Experimental literature accelerated dramatically in Vancouver in the 1960s as the influence of New American poetics merged with the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. Vancouver poets and artists began thinking about their creative works with new clarity and set about testing and redefining the boundaries of literature. As new gardes in Vancouver explored the limits of text and language, some writers began incorporating collage and concrete poetics into their work while others delved deeper into unsettling, revolutionary, and Surrealist imagery. There was a presumption across the avant-garde communities that radical openness could provoke widespread socio-political change. In other words, the intermedia experimentation and the related destruction of the line between art and society pushed art to the frontlines of a broad socio-political battle of the collective imagination of Vancouver.
Finding Nothing traces the rise of the radical avant-garde in Vancouver, from the initial salvos of the Tish group, through Blewointment's spatial experiments, to radical Surrealisms and new feminisms. Incorporating images, original texts, and interviews, Gregory Betts shows how the VanGardes signalled a remarkable consciousness of the globalized forces at play in the city, impacting communities, orientations, races, and nations.
By:
Gregory Betts
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions:
Height: 262mm,
Width: 184mm,
Spine: 28mm
Weight: 880g
ISBN: 9781487505318
ISBN 10: 1487505310
Pages: 392
Publication Date: 13 August 2021
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgments Introduction: Finding Nothing When American Literature Moved to Vancouver Finding Nothing (or, the Avant-Garde Flowering that Was the 1960s) The Problem of Nothing: A Short Interlude on the Theory of the Avant-Garde The VanGardes 1. 1–19 Thoughts on TISH, 1961–1969 (A Document of Response) 2. The Birth of Blew Harmony: Aristotle, Olson, and Vancouver, 1959–1963 Disharmony: Bissett, Collage, and another Vancouver, 1959–1983 The End of Categories: The Vancouver Litter-rary Collage 3. Blew Collage At the Margins of the Garde Blewointment Collage into Canada Literature into Collage (in Vancouver) 4. A Line, A New Line, All One: Variant Narratives of Concrete Canada The Concrete Liturgy Canadian Concrete Other Narratives of Concrete Poetry Judith Copithorne on Vancouver Concrete Coda: The Visual Roots of the Alphabet 5. The Triumph of Surrealism: Magick Art in Vancouver Vancouver Deformance The Surreal West Coast Precursors and Early Forays: Surrealism in Vancouver Canadian Literary Surrealism Super-natural British Columbia: From Lawren Harris to David W. Harris Post-revolutionary Surrealism The Colour of My Dreams 6. Performing Proprioception: The Birthing Story as Public Discourse 7. Avant Now and Then: Locating the Post-Avant Hegemony and the Single Riot Haling Taxi! Locating the Post-Avant Neruda, Chile, and Further Disenchantments Conclusion: “we stopped at nothing” Finding Nothing in the Avant-Garde Archive List of Figures Appendix A: Warren Tallman Elegy Apendix B: Concrete Poetry Appendix C: Glossary of Intermedia and Transdisciplinary Groups Appendix D: Letter to the Editor of the Georgia Straight Works Cited
Gregory Betts is a professor in the Faculty of Humanities at Brock University.
Reviews for Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975
Gregory Betts has produced a literary history of the avant-garde in Canada like no other. Finding Nothing offers deep reflection on the meaning of the new, including accounts of the positive transformational effects upon human structures of perception and the violent forms of erasure that the 'transnational cultural flow' of literary activity in and out of Vancouver has entailed since that space's appropriation by European settlers, through its examination of the histories of modernism, up to the present. With a combination of fastidious archival research, deep critical insight and empathy, and a most engaging style of historical storytelling, Betts has opened up important space for the development of alternative, decolonizing accounts of the literary avant-garde in settler Canada. - Jason Camlot, Professor of English and University Research Chair (Tier I) in Literature and Sound Studies, Concordia University Rich in aesthetic and personal anecdotes gleaned through interviews, Finding Nothing proposes that the mythologies of Vancouver modernist poetics both arose from colonial conditioning and worked against it. Readers will appreciate the intimate photographs and reprints of rare materials from private collections and institutional archives - the collation of these dispersals makes visible these absences from public spaces as an ongoing colonial erasure. - Felicity Tayler, Research Data Management Librarian and Interim Head of Research Services, University of Ottawa
- Winner of 2021 Gabrielle Roy Prize awarded by The Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures 2022 (Canada)
- Winner of Basil Stuart-Stubbs Book Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia 2022 (Canada)
