The ENGL 470 online conference is a class-wide project that aims to create dialogue on how unique interventions can affect the future of Canadian literature. It is inspired by Canadian Literature<\/i>\u2019s 50th anniversary edition, which \u201csuggests some strategies for changing the ways we read, write, publish and think about literature in Canada\u201d (Erika Paterson). Each project group will research either one of the interventions featured in Canadian Literature <\/i>or a new intervention of their creation, will engage in dialogue with other groups and their research, and will synthesize their finished research and dialogue into a final summary, to be presented at the conference\u2019s end.<\/p>\n
Our group\u2019s research will be based on Daniel Coleman\u2019s intervention, \u201cEpistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.\u201d Coleman resurrects Charles Taylor\u2019s \u201ccall for epistemic justice,\u201d a call that seeks to make us \u201cas students of the Canadian literatures\u201d aware of the assumptions inherent in how we not only judge but analyze literature. Our \u201cContinentally-derived theories\u201d make us interpret works of non-Continental literature through the Continental lens, resulting in knowledge bases that facilitate incongruities such as classifying \u201cthe works of Thomas King or Eden Robinson as examples of postmodernism.\u201d We are thus diverted from the native epistemologies of the non-Continental literature that we seek to understand by our own native, Continental epistemology–our theory of knowledge, that goes something like this:<\/p>\n