For Group Projects

From SFU Can-Lit alumnus M.S., a possible avenue for your Group project:

CBC RADIO ONE and CBC RADIO 3 are once again pleased to invte your radio and journalism students to enter our Student Journalism Awards.

We are awarding prizes for the best radio documentary and inviting pitches for a radio programming idea suitable for broadcast on Radio 3.

The Mowatt Award for best radio documentary is named after Don Mowatt who is an award winning documentary maker and long time producer with the CBC program IDEAS.

The Alexis Mazurin Award is named for our late colleague who was a bright light at CBC and whose sudden and premature death in 2006 was mourned by many. We all hope that his unique and creative talent will live on through this award.

[At this link].... you will find the entry guidelines and forms for these awards. This year we are asking for the entry applications to be made online TO THE ATTENTION OF YVONNE GALL.

Please feel free to contact me, if you have any questions. Good luck to all your students!

Yvonne Gall.  yvonne.gall@cbc.ca

On Canadian Parliament Proroguement

Following the tertiary discussion in one of our seminar groups on Canada's parliamentray system (as a part of our unique national identity) and its element of proroguement, there is this data, which I did not previously know and parts of which I found somewhat surprising, from today's online Toronto Globe and Mail:

"The Prorogue Score

Compared to a few Liberal PM's, Stephen Harper is a proroguing amateur.

Chretien 4, Harper 2.

35th Parliament Chretien 1996/2/2
36th Parliament 1999/9/18
37th Parliament 2002/9/16,2003/11/12 ...

And if you really want a lopsided score how about this one:

Trudeau 11, Harper 2

26th Parliament Trudeau 1963/12/21,1965/4/3
27th Parliament Trudeau 1967/5/8
28th Parliament Trudeau 1969/10/22,1970/10/7,1972/2/16
29th Parliament Trudeau 1974/2/26
30th Parliament Trudeau 1976/10/12,1977/10/17,1978/10/10,1983/11/30

....why are these numbers not front and center in the multitude of MSM stories on the topic?...

In our 143 years of existence as Canada, Parliament has been prorogued 105 times...an average of about once every 1.4 years that this, very legal and constitutionally granted power, has been used."

The 105 number surprised me... and Mr. Trudeau's 11 time use.

Ethel Wilson's "Mrs Porter"and the "Bluestocking"

There is a thumbnail distinction made between "Blue Stockings" and the "New Woman" as a means of explaining Ethel Wilson's use of the former term to describe Mrs. Porter in the "Hated House, Detested Wife" chapter.

This is a good opportunity for me to map out a process of simple academic literary analysis.

An unfamiliar term is encountered in the text: in this case, "blue-stocking." First, look it up in the OED. Under the etymology we find:

....in its transferred sense it originated in connexion with re-unions held in London about 1750, at the houses of Mrs. Montague, Mrs. Vesey, and Mrs. Ord, who exerted themselves to substitute for the card-playing, which then formed the chief recreation at evening parties, more intellectual modes of spending the time, including conversation on literary subjects....

The general definition is "....one who frequented Mrs. Montague's ‘Blue Stocking’ assemblies; thence transferred sneeringly to any woman showing a taste for learning," but as the emboldened phrase in the etymology reveals, the sneering is aimed at intellectually-minded women.

The next step in the analysis is to see if the surrounding context of the phrase supports the definition. And indeed we see Mrs. Porter described as the highly-educated daughter of, and research assistant to, a Greek scholar; and the eventual founder and head of a School for Girls.

Now, further, and more pointedly, the term "blue-stocking" is applied to Mrs. Potter by Topaz Edgeworth's father immediately upon his reading of a letter informing him that Mrs. Potter has become separated from her husband. This, then, adds to understanding the suggestion of a specific mental logic to Mr. Edgeworth's use of the term: in the textual situation, the assumed ratio is that Mrs. Potter's cultivation of mind is at the expense of ability to enjoy the body

[By the bye, the same equation is drawn with the sexes reversed by another woman writer -- George Eliot -- in Middlemarch, where Dorothea leaves her scholarly husband Casaubon for carnal Will Ladislaw.]

And with this understanding gained, the chapter can be read at a greater depth, with Ethel Wilson drawing a portrait of an intellectual woman, who declares herself "strong enough" to flourish on her own without support from a man. Wilson, with her fine literary subtly, draws a potrait of Mrs. Potter that shows the strengths and failings of this assertive female separatist.

Finally, to fully understand the historical context -- to "historicise" in literary jargon -- we apply classical dialectic, and compare "blue stocking" to a term closely related enough for relevancy but different enough for illumination. And the term calling for attention is "New Woman": both applied to women activists at the Late-Victorian age in which Innocent Traveller is set.

The OED defines New Woman thus: "....a woman of ‘advanced’ views, advocating the independence of her sex and defying convention." The existence of the two terms for what we now call "feminists" implies need to define separate qualities, and, indeed, the anxieties (by no means always male) about proto-feminism among Late-Victorians needed wider scope than charging against the cold austerity alleged of blue-stockings (i.e. too little sexuality), and so found a threat of wild excess in new Women (i.e. too much sexuality.) An excellent place to see this debate as played out in the 1890s is in Appendix C, "Debate over the 'Woman Question'" in our Library's copy of George Gissing's The Odd Women, book edited by a scholarly acquaintance of mine, Dr. Arlene Young: pp 370-377, Eliza Lynn Linton "The Wild Women" versus Mona Caird "A Defense of the So-Called 'Wild Women'. (Nb. "odd women" refers to the numerical superiority of women to men: the 'odd-women-out' in the marriage pairings.)

These two terms, then, as lecture suggested, can be very roughly distinguished by a greater freedom of sexuality attributed to 'New Woman'; or, to put it the other way around, by the attribution of sexlessness attributed to 'blue-stocking.' This corresponds, again as a thumbnail measure, to a separation in the present day around the term "pro-sex feminism" -- of which, being a scholar of English, I know only that the debate around the term exists, and less than nothing about the human reality to which it refers.

So much, at this time, for "blue-stocking" in Innocent Traveller.

New SFU President & "The Innocent Traveller"

As you may have heard, SFU has announced that former NDP politician Andrew Petter is the incoming University President. We might all offer him our sincere best wishes for a successful premiership.

Please watch this short clip online at the SFUNews Channel in which "Incoming Simon Fraser University president Andrew Petter reflects on what makes SFU deserving of its title as Canadas top comprehensive university."

In it, play close attention to the way in which education is conceived vis-à-vis society. We will compare these on Friday in relation to the opening of Ethel Wilson's The Innocent Traveller.

Update: Broken link now fixed.

Relativity in "Innocent Traveller"

As we will discover, Ethel Wilson actually uses assumed chronology in Innocent Traveller as a device by which to represent in fiction the real effects that past and future have on present. The "Innumerable Laughter" chapter, for example, has Topaz Edgeworth's present experience of a sleep-out in the veranda materially transformed by one particular girlhood experience with her private teacher, Mrs. Porter. Or the following from "'By our First Strange and Fatal Interview'": "Mary was hardly prepared to see the future leap out into the open and transform her past into something which was not enough. But this was now achieved by the young man in black walking by her side."

The idea used by Ethel Wilson -- of Time as an efficient cause -- is not simply a fictional conceit. In contemporary Western society, Time is assumed thoughtlessly to be what a clock does: a rigid linear series of equal units. This was not the experience or understanding of time, certainly, in the pre-modern West, and likely not either in non-Western cultures.

Ethel Wilson is arguably first post-modern writer. Innocent Traveller certainly, as I read it, is in sympathy with Albert Einstein's relativity theory (again, insofaras this layman understands it.)

e = mc2 (energy equals mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light) is an equation that represents matter as being energy at a particular speed. For students of fiction this has as one important implication that the thoughts and actions of characters -- i.e. forms of energy -- have real and significant effects on the material world and on the movement of history, making the writing, reading and academic study of fictional representations of life a worthy enterprise.

Of interest to our understanding of Wilson's fiction is the fact that Einstein's equation also defines Time as being Matter and Energy in a certain relation. Reformulate e = mc2 as c = [root] e/m.

Reading this formula in a fictional way, then: if we read Wilson's novel as representing the human spirit as energy (Topaz a personification of energy) and the circumstances of the world (marriages, emigrations, etc.) as matter (using "matter" in the colloquial British sense) then the depictions of Time that Wilson has woven throughout her narrative are to be read by us as having the same reality as matter and energy do in our ordinary understanding

But to continue with the exercise, to help understand how the "c" - speed of light - in Einstein's relativity equation relates to Time, just look at it this way.

Think of distance ("D") as being a change in place ("ΔP"). And Speed in general is represented as velocity ("V"). And of course Time is "T". You'll remember from High-School that the formula for velocity is V = ΔP / T. (Recall that we're saying that "D" is the same as "ΔP"). If we recast this equation for Time "T", then T = ΔP / V
So, if our velocity "V" is a particular value - using Einstein's speed of light "c" - then c = ΔP / T and T = ΔP /c.
Now returning to fiction. This last formulation lets us read Innocent Traveller (the traveller is the one ΔP'ing!) as showing us that Topaz's travels - to Vancouver, then to ... where? - and her velocity (Wilson depicts Topaz as perpetual rapidity of speech) are a form of Time. Or in other words, Topaz did have an effect on Time-with-a-capital-T: or, in the word the text uses at important points, on Eternity.

This, then, is what Rose/Ethel sets out to achieve through her narrative fiction - an eternal life for her Aunt Topaz/Eliza.

Physics, Mathematics, &c. experts more than encouraged to correct the forumlæ.