Travis V. Mason | Mount Allison University (original) (raw)
Papers by Travis V. Mason
University of Calgary Press eBooks, Nov 4, 2013
Commonwealth essays and studies, 2012
Review(s) of: Postcolonial ecocriticism: Literature, animals, environment, by Graham Huggan and H... more Review(s) of: Postcolonial ecocriticism: Literature, animals, environment, by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, London: Routledge, 2010. 250 p. ISBN (pb): 978-0-415-34458-6, 20.99 pounds; (eb): 978-0-203-49817-0.
In this dissertation I develop a vocabulary and a strategy for reading birds and ecology in Don M... more In this dissertation I develop a vocabulary and a strategy for reading birds and ecology in Don McKay's poetry. Stressing the importance of understanding such sciences as ornithology and ecology when adopting an interdisciplinary ecocriticism, I posit science textbooks, field guides, and extra-textual experience as valid intertextual referents. At base, my dissertation follows McKay's taxonomical and ecological specificity and argues that such accurate knowing, combined with an awareness of its epistemological limitations, invites readers to reconsider human-nonhuman relations. Individual birds populating McKay's poems exist both as birds that live independently of human language and as symbols of a human desire to name and know the world without possessing it. I begin by highlighting the need for sustained critical work on Don McKay, a poet whose work-long admired by awards juries and fellow poets-has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves. After outlining the risks involved for literary critics who linger in the ecotone between disciplines, I make an argument for taking seriously the "eco" in ecocriticism by linking the philosophical concerns of the historic science-and-literature debate to the methodological concerns of contemporary ecocriticism. Focusing on two biological aspects of avian ecology-flight and song-I then examine how they function in the English literary canon and how McKay resists the canon by redeploying certain conventions by inflecting them with his "poetic attention" and species specificity. Reading flight in McKay's poems, I demonstrate how McKay provides a strategy for recognizing a human desire to fly as an anti-ecological version of the will to power; reading birdsong, I develop a way of measuring phenomenological distances between poet and bird, language and world. Between chapters, I include what I am calling Ecotones, fictional accounts of a literary critic struggling to enact the interdisciplinary ecocriticism outlined in this dissertation. Each Ecotone-Field Marks, Field Guides, Field Notes-focuses on different versions of "field," highlighting the intellectual risks and benefits associated with occupying a space between. Finally, since McKay is a living writer at the most prolific phase of his career, I conclude by suggesting how future studies of McKay's work, including on what he calls "geopoetry," might productively benefit from the strategies I develop here.
Canadian Literature, 2016
Among Don mCKAY’s mAnY sTRengThs as one of Canada’s most significant poets and thinkers are two c... more Among Don mCKAY’s mAnY sTRengThs as one of Canada’s most significant poets and thinkers are two contradictory features that often work (and play) together in his poems: mcKay’s “gift for metaphor” vies with a persistent uneasiness regarding the supposed authority of human language to produce objective knowledge. As a result, his poetry often speaks to a desire for an ecologically attuned mode of thinking, and it draws upon both symbolic and scientifically accurate language to celebrate the phenomenological world while simultaneously admitting the impossibility of ever fully knowing the species and objects it describes. Focusing on these elements of mcKay’s work, this paper argues for an ecocriticism that has the capacity to measure the distance between (poetic and scientific) language and the phenomena it variously describes, celebrates, and eulogizes. such an ecocriticism would manoeuvre necessarily between and among various disciplinary approaches to the physical world while accom...
Coming out of the University of Zululand’s 2008 Literature & Ecology Colloquium at Twinstreams En... more Coming out of the University of Zululand’s 2008 Literature & Ecology Colloquium at Twinstreams Environmental Education Centre, this special issue of Alternation is devoted to articles about birds, in and out of literature. The birds under discussion range from the symbolic to the literal, the mythological to the real, and the local to the cosmopolitan. The twelve articles, book review, and two review articles contribute in multiple and compelling ways to ecological literary criticism (ecocriticism) in South Africa and beyond, while the section titled ‘Recently Reviewed South African Life Writing Publications VI’ continues a regular feature in Alternation. Key Concepts: ecocriticism, birds, ecology, South African literature
It might seem odd to claim birding as a postcolonial reading strategy, as a strategy of approach ... more It might seem odd to claim birding as a postcolonial reading strategy, as a strategy of approach to the text and the world that implicitly questions power structures and political injustices. Pre-eminent American ornithologist John James Audubon, after all, infamously slaughtered hundreds of avian specimens in the interest of preserving and identifying, through image, unique features for classification. Is it possible, after such a history, for the act of birding to be fairly neutral? Can birders avoid charges of ownership, especially considering the privileged economic, class requirements typically associated with the practice? I think they can, but not without acknowledging their complicity in a historical and an ongoing cultural and ecological imperialism. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: http://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol29/iss2/7
This paper considers how J.M. Coetzee's recent work unsettles deep-seated beliefs regarding h... more This paper considers how J.M. Coetzee's recent work unsettles deep-seated beliefs regarding humans' relations with nonhuman animals and, by extension, upsets boundaries placed between human-as-other and animal-as-other. The texts under scrutiny privilege different modes of movement across boundaries; formal shifts and what I call pronominal shiftiness invite interspecies ambivalence and understanding. ********** While even the most up-to-date among the sciences continue to view animals as inferior beings, and philosophers and anthropologists continue to deprecate them in order to assert human eminence, modern literature treats animals as a genuine problem. --Marian Scholtmeijer, Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice In "Unjust Relations: Post-Colonialism and the Species Boundary," Helen Tiffin considers "the question of animals, [alongside] racism and colonialism" with the goal of returning postcolonial criticism "to the very b...
Science, broadly defined, seeks to bring humans epistemologically closer to the physical world by... more Science, broadly defined, seeks to bring humans epistemologically closer to the physical world by empirical means; philosophy and history of science remind that the apparatuses deployed by scientists (scientific method; mathematical formulae; language) always already maintain a distance. Certain literary/artistic endeavours do not fundamentally differ in their attempts to bring humans closer to the world via language/symbolism. After laying a framework for negotiating the shifting tensions between distance and proximity when contemplating literature’s place in ecological thinking, I offer in this essay a series of comparative readings of bird poems complemented by an analysis of a book for young readers. Informing my readings of texts by British, Canadian, and South African writers is a thought experiment: what happens when we consider birds as works of art? For the first half of my argument, I offer readings of poems that sound an alarm regarding humans’ carelessness and that posit...
Commonwealth Essays and Studies
Studies in Canadian Literature
Cultivating Cultivation in Early Canada he impulse to fr ame early Canadian poetry through a nati... more Cultivating Cultivation in Early Canada he impulse to fr ame early Canadian poetry through a nationalist lens dominates literary critical studies and anthologies from the mid-twentieth century on. Concomitant with this impulse, environmental determinism emerged as an excuse for early poets' derivative verse-a verse that, predominantly, remained tethered to a British literary tradition-and later as an explanation of how Canadian literature came into its own. Developing his argument that much of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Canadian literature moved to New York, Nick Mount identifies this impulse as a "topocentric axiom of national canon formation" that privileges "a Canadian literature grounded in the Canadian soil" ("Expatriate Origins" 238; see also Mount, When Canadian Literature Moved). As Mount contends, "Canadian critics [have often] followed the canonical precedent that a national literature must reflect its physical environment" (238). If his thesis complicates a canonical notion of cultural nationalism looking back to post-Confederation writing by authors living and working in the United States, mine unsettles the "topocentric axiom," not by looking at work produced elsewhere but by considering how pre-Confederation modifications of the land physically changed the ground on and about which a certain author wrote. Complicating the axiomatic relation between physical environment and literary history in early Canada, Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village (1825) does not quite fit within a reading of early Canadian poetry as struggling to adapt a European form to describe a radically new geography. Rather, this poem relies on British literary tradition and form to support Goldsmith's assumption, buoyed by the public writings of a Scottish
Canadian Literature, 2007
Studies in Canadian Literature Etudes En Litterature Canadienne, 2008
Listening to Public Readings Listen, slow one let me be your fool-don McKay, "Song of the Saxifra... more Listening to Public Readings Listen, slow one let me be your fool-don McKay, "Song of the Saxifrage to the rock"
Canadian Literature Litterature Canadienne a Quarterly O Criticism and Review, 2005
Información del artículo The Fed Anthology/Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number 9.
Continuing the Voyage in Not Wanted on the Voyage…………………………7 CHAPTER 2 BUILDING THE CITY: BEING C... more Continuing the Voyage in Not Wanted on the Voyage…………………………7 CHAPTER 2 BUILDING THE CITY: BEING CIVIL & CIVIC IN ONDAATJE'S IN THE SKIN OF A LION……………………………………………………………..11 2.1 Revising the Construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct & the Toronto Waterworks…………………………………………………………………...16 2.2 Being Uncivil…………………………………………………………………26 2.3 Being Civil & the Possibility of the Civic……………………………………38 CHAPTER 3 THE IDEA OF A DAM: RATIONALISM, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE COMMON GOOD IN GREEN GRASS, RUNNING WATER……………………44 3.1 Native Rights, Dams and the Common Good………………………………...49
University of Calgary Press eBooks, Nov 4, 2013
Commonwealth essays and studies, 2012
Review(s) of: Postcolonial ecocriticism: Literature, animals, environment, by Graham Huggan and H... more Review(s) of: Postcolonial ecocriticism: Literature, animals, environment, by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, London: Routledge, 2010. 250 p. ISBN (pb): 978-0-415-34458-6, 20.99 pounds; (eb): 978-0-203-49817-0.
In this dissertation I develop a vocabulary and a strategy for reading birds and ecology in Don M... more In this dissertation I develop a vocabulary and a strategy for reading birds and ecology in Don McKay's poetry. Stressing the importance of understanding such sciences as ornithology and ecology when adopting an interdisciplinary ecocriticism, I posit science textbooks, field guides, and extra-textual experience as valid intertextual referents. At base, my dissertation follows McKay's taxonomical and ecological specificity and argues that such accurate knowing, combined with an awareness of its epistemological limitations, invites readers to reconsider human-nonhuman relations. Individual birds populating McKay's poems exist both as birds that live independently of human language and as symbols of a human desire to name and know the world without possessing it. I begin by highlighting the need for sustained critical work on Don McKay, a poet whose work-long admired by awards juries and fellow poets-has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves. After outlining the risks involved for literary critics who linger in the ecotone between disciplines, I make an argument for taking seriously the "eco" in ecocriticism by linking the philosophical concerns of the historic science-and-literature debate to the methodological concerns of contemporary ecocriticism. Focusing on two biological aspects of avian ecology-flight and song-I then examine how they function in the English literary canon and how McKay resists the canon by redeploying certain conventions by inflecting them with his "poetic attention" and species specificity. Reading flight in McKay's poems, I demonstrate how McKay provides a strategy for recognizing a human desire to fly as an anti-ecological version of the will to power; reading birdsong, I develop a way of measuring phenomenological distances between poet and bird, language and world. Between chapters, I include what I am calling Ecotones, fictional accounts of a literary critic struggling to enact the interdisciplinary ecocriticism outlined in this dissertation. Each Ecotone-Field Marks, Field Guides, Field Notes-focuses on different versions of "field," highlighting the intellectual risks and benefits associated with occupying a space between. Finally, since McKay is a living writer at the most prolific phase of his career, I conclude by suggesting how future studies of McKay's work, including on what he calls "geopoetry," might productively benefit from the strategies I develop here.
Canadian Literature, 2016
Among Don mCKAY’s mAnY sTRengThs as one of Canada’s most significant poets and thinkers are two c... more Among Don mCKAY’s mAnY sTRengThs as one of Canada’s most significant poets and thinkers are two contradictory features that often work (and play) together in his poems: mcKay’s “gift for metaphor” vies with a persistent uneasiness regarding the supposed authority of human language to produce objective knowledge. As a result, his poetry often speaks to a desire for an ecologically attuned mode of thinking, and it draws upon both symbolic and scientifically accurate language to celebrate the phenomenological world while simultaneously admitting the impossibility of ever fully knowing the species and objects it describes. Focusing on these elements of mcKay’s work, this paper argues for an ecocriticism that has the capacity to measure the distance between (poetic and scientific) language and the phenomena it variously describes, celebrates, and eulogizes. such an ecocriticism would manoeuvre necessarily between and among various disciplinary approaches to the physical world while accom...
Coming out of the University of Zululand’s 2008 Literature & Ecology Colloquium at Twinstreams En... more Coming out of the University of Zululand’s 2008 Literature & Ecology Colloquium at Twinstreams Environmental Education Centre, this special issue of Alternation is devoted to articles about birds, in and out of literature. The birds under discussion range from the symbolic to the literal, the mythological to the real, and the local to the cosmopolitan. The twelve articles, book review, and two review articles contribute in multiple and compelling ways to ecological literary criticism (ecocriticism) in South Africa and beyond, while the section titled ‘Recently Reviewed South African Life Writing Publications VI’ continues a regular feature in Alternation. Key Concepts: ecocriticism, birds, ecology, South African literature
It might seem odd to claim birding as a postcolonial reading strategy, as a strategy of approach ... more It might seem odd to claim birding as a postcolonial reading strategy, as a strategy of approach to the text and the world that implicitly questions power structures and political injustices. Pre-eminent American ornithologist John James Audubon, after all, infamously slaughtered hundreds of avian specimens in the interest of preserving and identifying, through image, unique features for classification. Is it possible, after such a history, for the act of birding to be fairly neutral? Can birders avoid charges of ownership, especially considering the privileged economic, class requirements typically associated with the practice? I think they can, but not without acknowledging their complicity in a historical and an ongoing cultural and ecological imperialism. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: http://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol29/iss2/7
This paper considers how J.M. Coetzee's recent work unsettles deep-seated beliefs regarding h... more This paper considers how J.M. Coetzee's recent work unsettles deep-seated beliefs regarding humans' relations with nonhuman animals and, by extension, upsets boundaries placed between human-as-other and animal-as-other. The texts under scrutiny privilege different modes of movement across boundaries; formal shifts and what I call pronominal shiftiness invite interspecies ambivalence and understanding. ********** While even the most up-to-date among the sciences continue to view animals as inferior beings, and philosophers and anthropologists continue to deprecate them in order to assert human eminence, modern literature treats animals as a genuine problem. --Marian Scholtmeijer, Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice In "Unjust Relations: Post-Colonialism and the Species Boundary," Helen Tiffin considers "the question of animals, [alongside] racism and colonialism" with the goal of returning postcolonial criticism "to the very b...
Science, broadly defined, seeks to bring humans epistemologically closer to the physical world by... more Science, broadly defined, seeks to bring humans epistemologically closer to the physical world by empirical means; philosophy and history of science remind that the apparatuses deployed by scientists (scientific method; mathematical formulae; language) always already maintain a distance. Certain literary/artistic endeavours do not fundamentally differ in their attempts to bring humans closer to the world via language/symbolism. After laying a framework for negotiating the shifting tensions between distance and proximity when contemplating literature’s place in ecological thinking, I offer in this essay a series of comparative readings of bird poems complemented by an analysis of a book for young readers. Informing my readings of texts by British, Canadian, and South African writers is a thought experiment: what happens when we consider birds as works of art? For the first half of my argument, I offer readings of poems that sound an alarm regarding humans’ carelessness and that posit...
Commonwealth Essays and Studies
Studies in Canadian Literature
Cultivating Cultivation in Early Canada he impulse to fr ame early Canadian poetry through a nati... more Cultivating Cultivation in Early Canada he impulse to fr ame early Canadian poetry through a nationalist lens dominates literary critical studies and anthologies from the mid-twentieth century on. Concomitant with this impulse, environmental determinism emerged as an excuse for early poets' derivative verse-a verse that, predominantly, remained tethered to a British literary tradition-and later as an explanation of how Canadian literature came into its own. Developing his argument that much of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Canadian literature moved to New York, Nick Mount identifies this impulse as a "topocentric axiom of national canon formation" that privileges "a Canadian literature grounded in the Canadian soil" ("Expatriate Origins" 238; see also Mount, When Canadian Literature Moved). As Mount contends, "Canadian critics [have often] followed the canonical precedent that a national literature must reflect its physical environment" (238). If his thesis complicates a canonical notion of cultural nationalism looking back to post-Confederation writing by authors living and working in the United States, mine unsettles the "topocentric axiom," not by looking at work produced elsewhere but by considering how pre-Confederation modifications of the land physically changed the ground on and about which a certain author wrote. Complicating the axiomatic relation between physical environment and literary history in early Canada, Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village (1825) does not quite fit within a reading of early Canadian poetry as struggling to adapt a European form to describe a radically new geography. Rather, this poem relies on British literary tradition and form to support Goldsmith's assumption, buoyed by the public writings of a Scottish
Canadian Literature, 2007
Studies in Canadian Literature Etudes En Litterature Canadienne, 2008
Listening to Public Readings Listen, slow one let me be your fool-don McKay, "Song of the Saxifra... more Listening to Public Readings Listen, slow one let me be your fool-don McKay, "Song of the Saxifrage to the rock"
Canadian Literature Litterature Canadienne a Quarterly O Criticism and Review, 2005
Información del artículo The Fed Anthology/Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number 9.
Continuing the Voyage in Not Wanted on the Voyage…………………………7 CHAPTER 2 BUILDING THE CITY: BEING C... more Continuing the Voyage in Not Wanted on the Voyage…………………………7 CHAPTER 2 BUILDING THE CITY: BEING CIVIL & CIVIC IN ONDAATJE'S IN THE SKIN OF A LION……………………………………………………………..11 2.1 Revising the Construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct & the Toronto Waterworks…………………………………………………………………...16 2.2 Being Uncivil…………………………………………………………………26 2.3 Being Civil & the Possibility of the Civic……………………………………38 CHAPTER 3 THE IDEA OF A DAM: RATIONALISM, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE COMMON GOOD IN GREEN GRASS, RUNNING WATER……………………44 3.1 Native Rights, Dams and the Common Good………………………………...49
Questions about “here” abound in Canadian literary history, from Northrop Frye’s famous “Where is... more Questions about “here” abound in Canadian literary history, from Northrop Frye’s famous “Where is here?” to Tim Lilburn’s meditative “how to be here?” WH New’s book-length poem Underwood Log (2004) takes these fundamental Canadian questions about place and reiterates them historically, lyrically, and playfully, evoking the form of a travel log with entries documenting and meditating on the notion of “here.” Three groups of entries, which are indicated by latitude and longitude co-ordinates, indicate different ways of thinking and living “here” in New’s poem.