Bodies, stories, cities : learning to read and write (in) Montréal with Gail Scott

This simultaneously comparative, theoretical, and pedagogical project is rooted in the recognition that it behooves students and teachers to ask about the costs, complicities, and competing interests constantly involved in learning to read and write (about) literature today; that literary practice takes place in a space or a structure of irreducible differences called, variously, but not exclusively, metaphor, narrative, or the city; and that the labour and investments required therefore to negotiate our (dis)course towards becoming increasingly learned and literate subjects is as costly and interminable as likewise a pleasure and a political necessity. While such conclusions tend toward the relatively abstract, the language of bodies and cities, and of addiction and violence, is meant to be all the more concrete and material therefore. The introduction maps out the landscape of readings and comparisons of Gail Scott's Heroine that are the centre of the project and identifies the institutional, historical, and personal contexts that threaten at every turn to decentre my practice here.   Chapter one articulates and illustrates the literary materialist methods employed, whereby literature is the preferred medium for conducting such theoretical investigations. Derived first from Gail Scott and Réjean Ducharme's theoretical-fictions, and then from the work of Walter Benjamin, Elizabeth Grosz and Pierre Macherey, this materialism refers to a collection of figures of the world as a book, and to the close comparisons consequently of different representations of the practice of reading found, for instance, in George Perec, Michael DeCerteau, Barbara Johnson, and Patricia Smart, all of which invites an interrogation of the relationship between bodies and stories that make the simultaneous necessity and contingency of literary practice all the more legible and teachable. Similarly, a collection of figures of literary Montreal, and of the pedagogical city more generally, gathered from a range of writers including Zygmunt Bauman, Patricia Godbout, and Lewis Mumford, provides a vocabulary in which to better describe what the differential spaces of literature look and feel like and what reading in turn (and learning) requires. Chapter two reads Scott's Heroine alongside other contemporary Québécois women writers, including Anne Dandurand, Marie Gagnon and Tess Fragoulis, initially, in the context of debates surrounding the institutionalization of (anglo)Quebec literature, but then in terms too of the much broader and more urgent pedagogical and political questions raised by the recurrence of gun violence at schools like the Polytechnique in Montreal, in 1989. That question of the relationship between violence, literary practice, and pedagogy, here, is compelled and enabled, specifically, by a collection of literary figures. Specifically, a series of cracks in both Scott's narrative and across much of the body of critical writing about her work, invites a reading of Heroine as a narrative of addiction, so-called, whereby the peculiarly recursive temporality of addiction, as well as its logic of introjection, invite a better understanding of the violence and power of the practice of literature upon which, in turn, is grounded the pedagogy under construction here.  Looking back, then, onto the work the project does as a whole, the conclusion looks forward also to the ways in which the materialist readings of literature here lead and contribute to the author's teaching of language to aspiring teachers of English as a foreign language in Korea. In this context, the assumptions investing Jacques Ranciere's work provide a frame for my intersecting of the history of educational debates and structures in Korea and the conclusions drawn in these close literary readings of Gail Scott's experimental prose.

Keyphrases: Littératures Québecoises, Littératures (Anglo)Québécoises, Métaphore, Violence, Quebec Literatures, Canadian Literatures, (Anglo)Quebec Literatures, Literatures of the City, Metaphor, Violence, Addiction, Pedagogy, South Korea