Canadian remembrance of the Great War (1914-1918) in the early twenty-first century is
often associated with grand gestures at national monuments like the opening of the new
Canadian War Museum in 2005 and the restoration of the Vimy Ridge Memorial in 2007.
However, these sites of memory, what Pierre Nora terms lieux de mémoire, are not part of the
everyday environments of memory, the milieux de mémoire, of most Canadians. In my
investigation of three contemporary works of Canadian literature: The Danger Tree by David
Macfarlane, Broken Ground by Jack Hodgins, and Unity (1918) by Kevin Kerr, locally-based
storytellers describe the continued influence of the Great War on their individual Canadian
communities. The fictionalized narrating personas in these three works create what I refer to as
bio-geographies: first-person accounts of the narrator’s particular social and memory
environments. While the bio-geographers in these three texts lack first-hand experience of the
Great War, their writing reflects the continued repercussions of the conflict in the weeks, years,
and decades after the 1918 armistice.
The Great War differentially affected thousands of communities in Canada and
Newfoundland. Constructing a coherent national narrative that accounts for the multiple lived
experiences of individuals in communities across North America is virtually impossible.
Turning to local representations of the Great War (in the case of the three bio-geographic texts:
depictions of communities in Newfoundland, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan) provides a
sense of the nation as a diverse landscape of memory with multiple vantage points. Negotiating
the complex terrain of self, place, and memory, the bio-geographers in the three works I examine
create representations of the past that reveal how sites of memory, lieux de mémoire, come to be
firmly embedded in the ongoing lived experiences of comunity members, the milieux de mémoire.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/2739 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Robertson, Megan Allison |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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