The
essays in Canadian Architexts and the editions
of Canadian poems of architectural interest that accompany
them on this portion of the Canadian Poetry website
have their origins in my recognition some years ago
that, while landscape has been the subject of a good
deal of Canadian literary scholarship, relatively little
attention has been paid to the relationship between
Canadian literature and architecture. That recognition
led first to the creation of a graduate course, “Civitas
Canadensis: from Shanty to Megacity” (English
585) that was offered in 2001-02 at the University of
Western Ontario, and then, partly as a result of the
potential recognized in the process of designing the
course, an application in the Fall of 2001 for a Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard
Research Grant under the title “Canada’s
‘Archives Architectural’ and Canadian Literature”
(the allusion is to A.M. Klein’s “Montreal”).
The very existence of the “Canadian Architexts”
portion of the Canadian Poetry website is the result
of the success of that application and the support and
generosity that it represents, as well as the support
and generosity of the Department of English, the Faculty
of Arts, and the Academic Development Fund of the University
of Western Ontario.
The
existence of “Canadian Artchitexts” is also
the result of expertise, dedication, and hard work of
a number of colleagues, students, and now ex-students
at the University of Western Ontario who have thrown
their talents and energies into its design, substance,
and maintenance, and into the research upon which it
is based. To Natalie Senst I owe thanks for helping
to bring “Canadian Architexts” into electronic
being, an achievement largely due to the extraordinarily
talented and dedicated Jane Powell, Julia Obert, and
Melissa Harris, to whom I owe enormous debts of gratitude,
not just for their computing talents, but also for their
inspirational camaraderie, their uncompromising perfectionism,
and their unfailingly and unflinchingly good humour.
I also owe large debts of gratitude to Danika Barker,
Jen Esmail, Jodie Elliot, Andre Narbonne, Henna Singh
and, especially, Stephen Artelle for their painstaking
and imaginative work in identifying and assembling material
of literary/architectural interest, and to Gord Nickerson,
R.J. Shroyer, Merran Neville, and Rick Harley for their
expert, generous, and patient attention to the Canadian
Poetry Project’s all-too-high maintenance computers,
scanners, servers, and printer. Finally, my thanks are
due to Beth McIntosh, Lynne Larmour, and Yvonne Hill
for their efficient and sensitive handling of the Project’s
myriad and, it seems, increasingly complex financial
relationships with students and the University.
Every
effort has been made to contact copy-right holders of
materials included in “Canadian Architexts.”
Any copy-right holder whom we have been unable to contact
or to whom inaccurate or inadequate acknowledgement
has been made is invited to notify us. Links to and
from other websites have generally been made by mutual
agreement. Webmasters who wish to provide users of their
site with links to Canadian Poetry or who wish us to
provide links to their site are also invited to notify
us.
Until
this sentence is removed, the editions and essays in
“Canadian Architexts” are works-in-progress,
which is to say that their contents may be modified
and material added to them in the light of new information
and on-going research.
D.M.R.
Bentley |
