The Contemporary Leonard Cohen: Reappraisal and Criticism in Canada and Abroad
Sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Recorded on 12/20/2023
Posted in The Authority File
Episode 365
In the third episode of this four-part series, our guests explore the reappraisal of Cohen in their coedited volume The Contemporary Leonard Cohen: Response, Reappraisal, and Rediscovery. Kait Pinder (Acadia University) and Joel Deshaye (Memorial University) discuss the artist’s legacy in Canada, and how negative views of his homeland in works like Beautiful Losers complicate that relationship. They chat about Cohen as a postmodern literary figure, his place in the Canadian cultural canon, and his impact on Jewish communities in Montreal. Further, Kait and Joel zoom out to look at Cohen’s influence outside of Canada and why they wanted to include international perspectives in the book. To close, our guests explain the critical lens the volume applies to Cohen and the self-criticism Cohen imposed on himself and career.
About the guests:
Kait Pinder
Associate Professor, Department of English and Theatre
Acadia University
Kait Pinder is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University. Her recent work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, and The University of Toronto Quarterly.
Joel Deshaye
Professor
Memorial University
Joel Deshaye is a professor at Memorial University. His move to the East Coast stimulated his writing of The American Western in Canadian Literature (2022). His first book was The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980 (2013), which focused partly on Cohen.
Enjoy the conversation? Listen to the rest of the series:
- The 2016 US Elections, SNL, and Applying Contemporaneity
- Exploring Nietzsche and Gossip
- Secular Sainthood, the Archives, and boygenius
Check out our previous series with Wilfrid Laurier University Press:
– Creative Disruption in Scholarship
– Performing Female Blackness
– Canadian Poetry Today
– Animal Studies, Postcolonial Literature, and Multispecies Modernity
– Unpacking the Personal Library
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