York, Lorraine (M.) 1958-

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YORK, Lorraine (M.) 1958-

PERSONAL: Born November 21, 1958, in London, Ontario, Canada; daughter of Reginald Francis (an oil company employee) and Margaret (a teacher; maiden name, Waddell) York; married Michael Lawrence Ross (a professor of English), May 23, 1987. Ethnicity: "Anglo-Canadian." Education: Attended University of Waterloo, 1977-78; McMaster University, B.A., 1981, M.A., 1982, Ph.D., 1985; attended University of Toronto, 1982-83. Politics: New Democrat.

ADDRESSES: Home—Dundas, Ontario, Canada. Office—Department of English, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4L9, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, assistant professor of English, 1985-88; McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, assistant professor, 1988-91, associate professor, 1991-97, professor of English, 1997—.

MEMBER: Association of Canadian University Teachers of English, Association for Canadian Studies in the United States, Modern Language Association of America.

WRITINGS:

The Other Side of Dailiness: Photography in the Works of Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Laurence, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1988.

Front Lines: The Fiction of Timothy Findley, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1991.

(Editor) Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels, House of Anansi Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1995.

Rethinking Women's Collaborative Writing, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2002.

Contributor of more than a dozen articles and reviews to scholarly journals, including Canadian Literature, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Essays on Canadian Writing.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Literary Celebrity in Canada, a study of the star system in Canadian literary institutions.

SIDELIGHTS: Lorraine York once told CA: "I am interested in bringing the findings of other disciplines (the fine arts and political science) to bear on my own. The two main areas of literary thought which have been most important to me are feminist and Marxist theory. The interaction of literature and political ideology fascinates me.

"Feminist and Marxist theory have been important to my writing because I have become aware of the way in which conditions of production relate to the forms and types of literature written in a society. This concept is particularly relevant to a student of Canadian literature, I think, because that literature in itself was born out of rather harsh physical conditions in the nineteenth century and it survived in spite of some equally adverse political conditions of the twentieth century. The Canadian position—that of being a smaller power in direct proximity to a nation that has emerged in this century as a superpower—gives Canadians a special appreciation for marginal discourses. Acquaintances often ask me why there are so many prominent female writers in Canada, and students sometimes ask why so many writers we study together have been attracted to radical critiques of social structures. (Many twentieth-century Canadian poets, for instance, were at one time or another members of Communist or Marxist parties or groups.) My own response is that we as Canadians inevitably speak from the margins. And the teachings of feminist and Marxist theory remind us of how powerful this voice can be."

More recently York added: "As a scholar working in the Canadian literary academy, I've always been interested in the ways in which other systems of knowledge, material practices, or media intersect with the literary, be they photography, warfare, or collaborative forms of authorship. More recently, I have become influenced, like so many of my colleagues, by the influential study of culture now taking place in our universities: popular culture, material cultural practices, globalization. I've become excited by the possibilities of taking that concern into my own field of Canadian literature, and so I've been working on the way in which literary celebrity in Canada and, by extension, in the literary field in general. Influential thinkers include the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, film theorist Richard Dyer, and especially the work of P. David Marshall on celebrity and power.

"In the past, discussions of marketing and of consumer power have been seen to be outside the purview of traditional literary studies; now they are of increasing importance to many of us. In my work on Canadian literary celebrity, I focus on three contemporary case studies: writers Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Carol Shields, whose careers offer three narratives of the workings of literary celebrity in Canada. I also historicize this study, however, by focusing more briefly on several earlier Canadian literary 'stars': Pauline Johnson, the very popular turn-of-the-century poet and stage performer, comic writer Stephen Leacock, 'Jalna saga' author Mazo de la Roche, and Anne of Green Gables creator Lucy Maud Montgomery. I argue that, although many discussions of literary celebrity tend to emphasize its workings in more recent years, somehow assuming that earlier literary periods were less commercialized, many of the workings and tensions of literary celebrity are evident in these earlier figures in our literature.

"My next step is to move beyond the literary institutions—funnily enough, for a scholar trained in the literary—and to examine the workings of Canadian cultural celebrity in general. Focusing again on case studies—but now drawn from film, television, popular music, dance, and sport—I ask how the workings of celebrity in various fields of culture tend to construct notions of citizenship and entitlement. I feel as though I have grown as a scholar along with the evolution of what we still call 'English' literary studies. Now encompassing the field of culture, in all of its manifestations, we are poised to read the world around us: institutions, material practices, the often accepted and bypassed details of our quotidian lives. What could be more important, more exciting?"