Moncton—or, as poet Marc Chamberlain calls it in his recent collection, Socialite (2024), “Moncton madone”—has long served as a muse, a formative urban socialscape, for Acadian writers, including Guy Arsenault, Gérald Leblanc, and France Daigle, among numerous others. But these writers go beyond the literal cartography of the city: they also, in the words of Daigle, make it a “ville du monde,” in that they bring to their literary universes the diverse and cosmopolitan artists and institutions that influence them. Chamberlain is the latest Acadian writer to do so and with such intention. This paper thus seeks to map out and digitally visualize an actor network operating in the Moncton that Chamberlain imagines in Socialite. Actor-network theory, popularized by such social philosophers such as Bruno Latour, posits that social worlds are constructed in terms of relational forces between various actors, whether people, institutions, or objects (2007). Using digital tools, I attempt to establish and represent the forces at play in Chamberlain’s actor network in order to study the ways in which the latter emerges as a form of poetics.

Dr. Matthew Cormier is Assistant Professor in the Université de Moncton’s Département d’anglais currently working in the digital humanities, memory studies, affect theory, Acadian literature, and contemporary apocalyptic writing in Canada. His recent publications include the edited collection of essays, Digital Memory Agents in Canada (UAlberta Press), and “On Apocalyptic Cultural Memories: Literary Affects of Estrangement in ‘Postcolonial’ Acadie,” a chapter featuring in Routledge’s volume, The Productivity of  Negative Emotions  in Postcolonial Literature.