modern novel Archives | Research & Innovation

Want compassinate sons? Professor Raymond Mar says get them reading novels

fmaquito — Fri, 13 May 2011 08:00:00 +0000

If you follow the advice below, chances are, your son will turn into the kind of man you want him to be, wrote , in a story about parenting advice for mothers:

Encourage him to read novels. Ongoing studies at 91��ɫ [by psychology Professor Raymond Mar and colleagues in the Faculty of Health] show that people who read more fiction than nonfiction score higher on empathy tests.

Why?

Researchers theorize that the parts of the brain we use to understand how fictional characters feel are the same ones we use to figure out how real people feel. And the more we use those parts of our brain, the stronger our ability to understand others.

See YFile for more coverage of Mar's research.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Third novel by English prof wrestles with what people believe

fmaquito — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ English Professor likens writing novels to driving bumper to bumper at 120 kilometres an hour for half a day, and being emotionally and physically spent by the end. That’s on good days.

“You have to concentrate so hard, but when you get out of the car, you’re just so exhausted. I always find it physically draining,” says Helm, author of the recently published , already number eight on the . Helm will read from his new book at Toronto’s Festival of Arts & Creativity June 12.

Left: Michael Helm. Photo by Alexandra Rockingham.

On bad days, Helm says, he might suddenly think the manuscript he just spent the last seven months working on is boring, “like I was just plodding along”. He has to go back and figure out where he took a wrong turn, made a wrong choice. In the end, it usually works out, but it’s a process punctuated by crises.

Take his new book. After rewriting the first 80 or so single-spaced pages five times, he realized it was becoming a very different story, faster paced, than what he wanted, “the kind of novel I might have written 12 years ago. It wasn't a novel I’d even necessarily want to read anymore,” says Helm, an editor at the literary journal from 1991 to 1998 and co-editor for magazine since 2003. The main character had to go, that much was clear – he was taking over the story. “The draft that wasn't working had a lot of frenetic energy and I needed a book that was slower, but still had dramatic tension – sort of a slower drawing of the story.”

After all, Helm is not the same man he was when his first novel, the Giller Prize-nominated made its surprising debut. Until that point, Helm hadn't published a short story or a poem.

Now, Helm has written his third novel, Cities of Refuge, which takes place in Toronto, a multicultural, cosmopolitan city Helm no longer lives in, but still enjoys for its energy. The problem with trying to write a particular kind of book is the intuitive part of the process doesn’t always cooperate, at least initially, and certainly not the way Helm approaches it. “I usually don’t know where the story is going,” he says. It evolves as he goes. He gets in for the ride and hangs on, never knowing where it's going to stop.

“If you’re doing a good job, it starts to form into recognizable shapes and wholenesses with understructures as you recognize things there you hadn’t realized were there. And that’s a sign you’re doing something right.”

It can't be rushed, though. It requires taking the elements of the novel "as far out as you can until it starts to break apart and you go through a crisis and if you come through that crisis then you’ll see a different thing and you’ll see it better,” he says. “One of the tasks of writers, whether we’re talking about narrative or character, is to take seeming certainties and to drive them into doubt, to the farthest reaches that you can and make them start to break apart. Though it’s no fun when the book does come to a big crisis and you think ‘Oh no, I got this dead wrong’.”

But to create great fiction, risk is part of the process, as is doubt. And so to get to the story he wanted, he had to elevate his two secondary characters to main billing and give them space to develop without really knowing where they would take him. As it turned out, Kim Lystrander, a 28-year-old PhD dropout volunteering at a local agency that helps refugee claimants who have been rejected, and her father Harold, a professor of Latin American history with an undetermined past, wanted to further explore a familiar theme – belief. Helm hadn’t realized at the time that the theme was also present in his last novel and to a lesser extent in his first.

It's about "the investment we make in different kinds of stories, and those can be personal stories, national stories, religious mythic narratives, the things we find meaningful and why do we find them meaningful, and what happens when those stories turn out not to be worthy of our investment," he says. "One question that I think the new book asks is, ‘can a thinking, thoughtful person, embrace old beliefs about story’, which is to say our seemingly fundamental shared instinct, a need to believe, a need to believe things that we can’t always know with certainty have validity."

In Cities of Refuge, Harold, who divorced his wife and abandoned Kim, is forced to confront his dark, unknown past, his beliefs, after the violent attempted rape of his daughter, and becomes obsessed with finding her assailant. Similarly, Kim suddenly doubts those things she once cleaved to as truths; all that has been stripped away. But as Kim gains strength and clarity, Harold falters.

“He’s a guy who’s perpetually contorted so as not to see what’s right in front of him. He doesn’t want to stare at the truth of his life, who he is and how he has behaved in the face of brute power in the past,” says Helm. Whereas Kim contains a "perceptive imagination and she understands him to a degree that he would never understand himself." And their relationship takes on different hues and rhythms in the aftermath.

As Helm says, most people’s characters are fully formed by the time they're adults and they have a good sense of themselves. The trick then is to discover “what we believe and why we’re messed up the way we’re messed up”.

Acting director of 91��ɫ’s Creative Writing Program, Helm is also the author of , a finalist for the regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

Currently, Helm is working on a short novel, under 150 pages, that he is trying his best not to complicate, as he says, crazily.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Professor Michael Helm's novel reviewed in Edmonton Journal

fmaquito — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

, assistant professor of English in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, has published his third novel, . Helm's novel has attracted media attention through reviews and interviews.

Helm's brother, Richard, :

It's a tricky business this, writing about your own brother. But what can I do? He’s produced another damned novel and I’m supposed to write about people who write novels.

Besides, this one’s mighty good.

Michael Helm is 48, he teaches English and creative writing at 91��ɫ in Toronto and makes his home in a leafy little acreage just outside of Dundas. His writings on fiction and poetry frequently appear in North American newspapers and magazines, including Brick magazine, where he has been an editor since 2003. He fancies himself something of a golfer.

Michael and I chatted recently, just a few days before Cities of Refuge hit store shelves.

Q: Are you comfortable being interviewed by your brother?

A: As long as we stick to the book. You don’t mention my strangeness at age seven and I won’t mention any of that stuff from your teen years. I mean, how does a guy get his pants on backward between classes? And then not notice? So none of that. But otherwise it’s fine. And Mom would have approved. So thanks for asking.

Q: It’s been six years since [your last novel] In the Place of Last Things. Is that about the cycle that works for you? Do you sometimes wish you could knock these things off like Alexander McCall Smith?

A; The math is three novels in 13 years, and that doesn’t count the time it took to write the first one. The writer’s either slow or exercising heroic discretion.

It just takes time to get it right. When a novel is forming in the imagination, characters are like invisible planets. I know they’re there because there’s a kind of gravity at work, and this gravity seems to draw a certain kind of language and that’s why I end up writing about this character and not that one. I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious – I’m trying to be exact. If this sounds mysterious, it is, and whatever offers me this mystery is probably why I write.

Q: What's up next? What are you working on now?

A: I have a couple of novels in early stages. I’d like the next one to be short, but it seems to have other ideas.

Novelist Robert Wiersema April 23:

Take Cities of Refuge, the new novel from Toronto writer and previous Giller nominee Michael Helm. The novel begins with a rape scene, but the novel is neither a thriller nor a healing journey, though it includes elements of both. It is set, in part, among Toronto’s immigrant communities, but it is not just an immigrant novel. It struggles with the weight of history, and with philosophical issues, but it is neither historical, nor a novel of ideas. And so on. It is, in short, a mosaic, and a stunning read.

Helm is the author of , which was a Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, and , a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Glendon prof's new Spanish language book looks at human playfulness

fmaquito — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

The main focus for Alejandro Zamora, a professor in Glendon’s Department of Hispanic Studies, is the study of the modern novel, including its philosophical and social issues, which he explores in his recently published book.

(Playing for Self Esteem: Playful Characters in the Modern Novel) (Peter Lang Publishing, 2009) was published as part of the European Union’s academic publication series, European University Studies. It is based on Zamora’s 2006 PhD thesis.

Through the works of some of the most important modern novelists, such as André Gide, Italo Calvino, Witold Gombrowicz, Julio Cortázar, Milan Kundera and others, this book is a literary exploration of human playfulness as an affirmation of authenticity and self-esteem. These human attributes are juxtaposed with the utilitarian, pragmatic and institutional dimensions of everyday life and interpersonal relations in contemporary societies.

Jugar por amor propio is an important contribution to the development of comparative literature in Spanish language. “Literature has a cognitive potential,” says Zamora. “It is an extraordinary tool for the understanding of cultures. It also provides a unique insight into important issues of the human experience – its complexity, its ambiguity, its paradoxes. A comparative system of literary analysis is by its nature multidisciplinary, enabling us to examine writings from psychological, philosophical, sociological, historical, as well as other perspectives.”

Zamora's next major undertaking is the mounting of a trilingual, comparative, interdisciplinary conference on the Glendon campus, from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, titled . The conference is to commemorate and reflect on the bicentennial of Mexican independence of 1810, and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Right: Alejandro Zamora

“The conference also provides an opportunity to examine those other Mexican revolutions, which have occurred or are currently taking place at the margin of the nation’s dominant narratives, at the periphery of nationalistic discourses that assign specific identities for Mexican-ness, at the borders and edges of well-defined and visible systems of power,” says Zamora.

Zamora is currently completing research on childhood and literature, and is writing a book-length essay on this topic. His research for the project took him to the National Film Institute of Madrid in the summer of 2008. While there, he watched three to four movies a day in order to compare the idea of Spanish children in movies made during the Franco era – Catholic, conservative, patriarchal – with those of the post-Franco era, portrayed with all the ambiguities, the questioning and wonderment that children display.

Why study Spanish language and literature? “Because literature is much more than just a collection of stories,” says Zamora. “In fact, literature reveals some of the most intimate aspects of a country and its society, culture, history and people.” As for learning the Spanish language, “…it is the third-largest language group in the world and thus very useful in the global workplace. It is also the necessary key to fully access an extraordinary culture.”

Zamora brings his experience in teaching, journalism, professional and fiction writing to Glendon as a specialist in comparative literature. He examines literature in Spanish, as well as French, Polish and Finnish. In addition, Zamora teaches a Spanish language course with French as the reference language, affirming the trilingual nature of Glendon's Hispanic Studies Program.

He has worked as a journalist for Mexican newspapers, including a weekly column, La ciudad y los libros (The City and Books), from 1996 to 2000, for which he received the Provincial Journalism Award of Michoacán. He has also published fiction and, in 1998, received the Jóvenes Creadores (Young Creators) Award from the government of Mexico's National Fund for Culture and the Arts.

By Marika Kemeny, Glendon communications officer

Republished with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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