David Williams

I completed my PhD in American Literature (William Faulkner) in the early 1970s and taught twentieth-century American literature until 1981, when I was invited as a novelist by External Affairs Canada to tour the four Nordic countries on the continent. Crisscrossing the landscape of Scandinavia for a darkling month in the dead of winter, I felt right at home, at least until I learned that many of my gracious hosts knew more about Canadian literature than I did. Back at the U of M, I asked to teach a course in the Canadian novel, and began to educate myself in the field. The joy of discovering with my students a literary culture still in the making led to many appearances in Europe and the USA, as well as to conference venues and seminars for professors and graduate students in India and China. In these exchanges, I began to rethink many of my assumptions about the nation, national culture, and communications in a globalizing world. 

One of the virtues of education, as I have found out, is that it can and should be continued for a lifetime. Although my secondary interest in the poetry of John Milton was every bit as "primary," allowing me to teach his work for forty years, I often joked that I was saving my writing on him for my old age. In retirement, I have finally learned enough, I hope, to say something new about this central figure and seminal period from which we still take many of our values.

• PhD (English), University of Massachusetts (Amherst), 1973
• MA (English), University of Massachusetts (Amherst), 1970
• Honours BA (English), University of Saskatchewan, 1968

Research interests

• Medium theory as a ground of literary studies
• John Milton and English revolutionary history
• Renaissance humanism and modes of reading
• The Nation as a cultural artifact
• Digital reading and its discontents

Research summary

Memory itself is a medium, as my reading of Great War narratives suggests and the nature of any medium, whether it is oral, written, cinematic or digital changes both the ways that we remember and what is valued in events. Cinema, for example, created a new sense of time – quite literally a new tense in the grammar of existence, a past-progressive present tense that turned the past into a province of the present and made "cinematic" narratives of that war into classics over more challenging works. The nature of community, and the type of politics it favours, has also been affected by the mode of communication, as one would expect from the recent confluence of digital media, nativist politics and white supremacy during events of January 6, 2021.

See my "Prolegomenon to a History of Reading" in "The Communion of the Book," vi-xxii. 

• "The Communion of the Book: Milton and the Humanist Revolution in Reading." McGill-Queen’s UP, 2022. 528 pp. 
• "Milton’s Leveller God." McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017. 502 pp.
• "And We Go On," by Will R. Bird. Introduction and Afterword by David Williams. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2014. 274 pp.
• "Media, Memory, and the First World War." McGill-Queen's UP, 2009. 336 pp. 
• "Imagined Nations: Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction." McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. 295 pp. 
• "Confessional Fictions: A Portrait of the Artist in the Canadian Novel." U Toronto Press, 1991. 301 pp.
• "Faulkner’s Women: The Myth and the Muse." McGill-Queen's UP, 1977. 286 pp.
• "Eye of the Father." Toronto: Anansi, 1985. 186 pp. Novel.
• "The River Horsemen." Toronto: Anansi, 1981. 218 pp. Novel.
• "The Burning Wood." Toronto: Anansi, 1975. 204 pp. Novel.

• 2017 - Winner of F.E.L. Priestley Prize (2017) for “Film and the Mechanization of Time in the Myth of the Great War Canon,” honoured as Best Essay in English Studies in Canada by Association for Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE).
• 2015 - Runner-up (2015) for Best Essay in Canadian Literature, for “Spectres of Time: Seeing Ghosts in Will Bird’s Memoirs and Abel Gance’s J’accuse.”
• 2010 - Runner-up (2010) for Gabrielle Roy Prize (national) for critical book "Media, Memory, and the First World War" (2009).
• 2003 - Winner of Gabrielle Roy Prize (2004), awarded by Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) for "Imagined Nations: Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction" (2003).