Canlit and the Culture of Confession

Join MISC at 4:00 pm on Tuesday, November 26th at the Faculty Club (3450 McTavish Street) for the 2024 Fall Eakin Lecture, Canlit and the Culture of Confession, by Dr. Myra Bloom.

Confession is everywhere in our culture. It drives banal social media posts, salacious reality television shows, revolutionary social justice movements, and is prominent in literature. Confession has also been central to feminist movements throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Nevertheless, self-disclosure comes laden with an array of dangers, particularly for women: that they will be disbelieved or retraumatized, seen as narcissistic and/or unliterary, or professionally stereotyped and blocked from opportunities. Moreover, ‘the personal’ has become such a dominant lens through which we view art by women that even writers of fiction risk being misread as autobiographers. In this talk, Dr. Bloom will discuss how writers negotiate the potentialities and pitfalls of confession, focusing specifically on Canadian women including Nelly Arcan, Sheila Heti, Sina Queyras and Tanya Tagaq, whose experiments in life writing are fueling literary innovation in this country. Dr. Bloom will also show how Canlit itself has become confessional, as personal disclosure increasingly shapes its texts, institutions, and discourse.

Myra Bloom is an Associate Professor of English at York University’s Glendon College in Toronto and is currently the Eakin Fellow at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Her research is focused on Canadian women's writing and intercultural relations in Québecois fiction. She is completing a SSHRC-funded monograph on confessional Canadian women's writing, Evasive Maneuvers. Her scholarship and criticism are published in various academic and popular venues, including in a recent issue of The Walrus dedicated to the best arts and culture writing of the past 20 years. Her collection Shelter in Text, co-edited with Kasia Van Schaik, is being published by University of Alberta Press in Fall 2025.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and reception. This event is free and open to public; registration is required via Eventbrite.

The Eakin Lecture series is bi-annually organized by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, as a part of the Eakin Visiting Fellowship in Canadian Studies established by the Eakin family in memory of William R. Eakin. The fellowships are awarded each term to active scholars whose research or teaching advances Canadian Studies.