Canada

In our contemporary, increasingly transnational world, national literatures may seem increasingly arbitrary—even more so in the context of electronic literature, whose barriers of circulation tend to be marked by transnational, rather than national, groupings based on, for example, language or access to certain technologies. In contrast to the frequently (hyper-)nationalized literatures of mainstream literary study, electronic literature is often framed as an international or transnational literature. There are very good reasons for this: for example, the medium of electronic literature naturally lends itself to transnational dissemination and readership through the global reach of the internet. However, this transnational approach, which frequently exhibits an unacknowledged bias towards works produced in the US, also frequently ignores the ways in which an understanding of national contexts may enrich the understanding of a work. Through this paper, I hope to facilitate discussion regarding the relative merits and demerits of a transnational or national framing of electronic literature by using my own larger project, which focuses on works responding to Canadian contexts, and its sub-study of the decidedly transnational setting of J.R. Carpenter’s Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl as a case study. This paper begins by briefly describing my larger project, which examines works of electronic literature that consider how gendered, queer, racialized, and economicallydisenfranchised identities navigate physical, regionalized Canadian spaces of the past, present, and future. In this project, I examine e-lit that uses temporally- and spatially-dynamic techniques to explore how marginalized identities operate on the peripheries and navigate Canadian spaces and historical contexts, and how these works trouble the dominant narratives that these marginalized groups encounter and resist. As a part of this study, I look at J.R. Carpenter’s works of electronic literature, which transform the aesthetics of predominantly male-authored printbased forms into non-linear, female-narrated digital explorations of girlhood and the formation of gender identity. In this paper, I briefly consider the thematic trajectory of Carpenter’s works (from a focus on Nova Scotia and North American maritime settings, to Montreal and urban settings, to a transatlantic aesthetic) before diving into a short case study of her work Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, set in a transatlantic space. The location of the work’s narrative in transatlantic waters means that this work is less obviously situated within a Canadian space, thus troubling my framing of her work within a Canadian context and making this work a perfect candidate for a study with a transnational approach. However, this work is also very much informed by the diasporas of the British Isles towards the now Atlantic Canadian shores, and the pre-digital communication networks that grew out of the transatlantic relationship between these two landforms. Thus, I argue that an understanding of both Canada’s history of colonization and exploration and its transnational underpinnings enriches our understanding of this work in which a girl’s appropriation and transformation of narratives of past colonialist endeavours is a subversive repurposing of those words in service of a feminist journey of personal discovery.

In the conclusion of *Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English* (1965), Northrop Frye asserts that there “is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference” (821). This paper will partly push against this tendency in Canadian literary criticism and will consider a select instance of Canadian electronic literature. In Frye’s terms, “Canadian sensibility” is “profoundly disturbed” not only by “our famous problem of identity,” which can be, in part, summarized by the question of “[w]ho am I?,” but by the question of “[w]here is here?” (826). I claim that *here* in the question of “where is here?” has become digital; i.e., “we” (as in Canadian writers and critics) are now online and not in the prairies or the lakes or the cityscapes and we live lives in which our identities (along with the potentiality of a national identity) have been outsourced to an indefinite electronic space. Identity is experienced through the mirrors of technological avatars and doubles in a mise en abyme of electronic spacelessness. I call it “spacelessness” because the ontology of this “space”—the space of the digital—is indiscrete and indefinite; it remains, to put it in the terms of Alan Liu (when applying Derrida’s notion of the transcendental signified to “data pours” [“59]), “transcendent” (62). Extrapolating from Liu, the space of electronic literature should be conceived as being “transcendent” as opposed to “immanent”—to use a Deleuzoguattarian term—but this notion of transcendence is unique in that a materiality of space is nonetheless configured through the complicated interplay of technological and subjective doubling, which renders materiality in very new terms and in a very new place. To put this argument differently, I would say that the emergence of Canadian electronic literature is still concerned with the question of “where is here,” but now the orientation of here is situated in a very different notion of “environment.” This new notion of environment is no longer a directly “Canadian” environment—an environment of mountains, trees, fields, prairies, lakes, and rivers that is inhabited by moose, geese, humans, and various other non-humans—but rather an environment that features an extreme plurality and a profound lack of both subjectivity and space. The electronic environment that is presented by Canadian electronic literature is not a void-space of subjective inexistence, but a material space of sociocultural heterogeneity; in other words, it is a space that is constituted as a vague, expansive, and indefinite commons. This argument will be primarily grounded in an in-depth analysis of Darren Wershler’s *NICHOLODEON* and *NICHOLODEONLINE* (but many other examples will be considered as well). *NICHOLODEONLINE* is akin to an archaeological locale that requires nonlinear apprehension: the text does not progress in a linear fashion (as it does in the print version for example), but rather proceeds through the nonlinear processes of clicking through the various pathways of what could be called its “ganglion” (a term that is very important for bpNichol).