Prize possession: Literary awards, the GGs, and the CanLit Nation

To date, the discussion of Canadian literary prizes as culturally influential forces --- and indeed as cultural practice --- has remained largely journalistic. "Prize Possession" opens the academic dialogue on the influence of awards on conceptions of Canadian poetry and literary culture by examining Canada's oldest and, until recently, most prestigious literary prizes, the Governor General's Awards. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theorization of the fields of cultural production, this dissertation argues that literary prizes can be read as sites of conflation between 'restricted' cultural endeavours like poetry and more 'large-scale' and popular cultural events by nature of the competitive model introduced by the prizing of the arts, and that this conflation affects the ways in which Canadian poetry is conceived of in both academic and popular communities. The case of the GGs is of particular interest in the era of globalization because of the cultural-nationalist implications invoked and enforced by their federal mandate and sponsorship.;"Prize Possession" begins by arguing that awards can be read as Derridean 'gifts' which initiate a symbolic (and economic) cycle of prestige designed, eventually, to return to the original giver. It then examines the official mandate of the GGs in relation to the major shifts in the history of critical thought about Canadian poetry since the Awards' inception in 1936 and contextualizes the prize's relationship to ongoing debates and conceptions of canonicity. This dissertation then examines shortlisted and winning works from representative years (books by F.R. Scott, Alfred Bailey, and Barry MacKinnon for 1981 [the first year the GGs designated Poetry an independent category], books by Don McKay, Judith Fitzgerald, Anne Michaels, Don Domanski, and Patrick Lane for 1991, and books by George Elliott Clarke, Anne Carson, Steve McCaffery, Robert Kroetsch, and Phil Hall for 200I), as well as selected work by relevant jurists, in order to argue that the Awards continue to uphold a state-sanctioned construction of 'CanLit' that is increasingly incongruent with contemporary critical purviews. The study concludes by speculating on the direction the GGs might take in order to remain viable and engaged in an increasingly globalizing cultural environment. In general this dissertation aims to emphasize how phenomena like prizes --- which are often thought to be extra-literary and market-driven --- are of significant import to literary culture and the way that poetry is portrayed, produced, and consumed in twenty-first century Canada.