After the Event: Commemoration and Literature in Canada

This dissertation advances a concept of commemorative literature in Canada. It argues that commemorative literature requires a method of scholarship that acknowledges the dynamic engagements between literature and collective memories through time. This critical approach involves detailed attention to the aesthetic strategies of commemorative literature in Canada, the contexts of its production and conditions of reception, and the distinctions between commemorative criticism and historical criticism. This project begins with an introductory chapter that provides a conceptual overview of commemorative literature in Canada by bringing together Maurice Halbwach’s formulation of the social frameworks of memory, Astrid Erll’s elaboration of literature as a medium of collective memory, and Michel Foucault’s concepts of events, discourse, and counter-memory to characterize and critique the peculiarities of commemorative literature and the dynamics of collective memory in Canada. Chapter Two provides histories of memory, or “mnemohistories,” of literary commemoration with attention to representations of the home front and battlefield experiences of the First World War in several landmark texts published at intervals after armistice; these narratives creatively and variously redeployed the tropes of war fiction in conversation with ever shifting frames of memory. Chapter Three interrogates an array of complexities—and compatibilities—that arise between protest literature of the Great Depression and collective memories of the depression era. Chapter Four examines the Expo 67 and the 1967 Centennial celebrations that exhibited literary texts as monuments to cultural progress and reveals that these texts both energized these commemorative events and undermined them with critiques of technological progress and Canadian idealism. Chapter Five compares deviating frames of memory in literary commemorations of the 1990 blockades at Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, otherwise known as the Oka Crisis. A brief conclusion synthesizes these findings and encourages further exploration of commemorative literature in Canada and elsewhere. This dissertation offers studies of both canonical texts and literary works that have received little critical attention despite their significance to the commemoratively important events examined here.

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