Search results for ""Author Linda M. Morra""

The image of the dusty, undisturbed archive has been swept away in response to growing interest across disciplines in the materials they house and the desire to find and make meaning through an engagement with those materials. Archival studies scholars and archivists are developing related theoretical frameworks and practices that recognize that the archives are anything but static. Archival deposits are proliferating, and the architects, practitioners, and scholars engaged with them are scarcely able to keep abreast of them. Archives, archival theory, and archival practice are on the move. But what of the archives that were once safely housed and have since been lost, or are under threat? What of the urgency that underscores the appeals made on behalf of these archives? As scholars in this volume argue, archives, their materialization, their preservation, and the research produced about them are moving in a different way: they are involved in an emotionally engaged and charged process, one that acts equally upon archival subjects and those engaged with them. So too do archives at once represent members of various communities and the fields of study drawn to them.Moving Archives grounds itself in the critical trajectory related to what Sara Ahmed calls affective economies to offer fresh insights about the process of archiving and approaching literary materials. These economies are not necessarily determined by ethical impulses, although many scholars have called out for such impulses to underwrite current archival practices; rather, they form the crucial affective contexts for the legitimization of archival caches in the present moment and for future use.

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The Black Death epidemic spawned Boccaccio's Decameron; the bubonic plague brought us A Journal of the Plague Year. Many other great literary works have centered around storytelling at the time of a pandemic. Of people quarantined in their homes in 1722, Daniel Defoe wrote: "It was generally in such houses that we heard the most dismal shrieks and outcries of the poor people, terrified and even frighted to death by the sight of the condition of their dearest relations, and by the terror of being imprisoned as they were."In March of 2020, a new virus in the shape of a crown forced Montrealers and people worldwide to be locked in their homes in fear of contagion. Social distancing, self-isolation, and quarantine became the new buzzwords dominating everyday vocabulary.In April, once this new reality set in, the Quebec Writers' Federation asked its members, "What’s the story of your day?” It initiated a project, Chronicling the Days, inviting writers to detail a typical day in their life. The aim was to provide writers with a forum to put their creative thoughts to paper to try to make sense of the surreal situation and find some connection with other writers. “Every story valid,” the guidelines stated. One hundred writers responded to the challenge.True to its slogan of “No Borders, No Limits,” Guernica Editions is collaborating with the Quebec Writers’ Federation to publish these essays in an anthology in the spring of 2021. These 100 essays are interspersed by six longer ones, also on the topic of the pandemic, but written for the QWF Writes series. Most submissions are by professional authors, members of the QWF; for some, however, this anthology represents their first time in print.Chronicling the Days—Dispatches from a Pandemic provides an intimate panorama of the early days and experiences of the coronavirus. Constituting a rich mosaic of different styles, forms, and voices, this anthology provides a moving account of the everyday life of Quebec writers in isolation, digging deeply into their souls and reaching out to others.

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On the Other Side(s) of 150 explores the different literary, historical and cultural legacies of Canada's sesquicentennial celebrations. It asks vital questions about the ways that histories and stories have been suppressed and invites consideration about what happens once a commemorative moment has passed.Like a Cubist painting, this modality offers a critical strategy by which also to approach the volume as dismantling, reassembling, and re-enacting existing commemorative tropes; as offering multiple, conditional, and contingent viewpoints that unfold over time; and as generating a broader (although far from being comprehensive) range of counter-memorial performances. The chapters in this volume are thus provisional, interconnected, and adaptive: they offer critical assemblages by which to approach commemorative narratives or showcase lacunae therein; by which to return to and intervene in ongoing readings of the past from the present moment; and by which not necessarily to resolve, but rather to understand the troubled and troubling narratives of the present moment. Contributors propose that these preoccupations are not a means of turning away from present concerns, but rather a means of grappling with how the past informs or is shaped to inform them; and how such concerns are defined by immediate social contexts and networks.

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Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland—one of Canada’s most beloved writers and one of Canada’s most significant publishers—enjoyed an unusual rapport. In this collection of annotated letters, readers gain rare insight into the private side of these literary icons. Their correspondence reveals a professional relationship that evolved into deep friendship over a period of enormous cultural change. Both were committed to the idea of Canadian writing; in a very real sense, their mutual and separate work helped bring “Canadian Literature” into being. With its insider’s view of the book business from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s, Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland, Letters presents a valuable piece of Canadian literary history curated and annotated by Davis and Morra. This is essential reading for all those interested in Canada’s literary culture.

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