{"id":265351,"date":"2020-08-15T05:47:08","date_gmt":"2020-08-15T09:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=265351"},"modified":"2020-08-15T05:47:08","modified_gmt":"2020-08-15T09:47:08","slug":"radical-hope-what-young-dreamers-in-literature-can-teach-us-about-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2020\/08\/15\/radical-hope-what-young-dreamers-in-literature-can-teach-us-about-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"Radical hope: What young dreamers in literature can teach us about COVID-19"},"content":{"rendered":"
The arts, literature and culture provide models for hope and resilience in times of crisis.
\n(Marc-Olivier Jodoin\/Unsplash)<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We rarely associate youth literature with existential crises, yet Canada\u2019s youth literature offers powerful examples for coping with cultural upheaval.<\/p>\n

As a scholar of modernism, I am familiar with the sense of uncertainty and crisis that permeates the art, literature and culture of the modernist era. The modernist movement was shaped by upheaval. We will be shaped by COVID-19, which is a critical turning point of our era.<\/p>\n

Societal upheaval creates a literary space for \u201cradical hope<\/a>,\u201d a term coined by philosopher Jonathan Lear to describe hope that goes beyond optimism and rational expectation. Radical hope is the hope that people resort to when they are stripped of the cultural frameworks that have governed their lives.<\/p>\n

The idea of radical hope applies to our present day and the cultural shifts and uncertainty COVID-19 has created. No one can predict if there will ever be global travel as we knew it<\/a>, or if university education will still to be characterized by packed lecture halls<\/a>. Anxiety about these uncertain times is palpable in Zoom meetings and face-to-face (albeit masked) encounters in public.<\/p>\n

So what can literature of the past tell us about the present condition?<\/p>\n

What we see in the literature of the past<\/h2>\n

Consider Canadian author L.M. Montgomery<\/a>, a master of youth literature. In her books, Montgomery grapples with change. She provides examples of how youth\u2019s visions and dreams shape a new hopeful future in the face of devastation. I have read and taught her novels many times. However unpacking her hope-and-youth-infused work is more poignant in a COVID-19 world.<\/p>\n

Her pre-war novel Anne of Green Gables<\/em> represents a distinctly optimistic work, with a spunky orphan girl in search of a home at the centre. Montgomery\u2019s early work includes dark stories as subtexts, such as alluding to Anne\u2019s painful past in orphanages only in passing. Montgomery\u2019s later works place explorations of hope within explicitly darker contexts. This shift reflects her trauma during the war and interwar eras. In a lengthy journal entry<\/a>, dated Dec. 1, 1918, she writes, \u201cThe war is over! \u2026 And in my own little world has been upheaval and sorrow \u2014 and the shadow of death.\u201d<\/p>\n

COVID-19 has parallels with the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more than 50 million people<\/a> and deepened existential despair. Montgomery survived the pandemic. In early 1919, her cousin and close friend Frederica (Frede) Campbell died of the flu. Montgomery coped by dreaming, \u201cyoung dreams \u2014 just the dreams I dreamed at 17.\u201d But her dreaming also included dark premonitions of the collapse of her world as she knew it. This duality found its way into her later books.<\/p>\n

Rilla of Ingleside<\/em><\/a>, Canada\u2019s first home front novel \u2014 a literary genre exploring the war from the perspective of the civilians at home \u2014 expresses the same uncertainty we feel today. Rilla<\/em> includes over 80 references to dreamers and dreaming, many through the youthful lens of Rilla Blythe, the protagonist, and her friend Gertrude Oliver, whose prophetic dreams foreshadow death. These visions prepare the friends for change. More than the conventional happy ending that is Montgomery\u2019s trademark, her idea of radical hope through dreaming communicates a sense of future to the reader.<\/p>\n

The same idea of hope fuels Montgomery\u2019s 1923 novel Emily of New Moon<\/a><\/em>. The protagonist, 10-year-old Emily Byrd Starr, has the power of the \u201cflash,\u201d which gives her quasi-psychic insight. Emily\u2019s world collapses when her father dies and she moves into a relative\u2019s rigid household. To cope, she writes letters to her dead father without expecting a response, a perfect metaphor for the radical hope that turns Emily into a writer with her own powerful dreams and premonitions.<\/p>\n

What we can learn from the literature of today<\/h2>\n

Nine decades later, influenced by Montgomery\u2019s published writings, Jean Little wrote an historical novel for youth, If I Die Before I Wake: The Flu Epidemic Diary of Fiona Macgregor<\/em><\/a>. Set in Toronto, the book frames the 1918 pandemic as a moment of both trauma and hope. Twelve-year old Fiona Macgregor recounts the crisis in her diary, addressing her entries to \u201cJane,\u201d her imaginary future daughter. When her twin sister, Fanny, becomes sick with the flu, Fiona wears a mask and stays by her bedside. She tells her diary: \u201cI am giving her some of my strength. I can\u2019t make them understand, Jane, but I must stay or she might leave me. I vow, here and now, that I will not let her go.\u201d<\/p>\n

A decade later, M\u00e9tis writer Cherie Dimaline\u2019s<\/a> prescient young adult novel The Marrow Thieves<\/a><\/em> depicts a climate-ravaged dystopia where people cannot dream, in what one of the characters calls \u201cthe plague of madness.\u201d Only Indigenous people can salvage their ability to dream, so the protagonist, a 16-year-old M\u00e9tis boy nicknamed Frenchie, is being hunted by \u201crecruiters\u201d who are trying to steal his bone marrow to create dreams. Dreams give their owner a powerful agency to shape the future. As Dimaline explains in a CBC interview with James Henley<\/a>, \u201cDreams, to me, represent our hope. It\u2019s how we survive and it\u2019s how we carry on after every state of emergency, after each suicide.\u201d Here, Dimaline\u2019s radical hope confronts cultural genocide and the stories of Indigenous people.<\/p>\n

Radical hope helps us confront the devastation wrought by pandemics both then and today, providing insight into how visions, dreams and writing can subversively transform this devastation into imaginary acts of resilience. Through radical hope we can begin to write the narrative of our own pandemic experiences focusing on our survival and recovery, even as we accept that our way of doing things will be transformed. In this process we should pay close attention to the voices and visions of the youth \u2014 they can help us tap into the power of radical hope.\"The<\/p>\n

Irene Gammel<\/a>, Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, Ryerson University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The arts, literature and culture provide models for hope and resilience in times of crisis. (Marc-Olivier Jodoin\/Unsplash) We rarely associate …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":265352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-265351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-art-and-culture","mauthors-irene-gammel-ryerson-university","mauthors-the-conversation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265353,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265351\/revisions\/265353"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}