Interviews with Dr. Wendy Roy and Dr. Lindsey Banco on Literature Matters Events, Travel and Horror Films

Literature Matters are public talks hosted by the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. The talks began in 2012 when the then department head, Dr. Lisa Vargo, sought to have public and community-oriented events to showcase some of the department’s research and work. The events have since taken place off-campus at Westminster United Church.

Literature Matters events generally include either a public talk by a faculty member or graduate student from the department or a panel discussion with multiple people from the department. Speakers will usually give a talk for about 30 minutes, then after a short break, there is another open discussion with the audience for the remainder of the event. Talks can be more formal or informal at the discretion of the speakers, and sometimes speakers and writers will read pieces of their own work.

Dr. Wendy Roy, a Bateman Professor in the department of English, currently serves as the Chair of the Outreach and Engagement Committee for Literature Matters. The Outreach and Engagement Committee is usually made up of three faculty members who oversee the event schedule for the year. 

“The whole idea is to be outward facing,” Roy says. “We’re looking for accessible talks on a variety of subjects related to our research, teaching and community work. We want it to be about literature, but we also want it to be about cultural studies that some of the department members do. Sometimes it’s on TV or film, [and] I think we even had things on graphic novels and talks on narrative in video games.”

Literature Matters’ final talk of the year also typically features a talk centred around a member of the board presenting on Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan, discussing upcoming performances for the year, as well as deeper themes and questions about the plays. Roy says that a previous event on Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan covered the simple yet intriguing question of “Why do we still go to see tragedies that we know the plot completely, like Romeo and Juliet? What about it is still important to us today?”

Roy expressed excitement towards this year’s events, which include topics such as “Can a Robot be a Poet?”, a panel discussion led by a mix of faculty and graduate students on how AI is impacting creative writing and the research of literature, and a discussion with PhD student Jenna Miller on Canadian writer Kate Beaton’s graphic novel Ducks. “I’m hoping to showcase some more of the department’s work to members of the public and show the importance of literature and ideas related to literature,” Roy says.

The next event, entitled “Detours into Dread: A Short, Scary History of Travel Horror Films” is a talk by Professor Lindsey Banco and is scheduled to happen on Oct. 22 at 7:30 p.m. Banco sat down with The Sheaf to talk more about his topic, its inspiration and how many of his research and teaching areas are combined in this upcoming talk.

Banco has been working on projects related to horror fiction and film and Gothic fiction, as well as teaching ENG 232: Gothic Narrative for over a decade.

One of the main themes that drew him to Gothic fiction was the intersection between the present and the past. “We see this in figures such as the ghost [or] haunted spaces like haunted houses or forests or cabins in the woods. These are haunted by presences from the past. That’s a key interest for me, [and] it’s something I talk about a lot when I teach that course–how the past intrudes into the present in often uncomfortable ways, and how we navigate or negotiate the inescapable presence of the past.”

Banco explains that his interest in travel literature began as an undergraduate and continued to be a part of his doctoral dissertation. “When I was a PhD student, I was thinking about different ways in which travel fiction primarily allows us to explore a lot of the things that make us uncomfortable about travel, things that challenge us and perhaps even frighten us in some ways.”

The intersection of uncomfortableness and fear around travel also manifested in experiences that Banco has had personally. “I’ve stayed in motel rooms that are out of a motel from hell movies from the 1980s. I’ve never myself had anything I would consider a ghostly or supernatural encounter, but I have had a lot of moments where you just ask, ‘What is going on? Why is this like this? What are those sounds we’re hearing in the woods behind there?’”

“There’s a kind of helplessness or vulnerability to that… You just feel uncomfortable because you are at the mercy of someone or something else. And that’s what a lot of travel is.”

The main themes Banco intends to explore within his upcoming talk include the question of why so many horror films deal with travel, and what these films show people about their attitudes toward travel.

“I’m asking the question of ‘why do we have this anxiety as manifested in these films,’ and what does it tell us about our relationship to cars, highways, to that kind of mobility, and our relationship and perceptions of the people at the side of the road–those folks who work at the motels and creepy diners, who run the weird gas stations, hitchhikers–what’s our relationship to these people who are peripheral, and what kind of space is the highway as a space to travel on?”

Banco intends to cover a broad range of horror films in his talk, ranging from classic travel-horror films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) to newer releases such as Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005). 

When asked about how horror films are sometimes seen as a controversial mode of storytelling, Banco sees attitudes towards this genre as polarizing. “People either really love them and are super keen fans of it, [or] the opposite reaction is of visceral disgust, who treat it like it’s a low-brow form of art that is violent, and often gets accused of being misogynistic or racist.”

But by the end of the talk, Banco says that: “I’m hoping that anybody who might be predisposed to seeing horror films as not for them would maybe give it another shot, [and] see it for a little bit more of its complexity… I would also just hope that people would come away from it with maybe some slightly different ways of thinking about what it means to travel and how we do it.”

Literature Matters events are free and open to the public. They take place on a monthly basis from September to April and are held at 7:30 p.m.at Grace-Westminster United Church Social Hall, 505 – 10th St. E. All scheduled upcoming Literature Matters events can be found under the Community tab on the Department of English webpage for the College of Arts and Science.