Remembering an early CanLit booster
Literature professor Gordon Roper, who died last month at the age of 93, is remembered in a Toronto Star obituary. A Peterborough native, Roper taught at the University of Chicago and then at U of T’s Trinity College — where he managed to sneak some Canadian content onto the reading list. As Star obituary writer Catherine Dunphy writes, Roper “hatched a plot with a colleague in the divinity school to devise a course of Canadian content he called ‘Spiritual Issues in Literature.’ ‘That’s how he got Canadian literature on to the syllabus,’ said Neufeld [James Neufeld, now chair of Trent University’s English department]. ‘It was one of the best courses I ever took. I taught CanLit at Trent on the basis of that course.’”
Related links:
Click here for the obituary of Gordon Roper
