressions et leurs fonctions? Ou se situent-elles dans Ie contexte des litteratures mondiales? Voila, entre autres, les questions que se posent Patrick Chamoiseau et Raphael Confiant, ecrivains antiHais, tour a tour rom a nciers, essayistes et critiques lith~raires, tous les deux recipendiaires de plusieurs prix litteraires prestigieux, a savoir, Ie Goncourt pour Texaco (1992) et I' Antigone pour Le Negre et l'AmiraI (1988) de Confiant. (N'oublions pas, non plus Derek Walcott, ecrivain originaire de SainteLucie, qui a remporte en 1992 Ie prix Nobel de la litterature.) La Caraibe, source et lieu d'etre de l'imaginaire creole, est Ie faisceau de plusieuTstracees litteraires, comme nous en temoignent les auteurs des Lettres creoles, puisant sa force, son dynamisme et son originalite dans les rencontres conflictuelles et prodigieuses des peuples, des langues, des histoires et des cultures. Lettres creoles se proposent de balayer les differents champs esthHiques qui fondent les lettres creoles et Ie texte s'ouvre sur des tableaux d'illustrations qui rassemblent diverses formes artistiques: la gravure, la peinture, la photographie, la sculpture. L' intention n' est pas seulement d' eveiller notre curiosite mais d' evoquer les influences multiples et les sensibilites artistiques qui nourrissent l'ecriture et repondent aux imperatifs politique, culturel et esthetique de l'activite litteraire de la Caraibe. Les origines de la litterature di te creole (terme qui valoriserait la pluralite et la diversite) remontent 'a la roche ecrite' c' est-a.-dire a l' art de la pierre, exerce par les premiers peuples de la Caraibe. Les petroglyphes constitueraient Ides paroles eparses' et feraient partie de ce que les auteurs denomment la 'litterature silendeuse.' Pourquoi silencieuse? C' est que ces 'paroles eparses' et leur sens echappent a ceux et celles qui ignorent les cultures amerindiennes de la Caraibe. Edouard Glissant, lui, prefere parler d' apparitions pour montrer a quel point les gestes millenaires des ancetres de la Caraibe reapparaissent et se manifestent dans }' exercice quotidien de la peche, de la vannerie ... La litterature creole suivra un parcours allant s'elargissant et les auteursrelevent les mouvements litteraires (le mimetisme, Ie regionalisme, Ie doudouisme, Ie surrealisme, la negritude, l'antillanite ... ) ainsi que des praUques d' ecriture (les chroniques, 'Ie silence du cri,' Ila poetique du conteur,' lIes pratiques du detour,' 'la parole oraliturelle' ... ). nest indeniable que Ie parcours de 'trois cent quarante annee d' ecrits' (1635--1975) effectue par Chamoiseau et Confiant est une tache gigantesque et entraine des choix difficiles a trancher. Anticipant les reproches et les critiques, iis admettent jeter 'un regard delicieusement injuste, partiel (sinon partial) par endroits, mais toujours sensitif' (LC 203). Ce texte nous en dit long sur la reception des textes litteraires aux

Planning: A Rural Perspective

Abstract: I dream of a time when the lamb will lie down with the lion, of a time when country and city will come together in harmonious interplay, not as now in a posture of predator and victim. No doubt amnesty between the lamb and the lion calls for a fundamental alteration of the lion's character. As for the lamb, what a long period of learning to trust will be required before it is comfortable with an amiable relationship. The prophet Isaiah, who foresaw this new regime, probably did not know that among the animals the lamb and the lion already had a sensible arrangement. The lion knew enough to dine on sick lambs and ancient rams and ewes, but not to destroy the strong breeding stock which provided his ongoing food supply. In a sense the sheep were beneficiaries too, even if the method seems heartless to us as we cope with too many people and too few lions. Whatever scenario you choose—the scriptural, which was clearly aimed at erring humans, or the ecological—the metaphor does not fit the relation of city to ...