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  • Dialectical Modernisms: Postcoloniality and Diaspora in A. M. Klein
  • Dean Irvine (bio)

Modernist Dialectics

Few would dispute the assessment of A. M. Klein as a second-generation, late-modernist Canadian author and critic who took an obsessive interest in Joyce’s modernism in particular and who more broadly adapted to an Anglo-Jewish context the densely allusive and elliptical style of the first-generation European and American modernists to his later poetry and prose fiction of the mid-1930s to the early 1950s. Even so, that critical portrait largely overlooks two interlocked phases in Klein’s modernism that deserve particular notice: his work from 1938 to 1955 as editor of and contributor to the Canadian Jewish Chronicle (1914–66) and his contributions from March 1944 to 1947 as an editor or poet to the little magazines Preview (1942–45), First Statement (1942–45), and Northern Review (1945–54). These phases coincide with his shift away from traditional prosodies and literary forms toward the innovative aesthetic modes of modernism. The first phase was initiated by his employment by Hirsh Wolofsky’s Eagle Publishing Company as editor of its Montreal-based English-language weekly paper; the second by his editorial collaborations—first with members of the Preview group (Patrick and Peggy Anderson, F. R. Scott, P. K. Page, Neufville and Kit Shaw, and Bruce Ruddick) and those of the First Statement group (John Sutherland, Irving Layton, and Louis Dudek), and later with both groups when the two magazines merged in 1945 to form Northern Review. [End Page 597]

These phases I correlate with two intersected dispositions in Klein’s authorial and editorial practice, namely the Jewish-Canadian diasporic modernism of his Canadian Jewish Chronicle period and, as an Anglo-Canadian variant on the modernist poetics of diaspora, the postcolonial modernism of his Preview period. The dialectical interrelation of his diasporic and postcolonial modernisms is, I think, key to understanding the ways in which Klein’s editorial consciousness of specific social and political contexts in periodical cultures shaped the dissemination of his modernist aesthetic practices. While the Anglo-Montreal context of Preview leant toward the localized national and socialist politics of an incipient postcolonial modernism in Canada, the Anglo-Jewish Montreal context of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle was tied to the globalized politics of an emergent diasporic modernism that addressed the transnational histories of Zionism, the Holocaust, and the state of Israel. For Klein, the politics of postcoloniality was but a local concern subsumed under the global politics of the Jewish diaspora. These social and political orientations thus direct my investigation of the periodical cultures in which Klein formed his modernist practices as an editor and author.

To situate Klein within the dialectics of postcoloniality and diaspora is to return to the scene of Anglo-Montreal modernism in the 1940s and its incitement of the so-called native-cosmopolitan debate. According to the original terms of the debate, as articulated by A. J. M. Smith in the introduction to his 1943 anthology, The Book of Canadian Poetry, the nativist poets “attempted to describe and interpret whatever is essentially and distinctively Canadian,” and the cosmopolitan poets attempted “to transcend colonialism by entering into the universal, civilizing culture of ideas.”1 Conjoining two keywords of the period, the native-cosmopolitan dialectic has frequently offered a ready-made theoretical nomenclature, but one that has been mobilized too often and uncritically in the interests of one or the other side of the debate. Because the significations of this dialectic oscillate throughout the 1940s, I want to insist that that these keywords—native and cosmopolitan—denote both colonial and postcolonial orientations. In other words, the terms of the native-cosmopolitan debate represent a kind of shorthand for an interrelated set of colonial-postcolonial cultural formations. In my reading the native-cosmopolitan debate is a sign of Canadian literary culture in transition from colonial to postcolonial positionings. There is no unilateral linkage between nativism and postcolonialism or between cosmopolitanism and colonialism, or vice versa. This terminological indeterminacy is a marker of the transitional movement within Canadian modernism of the 1940s from a colonial to a postcolonial literary culture. By dismantling the binaries of the native-cosmopolitan dialectic, it may...

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