ESC: English Studies in Canada

Pouring over Marjorie Garson’s valuable first twenty-five-year history of acute/accute, I am warmly reminded of all the reasons I became so involved in the association in the first place. Like a lot of emerging scholars, I first gleaned an idea that accute even existed when the Learneds invaded my town, that is, the town of the University of Western Ontario, where I was a graduate student in 1978. Talk about a transformative experience. I was a teaching assistant for both English literature and film classes and had no idea what a learned society was until I tagged along with some professors to well-attended panels being hosted by accute and the Film Studies Association. Besides the punishing late May sun and the opportunity to drink a lot of beer outdoors in the middle of the day with scholars whose articles I was devouring, I remember being surprised at the magnitude of the entire Learneds congress, the obvious camaraderie my professors shared with visitors to the Western campus, and the glamorous slate of international stars who were listed on the program for both societies.

Two years later I delivered my first formal conference paper for accute at the congress in Montreal, at the uqam campus, one of those career-marking moments one tracks in a line of continuity with whatever [End Page 4] follows. By then I had signed on to accute and was starting to shape an idea of what being a member of a national professional society meant.

accute has always had a sizable footprint at the Learneds, as they were called until 1998, and I sensed that belonging to it was not only an important gesture of my seriousness as a professional but an essential opportunity for connecting with other graduate students and, more importantly, potential employers. I was easily drawn in by the charisma and confidence of the apparent leaders of the organization—Judith Herz, Frank Davey, Shirley Neuman, Patricia Clements, Norman Feltes—people with guts and an admirable clarity of purpose and vision about what accute had been and needed to be. Before you could say “Business Arising” I was routinely attending the annual general meetings, becoming intrigued in particular by the larger pictures these people so eloquently conjured of the Canadian research environment, the challenges and threats to our community, and, indeed, the fact that we were actually a community about which one could speak so assertively. With apologies to Groucho Marx, I really did care to belong to the club that would have me as a member.

At those agms in the 1980s, I also first witnessed Robert’s Rules being expertly deployed and gathered an early impression of what a well-run meeting should be. To the jaded and the bored, herding a hundred or so stubborn academics toward a consensus was a tired fact of democracy, but to me that very achievement was an awesome demonstration of skills no one had ever before promoted as worthy or admirable, certainly not necessary for getting a tenure-track position in any city worth driving in. I also learned through all those extended and excited debates over motions on the floor about whether accute should be more or less interested in Theory, the World, in Writing, the French, sshrc, and so on, how what we read and taught was intimately connected to something larger than our books and our libraries and the dull little cells in which we graded papers. accute showed me that our own disciplinary project was intimately engaged with the dream of a civil society, with humanist, liberal values, and with a political landscape in which we had major responsibilities. To a Canadian literature scholar who was reading Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies and Frye’s Bush Garden at the time with gusto, accute was becoming my natural home.

And so it has been ever since. Because of the leaders I mentioned above, and others such as Marjorie Stone, Gary Kelly, Linda Hutcheon, and Len Findlay, accute emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and up until the present as a hugely influential player at the Federation. I watched a fearless...