CanLit Across Media

Book excerpt: The materials we turn to for the construction of our literary pasts - the texts, performances, and discussions selected for storage and cataloguing in archives - shape what we know and teach about literature today. The ways in which archival materials have been structured into forms of preservation, in turn, impact their transference and transformation into new forms of presentation and re-presentation. Exploring the production of culture through and outside of the archives that preserve and produce CanLit as an entity, CanLit Across Media asserts that CanLit arises from acts of archival, critical, and creative analysis. Each chapter investigates, challenges, and provokes this premise by examining methods of "unarchiving" Canadian and Indigenous literary texts and events from the 1950s to the present. Engaging with a remediated archive, or "unarchiving," allows the authors and editors to uncover how the materials that document past acts of literary production are transformed into new forms and experiences in the present. The chapters consider literature and literary events that occurred before live audiences or were broadcast, and that are now recorded in print publications and documents, drawings, photographs, flat disc records, magnetic tape, film, videotape, and digitized files. Showcasing the range of methods and theories researchers use to engage with these materials, CanLit Across Media reanimates archives of cultural meaning and literary performance. Contributors include Jordan Abel (University of Alberta), Andrea Beverley (Mount Allison University), Clint Burnham (Simon Fraser University), Jason Camlot (Concordia University), Joel Deshaye (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Deanna Fong (Simon Fraser University), Catherine Hobbs (Library and Archives Canada), Dean Irvine (Agile Humanities), Karl Jirgens (University of Windsor), Marcelle Kosman (University of Alberta), Jessi MacEachern (Concordia University), Katherine McLeod (Concordia University), Linda Morra (Bishop's University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia, Okanagan), Felicity Tayler (University of Ottawa), and Darren Wershler (Concordia University).