The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Canada Reads program, based on the popular television show Survivor, welcomes five Canadian personalities to defend one Canadian book, per year, that they believe all Canadians should read. The program signifies a common discourse in Canada as a nation-state regarding its own lack of coherent and fixed identity, and can be understood as a nationalist project. I am working with Canada Reads as an existing archive, utilizing materials as both individual and interconnected entities in a larger and ongoing process of cultural production – and it is important to note that it is impossible to separate cultural production from cultural consumption. Each year offers a different set of insights that can be consumed in their own right, which is why this project is written in the present tense. Focusing on the first ten years of the Canada Reads competition, I argue that Canada Reads plays a specific and calculated role in the CBC’s goal of nation-building: one that obfuscates repressive national histories and legacies and instead promotes the transformative powers of literacy as that which can conquer historical and contemporary inequalities of all types. This research lays bare the imagined and idealized ‘communities’ of Canada Reads audiences that the CBC wishes to reflect in its programming, and complicates this construction as one that abdicates contemporary responsibilities of settlers. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-08-14 21:44:50.087

This thesis explores, through a neo-Marxist/cultural materialist lens, how discourses of class conflict in three pieces of contemporary Canadian fiction — Megan Gail Coles’ Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club (2019), Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie (2015), and André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs (2015) — are suppressed in broader public discussions of the texts, particularly on the CBC Radio program Canada Reads. Through close-reading the texts and their respective Canada Reads seasons for how class is operating “equiprimordially” (Ashley Bohrer) — an intersectional conceptualization of class that views class and its relations to other systems of oppression such as race, gender, sexuality, and settler-colonialism as co-constitutive, not separate — I argue that Canada Reads serves as a cultural arm of the neoliberal Canadian state’s project of erasing the political saliency of class conflict so that it may continue to reproduce its conditions of existence. To demonstrate this, I first outline the history of Canadian state cultural policy in relation to class, as well my theoretical framework. I then close read the thesis’s three pieces of fiction to determine how they mobilize class in relation to Canadian state narratives of class. Following this, I close read each book’s respective Canada Reads broadcast to see if class is taken up at all in the discussions. I then examine Canada Reads as a “mass reading event” (MRE) [Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo] and explore alternative modes of shared reading that escape the nationalist logic of Canada Reads and thus have potential for bringing class discourses forward. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates that Canada Reads as a model of shared reading is too deeply tied to the liberal humanist values of the Canadian state for any radical class discourse to emerge from it. Radical class discourses in literature that could spur collective, transformative action must come from elsewhere. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This thesis examines how messages of class conflict in three pieces of Canadian fiction — Megan Gail Coles’ Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club, Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie, and André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs — are suppressed in broader public discussions of each piece, particularly on the CBC Radio program Canada Reads. Reading both the books and the Canada Reads seasons each book appeared on through a neo-Marxist lens that places class in relation to other systems of oppression, such as gender, race, sexuality, and settler-colonialism, I argue that Canada Reads serves as a cultural arm of the neoliberal Canadian state’s project of erasing the political saliency of class conflict — something that it requires in order to reproduce itself. Based on this finding, I turn at the end to alternative models of shared reading that could serve as spaces that recognize class messages in literature.

This thesis is an exploration of liminal teen agency in Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals and Raziel Reid’s When Everything Feels Like the Movies. By focusing on two teen characters from working class families, one female, one queer, I investigate how teens assert their autonomy while still living under the constraints of classism and (hetero)sexism. While these teens are able to retain some form of autonomy, I argue that their agency is often obscured or overwritten by the disgust reactions of other characters in each novel. Drawing on affect theory, particularly Sara Ahmed’s body of work, Jonathan Dollimore, and Sianne Ngai, and drawing on Joan Sangster’s work on the construction of female delinquency, I investigate the significance of the disgust reaction, and how the reaction is a means of reasserting power over the willful, resistant teen body. As the Canada Reads competition reveals, the middle class, cis-hetero readerly discomfort with these novels becomes an avenue through which this literature is deemed “unpalatable,” providing a justification to doubt the testimony of narrators like Baby and Jude. This thesis is ultimately an intervention into doubted testimony, and demonstrates how affective disgust is the source of doubt. Since agency and testimony are tightly intertwined in each novel, doubting testimony becomes a violent form of denying these characters, and the authors, agency. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis looks at three seasons of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) radio show Canada Reads – 2014, 2015, and 2016. I examine how each year’s debates over reconciliation (2014), inclusive multiculturalism (2015), and Canada’s role as a global refuge (2016) commonly presume a national mythology that Indigenous peoples have either disappeared or become “Canadian.” I argue that despite the show’s desire to build a better society through encouraging Canadians to read Canadian books, the debates featured on Canada Reads reflect the way assumed Canadian control of Indigenous lands is embedded in the language of Canadian literature and culture to both limit the political disruptiveness of Indigenous presence and reproduce ongoing colonial domination. Central to my argument is the sad truth that, even as the show invites diverse critiques of Canadian society, it nonetheless favours stereotypical narratives of Canadian multiculturalism, benevolence, and civility, and by doing so buttresses Canada’s unchanged status as a settler colonial state. I track and evaluate ruptures in the show's civil language and decorum by reading moments of debate when the logical foundations of these stereotypical national narratives are challenged. Thus, this thesis examines not only what panelists say to each other, but also what their dialogue says to other Canadians. I argue that panelists’ critiques of the nation drawn from their readings of the books - readings that are not so much holistic interpretations of books but strategies for winning the Survivor-style game - are welcomed by the show’s annual social justice themes which then use them to purvey the nation’s virtuous liberalism. Ultimately, my analysis traces how the civil protocols of the program through these three seasons reproduce conflicts between Indigenous peoples and Canadians by reinforcing the inequity of the arrangements of the existing nation-state. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.