ALL THE FEELS / TOUS LES SENS Affect and Writing in Canada A LL T HE F EELS Marie Carrière, Ursula Mathis-Moser & Kit Dobson, Editors Affect et écriture au Canada TOUS LES SENS Affect and Writing in Canada Affect et écriture au Canada Marie Carrière, Ursula Mathis-Moser & Kit Dobson, Editors 3 Published by University of Alberta Press 1–16 Rutherford Library South 11204 89 Avenue nw Edmonton, Alberta, Canada t6g 2j4 uap.ualberta.ca Copyright © 2021 University of Alberta Press library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Title: All the feels : affect and writing in canada = Tous les sens : affect et écriture au Canada / Marie Carrière, Ursula Mathis-Moser, Kit Dobson, editors. Other titles: All the feels (2020) | Tous les sens | All the feels (2020) | All the feels (2020). French Names: Carrière, Marie J., 1971– editor. | Mathis-Moser, Ursula, editor. | Dobson, Kit, 1979– editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references. | Text in English and French. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200345435E | Canadiana (ebook) 20200347071E | isbn 9781772124873 (softcover) | isbn 9781772125221 ( epub ) | isbn 9781772125238 (Kindle) | isbn 9781772125245 ( pdf ) Subjects: lcsh : Affect (Psychology) in literature. | lcsh : Cognition in literature. | lcsh : Canadian literature—21st century—History and criticism. | lcsh : Canadian literature (French)—21st century—History and criticism. Classification: lcc ps 8101. a 38 a 45 2020 | ddc c 840.9/353—dc23 catalogage avant publication de bibliothèque et archives canada Titre: All the feels : affect and writing in Canada = Tous les sens : affect et écriture au Canada / Marie Carrière, Ursula Mathis-Moser, Kit Dobson, editors. Autres titres: All the feels (2020) | Tous les sens | All the feels (2020) | All the feels (2020). Français Noms: Carrière, Marie J., 1971– éditeur intellectuel. | Mathis-Moser, Ursula, éditeur intellectuel. | Dobson, Kit, 1979– éditeur intellectuel. Description: Comprend des références bibliographiques. | Texte en anglais et en français. Identifiants: Canadiana (livre imprimé) 20200345435F | Canadiana (livre numérique) 20200347071F | isbn 9781772124873 (couverture souple) | isbn 9781772125221 ( epub ) | isbn 9781772125238 (Kindle) | isbn 9781772125245 ( pdf ) Vedettes-matière: rvm : Affect (Psychologie) dans la littérature. | rvm : Cognition dans la littérature. | rvm : Littérature canadienne—21e siècle—Histoire et critique. | rvm : Littérature canadienne- française—21e siècle—Histoire et critique. Classification: lcc ps 8101. a 38 a 45 2020 | cdd c 840.9/353—dc23 First edition, first printing, 2020. First electronic edition, 2021. Copyediting by Kay Rollans and Sarah Bernier. Proofreading by Kay Rollans and Christine Carrier. Book design by Alan Brownoff. Cover image : Winnie Truong, Lean Back, 2016. Drawing and cut paper collage, 18 × 18 inches. Used by permission This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons licence, Attribution–Noncommercial–No Derivative Works 4.0 International: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for noncommercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons licence, please contact University of Alberta Press. University of Alberta Press supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. University of Alberta Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Alberta Press gratefully acknowledges and thanks the University of Alberta Libraries for its financial support of this book, which allows for the electronic edition to be available as an Open Access title. 6 7 Contents / Table des matières Acknowledgments / Remerciements ix Introduction xiii Writing Affect in Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois Literatures / Écrire l’affect dans les littératures canadiennes, autochtones et québécoises marie carrière, ursul a mathis-moser, kit dobson Traduction par dominique hétu et marie carrière I N EG AT I V E A F F EC TS / A F F EC TS N ÉGATIFS 1 | Theorizing the Apocalyptic Turn in the Literatures of Canada 3 Un/Veiling the Apocalyptic Direction in Affect Studies mat thew cormier 2 | Free Will, Moral Blindness, and Affective Resilience in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last 23 ana maría fraile-marcos 3 | From Disgust to Desire 41 A Poetics of Subterfuge eric schmaltz I I CA R E A N D A F F EC T / S O I N E T A F FECTS 4 | Apprendre à dire la fin 59 Care et poétique du deuil dans L’album multicolore de Louise Dupré et Nocturne de Helen Humphreys maïté snauwaert 5 | Grand-mère et petite-fille, « des doublons désaccordés » 81 Réflexions sur une éthique du care dans Mère-grand de Tassia Trifiatis ursul a mathis-moser 6 | Le corps en crise 101 Littérature et système de santé au Canada daniel l aforest I I I A F F EC TS O F M E M O RY / A F F EC TS DE L A MÉMOIRE 7 | The Circuitry of Grief 123 Queer Time, Killjoy Politics, and Mourning in Sina Queyras’s M × T heather milne 8 | Vétiver de Joël des Rosiers 141 Où les souffrances encore affleurent nicolet ta dolce 9 | Écrire la blessure, relire la vie 163 Louise Dupré, Marie-Célie Agnant et Denise Desautels carmen mata barreiro I V A F F EC TS O F R ES I STA N C E / A F F ECTS DE L A RÉSISTANCE 10 | Écriture autochtone au féminin 183 Savoir affectif et valeurs relationnelles dans Kuessipan de Naomi Fontaine jeanet te den toonder 11 | Respect or Empathy? 203 Affect/Emotion in Indigenous Stories margery fee 12 | Jewish Affect During the Second Intifada 225 Terror, Love, and Procreation in Ayelet Tsabari’s “Tikkun” aaron kreuter V W R I T I N G T H R O U G H A F F EC T / ÉC R IRE AU FIL DE L’AFFECT 13 | Émotion vraie, sensation de fiction 245 nicole brossard 14 | Maladies of the Soul 257 Field Notes on my Research Imagination smaro kamboureli 15 | Des fantômes dans les yeux 283 louise dupré Biographies 299 ix Acknowledgments / Remerciements our gratitude towards those who made this project possible is, of course, deeply felt. First and foremost, we thank the contrib- utors, who gave the questions of this volume their thoughtful and careful attention and did so through their respective languages, approaches, and styles. Working with each and every one of them was delightful and energizing. We thank the University of Alberta Press for their willingness to provide a home for this demanding bilingual collection. The peer reviewers thorough and respectful dialogue with the material left us all the more committed to its research objectives. The two copyeditors, Kay Rollans for the English texts and Sarah Bernier for the French texts, lent their keen, critical reading to this work to make it better and stronger. The book’s stunning cover is thanks to the brilliant work of Winnie Truong, the artful eye of Alan Brownoff, and the inspirational counsel of Jason Purcell. For their support, we have numerous insti- tutional thanks to extend: the Canadian Studies Centre ( csc ) at the University of Innsbruck; the Canadian Literature Centre ( clc ) at the University of Alberta as well as the Department of Modern Languages & Cultural Studies, the Faculty of Arts, and the Office of the Vice-President (Research and Innovation) there; the Faculty of Arts and the Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic at Mount Royal University; and the Banff Centre. Ursula Mathis- Moser wishes to thank her staff and colleagues at the csc . Kit Dobson would like to thank his colleagues in the Department of Acknowledgments / Remerciements x English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University. Marie Carrière extends her thanks to staff, students, volunteers, and colleagues of the clc . The three editors of this collection thank one another for the learning and, most of all, the friendship that have emerged from it. notre gratitude envers ceux et celles qui ont rendu ce projet possible se manifeste, évidemment, dans tous les sens. D’abord et avant tout, nous remercions les collaborateurs et collaboratrices qui ont réfléchi avec soin aux questions de ce volume, dans leurs langues et selon leurs approches et styles respectifs. Le travail avec chacun et chacune fut agréable et dynamique. Nous remercions les Presses de l’Université de l’Alberta de leur volonté d’accueillir cet ouvrage collectif bilingue et exigeant. Les évaluations externes ont entretenu un dialogue approfondi et respectueux avec le maté- riel et nous ont permis d’entretenir une pleine confiance quant aux objectifs scientifiques. Les deux réviseures, Kay Rollans pour les textes en anglais et Sarah Bernier pour les textes en français, ont apporté une lecture critique assidue pour améliorer et renforcer ce travail. Nous devons la couverture éblouissante du livre à l’œuvre remarquable de Winnie Truong, à l’œil expert d’Alan Brownoff ainsi qu’aux conseils inspirants de Jason Purcell. Plusieurs institu- tions nous ont fourni leur appui : le Centre d’études canadiennes ( céc ) de l’Université d’Innsbruck ; le Centre de littérature cana- dienne ( clc ) de l’Université de l’Alberta ainsi que son Département de langues modernes et d’études culturelles, sa Faculté des arts et son Bureau du vice-président (recherche et innovation) ; la Faculté des arts et le Bureau du recteur et vice-président académique de l’Université Mount Royal ; et le Banff Centre. Ursula Mathis- Moser souhaite remercier son personnel et ses collègues au céc Kit Dobson voudrait remercier ses collègues du Département d’an- glais, de langues et de cultures de l’Université Mount Royal. Marie Carrière tient à remercier le personnel, les étudiants et étudiantes, Acknowledgments / Remerciments xi les volontaires et les collègues du clc . Les trois responsables de ce recueil éprouvent une vive reconnaissance pour les apprentissages et, par-dessus tout, l’amitié qui en a découlé. xiii Introduction | MARIE CA R R I È R E , U R S U L A M AT H I S - M O S E R , K I T D O B S O N | | Traduction par D O M I N I Q U E H É T U et M A R I E CA R R I È R E | xv Writing Affect in Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois Literatures affect , we might say, is everywhere, and as far as practically all forms of academic research are concerned, affect has been around for a long time. Our starting point in this volume is an under- standing of affect as an assemblage of thought and emotion and, inevitably, as a theory of emotions as well. Particularly since the 1970s era of high theory in humanities research, a number of critics from disciplines ranging from economics (e.g., Jon Elster’s Sour Grapes ) to psychoanalysis (e.g., Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun ) to contemporary feminist philosophy (e.g., Sarah Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion ) have bridged the otherwise longstanding meta- physical division between thought and emotion, and by extension between mind and body. They have understood, as do we and the contributors to this collection, that emotion is both internal and external, both private and public; that it is intertwined, rather than in conflict, with the mind, the body, our actions, and our beliefs; that affects such as happiness, shame, optimism, and melancholia emanate both from within ourselves and from the social structures that organize us; and that affectivity is a source and an effect of our individual and collective thought processes and actions. The diversification of affect studies, in both its present and past incarnations, is not lost on us. As Marie Carrière, one of the editors of this volume, discusses in her book Cautiously Hopeful: Metafeminist Practices in Canada , little unanimity exists in terms of the definition of affect in humanities studies. Some, such as theorist Eve Kosofsky Introduction xvi Sedgwick or philosopher Brian Massumi, align their thought with the earlier psychological work of Sylvan Tomkins. These theorists understand affect and emotion (or what they term feeling ) as clearly different things. Massumi, for example, describes affect as “irre- ducibly bodily and autonomic” and thus indeterminate, while emotion is “the sociolinguistic fixing of a quality of experience which is from that point onward defined as personal” (28). Massumi’s new materialist insistence on “the autonomy of affect” (35), and thus his neat distinction between affect and emotion, is useful in that it recognizes the prelinguistic intensity of bodily forces and highlights the embodied materiality constituting subjec- tivity. From this line of thought, we retain the idea of affect as sensation that can be both physiological and psychological, and both internally and externally driven. We take heed, however, of feminist scholars who warn against reinvoking metaphysical oppo- sitions—that is, any “contentious...display [of] a sharp dualism between cognition and emotion, the mind and the body” (Fischer 818). Sharing the reluctance of theorists such as Ahmed, Teresa Brennan, and Ann Cvetkovitch to strike any clear differentiation between affect and emotion, we consider the idea of affect to be most potent for literature in its permeation of conceptual bound- aries. Affect, that is, bridges the gaps between the traditional oppositions of interiority and exteriority: of body and mind, the personal and the collective, nature and culture, and thus of affect and emotion themselves. Ahmed’s work in The Cultural Politics of Emotion also refuses to allow clear-cut delineations between affect and emotion to stand. Rather than relegate affect to an “inside out” model of individu- ality or an “outside in” focus on emotions simply as social forces exercised on the subject (4), Ahmed renders affect and emotion relational and interchangeable. In other words, she thinks of them both as being individual and collective aspects of subjectivity. Introduction xvii Emotions and affects, she says, “show us how all actions are reac- tions, in the sense that what we do is shaped by the contact we have with others” (4). Brennan similarly argues that there is no such thing as an “emotionally contained subject” (2). For Brennan, affects do not simply “arise within a particular person but also come from without...via an interaction with other people and an environment” (3). Feminism has for quite some time insisted on the the falsity of any dichotomy between reason and feeling, as have thinkers who have inherited or adopted antiracist, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and postmodern frameworks of analysis. Literature, for its part, has always been a student of emotions (Lombardo and Mulligan 485). Critics responding to the “affective turn” in the humanities are now catching up to, or at least remem- bering, that very fact. They are remembering, too, that human and nonhuman life is “un faisceau d’affects, de désirs, de croy- ances, de décisions, d’actions, infiniment plus varié que ce que la psychanalyse freudienne a su voir” [a collection of affects, desires, beliefs, decisions, and actions that are infinitely more varied than what Freudian psychoanalysis was able to anticipate] (Lombardo and Mulligan 485; our translation). In other words, the tenor, aims, and focuses of criticism change when we bring affective reading practices to literary analysis—something we have already seen in critical work that predates the contemporary focus of this collec- tion. For instance, in the scholarship pertaining to 1970s feminist writings in English Canada and Quebec as well as Quebec’s lyrical “intimate” poetry of the 1980s, the complexities of feeling and corporeality, and the relation between personhood and the collec- tive, bolster reflections about writing, representation, and agency (Dolce; Dupré; Knutson). Indigenous writing and research are also no strangers to considerations of affect, with Métis critic Natalie Clark’s rethinking of trauma theory, as well as Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million’s influential “felt theory.” 1 Recent criticism in Introduction xviii English Canada has also turned to affect studies in examinations of neoliberalism (Derksen), celebrity culture (York), and the ethics of care (De Falco). De Falco and York have examined affect itself in a collection of essays on the work of Alice Munro. The turn to affect—a term we prefer to Clough and Heally’s “affective turn”—is all the more crucial and productive in the context of events that, at the time of writing, have coloured the world of Canadian literature and cultural criticism. It would be difficult for us not to mention the events that have, in recent years, flared up in the field of Canadian literary studies such as, in the words of Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliot, the “dumpster fire” ignited by the #MeToo movement and its bringing-to-light of global systemic sexual violence and abuse of privilege. These events have included controversies around sexual harassment in some of Canada’s foremost creative writing programs, perhaps epitomized by the ubc Accountable letter. This letter, signed by a number of Canadian literati, was put forward in support of a critically acclaimed male peer and then-professor at the University of British Columbia, against whom female students had filed complaints of sexual harassment. There was also the ill-advised call by the former editor of the Writers’ Union of Canada’s Write Magazine for the creation of an “Appropriation Prize”—a call made in the preface to an issue devoted to Indigenous voices 2 —that has reopened decades-old debates about cultural appropriation as it affects bipoc (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) artists. We would be remiss not to point out the “ugly feelings” (Ngai) that have satu- rated the discourses around these events—feelings of anger and disappointment in literary beacons, Margaret Atwood and Joseph Boyden among them, who, at one time associated with aesthetics and politics of liberation, are now seen by some to be harmfully closing ranks to protect their own. Many have expressed their “ugly feelings” towards these events by calling out the bad behaviour they see in Canadian literature. Introduction xix For us, these ongoing debates highlight that anger does not necessarily block agency and the work toward change. Anger is not just an ugly feeling. For Ahmed, anger is a crucial source of knowledge and change-oriented energy. Through her reading of African-American poet Audre Lorde, Ahmed constructs anger as: a response to the injustice of racism; as a vision of the future; as a translation of pain into knowledge; as being loaded with information and energy. Crucially, anger is not simply defined in relationship to a past, but as opening up the future. In other words, being against something does not end with “that which one is against” (it does not become “stuck” on the object of either the emotion or the critique, though that object remains sticky and compelling). (“not the time”) “Being against something is also being for something,” Ahmed crucially reminds us (“not the time”)—just as the vital pushback against exclusive frameworks and institutional norms by commu- nities of minority and women writers, scholars, critics, readers, and their allies in turn demonstrates. 3 Million, for instance, reclaims anger as “felt theory,” a form of “emotional knowledge” that is crucial for a better understanding of early and recent Indigenous women’s personal and experiential narratives outside the confines of certain traditions of white academia that have dismissed these works as “too angry” for serious critical consideration (63). The very production of this collection of essays aligns, in turn, with the generative aspects of critical resistance, social justice work, and the ethical impulses of affective expression and poetics. The seeds of this publication were planted at a conference: Maladies of the Soul, Emotion, Affect , co-organized by the Canadian Studies Centre at the University of Innsbruck and the University of Alberta’s Canadian Literature Centre. While there had by that time been much hurt, much anger, and much frustration in many recent public conversations about the literatures in Canada—especially