The Contemporary Leonard Cohen: Secular Sainthood, the Archives, and boygenius
Sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Recorded on 12/27/2023
Posted in The Authority File
Episode 366
In the final episode of this series, Kait Pinder and Joel Deshaye, coeditors of The Contemporary Leonard Cohen: Response, Reappraisal, and Rediscovery, discuss Cohen’s legacy and future Cohen studies. First, Joel explains how the popularization of Cohen as a “secular saint” coincided with the degradation of religion in the 1960s by counterculture movements. Next, Kait chats about Cohen’s impact on modern music through the 2023 song “Leonard Cohen” by indie rock group boygenius. She also references Lana Del Rey’s 2018 track “Mariners Apartment Complex,” exploring how today’s artists reinterpret and allude to Cohen in their songwriting. Finally, Kait and Joel dig into the Cohen estate’s goal to collect Cohen’s archives into a centralized location. They highlight the importance of accessibility and flexible reproducibility of Cohen’s records to further scholarship and generate new listeners and readers of Cohen for generations to come.
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
- Reappraisal and Criticism in Canada and Abroad
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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