Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, Rutherford South, University of Alberta
October 16, 2014 to January 30, 2015
Monday – Friday 12:00p.m. – 4:30p.m.

Paul Hjartarson and Shirley Neuman

This exhibition celebrates the life and work of avant garde poet and playwright Wilfred Watson. Drawing on the rich collection of letters, notebooks, manuscripts and sketchbooks in the University of Alberta Archives’ Wilfred Watson Fonds, this exhibition traces Watson’s development from his early encounters with the work of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Emily Carr to his decades-long engagement with the writing of Gabriel Marcel, Wyndham Lewis, and Marshall McLuhan, and from his initial work on stage to his career-changing involvement in the Edmonton theatre community centred on Studio Theatre, Walterdale Theatre and the Yardbird Suite. The archives include a rich correspondence between Wilfred Watson and his wife, Sheila Watson, and many notebook entries describing the two writers’ lifelong dialogue.

DH Team: Harvey Quamen, Matt Bouchard
Developer: Lucio Gutierrez Gutierrez

Let Canadian modernist writer Sheila Watson guide you on walks through Paris of the mid1950s, her words and sketches bringing the past and the city to life.

WatsonWalk is a literary geolocation app developed by the Editing Modernism in Canada research group at the University of Alberta. The application uses journals, sketchbooks and manuscripts from Sheila Watson’s year in Paris with her husband, Wilfred, to explore the life and art of one of Canada’s most celebrated and beloved writers. Part study companion and part city guide, WatsonWalk is, above all, an invitation to wander the streets of Paris either in person or from the comfort of your own home.

Readers know Sheila Watson as the reclusive author of The Double Hook (1959). That groundbreaking novel inspired a new generation of writers and foreshadowed the flowering of contemporary Canadian literature. Using period photographs and documents, WatsonWalk takes you back to Paris in the fifties, to the Watsons’ apartment at 28 Rue Vignon, and to a formative period in her development as a writer. Here, for the first time, you can enter the mind and heart of the writer herself as she goes to mass at La Madeleine, attends the funeral of French painter Maurice Utrillo, views an exhibition of modernist painting, lingers over coffee at a sidewalk café or sketches life in the Paris streets. Although the app focuses on Sheila Watson’s journals and sketchbooks, it offers insights not only into the genesis of her most important work but into Paris itself as it transitions from postwar reconstruction to the cultural and political ferment of the sixties.

WatsonWalk is a free app for iOS and Android created by the EMiC UA team and our developer, Lucio Gutierrez Gutierrez. WatsonWalk runs in either online or offline modes (so international users don’t need an expensive data plan). The app enables users to navigate the streets of Paris using any one of three different maps, including one from the 1950s. One feature enables users to tweet directly from the app. New literary content for the app will be in continual development.

Maps courtesy of the University of Toronto, OpenStreetMaps and its contributors.

“Vast and Unwieldy Archives”: Middlebrow Magazines and Digital Remediation

Project Lead: Hannah McGregor

This project is an interdisciplinary and collaborative undertaking that bridges the areas of periodical studies, middlebrow studies, Canadian literature, and digital humanities. Through the lens of the simultaneous 1925 serialization of Martha Ostenso’s classic of Canadian prairie realism, Wild Geese, in Pictorial Review and Western Home Monthly, it examines the early twentieth century middlebrow magazine as a print culture form that challenges familiar narratives of authorship, nationality, genre, literary quality, and medium.

The recent revival of critical interest in Ostenso has read her as a fundamentally border-crossing figure best understood through liminal concepts such as hybridity and the middlebrow. Scholars have long known that Ostenso’s first novel, winner of a $13,500 award for the best North American first novel, was circulated in different middlebrow media by the award’s sponsors: serialized in the popular American women’s magazine Pictorial Review, published as a single volume by Dodd, Mead, and Company, and turned into a silent film by Famous Players-Lasky. EMiC UA’s research has revealed, however, that the novel was simultaneously serialized in Western Home Monthly, a Manitoba-based family magazine best known for contributing to the success of prairie writers like Laura Goodman Salverson. Western Home Monthly constitutes an under-studied chapter in the history of Canadian print culture, and the fact that Wild Geese—which has been continuously in print via the explicitly nationalist New Canadian Library since 1961—was originally serialized in two middlebrow magazines, one situating it as North American and the other as regionally Western Canadian, is relevant to both the study of Ostenso and the understanding of middlebrow magazine culture in general.

A more rigorous and holistic study of Western Home Monthly and Pictorial Review as the contexts for Wild Geese’s original publication will allow for historically and materially grounded articulations of the forms that Canadian middlebrow culture took as it shifted from an Imperialist to a North American print culture network. This project attempts to increase the possibility for such a situated analysis of the novel’s serialization by offering a new methodological approach to reading magazines. The rise of periodical studies over the past three decades has been marked by particular attention to methodological problems. Struggling to work with the volume of material contained in even a single issue, scholars have tended to study magazines by sampling—reading excerpts from one issue every year, for example—rather than systematic analysis. This project is based on the hypothesis that periodicals are ideally suited for remediation into relational databases, particularly because they already resemble databases, with their capacity to both store and connect enormous quantities of seemingly disparate information.

The question of how databases can aid in the digital remediation of archives is being undertaken at the EMiC UA collaboratory which, in partnership with the University of Alberta Library, has been exploring the use of databases to remediate physical archives, exploiting the database’s sustainability, flexibility, responsivity to multiple forms of queries, ability to handle a wide variety of media, and above all its capacity to operate at the level of relationships, reinforcing the interconnectedness of items within and across archives. Building on this work, “‘Vast and Unwieldy Archives’” will produce a relational database as a proof of concept, modelling the middlebrow magazine as an object of study. This prototype database stands to significantly advance the methodological possibilities of studying periodicals. To maximize the potential for impact and expansion, the project’s other deliverables will include articles aimed at different disciplinary journals in Canadian literature, periodical studies, and digital humanities. It will culminate in a workshop, hosted at the U of A, that will bring together scholars involved in magazine digitization initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Modernist Journals Project (http://modjourn.org/), the Middlebrow Network (http://www.middlebrow-network.com/), and The Blue Mountain Project (http://diglib.princeton.edu/bluemountain/home). Negotiations are underway to publish expanded versions of the papers presented at this workshop as a special issue of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies (http://diglib.princeton.edu/bluemountain/home), co-edited by Faye Hammill, Paul Hjartarson, and myself. This project will also involve, as additional forms of resource-building, the pursuit of Ostenso’s currently unarchived papers and the digitization of Western Home Monthly. Both of these initiatives involve the support and collaboration of the University of Alberta Library.

Editor: Andrea Hasenbank

This project, Between Poetics and Polemics: Canadian Manifestos 1910-1960, collects a body of Canadian manifestos in a critical print edition, setting political manifestos against literary and artistic declarations to explore the impact of this wide-raging form of writing on Canadian thought and culture. In this juxtaposition, I am interested in portraying an incendiary side of Canadian culture and history that is often overlooked; an aim that I hope will be bolstered by the inclusion of unknown and out-of-print material. I am further interested in exploring the intertextuality of work hitherto defined categorically as ‘political’ or ‘literary/artistic’ to expose the common institutions, authorship, movements, and ideologies of Canadian manifesto production. My engagement with the texts in this collection has made clear that the social practice of political speech and the creative practice of literary writing fuse in the manifesto; it is in this form that the revolutionary character of modernism and the revolutionary potential of labour in its creative and productive forms find material fixity and enter into the same moment of an open-ended present.

Taking modernism as a relational process, following such critics as Raymond Williams, rather than a static school, the manifesto is an emblem for a succession of possible “alternative traditions” [Williams, Raymond. “When Was Modernism?” New Left Review 175 (May/June 1989): 48-52. Print.]. I read in the manifesto a cacophony of influences: pamphleteering traditions, religious ‘pulpit’ speech, legal strictures, public debate and oratory, newspaper journalism, artistic collectives, narrative fables, poetic defense, and classical economics. Here we might draw a connection between modernist play with convention in language and a politically revolutionary stance: both are indicative of shifts in the social process and the instability of convention. These voices cannot be narrowly confined to one sphere of textual production or another; they exceed absorption by the dominant culture and offer continued generative potential for the work of modernism.

The project is structured as an annotated sourcebook, with a critical essay addressing issues of genre, formation, and language. The texts will be arranged chronologically, with a brief introduction to each manifesto, followed by the manifesto itself, fully annotated. Part of the work of this project is to collapse the distinction between ‘political’ and ‘artistic’; accordingly, the selected manifestos will not be subdivided. I have identified some 25 potential texts for inclusion (detailed in the List of manifestos following). These manifestos range from widely printed and circulated historical documents (the CCF’s “Regina Manifesto,” 1933) to newly discovered archival material (Wilfred Watson, “A Manifesto for Canadian Drama,” 1960). In this collection, I am interested in working toward a reconstructive editorial method, based primarily around questions of print, representation, and labour. I am committed to bringing the manifestos in this collection to as wide an audience as possible. This access depends on a flexible critical apparatus, a strong sense of context, and the application of the most forward-looking methods for working with the text.

See detailed list of manifestos

Our pilot project with the John M. Kelly Library at St. Michael’s College is an edition of the letters Sheila and Wilfred Watson wrote one another between 1956 and 1961; at that time, she was a graduate student in Toronto studying for her doctorate under the supervision of Marshall McLuhan while Wilfred, a recently appointed professor of English at the University of Alberta, was in Edmonton seeking to build on his reputation as an internationally recognized poet and to establish himself as an avant garde playwright. Paul Hjartarson and Shirley Neuman are co-editing the letters. The letters will be published in print and digitally.

Editing the Wilfred Watson Archive is the core project for the EMiC UA team. We are currently in the process of scanning Wilfred Watson’s archival papers, which we will upload to the internet along with transcriptions.  Interface design and development are taking place alongside the scanning. Our work is funded by SSHRCC as well as by a Killam Cornerstone Grant from the University of Alberta; it is made possible through our partnership with the University of Alberta Library. Our lead project in this initiative is an edition of Wilfred Watson’s play, Cockcrow and the Gulls, produced by the University of Alberta’s Studio Theatre in March 1962. Gordon Peacock directed the play; Norman Yates served as set designer. Watson began work on Cockcrow as early as 1949 and was awarded a Canadian Government Overseas Fellowship with which he funded a year-long trip to Paris in 1955-56 to work on the play within an environment steeped in avant-garde and absurdist theatrical production and theorization.

Project leader: Paul Hjartarson