Misao Dean
University of Victoria, English Literature, Faculty Member
- Research interests in Canadian fiction, wilderness travel writing, English-Canadian nationalism, feminist theory and settler-colonialist studies.edit
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Research Interests: Psychology and Femininity
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The topical essays, however, are generally exact and rewarding. In 'Conradian Narrative' Jakob Lothe deals efficiently with framing, the transposing of cause and effect, and the shadings of irony and' defamiliarization.'... more
The topical essays, however, are generally exact and rewarding. In 'Conradian Narrative' Jakob Lothe deals efficiently with framing, the transposing of cause and effect, and the shadings of irony and' defamiliarization.' Andrea White brings an admirable grounding in nineteenthcentury history to bear on the complexities of the imperial enterprise in Conrad's novels, particularly its deflation into the absurd. She concludes that 'while Conrad's fictions inevitably bear traces of pervasive contempo. rary attitudes towards empire, and reveal his own anxiety, they contribute in a crucial way to a revaluation of imperialism.' His contribution to modernism is eloquently described in Kermeth Graham's essay, the most critically vigorous in the collection. He pomts to the 'onmivorousness' of Conrad's irony, the ubiquity of his scepticismJ and in its 'epistemological ambiguity' positions 'Heart of Darkness' at the centre of one major current in modernism. Graham also sketches Conrad's ties with 'the nineteenthcentury realist tradition,' but his primary example, the secret agent VerIoc' s walk to the embassy, is far more emblematic of what none of these essayists recognize in Conrad's fiction, although they might have had they dealt seriously with Jameson's work: the preternatural element of postmodernism. To see Conrad as the first and only 'pre-past-modernist' would be 'too dark too dark altogether ... / (MARK LEVENE)
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... Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW Sara Jeannette Duncan Misao DeanDuncan always wrote from the per-spective of someone on the margin of power. ... In her novels, however, Duncan's personal point of view is... more
... Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW Sara Jeannette Duncan Misao DeanDuncan always wrote from the per-spective of someone on the margin of power. ... In her novels, however, Duncan's personal point of view is presented as if it were the social norm. ...
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The setting of Alissa York’s 2010 novel Fauna, in the Don Valley and its adjacent neighbourhoods of Leslieville and Riverdale, provides a context for the theme of the persistence of life in the midst of waste and destruction. The realist... more
The setting of Alissa York’s 2010 novel Fauna, in the Don Valley and its adjacent neighbourhoods of Leslieville and Riverdale, provides a context for the theme of the persistence of life in the midst of waste and destruction. The realist setting of Fauna demonstrates the way the novel values the local and its specific characteristics, and in doing so suggests the way it seeks to reconcile the opposition identified by Susie O’Brien between ecocritical and post-colonial perspectives in contemporary fiction. At once biocentric, multicultural, and urban, the Don Valley setting undermines the discourses of “‘natural’ belonging that are seen to smack dangerously of colonialist forms of essentialism” because its history as a reclaimed habitat (“naturalized” rather than restored) acknowledges that it is a constructed space rather than a natural wilderness. The novel’s shifting narrative perspective includes animal perspectives along with human and reinforces their interconnection, raising the dodgy question of animal subjectivity and entering into dialogue with the genre of the animal story. But rather than projecting human subjectivity onto animals, Fauna makes an ethical choice to recognize the bodily specificity and precarity that humans and animals share. The flourishing of animal and plant life in the “naturalized” Don Valley provides companionship and recognition for the human characters in the novel who frequent the valley in their struggle to overcome trauma, loss, and abuse.
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for by Moodie's persistent efforts to please her readers and thereby ensure a much-needed income. Her letters to Richard Bentley, her English publisher, her avid reading of contemporary periodicals and whatever new literature she... more
for by Moodie's persistent efforts to please her readers and thereby ensure a much-needed income. Her letters to Richard Bentley, her English publisher, her avid reading of contemporary periodicals and whatever new literature she could lay her hands on, as well as her inquiries of her editing and writing sisters in England, Eliza and Agnes Strickland, all attest to Susanna's anxiety to keep up with what the public wanted, to produce writing that was market-driven. Surely the inconsistencies of the protagonist of Roughing It in the Bush are a series of attempts to construct a heroine for all tastes, underlined as they usually are by humour and self-deprecation that suggest Moodie was very much in control of her intentions. In his concluding chapter, Thurston suggests that 'in the mid 185os she [essentially] ceased to write for publication' despite the evidence of her correspondence with Richard Bentley during the 186os and his publication of her last novel, The World before Them, in 1867. By the late 186os Moodie realized she could no longer sustain the strategy of agility in response to a fickle public from which she was becoming more and more isolated as she aged.ln October 186g her husband died. The closeness of their relationship is often underestimated. They had been introduced as fellow writers in 1830 in London, and John Moodie clearly supported Susanna's literary endeavours throughout his life. With his death, she lost the daily sustenance of his intellectual companionship and encouragement. She ceased writing for these reasons, rather than, as Thurston contends, a sense of the failure of her writing to reconstruct her own identity. (ELIZABI:.!H HOPKINS)
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It’s hard to get more Canadian than the canoe, eh? In these two new titles, Dean and Erickson critically examine the relationship between the canoe and the Canadian nation. The books’ simultaneous publication supports their authors’... more
It’s hard to get more Canadian than the canoe, eh? In these two new titles, Dean and Erickson critically examine the relationship between the canoe and the Canadian nation. The books’ simultaneous publication supports their authors’ common argument that the canoe has played a significant role in the narration of the nation as a just, multicultural-but-primarily-white, environmentally conscious place. Erased from this version of Canada is the violence of colonialism and its impact on First Nations that challenge dominant ideas about the nation and that might also, but generally do not, appear in stories about the canoe. Dean and Erickson agree that the canoe possesses no inherent relationship to Canada – and indeed that the concept of the nation is itself constantly in flux – and state that their interest in the history of the canoe has nothing to do with the canoe itself, but with what it has been made to mean over time. That said, both authors situate themselves in relation to the canoe and argue that their love of and connection to paddling must also be challenged in order to decolonize (in Dean) and queer (in Erickson) the canoe and the territory it has helped to naturalize as the nation. Dean’s title resonates with the central political question at the heart of both books: how do non-Aboriginal Canadians deal with our colonial inheritance, an inheritance that we have learned to take for granted not only through a convenient narrative embodied in the canoe, but also through the intimate action of paddling? The authors begin to answer this question by denaturalizing through critical analysis the
Research Interests: History and Nationalism
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Sara Jeannette Duncan’s international novels display her consistent concern with defining a unique Canadian nationality. For Duncan, that nationality is founded on the reconciliation of British tradition and American freedom which results... more
Sara Jeannette Duncan’s international novels display her consistent concern with defining a unique Canadian nationality. For Duncan, that nationality is founded on the reconciliation of British tradition and American freedom which results in an ideal of social freedom within traditional bounds. She begins the process of defining Canadians by defining typical Americans and Britons in An American Girl in London, A Voyage of Consolation, A Daughter of Today and Those Deligh1ful Americans; the typical characters in these novels are all crippled, in some way, by personality traits which arise from their nationality. In the later novels, notably Cousin Cinderella, Duncan creates an ideal of Canadian capable of judging Britain and the United States and bringing them into harmony.
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It’s hard to get more Canadian than the canoe, eh? In these two new titles, Dean and Erickson critically examine the relationship between the canoe and the Canadian nation. The books’ simultaneous publication supports their authors’... more
It’s hard to get more Canadian than the canoe, eh? In these two new titles, Dean and Erickson critically examine the relationship between the canoe and the Canadian nation. The books’ simultaneous publication supports their authors’ common argument that the canoe has played a significant role in the narration of the nation as a just, multicultural-but-primarily-white, environmentally conscious place. Erased from this version of Canada is the violence of colonialism and its impact on First Nations that challenge dominant ideas about the nation and that might also, but generally do not, appear in stories about the canoe. Dean and Erickson agree that the canoe possesses no inherent relationship to Canada – and indeed that the concept of the nation is itself constantly in flux – and state that their interest in the history of the canoe has nothing to do with the canoe itself, but with what it has been made to mean over time. That said, both authors situate themselves in relation to the canoe and argue that their love of and connection to paddling must also be challenged in order to decolonize (in Dean) and queer (in Erickson) the canoe and the territory it has helped to naturalize as the nation. Dean’s title resonates with the central political question at the heart of both books: how do non-Aboriginal Canadians deal with our colonial inheritance, an inheritance that we have learned to take for granted not only through a convenient narrative embodied in the canoe, but also through the intimate action of paddling? The authors begin to answer this question by denaturalizing through critical analysis the
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Theorists of the nation such as Renan, Bhabha and Grant have commented on the way that the narrative of nationality is founded upon the obligatory forgetting of an originary act of violence. Through the tropes of indigenzation and... more
Theorists of the nation such as Renan, Bhabha and Grant have commented on the way that the narrative of nationality is founded upon the obligatory forgetting of an originary act of violence. Through the tropes of indigenzation and inheritance, Canadian fiction “forgets” indigenous peoples and Aboriginal title. But the Delgamuukw decision reminds us that the claim to unified nationhood in Canada is fractured at its base, in the uncertainty of the nation’s legal claim to a relationship with the nation-space. This kind of fracture and uncertainty is the theme of Marjorie Pickthall’s story, “The Third Generation,” which appeared in her collection Angel’s Shoes (1923).
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The Centennial Voyageur Canoe Pageant was one of the most successful events of Canada’s Centennial year, garnering extensive radio, newspaper, and television coverage, and involving many small northern communities in centennial... more
The Centennial Voyageur Canoe Pageant was one of the most successful events of Canada’s Centennial year, garnering extensive radio, newspaper, and television coverage, and involving many small northern communities in centennial celebrations. Ten teams representing eight provinces and two territories took part in the race, which left Rocky Mountain House in Alberta on 24 May 1967 and arrived at the Expo site in Montreal on 4 September. Many of the participants were drawn from the ranks of the professional canoe racing circuit and focussed on winning the race; however, organizers and publicists represented the race as re-enacting a specific nationalist historiography that portrayed the voyageurs as “the founders of Canada” and legitimized Canada itself as a culturally and geographically unified nation.
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... James' heroine, Mary Garland, shares her first name with Duncan's narrator, Mary Trent. In both Roderick Hudson and Cousin Cinderella, the Mary characters stand in quiet opposition to the hero's romance with... more
... James' heroine, Mary Garland, shares her first name with Duncan's narrator, Mary Trent. In both Roderick Hudson and Cousin Cinderella, the Mary characters stand in quiet opposition to the hero's romance with Europe. The Mary characters are also linked in more subtle ways. ...
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Research Interests: Engineering and Ideology
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... PAGES (INTRO/BODY): 139 p. SUBJECT(S): Canadian fiction; Domestic fiction; Femininity in literature; Sex role in literature; Realism in literature; Women and literature; Women authors; History and criticism; History; Canada.... more
... PAGES (INTRO/BODY): 139 p. SUBJECT(S): Canadian fiction; Domestic fiction; Femininity in literature; Sex role in literature; Realism in literature; Women and literature; Women authors; History and criticism; History; Canada. DISCIPLINE: No discipline assigned. ...
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Theorists of the nation such as Renan, Bhabha and Grant have commented on the way that the narrative of nationality is founded upon the obligatory forgetting of an originary act of violence. Through the tropes of indigenzation and... more
Theorists of the nation such as Renan, Bhabha and Grant have commented on the way that the narrative of nationality is founded upon the obligatory forgetting of an originary act of violence. Through the tropes of indigenzation and inheritance, Canadian fiction “forgets” indigenous peoples and Aboriginal title. But the Delgamuukw decision reminds us that the claim to unified nationhood in Canada is fractured at its base, in the uncertainty of the nation’s legal claim to a relationship with the nation-space. This kind of fracture and uncertainty is the theme of Marjorie Pickthall’s story, “The Third Generation,” which appeared in her collection Angel’s Shoes (1923).
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<jats:p>Canadian novelist and civil servant Irene Baird is best known for her second novel, Waste Heritage (1939), which was based on firsthand research into the Vancouver "sit down strike" of the unemployed in 1938. Waste... more
<jats:p>Canadian novelist and civil servant Irene Baird is best known for her second novel, Waste Heritage (1939), which was based on firsthand research into the Vancouver "sit down strike" of the unemployed in 1938. Waste Heritage was remarkable in its time for its use of colloquial idioms, its realist representation of the lives of the unemployed, and its naturalist approach to sexuality and violence. Often cited as the best Canadian novel of the Depression era, Waste Heritage was nonetheless a financial failure for Baird, and she sought a more reliable source of income writing promotional material and lecturing for the National Film Board during World War II, spending the balance of her career as a civil servant based in Ottawa.</jats:p>
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Charles G.D. Roberts's animal stories are regularly discussed as an attempt to create a new kind of animal character, one that is not an anthropomorphic copy of human psychology nor a one-dimensional allegory, but instead a... more
Charles G.D. Roberts's animal stories are regularly discussed as an attempt to create a new kind of animal character, one that is not an anthropomorphic copy of human psychology nor a one-dimensional allegory, but instead a "real" animal based on accurate observation and up-to-date science. However, since no realism is transparent, Roberts's stories cannot be expected to neutrally reproduce reality, despite their modernist techniques. Indeed, what Roberts's "animal biographies" choose to signify as "real" -- human, masculine selfhood concerned with hierarchical power structure, as well as a unified autonomous human personality as universal phenomenon -- is as important as the ways in which these notions are signified. The stories function as ideology and do the work of politics; they occupy a place in the critical narrative of the development of realism in Canadian fiction by constructing the reader as subject, "naturally predatory,&quo...
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for by Moodie's persistent efforts to please her readers and thereby ensure a much-needed income. Her letters to Richard Bentley, her English publisher, her avid reading of contemporary periodicals and whatever new literature she... more
for by Moodie's persistent efforts to please her readers and thereby ensure a much-needed income. Her letters to Richard Bentley, her English publisher, her avid reading of contemporary periodicals and whatever new literature she could lay her hands on, as well as her inquiries of her editing and writing sisters in England, Eliza and Agnes Strickland, all attest to Susanna's anxiety to keep up with what the public wanted, to produce writing that was market-driven. Surely the inconsistencies of the protagonist of Roughing It in the Bush are a series of attempts to construct a heroine for all tastes, underlined as they usually are by humour and self-deprecation that suggest Moodie was very much in control of her intentions. In his concluding chapter, Thurston suggests that 'in the mid 185os she [essentially] ceased to write for publication' despite the evidence of her correspondence with Richard Bentley during the 186os and his publication of her last novel, The World ...
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While Nellie McClung is best known as an advocate for women's participation in public life, she gained much of her authority on the public stage from her popularity as a writer of sentimental "family fiction." Both her... more
While Nellie McClung is best known as an advocate for women's participation in public life, she gained much of her authority on the public stage from her popularity as a writer of sentimental "family fiction." Both her fiction and her autobiography adopt many of the conventions of the genre, but also challenge those conventions by emphasizing the violence of patriarchy and the resulting alienation of women from language and from concepts of unified selfhood. McClung's writings stretch the definitions of popular genres by stimulating the readers to question the conventions to which they adhere.
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The opening of the Robin Mathews Fonds at Library and Archives Canada in 2014 provides an opportunity to revisit Mathews’s role in the struggle to make Canadian literature a legitimate area of study in English departments. Mathews was... more
The opening of the Robin Mathews Fonds at Library and Archives Canada in 2014 provides an opportunity to revisit Mathews’s role in the struggle to make Canadian literature a legitimate area of study in English departments. Mathews was instrumental in the founding of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures; he advocated for more courses and graduate programs, as well as expanded scholarship in the field -- goals which he argued could not be reached unless more Canadians were hired in university English departments. Inspired by the anti-colonial nationalisms of the sixties and seventies, Mathews saw Canadian nationalism as anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, and he argued that Canadian literature, rightly read, offered the materials for a collectivist counter-narrative to neoliberal capitalism. His work argued for the centrality of authors like Irene Baird, Earle Birney, Milton Acorn, and Dorothy Livesay to what he called “the tradition” of Canadian writing. While he was...
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Roderick Haig-Brown was a “nature writer” whose books described the flora and fauna, both wild and domesticated, that surrounded him in his family home just outside Campbell River. Books like The Measure of the Year and Fisherman’s Spring... more
Roderick Haig-Brown was a “nature writer” whose books described the flora and fauna, both wild and domesticated, that surrounded him in his family home just outside Campbell River. Books like The Measure of the Year and Fisherman’s Spring were organized by the seasons and by the careful “naming” of each bird and plant as it came into seasonal prominence. “Naming,” a process George Whalley describes as “evocatively, rehearsing with liturgical care and reiteration those things felt, touched, with the sense, remembered,” (617) is a specifically modernist writing strategy that seeks to “call back into felt reality moments of heightened recognition and profound feeling” (617) evoked by objects, and represents Haig-Brown’s modernist attempt to present things concretely, in themselves. But the emotion these books evoke is not merely psychic; they circulate emotion as a social value to reinforce class distinction, express dissent from post-war consumer culture, evoke nostalgia for a lost pastoral ideal, and naturalize the narrative of the nuclear family.
