Public Texts, Part Two: Second Semester Begins

By Jessica Anne Carter It’s the beginning of second semester, marks are coming in, and classes are starting up again. Time to take a breath. Reflect on last semester. Pat ourselves on the back for all the things we’ve accomplished in the past four months. (Yay, us!) Because let’s face it: Grad school is hard. […]

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Hi all! Please, allow us to introduce outselves. :)

Hi all! Welcome to a new school year! My name is Arma; I’ll be taking over for Ross as the blog manager for this school year (2017/2018).  I’ve completed my undergraduate degree as an English Specialist from the University of Toronto Scarborough. I’m now at Trent completing my MA in English (Public Texts)! This year, […]

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Considering the Canadian Public’s Most Fundamental Text: Christopher Moore Talks About the Canadian Constitution in the Face of Canada 150 at the W.L. Morton Lecture 2017

By Jessica Anne Carter On this rather rainy, snowy Thursday evening, I made my way up to Champlain College to hear Christopher Moore’s talk on the Canadian Constitution and how it has held up to the changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Expecting to hear about the outdatedness of a document drafted in the […]

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Welcome!

Welcome to the new cohort of Public Texts students! Looking forward to meeting the class of 2017-18!

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Controlling the Narrative in Dionne Brand’s “What We All Long For”

As part of our English Public Texts reading course entitled “Marginal Notations: Writing the Margins of the 21st Century” each of us will be writing a short blog post about one of the readings we cover in the course. I (Ross Chiasson) will focus on Dionne Brand’s 2005 novel What We All Long For. One […]

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Ten Books You May Have Missed in 2016

What follows is a fact so obvious it probably doesn’t need to be said but I’m going to say it anyway: There is too much content being produced to watch/read/play/listen to everything. Whether you only have an hour or two a week free or you’re simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of possible content, it’s […]

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Yoda is Wrong About NaNoWriMo: Why You Should Still Try NaNoWriMo Even If You’ll Probably ‘Fail’

Unless you’ve been in cryo-stasis since 1979, you’ve heard one of the most famous lines from the Star Wars franchise: Do or do not, there is no try. These words of wisdom uttered by Master Yoda to Luke Skywalker are often lauded by teachers, bosses, and parents as an ideal mindset to have when going […]

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Photo Gallery: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that those of us in the Public Texts program are huge book nerds. I hope the same holds true for anyone reading this post, at least to some degree. As we head into the second half of the Public Texts I course we have finished with our field trips. The […]

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Nuit Blanche 2016

Private, adj: concerning, involving, or affecting a particular person or group of people apart from the general community; individual or personal, rather than communal or shared. Public, adj: done, perceived, or existing in open view.   For my inaugural post to DON’T PANIC! I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate than to write about Toronto’s Nuit […]

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Public Texts symposium: Travel, Displacement, Mobility – May 25

You are invited to a Public Texts symposium – Travel, Displacement, Mobility: Canadian Voices and Cross-Cultural Encounters – which will take place on Wednesday May 25th, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm in Bagnani Hall at Traill College. The symposium is being organized by Dr. Suzanne Bailey (Trent English Department), and Dr. Magali Sperling Beck (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil), as a way […]

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Public Texts represents at SHARP2015

Trent University’s M.A. in English Literature (Public Texts) program was well represented at the recent meeting of SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) in Longueuil and Montreal (July 8 – 10). Posters were presented by Sarah Milner (“Frankenstein as Social Construct”), James Forrester (“Charles Dickens comes to Lakefield: The Lakefield Literary Festival, […]

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That’s a Wrap…

After reading over 500 pages a week, knocking off 6000 word essays like it’s my job, grading papers until I have nightmares about grammatical errors, and spending a small fortune in coffee at the Trend – I can’t believe the Public Texts program my time at Trent is just about over. So I figured for […]

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Let the Masses Go!

Last week, in the Public Texts core course, we discussed deception and manipulation in mass culture. Horkheimer and Adorno, in their essay on “The Culture Industry” critique mass culture because, they claim, it discourages the mass audience to think critically. Instead, audiences are deceived into passively accepting standardized forms of mass culture that reinforce the […]

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Book Review: Sin Eater

Trent is just bursting with talent these days! Every time I turn around, I hear about another member of the Trent community publishing a book. Soon to be Trent Alumna, Angela Hibbs, Bachelor of Education student, recently published a collection of poems called Sin Eater in 2014 with ARP books in Winnipeg. Hibbs previously completed […]

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Seeking our Eden Book Launch Review

It was an exciting day for the Trent English department this Wednesday, as Traill College hosted the book launch for our very own Joanne Findon. Findon’s Seeking our Eden was published this past February by the McGill-Queens University Press, and has so far received a positive review from the University of Ottawa. The book launch […]

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That Awkward Moment when the Dress Broke the Internet… and Proved a Point!

So what color do you think #TheDress is? Unless you have been living under a rock since Thursday evening, you know about the infamous black-and-blue (or white-and-gold) dress that whipped its way across social media in the span of a few hours. That very evening, this optical illusion was featured in news articles, science experiments were […]

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50 Shades of Grey: was Walter Lippmann right all along?

With the recent release of Fifty Shades of Grey in theatres a couple of weeks ago (and our recent class discussion about feeling publics in the Public Texts core course), there has been a ton of media hype for the film, and even more backlash against the risqué content and its perverse messages. So this […]

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Interview with Trent Alumni Affairs Communications Coordinator: Donald Fraser

Hi Public texts comrades! As we move into the second reading week of the year (it’s February already?!) those of us that are in the MRP or Internship stream of the program need to start thinking about what we intend to do after graduation, especially if our career aspirations are outside the realm of academia. […]

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The SPECTACULAR Bowl

This week, in Visual Culture and Modern Publics – a joint course with the History M.A. program at Trent – we discussed the rise of American mass culture, and specifically the international popularity of the exhibition (which, historically, was a national event that displayed the most innovative technological advancements and products of the time) and […]

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Teaching Assistant Union Strike: A Public Affair

There has been some talk amongst the graduate students this past week about a possible teaching assistant strike in the near future. On January 29th, there will be a vote amongst the members of CUPE 3908 Unit 2 to decide whether or not the union will move forward to bargain with the university in order […]

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A Glimpse of the Published Author in the Public Sphere: Janette Platana

Exciting news reached the Public Texts program this week when Janette Platana, Public Texts alumna, launched her new book, A Token of My Affliction, on Tuesday night in Toronto. The book is a collection of 21 short stories, published by Tightrope Books. Just after the launch, I met with Platana to discuss her experience publishing […]

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What’s in a Blog?

A journal by any other name would be as sweet! Greetings, readers! It has been an intense, thought-provoking week for the first week back for Public Texts students. After a very technical semester of learning the history of physical book culture, we have moved into the realm of difficult theories, particularly those of Michael Warner […]

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A Look at Pamela Bannos’ Biography of Vivian Maier by Arma Malik

Pamela Bannos’ text Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, is an enriching case study for a myriad of reasons. The discussion in this biography engages with our goal “to understand how images work to create and sustain publics” (ENGL5114 syllabus, 2018).  A woman unknown by the public becomes the subject of public debate and admiration. […]

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2017 Public Texts Colloquium – Wednesday, April 12

The 2017 Public Texts Colloquium was a great success! Thanks to the speakers, and to everyone who attended this year’s showcase of “Public Texts” research.

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