This dissertation complicates conventional understandings of the emergence of modernism in Canadian cultural production, proposing instead a multiplicity of modernist practices that emerge through direct engagement with leftist politics. By examining various genres—poetry, fiction, theatre, and reportage—“Writing Left” uncovers a set of organizational principles that frame several modes of modernist production within the interwar period. Steeped in the work of recovery, this project examines critical narratives of modernism and analyzes theoretical approaches that inform a revitalized understanding of modernism in Canada. Furthermore, this dissertation offers a series of strategies for reading the ways in which Canadian modernism and political modernity are deeply intertwined. Following an introduction that situates the uneven development of Canadian modernism’s emergence in the larger field of transnational modernism, six theoretically linked case studies show the multiplicity of Canadian modernism’s emergence in relation to leftist political organization. While the first case study discusses the modernist experimentations that came out of the largely antimodernist coterie who produced The Song Fishermen’s Song Sheets (1928–1930), the second case study explores the particularly modernist tensions between representations of art and collective action in the strike novels of Douglas Durkin and Irene Baird. A re-reading of F.R. Scott’s early poetry in the third case study shows the coextensive emergence of a modernist poetics of institutional critique and the development of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, while the fourth case study examines the modernist theatricality of leftist responses to Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada. The fifth case study looks to the ways in which the Spanish Civil War prompted modernist developments in the journalism and reportage of Norman Bethune, Hazen Sise, Jean Watts, and Ted Allan. Finally, the sixth case study reads across Charles Yale Harrison’s alternative strategies of anti-war modernism, ending with his characterization of the North American leftist imaginary in his fourth novel, Meet Me on the Barricades (1938). Together, the six case studies question teleological accounts of the development of modernism in English Canadian Literature.

S’inscrivant dans le tournant éthique survenu il y a peu en théorie littéraire, cette étude analyse la relation entre éthique et poésie moderne, avançant que les implications éthiques de ces textes ne sont pas seulement enrichies par, mais aussiindissociables de l’emploi créatif et non-conventionnel de la langue rencontré dans ce courant. La majorité des articles consacrés à la critique éthique se concentrent sur la transmission explicite de valeurs morales par le biais de romansou de nouvelles – sans tenir compte de la complexité linguistique renfermée par l’énoncé lyrique – ou assimilent l’éthique de la littérature, de façon très généralisée, à des phénomènes purement esthétiques à l’instar de l’expérience textuelleémanant de l’altérité ou de l’indécidabilité – et contournent de ce fait les préoccupations éthiques concrètes de chacun des textes. Dans le but d’atteindre une compréhension plus nuancée de la relation entre éthique et poésie (moderne), je propose d’envisager la parole lyrique comme un lieu de révélation du monde ouvrant de nouvelles perspectives sur les questions éthiques qui restent voilées ou dissimulées dans le discours ordinaire. Cette idée a été développée par MartinHeidegger et Paul Ricoeur, qui, dans leurs écrits sur l’art et la littérature, se penchent sur la manière dont les textes poétiques rompent avec les contraintes du discours institutionnel et rendent au langage son pouvoir expressif originel. [etc.] / Situated in the context of the recent ethical turn in literary theory, this study examines the relationship between ethics and modernist poetry, arguing that the ethical implications of these texts are not only enriched by, but also inseparable from, the creative, unconventional use of language typical of this genre. The majority of studies in the field of ethical criticism either focus on the explicit transmission of moral values in novels and short stories, while ignoring the linguistic complexity at the heart of lyric utterance, or equate the ethics of literature, in a very generalized way, with purely aesthetic phenomena such asthe textual experience of alterity or undecidability, thereby bypassing the concrete ethical concerns of individual texts. In order to attain a more nuanced comprehension of the relationship between ethics and (modernist) poetry, I propose to view lyric language as a site of world-disclosure opening up new perspectives on ethical issues that remain veiled or hidden in ordinary speech. This idea has been elaborated by Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur, whose writings on art and literature engage with the ways in which poetic texts break the constraints of institutionalized discourse and return language to its original, expressive power. [etc.]