FOREWORD

The CLC Kreisel Lecture Series

THE CLC KREISEL LECTURES bring together writers, readers, students, scholars, teachers—and with this book, publisher and research centre—in an open, inclusive, and critical literary forum. The series has also fostered a beautiful partnership between the CLC and CBC Radio 1 Ideas, which has produced exciting broadcasts that feature the lecturers themselves—including Michael Crummey, Heather O’Neill, Margaret Atwood, and Lynn Coady—and further probe each lecture’s themes. Through this partnership, the Kreisel Lectures are able to reach an audience of over a million listeners. The Kreisel Series raises a myriad of issues, at times painful, at times joyful, but always salient and far-reaching: oppression and social justice, cultural identity, place and displacement, the spoils of history, storytelling, censorship, language, reading in a digital age, literary history, and personal memory. The Kreisel Series confronts topics that concern us all within the specificities of our contemporary experience, whatever our differences. In the spirit of free and honest dialogue, it does so with thoughtfulness and depth as well as humour and grace.

These public lectures also set out to honour Professor Henry Kreisel’s legacy in an annual public forum. Author, University Professor, and Officer of the Order of Canada, Henry Kreisel was born in Vienna into a Jewish family in 1922. He left his homeland for England in 1938 and was interned, in Canada, for eighteen months during the Second World War. After studying at the University of Toronto, he began teaching in 1947 at the University of Alberta, and served as Chair of English from 1961 until 1970. He served as Vice-President (Academic) from 1970 to 1975, and was named University Professor in 1975, the highest scholarly award bestowed on its faculty members by the University of Alberta. Professor Kreisel was an inspiring and beloved teacher who taught generations of students to love literature and was one of the first people to bring the experience of the immigrant to modern Canadian literature. He died in Edmonton in 1991. His works include two novels, The Rich Man (1948) and The Betrayal (1964), and a collection of short stories, The Almost Meeting (1981). His internment diary, alongside critical essays on his writing, appears in Another Country: Writings by and about Henry Kreisel (1985).

The generosity of Professor Kreisel’s teaching at the University of Alberta profoundly inspires the CLC in its public outreach, research pursuits, and continued commitment to the ever-growing richness, complexity, and diversity of Canada’s writings. The Centre embraces Henry Kreisel’s pioneering focus on the knowledge of one’s own literatures. It is in his memory that we seek to foster a better understanding of a difficult world, which literature can help us reimagine and even transform.

The Canadian Literature Centre was established in 2006, thanks to the leadership gift of the noted Edmontonian bibliophile, Dr. Eric Schloss.

MARIE CARRIÈRE

Director, Canadian Literature Centre

Edmonton, May 2019