Glenn Deer

My dissertation examines how strategies of collaboration and collectivity are at work in the poetry of several poets who resided in Vancouver in the 1960s and 1970s: bill bissett, George Bowering, Martina Clinton, Frank Davey, and Maxine Gadd. It investigates works published in Tish and blewointment within a spirit of group work and sociability. I examine this “poetics of sociability” (Daniel Kane’s term), while acknowledging the fluidity of the term “collaboration,” which will give way to more contextual terms such as “collective” and “communal.” However, while these aspects of collectivity challenge the myth of the solitary author, and are in line with the communal ethos of the period, my study also investigates how these writers resisted or adapted these group models and asserted their own individual authorship. This dissertation is intended to serve as a broad survey of the early works of bissett, Bowering, Davey, but also as a recovery and inaugural scholarly engagement with the works of Clinton and Gadd. I employ the methodology of close reading texts by all these authors, expand upon it by interpreting documentaries of the period, and examine an audio recording of a poetry reading. The introduction surveys the theorization of collaboration in post-1945 North American poetry. My second chapter then introduces Tish and analyzes the responsive, collective nature of the work published in that magazine, with particular attention to a new collaborative form invented by Bowering and Davey, the “twin poem.” The raw materials of the poetry of these Tish poets is seen to emerge from a context of group work, or as Robert Duncan terms it, “works shared.” The third chapter introduces the journal blewointment, and looks closely at how its editors, bissett and Clinton, shared their domestic space and represented it in their works. The fourth chapter examines how George Bowering exploits the form of the anthology and risks the “anti-social” in his book Curious. And the fifth chapter looks at, and listens to, how Maxine Gadd uses the platform of the public poetry reading to circulate her unpublished work, and to express doubts about sociability and collectivity.

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My dissertation examines white masculine anxieties compelled by death and violence in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997). A close reading of the four novels in tandem reveals important dynamics of a subgenre of American masculinist fiction in a period of rapid technological change. The novels represent the travails of white male protagonists whose "occupational spheres," comprising jobs, domestic spaces and recreational pursuits, are meant to protect them from undesirable threats and the dread of death. I argue that these protagonists, who are immersed in their respective occupational spheres, do not comprehend the complex violence in which their occupations implicate them, nor do they appreciate the impossibility of insulating their “interior” simulated habitats from the supposedly toxic “outside” worlds that surround them. In the first chapter, I analyze Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which I claim inaugurates the subgenre of American fiction to which all four novels belong, and I conclude that the protagonist, Jack Gladney, is caught up in a cycle of "re-mediation." His efforts to remedy his ills are only remediated into a medial milieu that further undermines his agency. In the second chapter, I examine American Psycho and track Patrick Bateman’s occupational sphere, which manifests the classed, raced, and sexualized systemic violence of Wall Street finance. The third chapter on Fight Club explores the anonymous narrator’s violent occupation as an actuarial risk analyst for a major automotive manufacturer. The last chapter, on American Pastoral, analyzes the insidious violence of the protagonist Seymour Levov’s occupation as a glove-manufacturing entrepreneur and seeming-apogee of the Jewish American dream of white assimilation. This dissertation project is partly an intervention in DeLillo, Easton Ellis, Palahniuk, and Roth criticism, much of which is still atavistically stuck in a pre-digital moment. By and large, the existing criticism, I contend, does not pay enough attention to the densely-mediated environments inhabited by the novels’ protagonists. My engagement with these novels draws upon rhetorical analysis, genre theory, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, gender studies, and new media studies.

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Overview: This dissertation proposes that certain texts, positioned para-canonically at ambiguous thresholds of valuation, insistently infract on what Roland Barthes would term the “mythologies” of literary canons. While functioning as paracanonic, texts are anti-emblems of privileged aesthetic certainty, metonymic of the wide range of exclusions (literary and historical) that are the actual social cost of canonic value. Rooted in Dialogism (the Marxist “philosophy of language” of the Bakhtin circle) and materialist assumptions about literary value as a contingent social process and function, Paracanonic Activities draws extensively on findings in current linguistics research centred on of the production, reception and interpretation of speech. This area of empirical inquiry extends, substantiates, and often vindicates, concepts that remain notional in Dialogism; together they provide productive means (concepts and concrete findings) for a fresh investigation into the conditions of literary discourse and the social production of aesthetic value. Method, Outline and Primary Texts: Chapter One: Introduction revisits canon debates since the 1960s, to trace the contour of canon mythology. It then brings forward a pair of contrasting paracanonic case-histories – William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Aimé Césaire’s Soleil cou coupé – to inventory some of the necessary-but-insufficient conditions (including social-historical contexts and textual features) that contribute to a text’s positioning as paracanonic. Each substantive chapter applies a frame crucial to both Dialogism and the linguistics of interaction, in order to sift a wide range of intertextually related texts for discourse-effects that are signatures of paracanonic acti vity. Chapter Two, “Anti-languages,” is a dual-language paracanonic case-history of François Villon, traced through literary responses to his core work, and to the attributed poems composed in criminal argot – themselves paracanonic to Villon. Chapter Three, “Ambivalence and Reported Speech,” reads through Titus Andronicus, Ovid, Kathy Acker and Antonin Artaud. Chapter Four, “Unhappy Laughter,” reads through Petronius Arbiter’s Satyrica, C.R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, H.P. Lovecraft’s “In the Walls of Eryx” and Aimé Césaire’s verse-drama Et les chiens se taisaient. Contribution: Paracanonicity, as a value-function, has been attested in various terms before, yet remains otherwise undescribed in its specificity as an “indivisible remainder” of all processes of canon-formation.

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