The Canonical Debate Today: Crossing Disciplinary and National Boundaries ed. by Liviu Papadima, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen (review)

Liviu Papadima’s thoughtful introduction to The Canonical Debate Today: Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries informs us that the book is the outcome of a conference on “National Literature and Global Literature: The Issue of the Canon” held at the University of Bucharest in 2008. His international cast of contributors, he assures us, was eager to replace the belligerence that marred an earlier phase of this debate with an approach that highlighted “the intricacies and even the paradoxes of the problems dealt with” (10). The greatest of these paradoxes is that the most important issue raised by the book has dropped from its title. The subject of international or global literature dominates not only the section on “Reshaping Literary Studies,” but also the opening section on “Canons and Contexts,” and the third, misleadingly titled, “Transgressing Literary and Cultural Boundaries.” The shifting relationship between established national centers of cultural production and artists at the periphery who see an expanded international nexus as their opportunity for overdue recognition is at the heart of The Canonical Debate Today. The shape and content of this review has been framed accordingly (this has meant some fine essays, Stefan H. Uhlig’s “Historiography or Rhetoric?” and Adina Ciugreanu’s “From Art to Literature,” to name but two, cannot have the extended discussion they merit).

In a witty opener Theo D’haen reviews the proliferating proposals for canons launched in the Low Countries. Here brains trusts of academics, administrators, and journalists have all been busy composing lists of fifty—always fifty—masterworks that control the terms of discussion of everything from academic disciplines to civic and national identities. No one can think these proposals have fallen from thin air. Ever since the fracture of the communist bloc and the expansion of the European Union, the prosperous European nations—the Netherlands, France, Germany—have been encountering their neighbors much more regularly. Wars and upheaval in the Middle East, worsening conditions in Africa, and a global labor market have brought successive new trains of immigrants. In such changed circumstances, Western Europeans need to know more about the cultures and literatures of the people crossing their borders. Instead, D’haen sees the erection of barriers and the reappearance of essentialist mythologies.

D’haen is convinced that the explosion of these lists in the Low Countries derives from attempts to impose a rigid set of questions on a dynamic multicultural society and to control the terms of the debate about strangers in our midst. He looks to North America for a corrective, where anthologies, periodicals, and all the apparatus of contemporary scholarship have extended the scope of “American Literature” and provoked new answers to the time-honored question “What is an American?” D’haen suggests that a “massive program of translation” (36) organized by a central body might do the same for Europe. His goals are humane, but has anyone seen any lessening in national belligerence in the United States since the Modern Language Association started to hold sessions on postcolonial literatures?

Rodica Mahăilă, whose essay follows D’haen’s, explores how far the canonical expansion of American literature in the last thirty years has found its way into Romanian anthologies and textbooks. Mahăilă deplores the cultural lag that means Europeans have no contact with a literature of the United States that, since the publication of the Heath Anthology of American Literature in 1990, has reconfigured its boundaries. The Asian, Native American, and Caribbean artists represented in Heath or Norton are missing from their European equivalents, so that Romanian readers lack contact with Bharati Mukherjee, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Jamaica Kincaid. Yet contemporary authors enter and exit from anthologies all the time, and always have. The most significant feature of the Heath Anthology for students of the canon debate was always to be found in its first volume, which took canon formation in American studies...