Life and Times in Victorian Weardale, by Frank Sanderson. England, 2012. 180 pp.

You can find this book for $14.40 on Amazon.com or for £9.12 on Amazon.co.uk but – despite its Canadian content – not on Amazon.ca. My distant cousin-by-marriage Frank Sanderson created it as a self-published Amazon title. He’s a retired professor of Sports Science – in Canada that’s probably Kinesiology – who lives in Liverpool but whose ancestors lived and farmed for at least 4 centuries in or near the valley (“dale”) of the Wear River in County Durham.

The book itself is a contemporary example of the kind of technological change that in the late nineteenth century brought an end to traditional farming and social practices in British areas such as Weardale and spurred many disadvantaged inhabitants to emigrate to North America or Australia. A few decades ago such a book would have been a “local history,” produced in a village printshop and sold in local stores to residents and visitors.  Today it is written, formatted to include more than 60 photos and maps and ‘typeset’ on the author’s computer and globally distributed – sometimes to descendants of those nineteenth-century emigrants.

Sanderson has organized his book around eight letters sent by Francis Vickers (1821-1903), the son of his great-great grand uncle (i.e. Sanderson’s first cousin three-times removed) to his cousins George and Thomas Vickers who had emigrated to Canada. For each letter Sanderson writes a chapter in which he glosses the places, events and people mentioned by Vickers and contextualizes them within local, national and international economic and political history. Vickers writes the first letter in 1874 and the last in 1901.  Much like Charles Olson recommended to Ed Dorn, Sanderson appears to have learned more about his subject – a few square miles of Weardale during a 27-year period – than anyone before him. And much like Olson's admiration for Gloucester fishers, his admiration for Weardale's

Robert Duncan. Collected Essays and Other Prose. Ed. James Maynard. Berkeley: U of California P, 2014. 542 pp. $60.00.

This is the third gathering of Robert Duncan’s essays, following Duncan’s own selection of thirteen in Fictive Certainties, 1984, and Robert Bertolf’s selection of twenty in A Selected Prose in 1994. Maynard’s new selection of 41 essays certainly eclipses the other two, although it doesn't live up to its title of “Collected Essays” – something which Maynard hints in his introduction may have troubled him. He describes Collected Essays there, somewhat paradoxically, as including only “most of Duncan’s longer and more well-known essays along with a representative selection of other prose “ (xxxiv-xxxv) and calls for the publishing of  “a necessary companion volume for all of Duncan’s remaining uncollected prose” (xxxvi); he also provides a five-page “Appendix of Uncollected Essays and Other Prose.” His book’s title was possibly his publisher’s decision, perhaps dictated by its being part of the press’s series “The Collected Works of Robert Duncan.” Although Maynard also describes his new selected as a “reader’s edition” and only “lightly” edited, it is by far the most scholarly of the three, with a 51-page section of notes and a lengthy bibliography of the works and editions which Duncan appears to have cited.

Duncan’s 1984 selection, on which he worked intermittently for at least fifteen years, contained most of the essays that were influential in the reception of his poetry during the 1960s, its most productive decade – “Ideas on the Meaning of Form,” “Towards an Open Universe,” “The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante’s Divine Comedy,” “The Truth and Life of Myth,” and “Man’s Fulfillment in Order and Strife.” Bertolf in 1994 omits all but the first two of these, I suspect because the other three are among the most theosophical, performative and rhetorically extravagant of Duncan’s prose. One gets a sense that Duncan presented the essays he wanted to disseminate and be known by, and Bertolf those that he thought it politic for him to be known by. Maynard merely wants Duncan’s essays known and includes both these essays of wondrous excess and the somewhat more circumspect – “Ideas on the Meaning of Form” and “A Critical Difference of View.” Even in the latter, however, while writing less ecstatically, Duncan found it

Sanctioned Ignorance: The Politics of Knowledge Production and the Teaching of Literatures in Canada, by Paul Martin. Edmonton: U of Alberta Press, 2013. 310 pp. $49.95.

“Sanctioned Ignorance” is an aggressive title, taken from Gayatri Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. However, the ignorance referred to is not necessarily a deliberate one, although I suppose often consciously – and conveniently – acquiesced to. It’s an institutionally encouraged ignorance, here in Paul Martin’s view encouraged by the institution of anglophone-Canadian literature studies – a conveniently sanctioned ignorance of, among other things, the early history of Canadian Literature studies, of the 25% of Canadian literature produced by francophone Canadians, and of the tokenism of the representation of anglophone-Canadian literature in Canadian English department curricula – usually less than 10% of the total course offerings. Overall this ignorance is a comfortable habitus:  Martin draws substantially here on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to theorize and describe its effects on teaching, research, and conceptions of canonicity.

Martin is a former director of the Canadian Studies Program at the University of Vermont and currently Faculty Development Coordinator at MacEwan University in Edmonton. His book is the culmination of a 20-year research project that began -- in my 1993 graduate course at Western Ontario -- with an investigation of the CanLit course descriptions of most anglophone-Canadian universities, resumed in 1997-98 with a more thorough collection course descriptions and a 6-week interview tour of anglophone and francophone professors in the field, and continued with an online investigation of relevant course descriptions for 2007-08. From this data he has created ranked lists of the 400 or so Canadian books that appear on CanLit course descriptions and made charts that show the percentages of Canadian Literature courses at 22 anglophone universities, percentages which in 2007 ranged from highs of more than 15% of the English department courses offered at the University of Victoria, Carleton, and Concordia to lows close to 5% at Simon Fraser, Calgary and Acadia. Evidently the presence of highly productive Canadianists at Simon Fraser or high-profile writers at Calgary has not readily translated into rich undergraduate CanLit offerings. Calgary ranks similarly in Martin’s 1997-98 findings.

Martin argues that the ways in which the various Canadian literatures have been configured in anglophone Canada reflect the kinds of Canada that the country’s anglophone elites have desired. In the 19th century the desire was for a British Canada in the which Canadian writers strove for but deferred to the greater “quality” of the British classics. In the late 20th century it was for an up-to-date Canada in which contemporary Canadian authors such as Davies, Atwood, Shields and Ondaatje competed successfully with American and British writers for international awards. This 

John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, by Peter Jaeger. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.  186 pp. $34.50 paper.

Peter Jaeger’s account in his new book, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, of Naropa Institute (now University) students in 1974 “throwing objects at the stage, playing the guitar, making bird whistles and screaming” (78) in protest of Cage’s performance from his book Empty Words, and of mainstream literary critics responding to Cage’s work with “ridicule” (149), recalled for me church, state and some Western conservative’s responses to Pussy Riot’s now celebrated/notorious performance at St. Basil’s. The power of avant-garde art is often as much in its disruption of its audience as in its disruption of artistic and social conventions, and in its unsettling ability to be resistant to interpretation while simultaneously offering unconceptualizable clarity of meaning. In both the Cage & Pussy Riot cases the artists also generated site-specific meanings. Enigmatic chanting by a poet with his back to his audience in a site of authoritative knowing. Uncoordinated dancing in a site and state of politically choreographed hierarchy. Fools in the seats of masters. Women seizing the altar of patriarchs -- including of course patriarch Putin. Moments of social anarchism in places – a cathedral, the Moscow Kremlin, the academy – of ceremonial enclosure.

Peter Jaeger’s John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics is itself  an especially rich performance because, in not insisting on interpreting or summarizing John Cage, Jaeger also creates resonances of meaning. In a Canadian context, this book by Montreal-born Jaeger, now a leading conceptual poet and head of Creative Writing at the UK’s Roehampton University, can be read as a sustained demolition of thematic criticism. Texts, like other art objects or performances, have meaning mostly if that meaning is respected as irreducible, is left immanent, is not summarized in symbolic language; as Charles Olson quoted the Taoist poet Lao Tzu, “that which exists through itself is what is called meaning” (Muthologos I, 64). It's a principle that Jaeger has invoked and tried to observe throughout.

Despite its very precise title, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics is an ambitious, wide-ranging book – an exercise in radical critical methodology, a denial of the Cartesian cogito, a critique of the lyric poem (especially the lyric as

Franz Karl Stanzel, now 90 years of age and since 1993 a professor emeritus in English Studies at the University of Graz in Austria, is best known for his pioneering book on narratology, A Theory of Narrative – published in German in 1979 and in English translation by Cambridge University Press in 1982. He has also had a long-lasting interest in the literatures of the two World Wars and in Canadian writing about the wars. He is author of the 1987 essay “Englische und deutsche Kriegsdichtung 1914-1918: Ein kompararistische Versuch,” co-editor of the 1993 essay collection Intimate enemies : English and German literary reactions to the Great War 1914-1918, and co-editor of the 1986 essay collection Encounters And Explorations : Canadian Writers And European Critics. This past September he published his autobiography, Verlust einer Jugend (Loss of a Youth), with the German publisher Königshausen & Neumann.

I first met Franz Stanzel at the 1988 Grainau Canadian Studies conference in Bavaria, held at a rustic lodge a few kilometers southwest of Garmisch Partenkirchen, site of the 1936 Winter Olympics, and a similar distance northeast of the Eibsee with its huge resort hotel which from 1940 to 1945 was requisitioned as a recreation centre by the Luftwaffe. Midway through the conference we took a long walk through snowy pine woods and I casually asked my genial companion how he had become interested in Canadian literature. He replied that it had been a complicated war-time accident, that he had been a prisoner of war in Quebec. He added that on Germany’s March 1938 invasion of Austria, when he was 14, his family had fled to Rumania, which a military coup however would soon make a German ally. Forced to join the German armed forces, he had enlisted in the navy in late 1940. His U-boat was sunk in the Mediterranean in 1942, he was rescued by the British and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Quebec. He was surprised to find the prisoners there encouraged to plant and maintain a vegetable garden. The food was better than his parents had been eating in wartime Europe. Kindly elderly women brought the younger prisoners like himself both cookies and books, including classic works of English literature. On