Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies ed. by Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias (review)

Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies documents a growing trend toward materialist assessments of “Canadian literature not simply as a body of texts but as a field and institution that is subject to a host of complex but identifiable cultural, economic, and political pressures.” Coeditors Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias acknowledge in the preface that the collection does not “offe[r] a singular vision or critique of the complexities of the study of Canadian literature as of late,” but Kamboureli’s introduction tries to amplify the significance of this miscellany, most of which was presented at the second Transcanada conference in 2007, by arguing that the “cluster of singularities” creates a charged field of interdisciplinary methodologies whose combined force has begun to shift the ground of Canadian Literature. The benefits of such a methodological shift “from the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’ of the discipline” are best realized in Larissa Lai’s chapter on special issues, wherein Lai considers special issues of journals on Asian-Canadian writing as a departure from, and a supplement to, the norms of academic publishing before examining the objectives of special issues, their notions of collectivity, their relevance to broader race issues, and the contributors’ methods of translating politics into critical and creative texts. Likewise, Kathy Mezei works both inside and outside of disciplinary conventions in her chapter, where she explores archives, publishing houses, and texts in translation as conceptual spaces in which cultural and institutional factors mediate and transform literary matter. Jeff Derksen also provides a useful overview of the position of the Canadian state within different modalities of neo-liberal globalization, and he demonstrates how these forces shape Roger Farr’s sonnet sequence in Surplus. However, Derksen’s three-page discussion of Timothy Taylor’s novel Stanley Park, which summarizes the plot and themes of the novel as they relate to Derksen’s argument but does not cite a single passage from the novel, highlights the problem of the collection as a whole. Far from helping Canadian literature survive the paraphrase, as Kamboureli claims in her introduction, citing Frank Davey’s famous dismissal of thematic criticism, this collection’s emphasis on literary contexts threatens to en-shrine it by privileging cultural and political rationalizations of literary scholarship over the analysis of literary texts.

All of the essays in Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies would complement the teaching of Canadian literature, but the shortcomings of the collection’s methodological shifts become increasingly apparent with each passing chapter. Only a few of the meticulously edited chapters in this collection give novels, plays, poems, or short stories more than passing mention. For example, Janine Brodie’s “White Settlers and the Biopolitics of State Building in Canada” is an excellent work of political economy (Brodie’s discipline), but her concern with Aboriginal rights and government documents does not extend to their (re)inscription in literary texts. The chapter’s relevance to literary studies must be inferred. Zacharias’s chapter comes closer to the mark by surveying the myths of national origin favoured by Canadian authors before the First World War and explaining how the Battle of Vimy Ridge fulfilled their demands for some “originary violence” to solidify the state, but here, too, the discussion of novels and poems about Vimy is limited to a few clauses in the concluding paragraph. In “Beyond Canlit(e),” Danielle Fuller recommends greater attention to “reading as a social practice” and demonstrates how her research on mass reading events (such as Canada Reads) has benefited from collaborations with marketing experts. Fuller’s chapter pairs nicely with Yoko Fujimoto’s overview of the cultural and market conditions that influence the translation of Canadian literature in Japan, but in general the collection exhibits what Davey calls a “reluctan[ce] to focus on the literary work – to deal with matters of form, language, style, structure, and consciousness as these arise from the work as a unique construct...