ėMaking up the Past: The Archeology of Fiction'
Award-Winning Novelist, Newly Appointed York U. Chair in Canadian Studies Susan Swan Launches Millennial Project to Examine How Contemporary Cultures Reinvent Past

TORONTO, March 4, 1999 -- While researching her new novel, award-winning writer and York University Humanities Professor Susan Swan was struck by how contemporary cultures constantly reinvent the past. Swan, who has just been appointed to the distinguished one-year Robarts Chair in Canadian Studies at York University, will explore this concept further in a millennial project entitled ėMaking up the Past: The Archeology of Fiction.'

"The past is a novel with many different authors, but alas, only one or two of its authors finds a publisher," said Swan, author of five books of fiction including the widely acclaimed Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With (Somerville House, 1996) and The Wives of Bath, (Knopf, 1993) which was nominated for Ontario's Trillium Award for fiction and is being made into a film, along with her first novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, which was nominated for Canada's Governor General's Award.

During a series of public events and readings commencing at York University this fall, novelists, archeologists and historians will look at the way their disciplines re-create the past, examining such questions as who owns the past and whether novelists or historians or archeologists bestow us with a sense of history.

York University Professor Daniel Drache, Director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, said the Centre's executive committee was impressed with Swan's interest in how the imagination affects the way we reconstruct the past. "There is something to be said about going forward into the past at this point in our history," said Drache.

Swan's new novel revolves around the legendary 18th-century Venetian Jacob Casanova and a 20th-century Canadian archeologist. To research the life of modern archeologists, she has been writing her book at the Royal Ontario Museum, aided by Dr. Mima Kapches, Director of the New World Department of Archeology.

Characterized by some reviewers as a hip 20th-century Dickens, Swan's provocative and original novels examine gender, sexuality and the fate of the idealist in a post-modern, global culture. Her most recent public talk was ėThe Burden of Adjustment: Or why I sometimes put up with Racist and Sexist Art' for the 1998 Premier Lecture Series at York University. She has also lectured at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, the University of Bologna, the University of Athens and the Adelaide Writers' Festival. In 1996, she gave the Hugh McLennan Lecture at McGill University, and in 1997 delivered a Celebrated Writers' lecture in Stratford on The Taming of the Shrew.

During her year-long term as Robarts Chair in Canadian Studies, Swan will direct the Creative Writing Program at York and will also teach a graduate course in the fictionalized memoir entitled "Making Yourself Up." Swan replaces outgoing Chair Robert Wallace, who organized the Theatrical Trans/Formations series which brought together some of Canada's best known theatre and dance practitioners to York University to discuss, and in some cases demonstrate, how theatre has transformed Canadian culture.

Established in 1984, York University's Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies has developed a strong program of workshops and conferences on major Canadian cultural and social policy issues ranging from constitutional reform to aboriginal rights.

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For more information, please contact:

Cheryl Dobinson
Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies
York University
(416) 736-5499

Sine MacKinnon
Senior Advisor, Media Relations
York University
(416) 736-2100, ext. 22087
YU/018/99