Fw: Faculty meeting - May 8/01 (with documents)

[denis]

Dear Colleagues:
I thought you mind the message (see below) of interest.
Thanks.

Denis (Salter)



PLEASE NOTE NEW EMAIL AND FAX ADDRESSES.


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"Doing a live experiment is like the difference
between cinema and theatre--the audience is 
wondering if you will drop something"--Martyn
Poliakoff (Chemist; Stephen's brother)

Denis Salter
Professor of Theatre
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke St West
Montreal 
H3A 2T6

Telephone  (514) 398 6550
Email via Fax  (309) 294 0444
Regular Fax (514) 487 0157
Email   <denis.salter at mcgill.ca>
            <d.salter at videotron.ca>
    

Home Office
4965, avenue Connaught
Notre Dame De Grace
Montreal 
H4V 1X4

Telephone (514) 487 2568
Email via Fax  (309) 294 0444
Regular Fax (514) 487 0157
Email   <d.salter at videotron.ca>
            <denis.salter at mcgill.ca>

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FACULTY OF ARTS: McGill University


Resolution on the Death of Emeritus Professor Louis Dudek
701.1 Professor Kilgour presented the following resolution on behalf of the author Professor Trehearne:

Louis Dudek, Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, passed away on Thursday, March 22nd, 2001, at the age of 83. His contribution to Canadian literature as essayist, polemicist, critic and commentator gave the Faculty of Arts one of its most eminent scholars, but it is as a poet, and a defender of poetry's value in our lives, that he will be most keenly missed by a wider community of Canadian writers and readers.

Professor Dudek was born in Montreal in 1918. He took the B.A. at McGill in 1939, worked briefly in advertising, and was prominent among the rebellious young poets who participated in First Statement (1942-1945), a seminal "little magazine" in the development of modern Canadian literature. In 1944 he left for doctoral studies at Columbia University under the eminent scholars Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun, then returned to McGill in 1951 to join the Department of English. He established himself promptly on the Canadian scene with his long poems Europe (1954) and En Mexico (1958). Dudek maintained his commitment to the long poem throughout his life: Atlantis, a breakthrough experiment in fragmented modern form, appeared in 1967; Continuations-an ongoing record of the poet's meditative life-appeared in four volumes from 1981 to 2000. In and among these high-water marks Dudek published another sixteen volumes of poetry. His life-long commitment to self-publication, as a means of ensuring the poet's freedom from contamination by the marketplace, and his advocacy of modernism were exemplary for generations of younger poets.

Indeed, throughout his life, Prof. Dudek was active on their behalf. Although he vigorously opposed the teaching of creative writing in universities as yet another means of poetry's institutionalization, he was generous with his time and moral support whenever a young writer approached him with a sheaf of poems-as they did, in their hundreds, across the four decades of his work at McGill. The most famous of such encounters was the day in 1955 when a young Leonard Cohen approached him; Dudek's response was to establish the McGill Poetry Series at his own expense, with Cohen's Let Us Compare Mythologies as its first title. (It may be apocryphal that he also had the young Cohen kneel so he could strike him on either shoulder with the manuscript itself.) This vital role was continued through the many presses with which he was involved: most notably Contact Press, which he founded with Raymond Souster and Irving Layton in 1954, Delta Canada (named after his own one-man little magazine), and DC Books, which he ran with his wife Aileen Collins well into the 1990s. In the course of these efforts such poets as Margaret Atwood, Al Purdy, George Bowering, Daryl Hine and D.G. Jones received vital early publication.

Dudek also earned distinction among the founders of Canadian literary criticism. His pithy, demanding essays were collected in various volumes, most notably in Selected Essays and Criticism (1978) and in a special issue of Open Letter (1981). He was a regular contributor of articles to Canadian academic journals and-in keeping with his commitment to literature as part of daily life-made frequent appearances on CBC Radio 
and in various newspapers as a commentator on the arts and culture. Some of his most noted publications registered his ongoing disagreements with Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. In the former he found a dangerous critical propensity to value the 
contemporary writer only insofar as he or she replicated the patterns of some earlier, universalizing vision; in the latter he condemned the implicit validation of a new popular culture less attentive to the poet's vital function. Meanwhile he pronounced substantially on the complexities of modernism, statements that have since become required reading such as The Theory of the Image in Modern Poetry (1981) and The First Person in Literature (1967), from his lectures on CBC Radio's "Ideas" program. Dudek did not see such public and scholarly commitments as detracting from his vocation as a poet. On the contrary, he always sought forms and modes of poetry that would allow the expression of intellect and insight as readily as the articulation of feeling, and later in his career he found striking new forms for their convergence, perhaps most notably in Ideas For Poetry (1983).

A gifted and natural lecturer, Dudek created one of the most popular and challenging courses in the history of the Faculty of Arts. "Great Writings of Europe," a linked two-year course, brought together the finest literature of the last three centuries in an attempt to understand the dynamic of tradition and subversion that had reached disastrous climax in the twentieth century. The course swelled rapidly from an early enrolment of thirty to five hundred but (to my personal regret as his later student) was abandoned in the campus disruptions and curricular re-directions of the 1960s. He never relented, however, in the Socratic pedagogy that was his hallmark. A visit to his office was a vital experience of intellectual uplift and challenge that never left one indifferent. I still remember scoffing at T.S. Eliot, thinking to please the man who had himself shorn Eliot of a few feathers, only to have Dudek wheel his chair around to my side of the desk, The Waste Land in hand, and declaim from it passages of such intense beauty that I date my own dedication to modernist studies from that moment. It could not be more fitting that the Department of English Students' Association has named their annual award for excellence in teaching The Louis Dudek Award, a mark of gratitude that touched him deeply as he presented the first in 1996.

Though he received such prominent honours as the Order of Canada, Dudek's poetry received little critical attention during his lifetime, a lack I believe he felt keenly, even though he had always shunned the kinds of fame and reputation that popular poets will sometimes earn from their publishers and readers. His death will surely bring about a deepening of attention to his poetry's beauty and accomplishment as much as to its capaciousness of idea. That so much of that work was written during his years at McGill is telling of the university as it was once conceived-as a place in which Matthew Arnold, for instance, to whom Dudek has often been compared, might fulfill both scholarly duties and creative genius with equal brilliance. We can be grateful for the reminder.

I move, Mr. Dean, that the Faculty send a copy of this resolution, along with an expression of its deepest sympathy, to Prof. Dudek's widow, Aileen Collins, and to his son, Professor Gregory Dudek of the School of Computer Science.

701.2 Faculty unanimously accepted the resolution.




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