Randy Boyagoda

U of T's Randy Boyagoda's idiosyncratic survey of great Canadian reads

noreen.rasbach — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 17:23:03 +0000

U of T's Randy Boyagoda's idiosyncratic survey of great Canadian reads

noreen.rasbach Fri, 12/15/2017 - 12:23

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U of T English professor and novelist Randy Boyagoda recommends five from his personal Canadian literature library (photo by João Silas/Unsplash)

Randy Boyagoda

Topic

Our Community

Department of English

Humanities

The Conversation

Subheadline

What better season than winter to curl up with some interesting books? The Conversation went to ScotiaBank Giller Prize-nominated novelist and ��Ƶ English professor Randy Boyagoda and asked him to recommend to us five of his personal book choices from the shelves of Canadian literature.

Randy Boyagoda published his first novel, Governor of the Northern Province, in 2006, followed by Beggar’s Feast in 2011. His new novel, Original Prin, is forthcoming in 2018.

He surveyed his shelves and here are his five idiosyncratic choices:

Black Robe

Written by Brian Moore (1985)

Black Robe is historical fiction set in 17^th-century Canada – meaning New France. It’s a novel involving an encounter that French Jesuit missionaries have with members of the Algonquin, Huron and Iroquois.

What I found so remarkable about the book is its potential contribution to our contemporary conversation about truth and reconciliation, especially given that it was written in a very different cultural moment.

I think the book is honest and bracing and has a certain spaciousness of vision that attempts to provide full and meaningful lives for every character.

Arrival: The Story of CanLit

Written by Nick Mount (2017)

Arrival (Anansi) by Nick Mount, has rightly been generating a great deal of both public and critical attention this fall.

Nick’s book is an ambitious and readable effort to tell the story of how we went from being a nation without a literature to a literature without a nation. The book explores a specific interest in what we might think of as the “boom time” of Canadian literature, from the late '60s through the early '70s.

What I found especially interesting about Nick’s book is his willingness to offer a series of evaluations, ratings even, of various Canadian novels. We live in a culture that sometimes shies away from making aesthetic and critical judgments. I think what’s great in Arrival is that Nick invites us to read these books and disagree with him.

The Great Canadian Novel

I’m trying to decide whether I disagree with Nick when he says in his book, Arrival, that The Double Hook by Sheila Watson (1959), which is a slim and complex mid-century Canadian novel, is the Great Canadian Novel.

That’s a big claim. If I were going to make the same claim, I’d assign that honour to Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler (1989).

I’ve decided to read Double Hook in the coming weeks and decide if I agree with Nick or not.

The Way of the Strangers

Written by Graeme Wood (2017)

The Way of the Strangers is a work of striking literary journalism. It recently won the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. Wood is best known for his cover story in The Atlantic two years ago, on ISIS. His book is a series of first-person essays, travelogues and analyses of radical Islam.

Wood goes to various Middle Eastern states, places in the U.S., and elsewhere. There’s wide, personal contact with people in various forms of radicalization and he’s also subjected to various attempts at conversion – reading about that is also fascinating.

Wood’s care, seriousness and persuasive criticisms of radical Islam shows that understanding his subject only in political terms or as a misrepresentation of Islam does not do justice to the complex and riven reality of contemporary Islam. As an outsider who’s interested in these matters, I found the book really engaging.

A news-minded audience would find a book like this of real interest. It really does give you a sense of the inner lives of people who have committed to a radical interpretation of Islam and are trying to live that out in the world around them.

The quality of writing and reporting is excellent and the book is especially timely now for obvious reasons. I think that it will be an important historical document in global affairs 30 years from now.

Fifteen Canadian Poets x 2

Edited by Gary Geddes (1978)

My last pick involves a family tradition.

Most Sunday nights, the Boyagoda family gathers in our own library and we each read a poem. I choose my Sunday poem out of Fifteen Canadian Poets x 2 edited by Gary Geddes. It came out in 1978. The book was a very important and timely anthologizing of new Canadian poetry and also at that point, established poets. There are people in there ranging from E.J. Pratt to then emerging voices, such as Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood.

When I pick out a writer of that anthology, the writers I go for most often are poets like P.K. Page, Raymond Souster and Alden Nowlan. Here are people who write beautiful, arresting, strange and funny poetry. Reading from it is a double break: It’s a nice break, frankly, from the usual suspects, and it also introduces my American-born wife, who has a PhD in 20^th-century American and Caribbean poetry, I add, and our American children, to all the wonders of Canadian literature, poetically.

Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English and Principal and Vice-President of the University of St. Michael's College at U of T.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Randy Boyagoda on the role of a Roman Catholic college in a "proudly secular public-research university"

ullahnor — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 17:36:03 +0000

Randy Boyagoda on the role of a Roman Catholic college in a "proudly secular public-research university"

ullahnor Tue, 10/18/2016 - 13:36

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(photo by Viola Ma)

Randy Boyagoda

Author legacy

Randy Boyagoda

Topic

City & Culture

St. Michael's College

U of T

Religion

Undergraduate Students

Cities

Professor Randy Boyagoda is principal and vice president of the University of St. Michael’s College in the ��Ƶ and holds the Basilian chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters.

A biographer, novelist and former Scotiabank Giller Prize nominee, he recently wrote about St. Mike's for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I had a student’s complete attention. This is a rare prize for a professor, never mind for a dean standing at centre court. I had been invited to the varsity field house to deliver an invocation address on the meaning of a college education and was scheduled to speak in the middle of a pep rally. My remarks were sandwiched between a flash-mob dance and the debut of the school mascot.

After proving my bona fides by leading them in the school cheer, I congratulated the members of the incoming class of the University of St. Michael’s College in the ��Ƶ on choosing to join an avowedly Roman Catholic liberal-arts college that’s part of a proudly secular public-research university. This double affiliation will not be easy for my students – who include both practicing and nonpracticing Catholics, students of other faiths, and "nones," an especially ironic homonym at a Catholic college – but it creates a great opportunity to develop fresh models of dialogue, even integration, in a world riven by endless conflicts between the sacred and the secular.

I proposed as much that night in the field house, all the while wondering how that one particularly attentive student took in my words. She had an excellent poker face, and she was wearing a hijab. As a publicly committed Muslim, did she feel excluded because some of my remarks were explicitly Catholic? Or did she feel included because she could tell that she was entering an academic community that confidently affirms its own religious identity and practice, and from this source is just as open to those of others, including hers?

Fifty years ago, that kind of affirmation and openness worked very well in Toronto. St. Michael’s College professors like Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Maritain, and Étienne Gilson taught students from their Catholic school and from across the larger secular university what it meant to take a religiously informed view of the leading scholarly, intellectual, and public questions of the day – and what could be discovered in the process.

Gilson, arguably the pre-eminent medievalist of the 20th century, in fact accepted a job offer at St. Michael’s over Harvard because he wanted to be part of both a small Catholic intellectual community and a large research university, a combination that made possible scholarly work and teaching along a cosmopolitan sacred/secular axis. That’s historically interesting and a great story to tell donors and alumni, but it says little to the Class of 2020, young people confronting a larger world in which such binary thinking and practice make for a great deal of mutual suspicion and animosity.

These days, religious interests and commitments rarely play out with much grace or salutary effect on campuses. Religiously affiliated colleges too easily fall prey to stridency and divisiveness in affirming their confessional commitments; nonreligious colleges denude religious experience of its depth and richness either by framing it as the object of exclusively academic study or by confining it to purposefully bland multifaith gathering spaces. There are also historically religious colleges so eager to demonstrate their evolution from dim confessional pasts to the bright secular present that they tend to celebrate most every faith save their own.

There’s a more charitable construal, of course, for these tendencies and practices. I’m not interested in it. I’m more interested in preparing students to integrate their faith and intellectual commitments in ways that are mutually challenging, engaging, and relevant, in and beyond the classroom, and likewise for students without religious commitments to accept the reality, and indeed the potential benefits, of engaging with religiously serious people.

This is absolutely necessary for all concerned, because religion will never disappear from human experience, any more than rejection and critiques of religion will disappear. In other words, we need to move from an elite First World presumption that you’re either religious or you’re not, with all the stereotypical assumptions that flow from those positions, to a situation in which more and more people are confident and capable in being both religiously serious and thoughtfully secular.

But how do you do that if you’re 18 and attending a private Catholic college federated with a public secular university, situated in the heart of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan and diverse cities? Not by going backward, as I discovered. At the conclusion of my invocation address, and mindful that this was a pep rally, I informed the students that in addition to a wildly popular school cheer, St. Michael’s also has a centuries-old chant that remains alive today as part of our Catholic identity and tradition. This chant calls on our patron saint to pray for us. I invited them all to try it out with me – in the original Latin.

The result was a giggling, mumbling mess. Given their inborn millennial suspicion of the pietistic and ideological, they let me know this didn’t feel relevant to them, easy citizens of Drake’s 21st-century Toronto. So I challenged them to join me in making it feel relevant. Then I started spitting DJ beats into the microphone and invited the incoming class to join me in a call-and-response hip-hop version of "St. Michael the Archangel, pray for us."

There was still a lot of giggling, but the voices were louder, and the vibe was joyful rather than awkward. I looked up into the bleachers: That young woman in the hijab was still staring at me, but she wasn’t poker-faced anymore. She was smiling. Was this because her new college principal was making a holy fool out of himself? Or was it because she was down with this playful little bit of evidence that the sacred and secular can in fact intersect in fresh and positive ways on campus, ways that are open to all of the students who have chosen membership in a religious college at a secular university, including her? I think (and pray) that she was smiling for both reasons.

(This article was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education on Oct. 16 and is reprinted here by permission.)