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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/27004 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | McWhinney, Andrew |
| Contributors | York, Lorraine, English and Cultural Studies |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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