While we live in an age of information with fast facts and explainer videos just a tap away, certain histories and stories are becoming harder and harder to find.

This seemingly contradictory phenomenon is explored in “Ban this Book: Censorship, Sexuality, and Questions of Harm,” a unique graduate course offered at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University that encourages students to take direct, local action against censorship.

Throughout the course, students learn about the different laws, policies, trials, and practices used to target books, bookstores, libraries, and schools for representations of marginalized sexual and gender identities – and, more recently, racialized identities and information about racist and imperial histories.

Taught by English professor Jodie Medd, the goal of the course is to educate about this history of censorship and connect that history to the challenges we face today, such as to remove certain books from their libraries.

To that end, the course gives students the opportunity to work together on a community engagement group project relevant to what they’ve been discussing in class.

For example, the course’s Fall 2025 cohort helped organize a public talk by celebrated storyteller Ivan Coyote, created and distributed their own zine, volunteered at a new Ottawa-based , designed a “dangerous books” display in the MacOdrum Library on campus, and raised money for the Ottawa Trans Library, just to name a few projects.

“In a course that tackled pressing – and depressing! –  issues that could lead to a sense of despair or overwhelm, the class members generated joy, excitement, and possibility through their process of working together to make some lovely and powerful things happen,” says Prof. Medd.

Two graduate students reflect on their community engagement projects, in their own words:

What, if any, books are truly dangerous?

By Ashley Menard (MA student in English)

In Prof. Medd’s “Ban this Book” course, I worked with three classmates – Malak Zaid, Joyce Friesen, and Ally Robidoux – to create a library display called “Are These Books Dangerous?”

The display paired vivid visuals that hinted at each book’s themes with short text summarizing the book and explaining the challenges those titles have faced (and still face) in Canadian contexts. Although many of the books have not been formally banned, we wanted to spark discussion about what makes a book “dangerous,” and what motivates attempts to restrict it.

Our research suggested that outright bans are relatively rare in Canada, but challenges are not, and they come from a wide range of concerns across the political spectrum. I was surprised by the diversity of reasons, since I expected conservative and reactionary values to drive most objections, but found progressive concerns also drove challenges.

Finally, I noticed that many challenges claim to protect youth, from young children to teens, yet young people themselves had little voice in the proceedings I reviewed. Listening to those most directly affected could be an important step in deciding what, if any, books are truly dangerous.

Circumventing obstacles to knowledge through DIY publishing

By Maya Chorney (PhD student in English)

Payton Leigh, Laura O’Gallagher, Madeleine Vigneron, and I formed our group based on a shared interest in doing something with zines. After discussing a few possibilities, such as hosting a zine workshop, we ultimately decided that making one of our own would be the best way for us to share ideas and research inspired from this class with the general Ottawa community.

To develop the zine, we each took up topics related to the course and broader issues of censorship that we were most interested in. The result is a multi-media research-creation project that features mini essays, poetry, an interview with a community member, interactive prompts, and other resources that we hope will equip readers with knowledge to better understand censorship and tools to fight back against the kinds of regressive politics we have been discussing throughout the semester.

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Childhood and Youth Studies student Glenisha Austin-Clarke got the unique opportunity to complete her practicum at her alma mater Elmwood School – who were so delighted to have her back, they featured her in the school newsletter! 

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We repurpose stories to suit our agenda and situation. Metaphor and rhetoric are invaluable tools to convey the subjective from one to another – to help ourselves and each other understand the world. And in some cases, vastly reimagine frameworks and older ideas.

I’ve seen this time and again, reading through the Great Books program, and also in my journalism studies. As I conclude my degree, my mind is flooded with images of pamphlets and newspapers, hieroglyphs, art, and oral traditions – some of the media people have used to tell stories since the ancient world. When I started this degree four years ago, I wanted to know: Of all that has changed and evolved since the start of time, what has stayed the same? Ultimately, the media we use to tell stories has changed, but the reasons for telling them, and even the stories in and of themselves, have not. 

This semester, I had the pleasure of reading 2021 book, , for a small book club organized by the College of Humanities (O’Gieblyn was recently invited to ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ by the College to deliver the 2026 Edgar and Dorothy Davidson Lecture). Paging through was a walk down memory lane, revisiting old friends like Augustine, Hannah Arendt, Mary Shelley, and Job. Through a series of personal essays, O’Gieblyn attempts to uncoil our relationships to technology, drawing on her background in religion, philosophy, journalism, and physics. 

As someone who fervently enjoys contemplating a multitude of perspectives, I found O’Gieblyn’s multidisciplinary approach, as well as the ensuing conversations in our group, fascinating. We poked holes in O’Gieblyn’s account and each other’s interpretations. My peers also offered up passionate remarks, connecting her ideas to counter culture, biology, environmental humanities, and, of course, our dependence on technology. 

Today, vast storehouses of knowledge live at the tips of our fingers. Misinformation runs rampant; meanwhile, entire populations are subsumed by digital fatigue. From here, many point to weakened attention spans, but O’Gieblyn offers a different take. 

We hold technology today to similar standards that people held gods and religion throughout time. In consumerist North America, we have deified technology as an all-knowing means to fix our issues. We’ve crowned it an authority figure. 

But, I would argue it runs deeper than that.

Buried deep in her treatise, O’Gieblyn notes: 

I don’t think she’s alone in that. Language is imperfect and ever-changing. We rely on devices – metaphor, rhetoric, juxtaposition – because of how unreliable language is. Or, rather, because of subjectivity. We cannot trust that everyone will interpret messages the same. The “right” words to tell a story will differ based on your audience and the experience you contribute as its author.

Up until the modern world, the greater storytelling framework revolved around the divine. As one of my Humanities profs puts it, people understood the world as being of God, by God, and for God. Modernity, on the other hand, flips that script: today, our stories operate around the individual. How does one relate to the world? What do they create? How does every action serve the individual? In her discussion about paradox, O’Gieblyn says something to a similar extent that fundamentally changed my reading of the book: 

In my first reading of this, I felt like a deer in headlights. Throughout my degree, I’ve grappled with ethical storytelling and the notion of authority. Who can have it? How does it define relationships? 

In the group, my peers interrogated why O’Gieblyn approached questions of physics, attention, and religion the way she did. Did she consider environmentalism? Did she consider individual abilities? The questions posed were intriguing, but they speak to the limitations of authority that O’Gieblyn mentions when considering the ‘I.’ 

The best I can offer is that authority of any kind is fallible. Inserting ourselves into a story can make it more cohesive for the reader, but it also asserts that there are limitations to what any one person can speak to. This holds true for storytelling today, and throughout history.Ěý 

In an era of AI overviews, clickbait headlines, and partial truths, we must be skeptics. Most importantly, as consumers, I believe that we must question why we accept someone as an authority figure, as well as who benefits and whose voices are ignored when a particular angle is taken.

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Whether through Instagram, TikTok, or otherwise, everyone has heard about the new Wuthering Heights adaptation—or, perhaps more accurately, about the this movie has sparked.

Going into my English degree at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, Wuthering Heights was one of my favourite novels. After reading it five times now, I still feel that there are hidden layers which I discover on every re-read. So, upon hearing that there was going to be an adaptation, I was both excited and terrified. After watching the movie, starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, I was honestly conflicted.

Yes, the movie stripped much of Emily Brontë’s complexity, but I also can’t say that I hated it.

I think that this is central to the debate surrounding the movie—people who hate it, hate it because it was an unfaithful representation of Wuthering Heights, but a lot of people also enjoyed the movie because of its cinematography. So, what really matters? 

I spoke to Paul Keen, a Professor at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University who specializes in Romantic literature, and he thought that if you are going to make a movie adaptation, you may as well play with it—use the medium to adapt and mold the text, so that it is relevant to today’s audience. An example of this is the 1996 , directed by Baz Luhrmann. While it departs from Shakespeare’s original script, it is an intentional departure. While the family rivalry is accentuated and stretched to become ‘gang’ violence, the spirit of the play is still present. And this is what Keen believes is important: If the text held meaningful political or cultural commentary (important enough that it still remains relevant to today), then we don’t want to lose that. So, did we?

Immediately, a layer of the novel was stripped in the decision to remove Nelly as the unbiased narrator and to end the movie halfway through the novel. However, this is not what the conversations surrounding the adaptation have centered on. Inevitably, in today’s cultural climate, our debates tend to revolve around the big three of contemporary politics: class, race, and sexualization. As Keen puts it, “Wuthering Heights’ account of the doomed relationship between a well-off local girl and the menacing ‘dark’ orphan brought into their mix speaking ‘some gibberish that nobody could understand’ makes these questions inevitable.”

In the novel, BrontĂŤ creates nuanced class dynamics, which director Emerald Fennell has been criticized for excluding. Keen highlights that all the characters in the movie have working class accents, which already removes a layer of complexity and historical accuracy—Catherine, as a daughter of local gentry, would not have had the same accent as Nelly and Heathcliff. However, I would argue that, while complexity was lost, the movie did not strip the book entirely of its class dynamics but rather explored it through a more contemporary lens—such as Catherine’s gaudy, ‘over-the-top,’ costumes. 

One of the critiques of Fennell’s adaptation was that she chose to cast a white man as Heathcliff. In the novel, Heathcliff’s background is unclear. The fact that he is twice referred to as a “gypsy” reinforces both the racialized aspect of Heathcliff’s background and the ambiguity this implied. “Gypsy” referred in its most formal sense to the Romani people, but it tended to be used more broadly as a slur on anyone who was not quite English, or not English enough. The concerns surrounding Fennell “whitewashing”  then, are not entirely unfounded, as Heathcliff is the epitome of the threatening Other—an individual who would not have been white in the English sense of the word. 

Finally, Fennell received backlash for the overtly sexual nature of the movie. This is where I would argue that the movie completely strays from the book. As Keen explains, the novel belongs to the gothic genre, a genre which is about unfulfilled desire. It is a genre about thwarted desire, it is about impossibilities, it explores where this desire comes from, exposing a ‘lack’ in the self that can only be fulfilled through the Other, and instead of this desire actualizing, it becomes a destructive and malevolent force (which is very obvious in the novel).

So, by Catherine and Heathcliff acting on this desire in the movie, Fennell completely ignores the premise of the gothic and, in turn, erases these complexities. 

So, again, I come back to this question of whether we completely lost the spirit of the text. Here, I would like to consider one final detail. CBC explains that the movie is meant to be “a re-creation of memory, a stylized evocation of an experience the Saltburn director had reading the book as a starry-eyed fourteen-year-old.” When I read this, the lack of complexity in the movie suddenly made complete sense. I was fourteen when I first read the book, and all of which I have just discussed went completely over my head. Leaving the movie theatre, I felt the way I did when I first read the novel—a deep devastation for these two characters whose choices lead them on a path of self-destruction. Sure, as a twenty-two-year-old English major, I can now read the book and understand how interesting this novel is in its historical context and narrative choices, but when I was fourteen? Not so much. 

So, yes, I do believe the political and cultural debates of the novel were, for the most part, lost in adaptation. However, in some ways, I believe the spirit of the novel (perhaps only in its emotional provocation) was captured, which is why I left the movie theatre so conflicted. And I was not alone in my confliction. One critic expressed that, “in spite of the disgusting coarseness of much of the dialogue, and the improbabilities of much of the plot, we are spellbound.” Another argued that Wuthering Heights “baffl[es] all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about.” These reviews were published in 1847, and here we are, in 2026, still having similar debates, still not knowing quite what to do with this story. Perhaps this is what makes a faithful adaptation impossible.Ěý

Whether you hated or loved the movie, I believe something we can all agree on is the power of literature, and stories more broadly. Here is a book from 1847, which remains relevant to today and is still fueling debate. That, in the world of an English major, is the ultimate take-away. 

The post Let’s Talk ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ “Wuthering Heights”—What Really Matters in a Film Adaptation? appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

My name is Ayla, I’m an undergraduate English student at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, and I’m currently finishing up my three-term Co-op experience. When I first began, I thought I would be working ‘English-specific’ jobs like technical editing or working as an intern at a publishing house. Now, towards the end, I’ve learned that the skills I’ve built during my degree have allowed me to contribute meaningfully in a variety of professional environments: the , and .Ěý

Kanata North Business Association (KNBA)

It comes as a surprise to some that as an English major, I spent the first of my three Co-op work terms immersed in technology. 

My first placement was with the Kanata North Business Association (KNBA). The KNBA represents the 540+ member companies which are in Kanata North Tech Park—a designated business improvement area. 

One of the major events that I helped to plan was the Annual Technata Hackathon. The event focused on sustainability and invited students from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, the University of Ottawa and Algonquin College to participate in group mentorship and problem solving. Planning the event was a test to my time management skills, which were luckily already quite strong from balancing assignments in university. From organizing the catering to organizing the participants and mentors, I learned how to juggle not only my own time and expectations, but others’ as well.  

One of the highlights from this event was interviewing the participants, mentors and sponsors, whose responses I used to write an article on the event. In my degree, the lectures and materials have always invited discussion. The interpersonal skills acquired through these discussions allowed me to interview confidently and effectively. This article led to my favourite project of the work term, which was organizing and editing the KNBA’s annual publication TechTalk. This magazine was printed and distributed at the annual partner’s summit, and it included my article on the Hackathon.

For a few of my written deliverables, I was asked to write on topics which I was not familiar with, featuring ‘up-and-coming’ technology. One such instance was when I was asked to write a blog post on semiconductors, which was meant to kick-start Chip Month (October). I didn’t have a clue what a semiconductor was, and up until this point, would have guessed it was some kind of semi-truck. However, my degree has helped hone my research abilities. After asking a friend in engineering to explain the concept, reading through various articles and publications and asking AI to help simplify the topic, I was able to write a blog post explaining the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of a semiconductor. 

Working in the Kanata North Tech Park, I learned how versatile my degree was, and how many opportunities there were for an English major that no one thinks or talks about. 

Library and Archives Canada

My second work term was spent at the Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) branch of Library and Archives Canada (LAC). While it is difficult to picture an English major in a Tech Park, LAC is exactly where you would picture one. 

I worked largely on one project throughout the summer term, which I will first contextualize. Under the Privacy Act, there are exceptions for when LAC can release information which would normally be redacted. One of these exceptions is 8(2)(m)(i), which allows government institutions to release information in the ‘public interest.’ However, ‘public interest’ is interpretive, and it is therefore difficult to determine when an invasion of privacy is warranted. LAC is investigating how this section could be applied to Indigenous information. Like the rest of ATIP’s teams, the Indigenous records team is backlogged. Normally, information is released through an informal processing of requests under 8(2)(k) of the Privacy Act, however, this too is time-consuming. Unlike a non-Indigenous citizen requesting information, these requests often pertain to land claims, historical grievances, etc. which are often urgent in nature. Additionally, under OCAP (ownership, control, access, and privacy) which are the governing principles of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, First Nation, Inuit and MĂŠtis governments require access to their own information to properly practice self-governance. Canada has committed to reconciliation, and data sovereignty is a part of that.

While a Library and Archives might be an expected workplace for an English major, policy work is not necessarily included in that association. However, once again, my research skills were advantageous in this role. My work involved researching various Indigenous, First Nation and MĂŠtis organizations and reading through the reports that they had published concerning the Privacy and Access to Information Acts. Additionally, it involved reading through suggested policy changes and familiarizing myself with the concept on Indigenous Data Sovereignty. 

This research accumulated into a 25-page report wherein I made the case for why LAC needed a policy for releasing Indigenous information under 8(2)(m)(i) (‘public interest’), as the current structures were an obstacle to Indigenous Data Sovereignty—an incredibly important issue. 

This work term was incredibly fulfilling, as it allowed me to work on a real-world issue, and broaden my understanding of information, data and ownership. Bringing this knowledge back to my degree, I have a greater appreciation for information accessible to me in my studies. 

Hydro Ottawa

My third, and current, work term is with Hydro Ottawa. Again, this is a position not expected for an English major, and I often receive confused looks when I tell people that I work for an energy corporation. Despite this, I believe this placement to be the most related to my degree. 

I work on the Corporate Planning team responsible for internal reporting. Internal reporting includes deliverables such as the Annual Reports, Quarterly Reports, the CEO’s communications, the Board’s presentations to Hydro Ottawa’s shareholder (the ), and the 5-year Strategic Direction.Ěý

Thus far in my placement, I have worked on confidential presentations for my supervisor and for the board and am currently assisting in authoring the new 5-year Strategic Direction. I am incredibly excited to be working on this document, as it details the company’s plans for the next five years. Additionally, both through working on the presentations and now on the Strategic Direction, I am learning to write in a completely new way. Corporate writing is incredibly concise and should be accessible for most people. This means breaking down syntax, and asking myself “What am I trying to say? Can I say it in fewer words?” While building on my written communication skills from my degree, I am also adding new ones. 

Another learning curve has been the operational pace of the team. Because we have so many deadlines, it is an incredibly fast-paced working environment. It has pushed me to be even more efficient in my time-management, and to work under tight deadlines. This has been incredibly rewarding as I am able to directly see where my work is going and the impact it is having. And… I am writing and reading… All day, every day (an English major’s dream). 

I am learning an incredible amount in this work term—about energy, my own writing and the corporate setting in general. It is demanding, but it is rewarding, and it has pushed and challenged me in ways that, I believe, will best prepare me for any work environment that I might enter after graduation.

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When I chose English as my major, the question I was asked was: “What are you going to do with that degree?” Before I went into the program, my answer was straight-forward: “An editor.” Now, after two and half Co-op experiences, my answer has been to reframe the question itself. Rather than: “What are you going to do with that degree?” (because, really, to list off the various jobs seems a bit tedious), I would instead prefer to respond to the question of: “What skills and experiences are you gaining through an English degree?” I am learning communications, interpersonal relations, analysis, and, while I could go on, I will end with, critical thinking.

This last one is especially important in countering the new, though no less intimidating, question of: “Well, isn’t AI just going to replace you anyways?”. In some ways this question felt more insulting—the idea that a machine could do (better) what we’re spending years studying.

My initial reaction to society’s obsession with AI was to ignore its existence entirely. I refused to engage with any of the platforms outside of the few class assignments which mandated AI exploration. This approach worked while I was in school, and the idea that, if my will was strong enough, I could put the cat back in the bag was believable for a time.

So, imagine my surprise, when, on my second day of Co-op work at the Kanata North Business Association (KNBA), I was asked what they could be doing to better implement AI into their workflows. Apparently, I belong to the ‘technological’ generation, and I should just ‘know these things.’ What I had just spent the last year resisting, I would now have to wholeheartedly embrace and… advise on?

When I first started working with AI, it felt like a betrayal to my English degree. It felt like I was training the very entity that would eventually replace me. However, it was also through working with AI that I learned that would not happen, and that I was not replaceable.

On my first day of work at Hydro Ottawa, I was told by my supervisor that they were specifically looking to hire an English major. Rather than taking AI’s outputs at face value, I am able to read, analyse, comprehend and think critically on the content it is producing, which are all desirable skills.

One such example is writing a blog on semiconductors at the KNBA. I was tasked with simplifying the subject so that it was digestible for a wide audience. However, this was a technology that I was not familiar with. I did my own research, but the terminology was foreign – so how could I break it down for others, if I did not understand it myself?

Because I didn’t have the time to research extensively, I put my notes into ChatGPT and asked it to explain the information as if it were speaking to a ten-year-old. This helped me to understand what semiconductors were, and why they were important, so that I could write the blog post in a way that made sense to others.

AI did not do my work for me, it did not replace my abilities or skills, but rather it enhanced my productivity.  

The post What Are You Going to Do with that English Degree? The BA in an AI World appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

By 
 Student Blogger for 2022/2023

Dear reader, one of my academic nightmares finally came true. A few weeks ago, one of my classes had an assignment that required us to come up with pitches for an upcoming presentation in groups of four and present them in front of a small group of professors. My group had for some reason been under the impression that we were only submitting a written document and not presenting, but half way through that week’s class we were informed of our mistake. When we found out that we would be giving our half-baked presentation pitch to the class, my team and I nervously looked at one another, trying and failing to come up with a plan telepathically. We had no powerpoint, and after a brief stint of trying to pick a single representative from our group to go up and give a spiel by themselves, we ended up each staking out our separate spots around the front of the lecture hall and one by one sharing our visions of what our contribution to the project would be, framed by an improvised introduction and a conclusion that was more of a sputtering out than a complete stop.

Our pitch was a complete disaster. Our relatively small class was silent; a pin dropping would have been a welcome addition to the sonic landscape. When the feedback started, the professors present each took turns gently pointing out research challenges that we hadn’t considered and recommending that we switch topics. I alternated between unbreaking direct eye contact with who was speaking and staring at the yellowing leaves outside the lecture hall’s window. Once the feedback was done, I sat down in my seat and buried my face in my laptop for the final group’s pitch presentation. I wasted no time in leaving the class the second it was over. I speed-walked right out of the room and across the campus to the bus stop. My thoughts didn’t catch up with my body until I was stuck staring out the bus window, forced into stillness by the necessity of getting home. I felt thoroughly academically humiliated.

Academic embarrassment can come in a variety of different forms. Maybe you’ve been given assignment feedback in which the professor states that they haven’t given you a mark because it would be too low. Maybe you’ve shared an opinion in class that was met with a long silence and someone changing the topic. Maybe a professor has forgotten your name more than half way into a semester. If you’re the kind of person who (like me) is prone to feeling self-conscious, then embarrassment can be lurking around every corner of the academy. Judgment starts at the application process, as universities “accept,” “conditionally accept” and “reject” you. The existence of participation marks can make every moment in class feel like an evaluation, that you could be discovered a fraud, that your place at university could be revoked at any moment. Even praise at times can feel like a burden being heaped on your future self: doing something right once can feel like you’re setting yourself up for unrealistic expectations of greatness that will be followed by a plummet back to earth.

Reading these few paragraphs, it may come as no surprise to you that for my first few years in higher education, I took academic embarrassment really hard. I would always start the semester with so much energy, always contribute to classroom discussions, but then say something really dumb or submit an assignment that I hadn’t done very well, and feel too embarrassed to attend class the next week. These absences would make the shame grow larger in my head, and a week would turn into a month, until I would either drop the course or submit as much as my professors would allow at the end of the semester and slide through with a low grade. I would talk in therapy about how ashamed I felt all the time until I would miss a therapy appointment and feel too ashamed to go back. I took a break from university when this shame became too much to stomach, and spent two years working at retail and childcare jobs until I could work up the nerve to come back and try again in earnest.

I share all this not to imply that university must feel this high stakes, but instead to communicate that if you feel even a little bit this way, that you are not alone. Over the course of my stint in academia, my thoughts about academic anxiety have evolved from me thinking that it’s something that only I experience, to thinking that it was something that some other people deal with, to thinking that it’s a common feeling, to realizing that it’s nearly universal. Anxiety is not just the dominion of the student, either. In the introduction to Teaching Literature, Elaine Showalter writes about professors’ nightmares about teaching: some dream about starting a lecture but not being able to form words, some about having their students turn against them in the middle of a class, others about finding out that they’ve been supposed to teach a course but forgot about it and now need to give the last lecture of the semester, et cetera. She says that some professors are just as nervous for the first day of class as their students. These realizations don’t make the moments of humiliation feel any less painful, but they do somewhat help me try to embrace the old cliche that “this too shall pass” (I tell myself “jusqu’ici tout va bien” instead of “this too shall pass” because it’s from La Haine, a French movie where tout is not ‘va’ing bien at all, and I can only engage with such an earnest idea if I present it to myself ironically).

While I was looking out the window on the bus ride home from the class of my disaster presentation, I told myself that I was going to drop out of the Major Research Project (MRP) portion of my Master’s program, that I was going to cancel a party I was throwing that weekend and that I was going to quit my job. When I got home, I cooked myself pasta with tomato, onion and hot pepper sauce. I told myself that I would send out the emails announcing my retreat from my life the next morning, only if I still felt like it. Those emails never got sent.

Dear reader, I am still in the MRP program, and I did not quit my job. I still threw the party that weekend, and everyone had a great time. I had an office hours meeting with the professor that I was most worried that I embarrassed myself in front of (on a topic unrelated to the presentation), and she remembered only that our group had changed focus. 

I don’t even regret the presentation that much anymore. Our team used the feedback to come up with a better proposal. I’m grateful to myself that I handled it without letting it turn into a backslide and giant problem. I’m still putting one foot in front of the other, and I hope that you are too.

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Sam:
Sam Bean is a first-year Master’s Student in English Literature with a Climate Change Specialization. He is a free-floating writer who has worked for the Charlatan, a dubious tech startup and the Ottawa Art Gallery Communications team. He also writes poetry in his spare time. He is from Mississauga but insists that everyone back home calls it ‘M-Town.’

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ľţ˛âĚý
 Student Blogger for 2022/2023

As I entered the final days of my summer job, I said private goodbyes to my least favourite parts of food service. Goodbye to the flies in the maintenance room. Goodbye to the loft from which the managers could assess our work efficiency at any time. Goodbye to the smelly mops, goodbye to the dishwashing nozzle that would inevitably splash water back at me no matter what angles I would spray the dishes at, goodbye to putting on food safe rubber gloves only to be told that you have to go do something that requires you to take them off and then have to put a new pair on again. These routine annoyances, compounding each other in unique ways every day, made me daydream often of quitting in the middle of my shift, of throwing a temper tantrum and walking out to never be seen again. 

Luckily for the fast-ish food chain that I am contractually obligated not to disdain in a public forum, a few key factors prevented nuclear meltdown in the long four months of what I hope is the last service job that I’ll ever have to work. My coworkers, a scrappy mix of local nineteen-year-olds who don’t take things too seriously and international students vastly overqualified for the work they were doing, kept the atmosphere light. I ate my weight in free food. While hardly attractive, minimum wage did let me keep a roof over my head. These benefits, however, barely outweighed the tedium of changing the same six garbage cans and wiping the same twelve tables week after week. In short, I could not be happier to be back at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ for my Master’s degree.

Hello reader, I’m Sam, and I’m the next in line to be the “Life in English” student blogger. Like a lot of people I know, I simultaneously love to talk about myself and struggle to write on the subject. I graduated from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ with a B.A. Hons in English in the spring and am back for more, except this time with a (still finding out exactly what that entails). I came to English through a deeply felt love of people and the stories we tell ourselves. I was born and grew up on Treaty 13A land, which was sold by the Mississaugas of the First Credit to the British government under false pretenses and this deception remained unresolved for 200 years¹. (Parenthetically, the restitution from the Toronto government, which amounted to a one-time payment of around $20,000 per claimant,² is still only a fraction of a percent of the money that owning that land has produced. Is this really a land claim settled? Is this really justice?). My mother is Irish and a teller of long winding stories, something that has rubbed off on me in a serious way. I am a seeker of novelty, much more of an ‘idea person’ than an ‘execution person’. I am very sentimental; when I found out as a child that the plants in our garden died every winter and had to be replaced every spring, I was inconsolable for several days straight. I often bring things home that I find on the side of the road, even if I don’t know what I’m going to do with them. I’m a Pisces moon with heavy Aquarian influence, and I half believe that my astrological profile meaningfully describes me.

Everything I’ve listed in the previous paragraph is a version of how I might introduce myself at a party, in a mixer or on a date. They are expressions as much of the person I want to be as they are the person that I really am. The real me, like the real you or the real anyone else, is built every day in small pieces by action, personal experience and moments of connection. This is, however, little comfort for someone meeting a lot of people and making a lot of first impressions in a short amount of time.

The fact that academia marks the beginning point of many people’s careers adds another layer of stress on top of meeting new people. The very idea of ‘networking’ has always made my skin crawl, especially as a young person and student with very little to offer in terms of reciprocity for advice and connections. As the short- and long-term prospects for employment seem increasingly unstable, family, work and school have all seemed to push the idea that making these ‘professional connections’ is necessary to building a durable future for myself. At an introductory presentation to FASS graduate students, one of the presenters said something along the lines of “making connections and securing reference letters is a central part of graduate studies” (I suppose it’s possible to somewhat agree with a statement while hating the way it’s made and its implications). There is an undeniable urgency to having limited time access to a group of highly motivated, thoughtful and lovely people in your peers and faculty members, especially when these people could give you your first big break. Just making normal friends can be hard enough.

When I first came to ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, I signed up for Frosh, half-heartedly attended the first event and then hid in the Canal Building to read a copy of The Charlatan front to back three times before going home. Flash forward several years and things are very different. Attending faculty events and meeting my cohort are now for me a huge source of joy and excitement. I wish I could go back and comfort my younger self, give him a few words of encouragement. Since I can’t do that, I’ll write what I would say here.

1. The vast majority of people you meet all want to like and be liked. 
2. People like to be listened to. 
3. People like to hear a fun little story if you’ve got one to tell.
4. Awkwardness often comes from someone wanting to connect but not knowing how, not from judgment.
5. If you ever want to leave a situation, say a little goodbye and that it was nice to meet them. They’ll appreciate it.

These observations are obvious to the point of banality, but their obviousness helps me relax into meeting people. It’s not that complicated, it’s not final, it’s not a reflection of personal worth. It’s a chance to say hello and take the first step into everything that’s to come.

I can’t wait for all of that.

Endnotes

¹ I first found this information through a fantastic online application, the , which highlights treaty land and Indigenous nation land, among other functions.

² .

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Sam:
Sam Bean is a first-year Master’s Student in English Literature with a Climate Change Specialization. He is a free-floating writer who has worked for the Charlatan, a dubious tech startup and the Ottawa Art Gallery Communications team. He also writes poetry in his spare time. He is from Mississauga but insists that everyone back home calls it ‘M-Town.’

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By Noah Bendzsa
Student Blogger for 2021/2022

Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, my friends and I were addicted to feeling shocked, scandalized, thrilled, chilled, freaked-out. We loved horror movies with leaping danger and sudden, discordant sounds, and creepypastas—short stories published on the internet that are scary as long as you don’t contemplate their logic (“If my dog was dead, who was licking my leg, in the dark?” and that kind of thing). Interestingly, though, none of us had read Stephen King. Everyone we knew who had grown up in the seventies and eighties—parents, teachers—regularly adduced King’s books, in conversation, as the scariest things they had ever read. Carrie, Christine, Cujo, The Shining, and It were household names, like Bran Buds. And like Bran Buds, they were nothing we had ever tried.

When I was fourteen, I finally took Carrie out of the library. It bemused me more than it frightened me. Nineteen-seventies culture was odd, and I couldn’t quite figure out the characters’ motivations. What I remember most vividly is identifying quite strongly with Carrie’s friend, the one who, at the end of the book, is left wandering a field somewhere—though I can’t recall her name. Although I liked Carrie well enough, I moved on to other things, and until recently hadn’t had any urge to read another Stephen King novel. A few weeks ago, I got the urge.

The novels I read were ’S˛šąôąđłžâ€™s Lot and It. I started reading them because I have an obsessive interest in regionalism, or local colour—of which I had heard King is a specialist—and I finished reading them because their writing surprised me. King is not, as Harold Bloom blustered, “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis” (qtd. in Ciabattari, 2014). He is a talented writer who works with mature themes and is sometimes capable of genuinely beautiful prose and imagery.

Admittedly, ’S˛šąôąđłžâ€™s Lot is not superbly strong, but it is only King’s second novel. And it certainly delivered on its regional promises (and in high gothic fashion): the best writing in the novel comprises descriptions of the fictional town Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine. Nonetheless, a lot of the other writing, including the horror, is boilerplate. The protagonist’s love interest, like many of King’s women, apparently, is repeatedly described as “pretty” (as in, she has pretty much the depth of the woman from the ). Characters’ emotions can often be read off their faces, like those of the characters in a sitcom. And King’s musings about evil and the haunted house on the hill are clumsy. The word “haphazard” is used in a description of the house, and then, as if readers don’t get the point, “haphazardly” is used a few lines later (King, ’S˛šąôąđłžâ€™s 24). The echoes of Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House and Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream” are too frequent, and the internally rhyming sentence “Hail Mary, full of grace, help me win this stock-car race” is embarrassingly like something a teenager might write (241). (I should know, because that’s the kind of stuff I wrote as a teenager). But as a whole, ’S˛šąôąđłžâ€™s Lot is an entertaining work, and the last 150 pages read very, very quickly—to King’s credit as a haberdasher of plot.

It is an entirely different work and an impressive novel, without qualification. It was published ten years after ’S˛šąôąđłžâ€™s Lot and showcases King’s development as an artist. It is a masterclass in structure. Over 1100 pages long, the text jumps back and forth between 1986 and 1958, and across more than a dozen different focalizations. Certainly, King doesn’t worry over his sentences like Henry James or Jean Stafford or Shirley Hazzard, and many are duds. Though none are any worse than many of those authored by the most-praised contemporary “literary” writers (see ), and the book contains some truly beautiful passages. Consider the focalized description of a boy getting his first bicycle, named after the Lone Rider’s horse, Silver, up to speed:

King’s diction doesn’t always strike the right note, as this passage demonstrates (is an airplane really a “waddling gadget”?), but the whole is an amazing trick. Anyone who has ever ridden a bicycle and has pushed it to thirty-five or forty kilometres per hour feels what’s being described, here. The experience is like that.

Later on, one of the male protagonists, Ben, returns to his hometown, the fictional Derry, Maine. “He walked across the library lawn, barely noticing his dress boots were getting wet, to have a look at that glassed-in passageway between the grownups’ library and the Children’s Library,” King writes;

Although It is inarguably a horror novel, it is also delightfully ruminative, and explores serious themes of childhood remembrance, belonging and ostracism, and friendship and the bonds between people. If any of that sounds familiar, it’s because those are some of the same things that Proust writes about in À la recherche du temps perdu—for instance. I’m not trying to imply that King is “our Proust” or as even meticulous a writer as Proust; all I’m trying to say is that saintly feet have walked this ground before.

I should remark, though, that It’s status as horror is not as straightforward as you might assume—as I assumed—at least, not for a non-coulrophobic adult reader. Before I began the book, I understood its horror elements to consist of a shapeshifting clown called Pennywise (or an eternal spider-thing that sometimes takes the shape of a clown called Pennywise) and his various forms. But the portions of the book about the clown, the clown-cum-teen-werewolf, -cum-mummy, -cum-Honda-Civic-sized-chickadee aren’t scary. These are childhood fears, and may be the things that tweens and teens find frightening when they pick up the book. They certainly would have been the scares my friends and I were after at thirteen. What’s really horrifying for an adult reader, though, are the human acts of violence, for which the clown is only a catalyst. I’m not sure if Henry Bowers resembles any real fifth-grade bully, but his homicidal tendencies make you angry, make you feel powerless, make you really fear for the kids in his sights and wish you were there to give him a few whacks with a sand-filled hose. This is how we are made to feel about a twelve-year-old. And then there’s the protagonist Beverly’s abusive husband, Tom; the scene in which he beats Bev’s whereabouts from one of her friends, and then threatens to come back and kill the friend if she calls the police, is hard to read. It’s awful and all too real.

But Tom’s violence is not the only violence based on a—based on many a—true story. After the famous clown-in-a-storm-drain opening, which even those who haven’t read the book know about from the 1990 miniseries, comes the first murder of the clown-creature’s new cycle. Except this murder is not perpetrated by the clown. Pennywise, although he snacks on the corpse, as he is wont to do, is essentially a bystander. The victim is a gay man, Adrian Mellon, and the murderers are a pack of rabid homophobes. It is these banal and intolerant human characters who “stab [Mellon] seven times,” before throwing him over the side of a canal (38). The episode is based on the real-life killing of Charlie Howard in Bangor, Maine, in 1984. But hate-crimes against LGTBQ folks—like spousal abuse, like violence against women—are frighteningly commonplace. This murder isn’t the reified fear of a desiccated corpse. One of my friends has had to lie about his sexual orientation before because feared for his life. We’ve all been in a situation where we’ve had to keep quiet because it’s safer, and we’ve all read or heard stories about people who have been badly hurt, or died, if we haven’t known a survivor personally. That’s terrifying.

There is received wisdom, other than that about the scares, that turns out to be wrong, too. First, there is the assumption, upon which the two-“chapter” adaptation of It from 2017 and 2019 is based, that the novel is actually a pair of novels grafted together: a protagonists-as-children novel, set in 1958, and a protagonists-as-grownups novel, set in 1985. A diligent structural reading reveals that these two “novels” are not separable. The as-adult sections might be surgically removed from the as-children sections, but unlike the as-children sections, they would not be able to survive on their own; they rely too heavily on flashback and recollection, and the scenes that result from these techniques constitute parts of the as-children section. The above-quoted scene from the as-adults section, when Ben returns to Derry, for example, is anchored in the winter scenes of the as-children section.

Then, there is the notion that “what amounts to an orgy” takes place amongst the seven protagonists, in one of the sections set in 1958 (Smythe, 2013). What happens is the six male protagonists have vaginal sex with the female protagonist, Bev, at her instigation. Doubtless, for some the scene will be discomfiting and feel voyeuristic, although I suspect this is age dependent. The protagonists are eleven- and twelve-year-olds, and the reader—at least, this reader—and the writer are much older. Overstating the case somewhat, we might ask, “Does this scene amount to the promotion of some kind of meta-literary pedophilia?” Without appealing to King’s intentions, I think we can answer “No” to this question and its variants for two reasons. First, there are a fair number of sexually active eleven- and twelve-year-olds; the scene, if improbable, is realistic in the sense that children become sexual subjects (in the self-forming sense of “subject”) around this time in their lives. Second, the sex isn’t exploitative of the characters, or especially explicit within the text. Bev uses sex strategically, and its purpose is to renew the bonds of friendship amongst the participants. She isn’t objectified during the scene; in fact, in a pleasant inversion of many adult-heterosexual-sex scenes, it is her pleasure that is central, and most of the male characters are unable to ejaculate. (Oddly, this appears to be for developmental rather than psychological reasons).

For folks in English studies, the most controversial thing about It, or any of Stephen King’s novels for that matter, ought to be their literary status. Are they Literature or are they mass entertainment, pulp, penny-dreadfuls, or whatever else you want to call the negation of Literature? This question, popping back up like a clown-shaped punching-dummy whenever someone thinks that they have successfully put it down, is one of the eternal questions of our discipline that many pragmatic people wish would just go away. It is interesting to study why people hold the beliefs they do about Literature, and what it means that literature has been defined this way (with a capital L), rather than that way, but Is It Literature? is largely irrelevant as a question in and of itself. The great Literature Debate is a debate in the same way that “Who would win—Darth Vader vs. Kylo Ren, Jaws vs. Moby Dick” are debates. Yet people insist on debating.

Harold Bloom has already weighed in; a few years after he made the above-quoted comment, he said this: “Stephen King is beneath the notice of any serious reader who has experienced Proust, Joyce, Henry James, Faulkner and all the other masters of the novel” (qtd. in Ciabattari, 2014). I don’t know how Bloom could have taught undergraduate English students for all those years and made this statement, but there you are. Here is another self-avowed snob, the novelist Dwight Allen: “After you’ve read Roberto Bolaño and Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon… why would you return to Stephen King?” This is not the best set of examples, not the least reason being that all the writers are men, and three of them are white American men. It is also predicated upon excluding these (admittedly very impressive) writers’ worst work. Having not read enough Bolaño and Johnson, I can’t speak of their books, but after a few chapters of the expansive and frivolous Against the Day or an encounter with the aptly named Wallace narrator Ovid the Obtuse, I think most people, even serious readers, would gladly return to King, and even say that some of his writing is markedly superior.

Heck, I am willing to do both, right now.

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French Dispatch Sentences. I am still looking for opening sentences with three dangling participles, two split infinitives, and nine spelling errors, in response to a challenge posed in “Fifteen-Minute Intermission” (send to: noahbendzsa@cmail.carleton.ca).

Below are a two marvellous submitted sentences—one by Vivian Astroff, a fourth-year student studying the History and Theory of Architecture, and one by Professor Jody Mason, of the English Department—and one sentence I’ve written.

Works Cited

• Ciabattari, Jane. “” BBC, 31 Oct. 2014.
• Dry, Judy. “” IndieWire, 10 Sep. 2019.
• Dwight, Allen. “.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 3 Jul. 2012.
• King, Stephen. It. 1986. Scribner, 2017.
• King, Stephen. ’S˛šąôąđłžâ€™s Lot. 1975. Anchor Books, 2011.
• Smythe, James. “” The Guardian, 28 May 2013.

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By Noah Bendzsa
Student Blogger for 2021/2022

Like ballets and operas, many long old movies have intermissions, partway through, when viewers can get another popcorn or soda, or go to the washroom, or leave gracefully. There is an intermission in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Ben-Hur (1959), Giant (1956), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and My Fair Lady (1964). Gone with the Wind (1939), which is almost four hours long (and almost four hours too long), has a twenty-minute intermission.

In this intermission, I would like to pose two challenges for my readers. Both of them come from a very literary new film, The French Dispatch (2021), which is about the composition of three articles in the life of an editor-in-chief (Bill Murray) and his literary journal—The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun—headquartered in the fictional Ennui-sur-Blasé, France, from 1925 to 1975.

The first challenge concerns a comment, made by a proofreader, about an article written by J. K. L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) about the artist Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro). The proofreader deadpans: “Three dangling participles, two split infinitives, and nine spelling errors in the first sentence alone” (Anderson 7). My challenge for you is to write that sentence and send it to me (noahbendzsa@cmail.carleton.ca). The best three sentences I receive will be appended to my next blog post. They need not be about the fictional Rosenthaler, but they should be in the form of the first sentence of an article about some artist or creator—writer, moviemaker, singer, songwriter, actor, painter, sculptor, showrunner—fictional or not, living or dead. For the spelling mistakes, take inspiration from the days of pre-standardized spelling (from, for instance, Spenser and Chaucer). In order to make it all hold together, you will probably need a semicolon or two.

The second challenge is to identify, or at least speculate about, what the chart drawn up by the copy editor played by Elisabeth Moss is meant to reveal about the sentence, “They will fail to notice, under the corner of a threadbare rug, the torn ticket stub for an unclaimed hat which sits alone on the upper shelf of a cloakroom in a bus depot on the outskirts of the work-a-day town where Nickerson and his accomplices were apprehended” (3–4). And what’s with that sentence? Wouldn’t “They will fail to notice, under the corner of a threadbare rug, the torn ticket stub for the unclaimed hat that sits alone on the upper shelf of a cloakroom in a bus depot…” be better, or at least more conventional?

Regardless, try not to join in your compositions and speculations. Sometimes, says Nickerson, a work-a-day sentence will do.

Exeunt moviegoers.

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Below are a two marvellous submitted sentences—one by Vivian Astroff, a fourth-year student studying the History and Theory of Architecture, and one by Professor Jody Mason, of the English Department—and one sentence I’ve written.

Works Cited

• Anderson, Wes. The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. Deadline, 2022, . Accessed 24 Jan. 2022.

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