An Experimental Documentary: Making a Case for Baird’s Modernism

The refutation and the obliteration of the modernist era in Canadian literature by Robert Kroetsch and reasserted by Glen Wilmott makes it imperative to look at highly experimental literary works in the first half of the 20th century in Canada. The purpose of this paper, thus is to make a case for the inclusion Irene Bird’s Waste Heritage in the repertoire of modernist works in North America. The various criticism of Canadian literature as not having a modernist era needs to be debunked. The false assertion that Canadian literature moved straight from the Victorian era to a postmodernist face is probably due to the difficulty of defining what modernism is. The evolution and the expansion of the term modernism makes it imperative for one to reappraise the creative works of Irene Bird (Waste Heritage) and Sheila Watson (Double Hook) as modernist. An attempt to include Waste Heritage in the new modernist discourse of global literature by looking at the experimental way by which Baird used documentary modernism. The sustainability of a growing modern society vis-à-vis modernism, and the resistance of capitalism in Baird’s narrative would be used to make a case for Baird’s modernism.

Postmodernist and Literary Experiments

This chapter examines postmodernist and literary experiments in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific. It first considers Australia's brand of postmodernism, noting that it was much less a reaction to modernism than an effect of American influences that developed mid-century and a reflection on its late emergence from the colonial condition. It shows that Australian literature and its institutions since the 1930s had maintained a distant and uncomfortable relationship with literary modernism. Key writers discussed include Peter Carey, Gerald Murnane, and Elizabeth Jolley. The chapter goes on to discuss how Canada's scholars and writers, such as Robert Kroetsch, George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt have been interwoven in the genealogy of postmodern fiction in the Americas before concluding with an analysis of the postmodern novel in New Zealand and the South Pacific. Important writers here include Ian Wedde, Albert Wendt, and Sia Figiel.

O espaço liminar das listas em romances em inglês

A esperança, a imagem e a resposta utópicas discutidas por Terry Eagleton e Georg Lukács se tornam evidentes em The studhorse man de Robert Kroetsch, Waiting for the barbarians de J. M. Coetzee, The god of small things de Arundhati Roy e City of god de E. L. Doctorow na maneira que os conflitos são, se não resolvidos, pelo menos revestidos de uma aparência insólita nas coisas e objetos inventariados em listas. Proponho pensar como as listas nos referidos romances participam na ruptura da linguagem, no colapso da narrativa, no confronto de perspectivas, na fragilidade do valor e na vacuidade de sentido. Estes romances em inglês tendem a nos dar um tipo de atalho na percepção por meio do uso de listas, enumerações e inventários, os quais suspendem a linguagem, a narrativa, a subjetividade, o valor e o sentido, em sua confusa voracidade e infinidade.