Gregory Betts is the Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence, the Director of Canadian Studies, and the Graduate Program Director for Canadian and American Studies at Brock University. He is the author of Avant-Garde Canadian Literature (UTP 2013), curator of the bpNichol.ca digital archives, and editor of six books of experimental Canadian writing. His most recent book is Boycott (Make Now Press, 2014). He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Authors | Gregory Betts
Articles on Amodern by Gregory Betts
WE STOPPED AT NOTHING
Finding Nothing in the Avant-Garde Archive
Given its noticeably Western orientation, it is fair to characterize the SGWU reading series as the first re-presentation of the Vancouver literary community – or what George Bowering calls the “Vancouver Renaissance” in his introduction to Lionel Kearns in 1968 – in its full context (i.e. including many of its determining influences) outside of that locale. Though it would be years before critics narrativized the dissolution of the 60s avant-garde, one of the things that this re-presentation reveals is the bifurcation of aesthetics in the Vancouver avant-garde community. This paper explores the problem in the archivization of the series; for how does one represent or archive doubt, division, and conflict?