“The Making of Canadian Cultural Poesis“

Garry Sherbert

Associate Professor of English

Sheila Petty

Dean of Fine Arts and Professor of Media Studies

23 March 2006

This event was co-sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

How do we make culture and how does culture make us? These are the questions raised by the first textbook on Canadian culture for Canadian universities, Canadian Cultural Poesis (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2006). Two of the book’s three editors, Sheila Petty and Garry Sherbert, discussed the complex and difficult editorial process of producing an introductory text for today’s students of culture across Canada. The challenge of the book was to represent the cultural diversity of Canada and span a broad range of academic disciplines while also organizing this sprawling content into a coherent whole. Having gathered the original essays into the areas of technology, identity, language, and dissidence, the editors talked about how the book itself is a cultural artifact. By featuring original artwork, the book offers the simultaneous experience of making and being made by culture. In fact, the collection is designed to provoke students into doing their own version of a poetics of culture whereby they experience making and being made by culture through a critical or creative act.

Garry Sherbert is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Regina. He is the author of Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit.  He is currently co-editing two volumes of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye: Shakespeare and the Renaissance, as well as co-authoring a book entitled In the Name of Friendship, on Jacques Derrida and poet-philosopher Michel Deguy.

Sheila Petty is Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts and Professor of Media Studies at the University of Regina. She is also an adjunct scientist (New Media) at TRLabs, Regina. She has written extensively on issues of cultural representation, identity, and nation in African and African diasporic cinema, television, and new technologies. She has curated film and television series and exhibitions for galleries across Canada.

For more details about Canadian Cultural Poesis, go to the Wilfrid Laurier University Press website.