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Profiles of Department Members and Activities

Guy Poirier


B.A. (Laval), M.A., Ph.D. (McGill)
ML 341, 519-888-4567, x33394
poirier@uwaterloo.ca

"Learning with the students is part of the joy of teaching."


Born and raised in Québec City, Guy Poirier was the youngest of three children. He had always loved history, with a special thirst for European antiquity. By the time he was 12 he had decided on archaeology. Then he began reading his older sister's CEGEP (junior college) books, short stories from Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert's Mme Bovary. And so began his romance with French literature, modern and ancient.

Surprisingly, he first learned to read in English. It was in 1967 when bilingual exchanges were made possible for whole families of selected federal government officials. The family was moved to Ontario and Poirier spent his first school year at a bilingual school in Scarborough. While he was carefully intoning poems about Jack and Jill, his first exposure to English literature was The Story of Mr. Whiskers.

For the rest of his primary school years his mother drilled him in dictée every day after school because she felt his French wasn't good enough. He got caught up in the theatre during his CEGEP years and read the literature of Hermann Hesse and the poetry of Emile Nelligan. This took him on to Laval where he studied modern French poetry. In Montréal he did his Masters on the modern French poet Pierre Jean Jouve, who was influenced by 16th-century Spanish and French poetry. He began teaching at this time, giving summer immersion classes to English students at the Université de Québec à Trois-Rivières and McGill summer school. It was during his Ph.D. that he became rooted in the Renaissance, in its literature and aspects of its political and cultural life.

Renaissance literature and culture remain the central area of Professor Poirier's research. "I deal not only with literary texts, but with different kinds of texts," pamphlets, for example, which were most often political writing, emotional outpourings against Henri III, medical discourse, French religious works, poetry, short stories, etc. Travel literature is also studied; early accounts of trips to America, Rome, Japan, China, and India. Many of these were Jesuit missions and developed into news bulletins that were sent to Rome and translated into different languages for the European courts. Read at first by the Kings and royal houses, these accounts began to be published more widely and may have been read to common people in religious communities. They formed part of the curriculum in Jesuit colleges. These accounts dealt with issues such as housing, coping with foreign governments and cultures, persecutions, miracles, conversions and much of daily life. They make up a valuable part of historical and cultural knowledge.
Close by this interest is his research into Queer Studies, both modern and from the Renaissance. "It's a queer name for it too," he laughs. "In a few words, what it is, is the study of different texts and their representations of homosexuality and trans-gender people, from religious, legal, travel, cultural and medical texts. They are accounts of impression and imagination; how they saw it and how they represented it in literature. In the Renaissance, it is the construction of the image of homosexuality, the perception of sodomites, people with anatomical irregularities. In the Americas, in what is now the southern states, the Shaman, or medicine men, were considered to be a third, distinct gender. The Europeans didn't know what to make of them." Québec gay literature is a somewhat easier study, at least from the source; it concentrates on how homosexuality is described in literary work.

Next on Poirier's list of research interests is contemporary French, Québec and British Columbia French literatures and cultures. "Yes," he says, "even British Columbia has its own French literature!" He is presently co-editing the third volume of a collection of texts and articles (Espaces culturels francophones III)

One of the many aspects he favours about the University of Waterloo is its size. There are smaller classes, you can have personal contact with students and they can contact the professor, rather than going through a hierarchy of TAs. You can't get that at larger universities." Having this exchange with students and interacting with their perception of literary work is vital to Poirier. "It's interesting to open minds. When we talk about old literature they find that it's not as disconnected from our world as they think." It is this curiosity that makes teaching such a pleasure for him. "You learn more about yourself when you teach. Learning with the students is part of the joy of teaching. There's always more to know."

Representative Publications:

Books

L'Homosexualité dans l'imaginaire de la Renaissance, 1996.

Le bref et l'instantané. A la rencontre de la littérature québécoise du XXIe siècle, (ed. with P-L. Vaillancourt), 2000.

La Renaissance, hier et aujourd'hui, (ed.) 2002.

Littérature et culture francophones de Colombie-Britannique (ed. with J. Viswanathan and G. Miller), 2004.

Henri III mécène des arts, des sciences et des lettres (ed. with I. de Conihout and J.-F. Maillard), 2005.

Culture et littérature francophones de la Colombie-Britannique : du rêve à la réalité, (ed.), 2007.

Dix ans de recherche sur les femmes écrivains de l’Ancien Régime : influences et confluences (ed. with C. McWebb, F. Paré, D. Russell), 2008.

Forthcoming :

Henri III de France en mascarades imaginaires

De l’Orient à la Huronie; textes de mission et récits de voyage

Textes en marge de la Distance habitée

Espaces culturels francophones III

Selected Professional and Community Affiliations

Interim Chair, French Studies, University of Waterloo

Past President, Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies

Associate Editor, Renaissance and Reformation, Renaissance et Réforme.

Member of Editorial Committee, éditions Garnier.


Links:

Les Lettres du Japon research project :
http://lettresjapon.uwaterloo.ca/

"Espaces culturels francophones de la Colombie-Britannique" research project:
http://www.espacesfrancophones.uwaterloo.ca/

CMOC