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It was [the Contact Poetry Reading Series] more than the magazines that had, I believe, the greatest impact on Canadian poets of the 1960s ... [I]t brought the world to us. When the fledgling Canada Council gave us money for the Series, we were able to bring some of the best poets in the world to Toronto ... these Black Mountain and City Lights people were avenues to the wider world of human intrigues. Toronto and Canada felt restrictive and parochial by contrast. When they started to come, our own poets started to change. It was like flowers germinating. (Souster 2002, 200)Poetry readings are a distinct and important part of the processes of publication, distribution, and reception of poetry in Canada. They are public utterances that occur in the presence of a reading public reconstituted as a listening public. Poetry readings, by their ephemeral nature, shift the terms of what can and should be studied as a literary "text," rendering it difficult but necessary to interrogate the roles such events play. The physical and symbolic conditions of public performance invest readings with particular significance in the development of Canadian literature in the middle decades of the twentieth century, yet such events remain widely understudied. The Contact Poetry Reading Series, organized and run primarily by poetpublisher Raymond Souster and poet Kenneth McRobbie from 1957 to 1962, was a landmark in Canada, establishing a successful model for future poetry reading series while engaging Canada's poets in new dialogues with international writing and publishing communities.1 Among the 44 poets hosted during the series' five-year run were many of the leading Canadian poets of the day; A.J.M. Smith, Margaret Avison, Leonard Cohen, Jay Macpherson, and Al Purdy all made at least one appearance. The series also featured writers from the vanguard of mid-century American poetics such as Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Frank O'Hara (see Appendix A for a full list of poets). Importantly, the Contact Poetry Reading Series was the first institution of its kind to receive funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, establishing a precedent that would shape the development of Canadian poetry in the twentieth century and the structures that supported, promoted, and distributed it. The Contact Poetry Reading Series marks the emergence of a fundamental form of modern literary expression in Canada. Studying the series broadens the history of literary publication and dissemination in this country, and restores an indispensable-yet-overlooked component of Raymond Souster's editorial legacy.The Contact readings, like much of Souster's editorial work, occurred at a nexus in Canadian poetry between the origins of Canadian literary modernism in the 1920s and the first appearances of influential poets and theorists of the coming postmodern turn in the 1970s. The series is a fundamental part of Souster's contribution to Canadian poetry at mid-century, and its implicit relationship to his more commonly studied editorial projects is made clear by his use of "Contact" for each of them. Contact Press (1952-67), Contact magazine (1952-54), and the Contact Poetry Reading Series (1957-62) collectively emphasize his concern with building and maintaining the community of Canada's poets. None the less, little has been written about the series. The few discussions that do exist tend to subordinate the Contact Poetry Reading Series within broader treatments of Souster's life and work.2 Existing criticism of Souster includes textual analysis (see Frank Davey's Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster [1980] and Stephen Cain's "Mapping Raymond Souster's Toronto" [2005]), bibliographic and archival research (see the bookseller catalogues of Nicky Drumbolis's Letters Bookshop [Drumbolis 1984], Bruce Whiteman's Collected Poems of Raymond Souster: Bibliography [1984], and Michael Gnarowski's Contact Press 19521967 [1971] and Contact 1952-1954 [1966]), as well as studies that document and analyze his work as an editor (see Ken Norris's The Little Magazine in Canada, 1925-1980 [1984] and Davey's Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster [1980]). …

First published in 1987, Paul Quarrington's novel King Leary was out of print until being selected as a contestant in, and ultimately the winner of, the 2008 edition of CBC Radio's Canada Reads competition. Since it is a novel about hockey, narrated from the perspective of Percival "King" Leary, a fictional ex-NHL (National Hockey League) star, it is easy to see the book's victory as yet another example of how the Canada Reads contest has tended to prioritize "titles [that] reinforce certain popular notions of Canadianness" (Moss 2004, 2). While the novel in some ways readily lends itself to being made to serve the nationalist agenda of Canada Reads, it is important not to underestimate the complexity of Quarrington's representation of hockey and its meanings in Canadian culture. The novel's new visibility in the field of Canadian literature has coincided with an increasing amount of critical attention being directed, in literary and cultural studies, not only to a previously ignored or maligned body of "Hockey Literature" (Dopp and Harrison 2009, 11), but also to the category of age as a previously "unspoken (and thus untheorized) form of 'difference'" (Goldman 2012, 1). Drawing upon these two bodies of work in order to trace the complexities implicit in the novel's deployment of "the unusual perspective" of the "aged ... hockey player," this essay explores the extent to which Quarrington's text is both critical of and invested in the version of masculinity habitually celebrated in hockey, and the central place accorded to the game in Canadian culture (Morrow 2002, 114).The novel follows Leary as he travels from his small-town nursing home to the city to drop the ceremonial puck as the guest of honour on "King Leary Night at the Toronto Gardens" (Quarrington [1987] 2007, 26). Alternating with this present-day plot is a chronologically ordered series of reminiscences in which he tells the story of his life from the time he was a boy in Ottawa skating on the frozen canal, to a stint as a juvenile delinquent at the Bowmanville Reformatory, to his career in the NHL as a player with the Ottawa Patriots and the New York Americans. When his playing career is ended by an injury, he joins the Toronto Maple Leaves (sic) as a coach, then as director of hockey operations, and, finally, as president. In the nursing home, Leary remains the "honorary president" of the franchise (17), occupying the kind of "prestigious but ... powerless" position that is a privileged variant of the downward career mobility experienced by many ex-professional players (Smith and Diamond 1976, 287). The difficulty involved in sustaining a position of prestige without the power to back it up is an experience that links "King Leary" to his Shakespearean namesake. Both Quarrington's novel and Shakespeare's play explore situations in which the problems often associated with adjusting to retirement are unusually vexed and aggravated. King Lear's troubles are traceable in part to his attempt to step down voluntarily from his position as head of a political system that does not really acknowledge his right to do so (Porter 1984, 60). By contrast, Leary's retirement is thrust upon him at 35 because his body can no longer withstand the rigours of professional hockey. His is the "minor tragedy" of the star athlete's truncated career trajectory (Blake 2010, 51), a life narrative that Ken Dryden describes as both accelerated and attenuated, "a quick climax in the first act, and a long denouement to the end" (2013, 69).1Further situating his novel in relation to canonical scripts of aging masculinity, Quarrington includes an epigraph from The Winter's Tale: "A sad tale's best for winter; I have one of sprites and goblins" (Quarrington [1987] 2007, n.p.). In addition to characterizing Leary as a man in the winter of his life, haunted by the ghosts of his past, the epigraph provides a context for reading the novel's critical exploration of the role of sport in conceptualizations of male development. …

Halfway through Suzette Mayr’s 2004 novel Venous Hum , a number of the central characters are revealed to be cannibalistic vampires, some of whom are reformed and loveable while others are violent and villainous. The novel is funny and satirical with connections to cult horror films and canonical Canadian literature. By reading Venous Hum in terms of magic realism and literary cannibalism, this essay focusses on the ways in which Mayr’s evocations of vampires and cannibals lead readers towards a politicized questioning of the relationship between perceived differences and official nation-state discourse. This essay thus examines the novel’s magic realist monster imagery in relation to racialization and the politics of interpellation, visibility, inclusion, and assimilation in multicultural Canada. Mayr makes ironic use of the colonial resonances of cannibalistic discourse in order to critique the relationship between the nation-state and its varied citizens, and between official multicultural policy and the lived experience of racialization. Abstract: Vers la moitie du roman de 2004 de Suzette Mayr intitule Venous Hum , plusieurs des personnages centraux sont devoiles comme des vampires cannibales, dont certains sont reformes et aimables tandis que d’autres sont violents et malefiques. Le roman est plein d’humour et de satire, et offre des liens avec divers films d’horreur cultes ainsi que les canons de la litterature canadienne. En examinant Venous Hum en termes de realisme magique et de cannibalisme litteraire, le present article met l’accent sur les facons dont les evocations de vampires et de cannibales de Mme Mayr orientent les lecteurs vers un questionnement politise du rapport entre les differences percues et le discours officiel de l’Etat-nation. Cet article examine donc l’imagerie realiste magique du monstre dans le roman en faisant un lien avec la racialisation et la politique de l’interpellation, de la visibilite, de l’inclusion et de l’assimilation dans un Canada multiculturel. Mme Mayr utilise avec ironie les resonnances coloniales du discours cannibalique afin de critiquer le rapport entre l’Etat-nation et ses divers citoyens, et entre la politique multiculturelle officielle et l’experience vecue de la racialisation.

This essay proposes a new critical approach to modern prairie fiction through a reading of Edward McCourt's self-contradictory criticism and novels. The author re-evaluates McCourt's literary significance and locates his book, The Canadian West in Fiction, at the beginning of a formative and enduring prairie-realist "school" of criticism with geographical, thematic, and regionalist emphases. This essay suggests that these same theses, ironically, are partly responsible for the neglect of McCourt's own significant fiction, which resists them. These established and influential theses have disconnected prairie writing from larger modern movements and its rarely acknowledged international, psychological, and experimental aspects. Le present article propose une nouvelle facon critique d'examiner la fiction moderne des prairies en lisant les romans et ouvrages critiques contradictoires de Edward McCourt. L'auteur re-evalue l'importance litteraire de McCourt et situe son livre - The Canadian West in Fiction - au tout debut d'une « ecole » critique formative et persistante de realisme des prairies en mettant l'accent sur ses aspects geographique, thematique et regionaliste. Cet article suggere que ces memes hypotheses sont, ironiquement, en partie responsables de la negligence de l'importante fiction de McCourt lui-meme, laquelle leur resiste. Ces theses acceptees, voire influentes, ont debranche la fiction des prairies, avec ses aspects internationaux, psychologiques et experimentaux rarement reconnus, de plus vastes mouvements modernes. Although Edward McCourt is almost unknown today, he was among the most prolific Canadian writers of the middle of the twentieth century, and his most significant work of literary criticism, The Canadian West in Fiction, belongs among the most influential books about Canadian literature. The Canadian West in Fiction - first published in 1949 and reissued in revised form in 1970 - established foundational and enduring conceptions of western Canadian writing, and its characterizations of early twentieth-century prairie fiction have been especially influential. It offers the first significant literary-historical survey of Canadian writing from west of Ontario and features in-depth treatment of major writers of the West (most of whom have since become canonical figures). It asks why western Canadian literary production and quality, in McCourt's estimation, have been substandard. Most significantly and influentially, McCourt roots his analyses and evaluative principles in three main suppositions that have been loudly echoed and proven remarkably persistent: writing from western Canada should be seen primarily through the lens of regionalism; it is firmly grounded in a particular and deterministic geographical space or place; and, accordingly, it is realistic, mimetic, and technically conventional. As McCourt writes on the first page of his preface, "It is the purpose of this book to examine some of the prose fiction written about the Canadian West by native Westerners and others, and to attempt an estimate of the extent to which it is an artistic re-creation of the prairie way of life" (1970, 5). Both editions of McCourt's book were greeted with laudatory reviews, and nearly all of the major critics to approach prairie writing implicitly or explicitly consider The Canadian West in Fiction a point of departure. The thematic bases for evaluation that McCourt employs in his book proved particularly useful to critics writing as Canadian cultural nationalism was peaking in the 1970s. Even today, the criticism and pedagogy that surround prairie fiction continue to be guided by thematic theses that can be easily traced back to McCourt's book. McCourt's influence is perhaps most tangible at the beginning of Laurence Ricou's Vertical Man / Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction (1973), probably the most read book on prairie writing: "Anyone who writes on the fiction of the Canadian West would do well to start with a tribute to the author of the only book-length study of the subject yet attempted" (1). …

This essay argues that As for Me and My House is very much in need of ecocritical approaches that resist the kinds of cultural marginalization that have long been a part of the Canadian experience. The essay offers a fresh approach to Ross’s extensively analyzed novel, beginning with comments about the under-representedness of Canadian regional literature in the burgeoning field of ecocriticism (a field itself robustly American) and then developing a case that the distinctively Canadian context and traditions to which this slightly queer novel responds require a criticism that both differs from the American nature-celebration mode often associated with ecocriticism and addresses the novel’s complex representations of social responses to sexuality and to the natural environment. Such an approach reveals that the unpredictability of the land on the one hand and the compulsions of Philip on the other share a kind of theoretical alliance; an ecocritical approach allows us to hear the silenced voices of the land and of Philip, while affirming the importance of continued readings of this very central morsel of Canadian literature.

Aritha van Herk's writing-fiction and non-fiction-constitutes one of the defining aspects of Canadian western letters of the last 20 years. Of the multiple Wests at work in her oeuvre, her playful reimaginings of the mythic West / American Wild West (e.g., the romancing of force and violence at the celebrated Calgary Stampede chuckwagon races or her "deconstruction" of the Marlboro Man) have, however, received scant attention from critics. This article will attempt to remedy this critical oversight by exploring the representation of this mythic West as it appears in four of her most recent performance pieces and short stories: "A Fondness for the Bay" (1998), "Washtub Westerns" (2004), "Shooting a Saskatoon (Whatever Happened to the Marlboro Man?)" (2005), and "Leading the Parade" (2006). The author's purpose here is thus to examine the intersection of gender and the West in these less-studied texts, but also to use them as an inspiration for "the poetics of the crossing"-that is, the development of a specifically North American approach to Canadian literature that posits the Canadian imaginary not in deference to but in relation to the American. Les romans et essais critiques de l'ecrivaine Aritha van Herk ont enormement marque la litterature canathenne de l'ouest des 20 dernieres annees. Or, de tous les differents espaces dans son oeuvre, son evocation ludique de l'Ouest mythique americain (p.ex. sa representation romantique de la force et de la violence des chuckwagon races lors du Stampede de Calgary et sa deconstruction de l'homme Marlboro) n'a suscite que tres peu d'interet de la part de la critique. Cet article va travailler a combler cette lacune en explorant la representation de l'Ouest mythique tel qu'il se manifeste dans quatre de ses textes courts recents : "A Fondness for the Bay" (1998), "Washtub Westerns" (2004), "Shooting a Saskatoon (Whatever Happened to the Marlboro Man?)" (2005), et "Leading the Parade" (2006). Le but de I'auteure ici est d'examiner la relation entre les questions du genre et de l'Ouest dans ces textes moins connus, mais egalement de les utiliser pour developper une "poetique de la traversee," c'esta-dire une approche specifiquement nord-americaine de la litterature canathenne qui encourage and facilite un cadre qui situe l'imaginaire canathen non pas par egard de l'imaginaire americain mais en rapport avec celui-ci. Part frontier, part prairie, part no man's land, part Klondike, the Canadian West, like its southern counterpart, is both geography and imagination, place and narrative, homestead and story. Western Canadian identity is "a puzzle in motion with new pieces added and old ones discarded, all without a sense of where the edges lie" (Felske and Rasporich 2004, 1). Basic terminology is fraught: what was "wilderness" or "frontier" to trappers, miners, and fortune-seekers was the "home" of a diversity of Aboriginal peoples. The perspective of First Nations and non Anglo-Saxon settler cultures has been strengthened in recent years by postmodern and postcolonial theorists who argue that all voices have equal weight and that those voices that claim centrality ahead of others, previously on the margins, need to be counterbalanced (2). This new theoretical context has informed the ongoing study of the complexities of western development (backed by the imperial designs of the Canadian heartland), settlement (by various waves of incomers), and displacement (of Native peoples and their cultural practices). Others have sought to rethink western cultural history from a continental rather than national perspective, highlighting how the western regions in both Canada and the United States were the result of nineteenth-century statemaking: eastern-controlled, resource-driven expansionist enterprises, translated into eastern desires and then projected onto western spaces (West 2004). Despite the plethora of western histories from each side of the border, comparative analysis of Canadian and American Wests as "interconnected, interdependent stories, histories and myths" remains, as Robert Thacker laments, "a nascent enterprise" (2006, 11). …

The term “Canadian literature” was popularized by early Canadian anthologists who viewed their collections as evidence of the country’s coming of age. These editors were driven by a mix of evangelical nationalism, political allegiance, literary alliances, and the desire to profit from shifting perceptions of the country and its literature as Canada moved towards the twentieth century. The representation of Canada that emerges in these formative collections is intimately linked to the conditions surrounding their production, which impacted the anthologies as much as the editor’s religious, political, or aesthetic values. These conditions influenced the representation of nation and affected the ways in which readers came to understand the meaning of “country” as a textually constructed ideal. This essay examines seven anthologies of English-Canadian literature published in the nineteenth century in an attempt to determine the kind of values they promoted, the tensions their editors faced, and the extent to which they established canonical norms that would be inherited by their twentieth-century successors.

During the mass Jewish immigration of Eastern-European Jews to Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish publications offered a primary forum for a group of local writers to negotiate with their new identities as Canadian Jews. Within this wider process, Montreal writers H.M. Caiserman and B.G. Sack authored studies of Canadian literature in the early 1920s centred on Mohawk-English writer E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). What these essays show is that, despite the long-standing association of Canada’s Jewish population with the country’s dominant English culture, their status as “other” impelled leading members of the local Yiddish cultural milieu to seek out literary models among other historically marginalized groups. For Caiserman and Sack, Johnson’s Native heritage offered a model for resistance to assimilation into Canada’s dominant culture. In contrast, the advent of literature responding to the Nazi Holocaust by A.M. Klein and Eli Mandel, Native peoples became a symbol of loss and vanished landscapes.

This essay traces the genealogy of the stereotype of the French Canadian found in two popular postwar Canadian history textbooks. French Canadians were portrayed as gregarious, easy-going, colourful, and fond of song and dance, but also unlettered, ignorant of the world outside Quebec, and content with their lot. These stereotypes are traced back to the work of earlier scholars on New France, notably Francis Parkman, and to primary sources. From the character traits mentioned in these sources, textbook writers selected those that allowed them to construct the French Canadian in the negative image of the contemporary English Canadian, thus detaching French Canadians from the main narrative of Canadian history.

From 1909 until his death in 1924, Peter McArthur became one of Canada's most popular writers by describing life on his Middlesex County farm in articles for the Toronto Globe and the Farmer's Advocate of London, Ontario. That he was able to appeal to both rural and urban readers is interesting in two respects: it suggests that the lines between the country and the city were considerably more amorphous than contemporary rhetoric has suggested, and it provides an example of anti-modernist writing that gave as much pleasure to the "folk" as it did to the urban middle-class. De 1909 jusqu'a sa mort en 1924, Peter McArthur devint l'un des ecrivains canadiens les plus populaires par les descriptions de sa vie passee a sa ferme du comte de Middlesex, parues dans des articles ecrits pour le Globe de Toronto et le Farmer's Advocate de London, en Ontario. Le fait qu'il ait pu plaire a la fois aux lecteurs ruraux et urbains est interessant et ce, pour deux raisons : ce phenomene suggere que les differences entre la ville et la campagne etaient beaucoup plus floues que la rhetorique contemporaine ne l'avait suppose et fournit egalement un exemple d'ecriture antimoderniste qui a procure autant de plaisir aux « paysans » qu'a la classe moyenne urbaine. Like two sides of the same coin, conceptions of "the city" and "the country" have travelled inseparably through western culture, from antiquity to the present day. From one perspective, cities have been seats of government, learning, civilization, and commerce standing in contrast to a backward and unwashed countryside. From another, the country has been the locus of healthy living and untutored virtue, and a food-producing bulwark of social and racial strength against urban centres of corruption, pollution, crime, and sexual deviance. In late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Ontario, this rural-urban dichotomy was particularly strong in the face of contemporary developments in the province. In the daily and farm press, in magazines and at pulpits, in Ottawa and at Queen's Park, people followed the decennial returns of the census and worried about rural depopulation and the province's urbanization. Many farmers' opposition to the conscription of their sons in the First World War prompted further debate, and the election of the United Farmers of Ontario to government in 1919, the first third-party victory in Canadian history, seemed the countryside's ardent response. Into the breach of a supposedly hardening rural-urban divide, however, we might place a discussion of the life and career of the Canadian writer Peter McArthur. He is now little known-rarely anthologized and no longer considered a part of the national literary canon. His Ontario farm house survives at Doon Heritage Crossroads in Kitchener as an example of a generic "pioneer building" rather than as an opportunity to introduce visitors to someone who was, in fact, one of the most successful and prolific authors of his time. From 1909 until his death in 1924, McArthur wrote more than 1,500 articles for the Toronto Globe and the London-based Fanner's Advocate. Many of these pieces, which combined a whimsical advocacy of rural life with realistic descriptions of activities on a farm, were collected and republished in five books. McArthur was known throughout Ontario and much of Canada, admired by figures ranging from the teetotalling E.G. Drury to the free-loving Bliss Carman, and honoured in 1923 with a volume in the Ryerson Press's Makers of Canadian Literature series. Eighty years after he first encountered it, John Kenneth Galbraith, who grew up on a farm in Elgin County not far from McArthur's, had "vivid memories of the McArthur poetry" and of his father cutting out McArthur's pieces to be "kept, read, and reread" (2000). What do we make of this literary phenomenon and its meaning for the ruralurban dichotomy of the author's times? Was Peter McArthur a rural or an urban writer? Did he effectively straddle both worlds and, if so, how did he do so? …

CBC Radio One's "Canada Reads," which aims to select a work of Canadian literature "that all of Canada should read together," was first broadcast as a network special in 2002. This essay undertakes an ideological analysis of the cultural work that "Canada Reads" performs, focussing on the first three series and drawing upon original interviews with the show's producers, listeners, and cultural workers. The authors conceptualize the show as both a mass reading event and a media spectacle that reinforces the "blockbuster culture" of contemporary Canadian literary publishing. They also contend that the model of nation "imagined" by the content of "Canada Reads" is problematically, if predictably, conservative (bilingual and uncritically multicultural); however, the authors position this ideological limitation against the potential for creative resistance produced by the show's multiple modes of delivery. L'emission de CBC Radio One intitulee Canada Reads qui choisit une oeuvre litteraire canadienne « que tout le Canada devrait lire ensemble » a ete diffusee pour la premiere fois lors d'un special du Reseau en 2002. Le present article effectue une analyse ideologique des oeuvres culturelles choisies pour l'emission en mettant l'accent sur les trois premieres series et en se servant d'entrevues originales avec les realisateurs de l'emission, les auditeurs et les agents culturels. Les auteures conceptualisent l'emission comme un evenement de lecture de masse et un spectacle mediatique renforcant la « culture de superproduction » de la publication litteraire canadienne contemporaine. Les auteures avancent que le modele de nation qui est « imagine » par le contenu de l'emission est problematiquement, mais de facon previsible, conservateur (bilingue et aisement multiculturel). Toutefois, les auteures placent cette limite ideologique dans le contexte d'une resistance creatrice possible causee par les divers modes de delivrance de l'emission. "CBC Radio is a great literary patron and sometimes has (quasi-) original ideas." (Richler 2002, RA4) "Ungrateful listeners have criticized the CBC's Canada Reads campaign.... Isn't it somewhat totalitarian to urge everyone in the country to read the same book, even if the book is as good as Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion?" (Gordon 2002, A18) "The jury's choice of an essentially unreadable novel arose partly from the ambiguity of the job. They were not to pick the best book, but the book Canada should read-an opening that gave free rein to CanCult's ingrained nannyism." (Bethune 2003, 52) "Like many One Book pseudo-communities, the CBC also provided the requisite illusion of public participation in the form of a people's ballot... a patronizing top-down process leads us to supposedly morally edifying books that are already quite popular." (Niedzviecki 2002, 16) What cultural work does CBC Radio One's "Canada Reads" perform-and for whom? Does it uphold the symbolic power of the CBC and reinforce its explicit ideological imperatives as a public broadcaster to educate, inform, and represent Canadians? Or, does "Canada Reads" represent a reimagining of CBC Radio's national community and the corporation's role within the field of Canadian culture? The responses quoted above represent the complex, and often conflicting, attitudes articulated by media commentators and arts critics writing for national print publications. These writers alternately question or reinforce the CBC's cultural authority as an arbiter of literary quality, as a promoter of Canadian literature, and as a nation-building institution. Their comments underline the corporation's ideological and structural position within the ruling relations of power' and trouble the CBC's relationship to its audience, in particular to readers of literary fiction. "Canada Reads" is an annual program that first aired in April 2002, and that aims to get Canadians across the country to read the same book: it has been described as an attempt to create a huge trans-Canadian book club. …

"Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word 'archive.'" So declared Jacques Derrida in his well-known address to the 1994 international conference on Memory: The Question of Archives. Fittingly, the conference took place in Sigmund Freud's last house in London, England, now the international centre of Freud studies and the repository-arkheion, the Greek word for domicile, address, and residence-of his archives. Derrida's lecture, "The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression," appeared the following year under the title Mal d'archive: Une impression freudienne (1995). Its English language translation, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996), has provided tremendous impetus to renewed, if not feverish, interest in archives, archival research, and archival theory, no less in Canada than throughout the world of scholarship. This collection of essays aims to contribute to the debates and discussions. Central to Derrida's discussion is the term archive itself, from the Greek arkhe-"the commencement and the commandment... there where things commence ... there where men and gods command" (Derrida 1996, 1). It is the place of inter section between commencement and commandment in archives that this collection proposes to explore. Notwithstanding Carolyn Steedman's contention that "nothing starts in the Archive, nothing ever at all" (2002, 45), archives mark the point where, among other commencements, scholars begin what can prove to be a lengthy, sometimes lifelong, attachment to the unpublished legacy of their research subject. The act of commandment is, at least in its earliest stage, the work of the archons, the archival professionals, the "guardians" under whose "house arrest" the archives "speak the law" (Derrida 1996,2). Our purpose here is to examine this "uncommon place, where law and singularity intersect in privilege" (3) from the points of view of its two most visible and most powerful inhabitants, the scholar and the archivist, and in particular, their shared enterprise as it relates to Canadian literature. There is a distinctly Canadian tradition of scholarly interest in the nature of communication, an area in which the archival record plays an essential part. Its most prominent trajectories have been traced by the work of Harold Innis, George Grant, and Marshall McLuhan. Innis, a historian and pioneering communications theorist, saw in Canada the representation of a balance between civilization and power. Grant, in contrast, found "a lack of morality and vision in this technological dynamo, which also incorporated technocratic bureaucracies," while McLuhan concerned himself with "the impact of technological media, which include the media of record, on the user" (Taylor 2003, 174).' Arthur Kroker, a more recent contributor to the discourse on communication technology, has described Canada's unique situation "midway between the future of the New World and the past of European culture" (1984, 7). He sees Canada "by virtue of historical circumstance and geographical accident to be forever marginal to the 'present mindedness' of American culture (a society which ... does not enjoy the recriminations of historical remembrance)" and as "incapable of being more than ambivalent on the cultural legacy of our European past" (8). We will be considering the archive here in the context both of cultural communication and of what Ursula Franklin has called "technology as practice" (1999, 2), involving "organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset" (3). This volume will also demonstrate that the ready availability of the more material elements of technology, particularly the Internet, has both illuminated and complicated the archival space for scholars and archivists alike. In a special issue of English Studies in Canada (ESC), "The Event of the Archive," (March 2004), co-editors Michael O'Driscoll and Edward Bishop commence with the necessary question: just what do we mean by the term "archive"? …