Notes
269 notes Introduction shifting the ground of a discipline 1 I am not suggesting here that formalism has been a dominant mode of reading Canadian literature. But it is worth noting that attention to the literariness associated with formalism need not be exclusively understood as an approach that refutes the relevance of the externality of literary texts associated with mimetic approaches. As Mihai Spariosu, among other scholars, notes in his“Editor’s Introduction”to Mimesis in ContemporaryTheory.Vol.1. The Literary and Philosophical Debate (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984), “‘objective,’” that is, formalist, theories of literature, such as that of structuralism , are “ultimately based on mimetic assumptions.” His example of TzvetanTodorov,an“influential theorist with a non-mimetic reputation,”is a case in point.Todorov “postulates a continuity between literary and nonliterary language, which enables him to reintegrate literary structures into larger social structures through … the ‘verbal function’ of literature” (xx). I return to this point later. 2 TransCanada project is an expedient way of referring to the serial conferenceTransCanada : Literature, Institutions, Citizenship, which I co-organized in collaboration, chiefly, with Roy Miki (TransCanada One, at Simon Fraser University, 2005, and TransCanada Two, University of Guelph, 2007) and Christl Verduyn (TransCanada Three, Mount Allison University, 2009), as well as to the various events and projects sponsored byTransCanada Institute (TCI), University of Guelph, which was founded in 2007 (seeTCI’s website for full information).A selection of the plenary talks presented atTransCanada One has appeared in Trans.Can.Lit:Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, co-edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. 3 As we said in our call for papers for TransCanada Two: Literature, Institutions , Citizenship, “it has become apparent to many scholars that its [Canadian literature’s] study can no longer take place in isolation from the larger forces that shape the nation, global relations, and the corporatization of higher education. The pressures of multiculturalism on the Canadian state ... put more emphasis upon discourses of citizenship and security. At the same time,market-driven factors increasingly shape the publication,dissemination , and reception of Canadian writing.These are just some of the factors that have caused a subtle yet palpable shift in the critical and cultural paradigms that inform the study and teaching of Canadian literature.” See the TransCanadas website. 270 Notes to pages 3–6 4 Though this project has been collaborative, I do not purport to speak for others here. As the TransCanada Two conference’s call for papers states, “[t]he task of identifying the implications of these shifts and, above all, of devising constructive ways of responding to them involves a long-term and multilateral project that can only be a shared endeavour, undertaken in interdisciplinary and collaborative terms.” 5 Concern with the nation, of course, is not necessarily synonymous with adopting a nationalist position; in fact, it often critiques nationalism.As far as Canadian nationalism is concerned, this is not the place to examine or distinguish between its different and often contradictory manifestations across time. In this context I have in mind mostly the tenor and effects of the Massey Report (see Royal Commission 1951), as well as those reports that appeared immediately after the Centennial, A.B. Hodgetts’ What Culture? What Heritage? (1968), Robin Mathews and James Arthur Steele’s The Struggle for Canadian Universities (1969), and T.H.B. Symons’s To Know Ourselves:The Report of the Commission on Canadian Studies (1975). The intensification of nationalist sensibilities in the late 1960s and early ’70s had a direct impact on introducing Canadian studies programs in universities and on the formation of the Association of Canadian Studies (1973). My interest here lies not in Canadian Studies as such, what one of the anonymous readers of this book assumed, but rather on Canadian literary studies.While both of them are institutionalized, the first is a formal entity that has followed a distinct trajectory since its inception; though some of their concerns overlap, the second is not identified with a single administrative body. 6 Obviously I have in mind here Jonathan Kertzer’s Worrying the Nation:Imagining a National Literature in English Canada (Toronto: U ofToronto P, 1998). 7 For my formulation of extensive and intensive readings I am indebted to David Damrosch’s What Is World Literature? He writes that “world literature is not an immense body of material that must somehow, impossibly, be mastered ; it is a mode of reading that can be experienced intensively with a few works just as effectively as it...
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