Introduction to the Chair
The Canada Research Chair of Literary and Cultural Transfers was implemented by the University of Ottawa as a concerted research initiative addressing our era's cultural mobility and instability. Its objective is to better understand contemporary culture by taking a scientific and critical look at many of its aspects, by developing new critical paradigms, with which to address its phenomena.
Two inescapable cultural realities gave rise to the Chair. The first is the shock resulting from the many upheavals occurring on the contemporary cultural scene, upheavals perceived both as a potential opening of barriers and as a very real threat of identity wars. The second is the prevalence of the term "transfer" in various networks of communication, in various types of discourse.
The Chair adopts the following position: since transfer has proven to be a central process in contemporary culture, the notion of "transfer" might also prove a useful intellectual instrument, an axis concept, with which these current transformations may be approached and explored. This would entail an initial focus upon the concept itself, an attempt to extract from the various discursive manifestations of "transfer" a core concept, which would then serve as an analytical tool. Furthermore, we shall never lose sight of the very real impact that the current multiplication of transfers has upon our lives-an impact to be addressed, specified, sorted out.
Cultural Transfer
In its simplest, interculturally accepted sense, cultural transfer is the transport of cultural materials from one culture to another. This means displacement and transport, the breaching of distances, the crossing of thresholds. At the point of departure, there is a selection of what to transport, an extraction, a de-contextualisation; at the point of arrival, a reinsertion, a re-contextualisation. The transferred material is transformed in the process, since its identity and its meaning depend on its relation to a context. To be considered, in their effects, are the channels of communication, the networks of transport, the agents, mediation and agency. The process is further complicated by power politics and the value systems at stake. Any analysis of transfers and of the changes they leave in their wake must also address that which is latent within power structures or within the less salient aspects of the process itself.
The intercultural conceptualization of transfer often assumes the existence of stable, homogenous cultures, between which the process of transfer plays out. But it turns out that transfer also occurs within cultures, in more than one direction, across many strata. The Chair must therefore include within its focus these intracultural transfers and, in doing so, develop new critical perspectives to address these notions of stability and unity within specific cultures.
Particular attention shall be paid to the erosion of pivotal sociopolitical identities. The accelerated displacement of peoples, both physical (migratory) and virtual (electronic, without time delay) intensifies and exacerbates the unsettling effect of cultural transfer. Nonetheless, as Lacan observes, "in transfer, the subject builds, constructs something." Taken beyond psychoanalysis, such a statement underscores the inherent "creativity" of transfer, a notion that shall be developed in the course of our research.
