httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hvaeHllwtw
Under any other circumstances, it’d be cruel to post such a video. But now that the cavernously ignorant and aggressively semi-literate serial liar Sarah Palin is the de facto leader of the Republican Party, it’s not necessarily a laughing matter.
This is Basil Marceaux, Republican candidate for governor of Tennessee.
Website here.
Maclean’s article on the closing of the Centre for Contemporary Literature here.
An excerpt, including a quote from our own Jonathan Allan:
Students have organized a campaign called “Save Comparative Literature” that includes a petition with around 5,800 signatures, including Margaret Atwood’s. Online forums have seen an unfavourable acronym attached to the School of Languages and Literature at U of T, namely “SLLUT.”Some students see the plan as a breach of contract. “I think something that is going to be very difficult for us going on the job market is that we are the last classes for the [Centre] and that’s damaging to us,” fourth-year PhD student Jonathan Allan said. “We didn’t agree to come to the University of Toronto to become a part of some school of languages.”
Professors are similarly disappointed. Linda Hutcheon, who teaches at the Centre, although her home department is English, says that interdisciplinary studies, like comparative literature, are being threatened. “There’s no other Centre that brings people together, not only from other languages to work together, but from other disciplines, from history to sociology to the theatre,” she told Maclean’s. “Almost every school in the United States has a comparative literature department. That’s the joke.”
Today is de Tocqueville‘s birthday (1805-1859).
Frye in the “Conclusion to the Second Edition of Literary History of Canada“:
The coherence of the “American way of life” is often underestimated by Americans themselves, because the more thoughtful citizens of any country are likely to be more preoccupied with its anomalies. Hence outsiders, including Canadians, may find the consistency easier to see. De Tocqueville, who didn’t like much of what he saw in the United States, wrote his book [Democracy in America] very largely about that consistency, almost in spite of himself. (CW 12, 452-3)
In his “Speech at the New Canadian Embassy, Washington”:
De Tocqueville, in his magesterial survey of democracy in America, says only one thing about Canada, but what he says bears on our present point. “In Canada,” he says, “the most enlightened, patriotic and human inhabitants make extraordinary effort to render the people dissatisfied . . . more exertions are made to excite the passions of the citizens there than to calm them elsewhere.” He is speaking mainly of French Canada, but the remark applies to the whole country. One reads between the lines the desperate frustrations of the earlier communicators, and the massive indifference of those they attempted to address. The silence of the eternal spaces remained at the bottom of the Canadian psyche for a long time, and in many respects is still there. (ibid., 647-8)
In a 1969 interview, “CRTC Guru”:
Chiasson: I’m considering some thoughts that Tocqueville, the French historian, had about the U.S. and indeed about Canada, which I think have something to do with the fundamentally classless situation of North America.
Frye: The thing is that when you don’t have a class structure you have to diversify society in some other way, otherwise you just get a mob; of course, the mob is what Tocqueville is worried about. This is why, I think, this breaking down of the Canadian population into separate groups is so important.
Chiasson: And something to be encouraged?
Frye: Well, it takes place anyway. (CW 24, 101)