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Editing as Cultural Practice: Institutional Formations, Collaboration, and Literatures in Canada

An Editing Modernism in Canada and TransCanada Institute Workshop
Organized by Dean Irvine, Smaro Kamboureli, and Hannah McGregor
October 20-22, 2011
TransCanada Institute, The University of Guelph

For more information on the event, please visit Editing Modernism in Canada's website.

Description | Invited Participants | Event Program | Participant Bios

Event Description

From the compilation of ancient oral epics like the Homeric poems to the construction of the canonical Bible, from medieval monks’ copying of ancient manuscripts to scholarly editions of literary works, from present-day collaborative projects to digital editions, editing has been integral to the production, organization, and dissemination of knowledge in the arts and humanities. While there is no shortage of training manuals for magazine editing or the kind of editorial work that does not see the editor’s name on the cover of a book, the majority of studies examining editing tend to adopt what Jerome McGann calls “empiricist inclinations” (The Textual Condition [1991], 48). This is usually the case with discussions of editorial work that deal with the editing of an author’s oeuvre (e.g., Shakespeare) or programmatic guidelines about editing scholarly editions. While these studies are certainly important, they display an inclination to approach editing mostly as an instance of textual criticism or as a rhetorical practice. Thus, despite the fact that the presence of editing is visible everywhere in the institutions of literary studies in English, there have been some attempts to theorize scholarly editing—notably, McGann’s A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983), The Textual Condition (1991), and Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (2001); Peter Shillingsburg’s Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (1986; rev. 1996); Philip G. Cohen’s Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (1991); George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams’ Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (1993); Hans Walter Gabler’s Contemporary German Editorial Theory (1995); Christa Janson’s Problems of Editing (1999); Laura J. Murray and Keren Rice’s Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts (1999); John L. Bryant’s The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (2002); and Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth’s Electronic Textual Editing (2006)—but no attempt to undertake a systematic analysis of the procedures, methodologies, technologies, and theories that inform editing as a multidisciplinary practice.

Similarly, though the formation of Canadian literature as an institution is, to a large extent, the result of editorial work, there is a dearth of critical work on the theory and practice of editing in Canada. What little exists—Editing Canadian Texts (1975), edited by Francess G. Halpenny and Challenges, Projects, Texts: Canadian Editing (1993), edited by John Lennox and Janet Patterson—is limited to case studies of editing scholarly editions of individual authors. Whether employed by presses or periodicals to make decisions about the acquisition of texts, engaged in the collaborative processes of revising manuscripts, setting criteria for anthology selections, marking up electronic documents, organizing online multimedia repositories, or establishing principles for the presentation of texts in scholarly print and digital editions—Canadian literary and scholarly editors occupy a multiplicity of distinct, yet frequently overlapping, positions. In recognition of the irreducibly varied and complex roles that editors play in the production of literary and scholarly texts in Canada, this workshop will pursue research on the cultural, social, economic, canonical, pedagogical, materialist, and theoretical significance of editing as a creative and scholarly practice in the field of Canadian literary studies.

The Editing as Cultural Practice: Institutional Formations, Collaboration, and Literatures in Canada (ECP) workshop is thus designed to address this gap at the same time that it aspires to contribute to the theoretical discussions about editing that have been taking place outside the realm of Canadian literature. ECP’s purpose is to investigate three principal aspects of editing as scholarship and cultural creation. First, it will address the multilayered character and politics of cultural transmission that are specific to the editing of Canadian literatures; it will accomplish this by bringing together a wide range of participants who have played seminal roles as editors of different kinds of Canadian literature—from that of the nineteenth century to that of avant-garde authors, from canonized texts to anthologies of so-called minority writers and the oral literatures of the First Nations in Canada—and who will thus have the opportunity to address the cultural and publishing politics of editorial practices that seek to question inherited paradigms of literary and scholarly values. Second, it will theorize the editorial process, relying as much on specific cases of Canadian editorial productions as on theoretical considerations of editing in general; it will achieve this goal by interrogating such key issues of the editorial process as authorial intentionality, textual authority or “definitive” texts, the historical contingencies of textual production, circumstances of publication and reception, the pedagogical use of edited anthologies, the overall instrumentality of editorial projects in relation to canon formation and minoritized literatures, and the role of editors as interpreters, enablers, facilitators, and creators. Third, it will situate editing in the context of the growing number of collaborative projects in which Canadian scholars are engaged; this focus will thus bring into relief not only those aspects of editorial work that entail collaborating, as it were, with existing texts and documents but also collaboration as a scholarly practice that perforce involves (co-)editing.

This three-pronged structure of our workshop promises to make a major contribution to the Canadian field of editorial work, and beyond. The first workshop of its kind in Canada, and to our knowledge the first such collaborative endeavor to address the role of editing in the formation of a national literature, it will provide a timely forum for intensive discussions among a wide range of participants.

The ECP workshop is organized by two of the most prominent and internationally recognized collaborative research groups currently working on Canadian literatures: TransCanada Institute (TCI), founded and directed by Smaro Kamboureli through her Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature, and the Editing Modernism in Canada project (EMiC), directed by Dean Irvine and funded by a SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Cluster grant. Our plan to include participants who are scholars as well as literary authors responds to the historical and cultural contingences of the formation of Canadian literature as an institution, namely, that the Canadian writer as critic and as editor has been instrumental in the shaping of this national literature. We have been able to assemble a group whose varied experience represents an active contingent of established and emerging editorial practitioners working on Canadian literatures. Participants have been invited based on their expertise (published scholarship, editorial skills, collaborative experience); knowledge of relevant theory (book history, textual studies, canon formation, pedagogy, digital humanities); representation of multiple traditions and emergent practices (small and academic presses, journals, anthologies, book series, scholarly editions, digital media); and recognition of editors and publishers from minority groups. That three of the papers to be presented will be collaborations of editorial teams that have already produced major work in the field will further enhance our intention to investigate editing as collaboration. We have also included two doctoral students who have already developed substantial knowledge of editing and collaboration, and will have graduate students and postdoctoral fellows whose research interests include editing attend as observers. The academic editor of the press that will publish our collection will also be present.

This three-day workshop will represent the culmination of several months of advance communication among its participants. Beyond its research goals, ECP is also designed to offer substantial training, pedagogical, and collaborative opportunities as much to the graduate-student participants as to a small group of graduate students of the host institution and postdoctoral fellows whose research interests engage with editing.

Program

Thursday, October 20

Late afternoon/early evening: participants arrive in Guelph.

7:00 pm Roundtable: Editing as Cultural Practice
Faculty Club, University of Guelph
(5th Floor, University Centre Building)

Readings & Discussion Moderated by
Smaro Kamboureli (Guelph-TCI) and Dean Irvine (Dalhousie-EMiC)

Robert Bringhurst, George Elliott Clarke, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Frank Davey, Roy Miki, and Daniel David Moses.

Session to be recorded for dissemination as podcast on TCI and EMiC websites.

9:00 pm Reception

Friday, October 21
TransCanada Institute (TCI)
(9 University Ave. East, University of Guelph)

9:00-9:30 Opening remarks: Editing as Cultural Practice: Workshop’s Goals and Scope
Smaro Kamboureli and Dean Irvine

9:30-12:00 Session I: Editing as Recovery/Editing as Scholarship
Moderator: Dean Irvine (EMiC, Dalhousie)

Bart Vautour (Mount Allison): The Politics of Recovery and the Recovery of Politics: Editing Canadian Writing on the Spanish Civil War

George Elliott Clarke (Toronto): Toward Establishing an-or the-"Archive" of African-Canadian Literature

Zailig Pollock (Trent): Bad News and Good News: The Material and Cultural Transformation of Scholarly Editing in Canada

12:00-1:00 Lunch break (catered on the premises)
Discussion led by Lisa Quinn (Wilfrid Laurier UP)

1:00-3:00 Session II: Editing and Institutional Formations part 1
Moderator: Smaro Kamboureli (TCI, Guelph)

Robert Lecker (McGill): Keeping the Code: Narrative and Nation in Donna Bennett and Russell Brown’s An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English

Carole Gerson (SFU): Project Editing in Canada: Challenges and Compromises

3:00-3:30 Nutritional Break               

3:30-5:30 Session III: Editing and Institutional Formations part 2
Moderator: Dean Irvine (EMiC, Dalhousie)

Laura Moss (UBC) and Cynthia Sugars (Ottawa): Performing Editors: Juggling Pedagogies in the Production of a “Canadian” Literature

Kate Eichhorn (New School) and Heather Milne (Winnipeg): Labours of Love and Cutting Remarks: The Affective Economies of Editing

5:30-6:00 Free Time

6:00-9:00 Working Dinner (Takeout at TransCanada Institute)
Collaborative production of document on editorial principles and practices.

Saturday, October 22
TransCanada Institute (TCI)
(9 University Ave. East, University of Guelph)

9:30-12:00 Session IV: The Poetics and Politics of Editing
Moderator: Smaro Kamboureli (TCI, Guelph)

Terry Goldie (York) and Daniel David Moses (Queen's): Canon Fodder: Editing Native Literature in Canada

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Freelance Poet, Editor/Publisher, Kegedonce Press): W’daub Awae: Editing Indigenous Texts as an Indigenous Editor

Robert Bringhurst (Freelance editor/poet/translator): Air, Water, Land, Light, and
Language

12:00-1:00 Lunch Break (catered on the premises)

1:00-3:30 Session V: Editing as Digital Practice
Moderator: Dean Irvine (EMiC, Dalhousie)

Darren Wershler (Concordia): The Ethically Incomplete Editor: Coach House Books and Canadian Digital Cultural Policy

Hannah McGregor (Guelph): Martha Ostenso: Editing Without Author[ity]

Paul Hjartarson (Alberta): Paul Hjartarson, Harvey Quamen, and EMiC UA (Alberta): Editing the Letters of Wilfred and Sheila Watson, 1956-1961: Scholarly Edition as Digital Practice

3:30-4:00 Nutritional Break

4:00-6:30 Session VI: Editing as/and Cultural Theory
Moderator: Smaro Kamboureli (TCI, Guelph)

Irene Gammel (Ryerson) and Benjamin Lefebvre (Wilfrid Laurier): Editing in Canada: The Case of L.M. Montgomery

Frank Davey (Western): bpNichol editor

Christl Verduyn (Mount Allison): Literary and Editorial Theory and Ins and Outs in Editing Marian Engel

6:30-7:00 Free Time

7:00-10:00 Dinner and Discussion: Editing the Collection
At private room in local restaurant The Bollywood Bistro (51 Cork St. East)

Thursday, October 27, 2011
TransCanada Institute (TCI)
(9 University Ave. East, University of Guelph)

12:00-2:00 Post-Workshop Seminar for Postdoctoral Fellows and Students
Moderator: Smaro Kamboureli (TCI, Guelph)

One week following the workshop invited student and postdoctoral participants and observers will gather at TCI with the Institute’s director, Dr. Kamboureli, to discuss the outcomes of the workshop and to give students and postdoctoral fellows an opportunity to reflect on and share their experience. All participants will be encouraged to blog on the TCI and EMiC websites or elsewhere about their experience of the workshop.

Participant Bios

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is the Managing Editor of Kegedonce Press, one of only four established Indigenous publishers in Canada. Also a writer, creative writing instructor, and communications consultant on Indigenous issues, she has extensive experience working with Indigenous writers and organizations, as well as with Indigenous publishers internationally. She is the editor of Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica (2003), the co-editor of skins: Contemporary Indigenous Writing (2000), and the author of my heart is a stray bullet (1993/2002).

Robert Bringhurst is a world-known poet, translator, editor, and independent scholar. His translation and editing of the oral stories of the Haida gave rise to controversies, but also raised fundamental questions at the time of its release about the cultural politics of Indigenous narratives being edited by non-aboriginal people. He is the editor and translator of the three-volume Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers (1999-2001) and the author of The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada (2008). Bringhurst won the British Columbia Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2005.

George Elliott Clarke is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, and a renowned poet, playwright, and literary critic. He has edited two major anthologies in African-Canadian literature: Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing, published in two-volumes (1991-92), and Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature (1997). He also edited a special Africadian issue of The Dalhousie Review (1997, 1999) that blended interdisciplinary scholarly articles, book reviews, poetry, and short fiction. Finally, his major scholarly book, Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002), includes a history of this body of literature and a bibliography of primary materials that establishes the historical, national, and bilingual existence of writing by Canadians of African heritage.

Poet, editor, and critic, Frank Davey is Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. He is currently writing a biography of bpNichol under contract to ECW Press. His 1980 book on Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster addressed the editing practices of those modernist poets in projects such as Contact Press and Combustion and Delta magazines. He has published four articles on Nichol since 1986, as well as articles on the editing of Canadian poetry anthologies, collected in his books Reading Canadian Reading (1988) and Canadian Literary Power (1994). He also has extensive experience as a working editor: he served with Nichol on the Coach House Press editorial board from 1976-88, edited the New Canadian Criticism series for Talonbooks from 1983-2007, was a founding editor of the poetry newsletter Tish in 1961, and has edited and published the journal Open Letter since 1965.

Poet, book historian, and literary editor, Kate Eichhorn is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School University in New York. She has completed since 2007 three collaborative editorial projects related to innovative women's writing: Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (an anthology co-edited with Heather Milne and published by Coach House Books); a special issue of Open Letter on feminist poetics (co-edited with Barbara Godard); and Belladonna Elders Series, Vol. 6 (a book featuring interviews with and writing by M. NourbeSe Philip and Gail Scott for Belladonna Books, a US based avant-garde feminist press). She has also edited essay collections by Sina Queyras and George Bowering for BookThug Press. Forthcoming editorial projects include essay collections by Lisa Robertson and Gail Scott.

Irene Gammel is Professor of English, Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Modern Literature and Culture, and director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Institute at Ryerson University. She has edited eight books of essays and primary texts, four of them devoted to L.M. Montgomery studies. As a textual editor, she has contributed to the preservation of European and North-American modernist women's heritage by editing the unpublished or out-of-print works of Dada artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and New York poet and painter Florine Stettheimer. Most recently, Gammel has discussed the editorial politics of mainstream publishers' re-issuing of "restored" editions, such as the restored edition of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

Carole Gerson is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She has 30 years of editorial experience in three significant areas: she has prepared such foundational collections of Canadian literary texts as The Prose of Life: Sketches From Victorian Canada (1981) and Canadian Poetry: The Beginnings Through The First World War (1994); reissued literary texts that were out of print, including Roland Graeme: Knight, by Agnes Maule Machar (1996) and Marie Joussaye's Labor's Greeting (2003); and worked as a member in the bilingual editorial team of History of the Book in Canada/Histoire du livre et de l'imprimé au Canada (3 vols, 2004-07), for which she co-edited volume 3, which covers 1918-1980.

Terry Goldie is Professor of English at York University and the author of several books, including Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures (1989). As the non-aboriginal co-editor of the three editions of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, he has extensive experience in collaborating and co-editing with Aboriginal poet, playwright, and editor, Daniel David Moses (and Aboriginal poet and scholar Armand Ruffo, who has joined this editorial collective in the production of the fourth edition of this anthology), what has without doubt become the most important such anthology in the context of Canadian literature.

Paul Hjartarson is Professor of English in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the EMiC project leader at the University of Alberta, lead researcher on the Wilfred and Sheila Watson projects, and co-editor (with Shirley Neuman) of the print and digital editions of the Wilfred and Sheila Watson letters. He has been studying and presenting on what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin term "remediation" since 200, editing and publishing archival documents for over twenty-five years, and has been involved in collaborative editing and publishing for much of that time.

Robert Lecker is Professor of Canadian Literature and Greenshields Chair at McGill University. He is the editor of Open Country (2007), a large anthology of English-Canadian literature, and has recently completed a history of English-Canadian literary anthologies entitled Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation (forthcoming). He was the co-owner of a scholarly and commercial publishing company from 1977 to 2004 and the editor of the critical journal Essays on Canadian Writing during the same period.

Hannah McGregor is a SSHRC-funded PhD student in the University of Guelph’s School of English and Theatre Studies. She has been a doctoral fellow at TransCanada Institute since 2009 and a graduate fellow for Editing Modernism in Canada since 2008. Her dissertation research engages with the ethics of representation in the context of white Canadian women’s representations of “foreign” spaces. Via her work with EMiC she is also collaborating on ongoing editorial projects on Wilfred Watson and Martha Ostenso.

Award-winning poet, editor, and critic Roy Miki is Professor Emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University. For the past thirty years he has undertaken a range of editorial projects; he was the editor of West Coast Line from 1989-98, where he collaborated with guest editors to offer readers special issues on minority writers including Colour: An Issue (1994), co-edited with Fred Wah. He also edited Roy Kiyooka's collected poems, Pacific Windows, which received the poetry award from the Association for Asian American Studies.

Heather Milne is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg. Over the past two years, she has collaborated on two editorial projects, including Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (an anthology co-edited with Kate Eichhorn) and a special issue of Open Letter dedicated to the work of Lisa Robertson (co-edited with Angela Carr). She is the co-founder (with Roewan Crowe) of Hot House, a creative, activist duo committed to staging queer and feminist cultural and political interventions.

Daniel David Moses is Associate Professor of Drama at Queen’s University. He has worked as a dramaturge, editor, essayist, teacher, and artist-, playwright- or writer-in-residence with institutions as varied as Theatre Passe Muraille, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the University of British Columbia, the Sage Hill Writing Experience, Concordia University and, in 2006-2007, the National Arts Centre's English Theatre. He has served on the boards of the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts, Native Earth Performing Arts, and the Playwrights Union of Canada (now the Playwrights Guild of Canada) and co-founded, with Lenore Keeshig-Tobias and Tomson Highway, the Committee to Re-Establish the Trickster. One of the most important Aboriginal poets and playwrights in Canada, he has co-edited three editions of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English for Oxford University Press (1992, 1998, 2005), in collaboration with (non-Native) Terry Goldie.

Laura Moss is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, and director of the UBC International Canadian Studies Centre. She is the editor of five books, including Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The Poetry of F.R. Scott (forthcoming), the two-volume anthology Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2008-09), and Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature (2003), as well as the associate editor of the journal Canadian Literature.

Zailig Pollock is Professor of English at Trent University and the director of the MA program in Public Texts. He is one of the general editors of the Collected Works of P.K. Page and has played a similar role for the Collected Works of A.M. Klein. He has also edited a number of individual works by Page and Klein. He has taught TEMiC (Textual Editing and Modernism in Canada, a two-week intensive seminar on the theory and practice of scholarly editing, held annually at Trent University) and has written extensively on editorial and archival theory and practice.

Bart Vautour is a Killam Scholar at Dalhousie University, where he also holds a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. He is currently working on his dissertation, “Writing Left: The Emergence of Modernism in English Canadian Literature,” under the supervision of Dr. Dean Irvine. He is the editor of scholarly editions of Ted Allan’s Spanish Civil War novel, This Time a Better Earth (1939), and with Dean Irvine, Dorothy Livesay’s Right Hand Left Hand: A True Life of the Thirties (1977), both for the Canadian Literature Collection at the University of Ottawa Press.

Cynthia Sugars is Associate Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. As the co-editor of the two-volume historical anthology, Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2009), she has extensive experience in working editorially with historical as well as interdisciplinary material. She is also the editor of a number of collections of Canadian literary scholarship, including the compilation of important essays in the field, Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism (2004), as well as Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature (2004). In addition, she has published a textual edition of The Letters of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry (1992). She also serves on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals in Canada.

Christl Verduyn is Professor of English and Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University and Davidson Chair and Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies.
As the editor or co-editor of twenty volumes and/or special issues of journals, she has a wide range of editorial experience that includes the 1998 essay collection Literary Pluralities, Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries (2005), and her work as editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies.

Darren Wershler is a poet, non-fiction writer, critic, and editor. At Concordia University he is a member of TAG, the Technoculture, Art and Games Initiative, a cross-faculty interdisciplinary research team that explores the relationship between art and contemporary digital culture. He is also faculty at the CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program in Toronto and a contributing editor for Coach House Books. He has edited and designed about 35 full-length books of various sorts, and has two Alcuin Citations as recognition of the merits of his book design skills. With Mark Surman, he wrote the first Best Practices guide for Canadian online publishers, commissioned by Library and Archives Canada and published in 2001. He has worked professionally as a copy editor, substantive editor and freelance consultant for Canadian presses of all sizes, particularly on matters dealing with digital publishing. He is the author or co-author of 13 books, including his own apostrophe, the first book of poetry published in Canada under a Creative Commons license.

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