Sanctioned Ignorance: The Politics of Knowledge Production and the Teaching of Literatures in Canada by Paul Martin (review)

In 1997 author Paul Martin set out on a quest. He would complete a whirlwind tour of twenty-eight university literature departments across Canada in order to interview nearly 100 professors of “the Canadian literatures.” He wanted to determine how Canadian literature was being taught, what texts were used in that teaching, and what it all meant in terms of our conception of nation. Most of all, he hoped to answer a central question: “What happens to our understanding of the complexity of Canada as a site of literary production when we confine its study to university departments organized (and deeply compromised) by the premises of Romantic nationalism that were so fundamental in their founding?”

Martin sought answers to this question through his interactions with a wide range of professors (but, curiously, no students). The result is an examination of curricula, pedagogy, and departmental policies that provides a snapshot of the professional state of Canadian literature instruction in the late 1990s. Ten years later, Martin revisited his project and gathered new figures, which he discusses in the last chapter of his book. But the bulk of the analysis, and the accompanying tabulations and charts in five appendices, are devoted to the earlier research period.

Perhaps the first observation to make about this book is that it is more of a historical study than a study of the teaching of Canadian literature today, mainly because it is centred in a period now almost two decades past, and even the brief commentary on the 2007–08 period takes us back seven years. So I read the book as a commentary on the ways things were, back then, but not necessarily on how they are now. Martin’s central argument inspires the title of his book. His research leads him to conclude that “[i]t is only through an active ‘sanctioned ignorance,’ perpetually reinforced by this country’s predominantly unilingual literary institutions, that scholars and students (whether anglophone or francophone) are able to justify such perspectives.” Martin returns to this argument again and again, in an attempt to show that while the country’s literature is linguistically plural (hence the constant reference to Canadian “literatures”), that plurality is almost always denied, mainly because the teaching of English literature at Canadian universities (excluding those in Quebec) is inspired by a British model that has its roots in Matthew Arnold’s ideas about pedagogy, morality, and culture. He laments the cultural divide that characterizes the teaching of Canadian literature and finds the cause of this divide in English-Canadian professors’ stubborn refusal to embrace French Canada. In this sense, the book is driven by a nostalgic dream of linguistic unity, by the idea of a professional bond among Canadian literature professors that would allow them to talk together about “the magic of unleashing a text into the classroom, or about our hopes and concerns for the future of our country’s rich literary heritage.”

So who is really to blame for what Martin sees as this “sanctioned ignorance”? It turns out that this ignorance is found only in English-Canadian institutions, which stubbornly refused to devote their resources to the study of Canada’s literatures. In contrast, the French universities in Quebec and New Brunswick are doing an admirable job, according to Martin: “the French-language universities in this country far outperform their English counterparts.” Martin provides several examples of research and study centres that have been set up in Quebec to study Québécois literature. He can’t praise them enough. They have encouraged “an extraordinary amount of research” on Quebec literary history, while English research centres, such as the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta, have “yet to become a major centre of research approaching anything resembling” the ones in Quebec. In a footnote, Martin reveals that he approached the University of Alberta to create such a centre in...