Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies

Introduction: Shifting the Ground of a Discipline: Emergence and Canadian Literary Studies in English

1 Introduction Shifting the Ground of a Discipline: Emergence and Canadian Literary Studies in English Smaro Kamboureli Canadian criticism is only its fields or contexts. Eli Mandel,“Introduction” (1) Something has happened to English Canadian literary studies.It has a cast of “new” characters. No longer exclusively concerned with Canadian literature’s themes and imagery, its forms and genres, or its linguistic nature and structure, it has begun to demonstrate a steady shift toward a foregrounding of the situational and material conditions that influence the production of Canadian literary texts. Richard Cavell’s Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada’s ColdWar (2004),PaulineWakeham’s Taxidermic Signs: Reconstructing Aboriginality (2008), Julia Emberley’s Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural Practices and Decolonization in Canada (2009), and Lily Cho’s Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada (2010) are examples that reflect the most recent stages of this shift.As the titles of these studies suggest—ColdWar, taxidermy, cultural practices, menus—a growing number of Canadian literary scholars writing today appear to circumvent the literary or, more precisely, to approach it as a sign that is generated by the triangulation of culture, literature, and the nationstate . Now seen as belonging to the larger category of culture—culture in the general sense of “meaning-making activities” (Coleman, Szeman, and Rethmann 1)—now as belonging to particular networks of power relations and economies that make the nation-state, or a combination of 2 Kamboureli both streams, Canadian literature is no longer seen solely as a discrete textual construct, nor is it read exclusively in the context of Canada. Far from being a current phenomenon, as the opening sentence of this Introduction would suggest,this shift has been taking place for a while now, hence “new” in scare quotes.As Diane Bessai and David Jackel, the editors of Figures in a Ground, wrote in 1978:“Twentieth-century literature and literary criticism both reflect and react against the dynamics of change: cultural, political, technological. Changing modes of perception and consequent shifts in values lead in turn to new forms of expression and adaptations of old ones. The critic of twentieth-century literature is continually confronted by the need to understand and evaluate the complexities and idiosyncracies of new creative sensibilities”(n.p.).Here, then,“new” is not meant to suggest that such changes in focus as those noted above usher in an entirely novel stage of critical developments. Rather, it is intended to highlight the noticeable, because progressively more concentrated, emphasis among Canadian literary scholars on the contexts and various conditions, often not readily identifiable as literary , that produce literature and their attendant critical discourses.There have always been critics who study literary texts as a “reliable source of information about anything but [their] own language,” the result often being “confus[ing] the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies” (de Man 11). Nevertheless, the growing engagement of Canadian literary scholars with the contingencies that influence the making and teaching of Canadian literature demands to be examined in its own right. Such shifts of the critical gaze do not follow a single direction or method.They may veer away from conventional notions of formalism, but they do not entirely disavow all aspects of literariness.1 If anything, they broaden our understanding of what the literary entails and invite a reassessment of the disciplinary contexts within which we customarily read literature. Signalling what we might call a “contextual approach”(Klarer 74),they reflect above all an intensifying concern with the larger discourses within which the literary is embedded.To put this in both Frygian and non-Frygian terms, we might see these shifts as registering Canadian literature’s loss of its autonomy as literature (assuming it was autonomous in the first place). TheTransCanada project,2 which this book comes from, is designed to provide a forum for exploring precisely the conditions that have generated these critical turns in the study of Canadian literature in recent Shifting the Ground of a Discipline 3 years.3 Though I cannot possibly offer here a survey, let alone an exhaustive analysis, of the circumstances that have brought about these changes, I have a double goal in mind: to situate the essays gathered in this collection and to do so in a fashion that provides a critical delineation of what animates theTransCanada project at large,at least from my perspective .4 In some ways, then...