Dr. Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire was awarded a $80,928 SSHRC Insight Grant for a project titled: Narratives of the Fall: Contemporary Poetics of Ruin.
Description of the research project:
We are living in times of worry. National narratives in Europe and North America are being shaken and rewritten, unsettling a social and cultural foundation many thought secure. Strife grows as refugees are forced on the perilous crossing of desert and sea, pressed by war and irreversible ecological change. The current pandemic, in turn, further exposes the vulnerable and amplifies systemic inequalities.
Such worries are shaping contemporary French and French-Canadian literatures in a decisive way, driving poetic responses to radically political questions. This research project will survey and theorize this literary shift and, by doing so, challenge our understanding of the contemporary canon. Dr. Gélinas-Lemaire’s approach relies on the mobilization of dozens of recent narratives and that of critical frames from multiples fields, including narratology, literary poetics, as well as spatial and environmental studies.
