City mouse v. country mouse
Hal Niedzviecki’s article from Thursday’s Globe and Mail has drawn a response from Alex Good of Good Reports. Good points out, as we did in In Other Media on Thursday, that the point of an exercise like the one he describes at Humber College’s summer publishing workshop is more corporate than creative. Good also takes issue with Niedzviecki’s calls to find the Canadian equivalents of the likes of “Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, Michel Houellebecq, and Haruki Murakami.” As Good points out, they write “books that could be published and read anywhere,” not unlike the ones that were suggested at the publishing workshop. Writes Good: “There’s an old argument in the background here, between the country and the city parties in CanLitCrit. Niedzviecki is cleary in the city camp, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Canada has plenty of good writers rooted in an urban locale. But their cities are particular places, not flabby constructs like ‘an urban, multi-ethnic, pop-culture-attuned Canada.’ If the students tried to pitch a line like that in the boardroom they’d probably keep their jobs. But I think I might go for the coffee-table book instead.”
Related links:
Click here for Alex Good’s article
Click here for the Globe and Mail article
