Joel Deshaye

Position

Full Professor

Education

  • PhD (McGill University)
  • MA (University of Saskatchewan)
  • BA Hon (University of Saskatchewan)

Contact Information

Research Interests

Canadian literature, especially fiction and poetry; metaphor; celebrity; film; genre

Selected Publications

Books

  • The Contemporary Leonard Cohen: Response, Reappraisal, and Rediscovery, co-edited with Kait Pinder, WLUP, 2023.
  • The American Western in Canadian Literature. University of Calgary Press, 2022.
  • The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980. University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Articles 

  • “Fair Warning: Costs of Poetry and Its Copyrights,” by Joel Deshaye and Erin Patterson, forthcoming from English Studies in Canada, 2026.
  • “The Media of Environmental Listening in Don McKay’s Songs for the Songs of Birds.” Canadian Literature. no. 256, 2024, pp. 102-122.
  •  “The Medium Is the Message Is the Metaphor: Cool Reason and the Young Intellectual Public of Marshall McLuhan.” The Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 44, 2019, pp. 49-68.
  • “Theatrical and Self-Conscious Metaphor in Modern Realism: Ernest Hemingway and Morley Callaghan Reunited, Parts 1 and 2.” The Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 71, 2018, pp. 173-99.
  • “Late Style and Automortography in Leonard Cohen’s Circle of Public Life.” Canadian Poetry, vol. 82, 2018, pp. 12-31.
  • “‘Do I Feel Lucky?’: Moral Luck, Bluffing, and the Ethics of Eastwood’s Outlaw-Lawman in Coogan’s Bluff and the Dirty Harry Films.” Film-Philosophy, vol. 21, no. 1, 2017, pp. 20-36.
  • “Racialized Rooms and Technologies of Stardom in Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2016, pp. 1-15.  
  • “Tom King’s John Wayne: The Western in Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature, vol. 225, 2016, pp. 66-80.
  • “The Metaphor of Celebrity, Three Superheroes, and One Persona or Another.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 47, no. 3, 2014, pp. 571-90.
  • “Irving Layton’s Televised ‘Public Poetry’ and The Pierre Berton Show.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, vol. 73, 2013, pp. 32-53.
  • “Celebrity and Passing in Gwendolyn MacEwen’s The T.E. Lawrence Poems.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 46, no. 3, 2011, pp. 531-50.
  • “Celebrity and the Poetic Dialogue of Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen.” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, vol. 34, no. 2, 2009, pp. 77-105. 
  • “Parading the Underworld of New Orleans in Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter.” American Review of Canadian Studies, vol. 38, no. 4, 2008, pp. 473-94.
  • “Callimachus: Avoiding the Pitfalls of XML for Collaborative Text Analysis.” Jeff Smith, Joel Deshaye, and Peter Stoicheff. Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 21, no. 2, 2006, pp. 199-218.
  • “Attention from Saskatchewan: The Psychedelic History of The Doors of Perception and Island.” Aldous Huxley Annual, vol. 2, 2003, pp. 181-205.

Book Chapters

  • “Masculinity, Civilization, and Apocalypse in Recent Canadian Westerns: Clifford Jackman’s The Winter Family and Aaron Tucker’s Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys.” The Routledge Companion to Transnational Westerns, edited by David Rio, Marek Paryz, and Christopher Conway. Under contract.
  • “‘That Eventual Stranger’: Towards Unrecognizability in [Michael Ondaatje’s] Warlight.” Do You Want To Be Happy and Write? Critical Essays on Michael Ondaatje. Edited by Robert Lecker. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2023, pp. 379-395.
  •  “Rumour and the Celebrity of American Historical Figures in Contemporary Women’s Canadian Westerns.” The Western in the Global Literary Imagination. Edited by Marek Paryz, David Rio, and Christopher Conway. Brill, 2023, pp. 38-53.
  •  “Canada’s Triumph Comics and David Garneau’s Métis Response to the ‘Indian’ of the Comic Book Western.” The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre. Edited by Christopher Conway and Antoinette Sol. University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Winner of the Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture, 2023.
  • “Listening to the Unscripted: Aura and Experience in Irving Layton’s Televisual Archives.” CanLit across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Edited by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019, pp. 205-220.
  • “The Hero’s Energy in Newfoundland and Labrador.” The Democracy Cookbook. Edited by Alex Marland and Lisa Moore, ISER Books, 2017, pp. 113-116.
    “Anthology on the Radio: Robert Weaver and CBC Radio’s Anthology.” Anthologizing Canadian Literature: Theoretical and Cultural Perspectives. Edited by Robert Lecker, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015, pp. 167-182.

Regularly Taught Courses

Undergraduate

  • English 2150: Modern Canadian Fiction
  • English 2850: What Is Film?
  • English 3158: Canadian Literature 1970 to the Present: City/Scape
  • English 3848: The Western

Graduate

  • English 7069: Public Intellectuals in Canada

Honours And Graduate Supervision

  • BA Hon: any topic in Canadian fiction, poetry, and film
  • MA and PhD: twentieth-century and contemporary Canadian fiction and poetry, genre (especially but not only the Western), celebrity (especially in literature, of public intellectuals, or in Canadian music), and theories of metaphor, transnationalism, and ecocriticism