A Salute to Ben Shek/ Hommage à B.-Z. Shek

This special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, with contributors who span several generations and represent some of the main critical trends in Quebec cultural studies over the last twenty-five years, seems a fitting homage to the work of Professor Ben-Zion Shek, a former Associate Editor of the Quarterly who presided for eleven years over its annual 'Letters in Canada' section. Ranging from literature to music, painting, and film, and including studies of biography, autobiography, and cultural history as well as the more traditional genres of the novel, poetry, and theatre, the articles assembled here recall the breadth and variety of Ben Shek's own work. And in the enthusiasm with which both artists and critics responded to the invitation to contribute to this issue, there is an echo of Ben Shek's own well-known enthusiasm for and curiosity about all aspects of Quebec culture. Several of the articles treat authors that have been particular favourites of Ben's – most notably Hubert Aquin, Gérard Bessette, and Gabrielle Roy, to whose writings he has returned again and again since his first published study of her work in 1971. If there is a common thread among them, it is in the recognition that culture is political, and that the vibrancy of Quebec cultural productions cannot be dissociated from the sometimes tumultuous and sometimes more muted voice of a society in search of justice and autonomy. The articles thus constitute an apt reflection of Ben Shek's own role as an ardent defender of Quebec's culture and right to self-determination, who has nevertheless interrogated that culture from the perspective of social class and ethnic minorities throughout his long career.