Cormier takes up France Daigle’s postmodernist Pour sûr (2011), a Governor General’s Award-winning novel that depicts the day-to-day lives of a group of Acadians in Moncton, New Brunswick, over the course of 1728 fragments that belong to various aspects of Acadian culture, as a case study for a new methodology that aims to offer innovative means of studying minor literatures in Canada.
First, it does so by distant reading the novel’s quantifiable aesthetics—fragments, intertextuality, self-reflexivity—using digital tools, with data visualizations that show hidden patterns and clusters indicative of an unconscious cultural memory; second, it close reads these patterns and clusters alongside the author’s self-reflexive interjections as sites of conflict, sites that affectively construct their depiction of Acadian identity.

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Dean Irvine is an associate professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University and director of the SSHRC-funded Editing Modernism in Canada project. He is the author of Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916-1956 (University of Toronto Press, 2008), and editor of Archive For Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay (Arsenal Pulp, 1998), Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924-61 (Vehicule, 2003), and The Canadian Modernists Meet (University of Ottawa Press, 2005). His forthcoming work includes a new monograph, Variant Readings: Editing Canadian Literature in English, under contract to McGill-Queen's University Press, and a two-volume critical edition, co-edited with Robert G. May, of F.R. Scott's complete poems and translations. He is a general editor, with Zailig Pollock and Sandra Djwa, of the multivolume print edition and digital archive of the collected works of P.K. Page and the director and English-language general editor of the University of Ottawa Press's Canadian Literature Collection/Collection de littérature canadienne.

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