Canadian Thinkers in the 20th Century

Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes Introduction Canadian Thinkers in the 20th Century Michael D. Behiels 0 n the cusp of a new century and a new millennium, the· Association of Canadian Studies enjoined its members to celebrate the maturation of intellectual thought in Canada over the past century. For many decades, Canadians have been recognized world-wide for their marvellous scientific, technological and medical contributions to humanity. The world has been slower to acknowledge Canadians' contributions to the realm ofideas, theories and concepts. In part, this predicament was to due until recently to the relative underdevelopment of the history of ideas in Canadian historical, literary and critical writing. Canadian intellectual history did not come of age until the 1960s, long after it had established firm roots in most Western industrialized nations. Thanks to the work of several intellectual historians and literary critics, it is now realized that Canadians have a rich heritage of philosophical, theological, intellectual and social thought. Analysis has shown that Canadian thinkers, thanks to their unique conditions of climate , geography, natural resources and the co-mingling of peoples with diverse cultures , languages and spiritual traditions, have produced a modest but growing number of original ideas that have been adopted and built upon by thinkers world-wide. Indeed, Canadians were reminded repeatedly that their world of ideas, theories and the imagination was fundamentally colonial, that they borrowed unashamedly from the French, British and American societies. For a long time Canadians were loath to believe, or to admit if they did believe, that they had any truly original ideas, theories or concepts to share with the rest of the world. With this in mind, the Association of Canadian Studies gave its members the opportunity to discuss some of Canada's principal thinkers of the twentieth century. As John Higham, a leading American intellectual historian, reminded us, intellectual history "includes Little Orphan Annie as well as Adam Smith."' This small selection of papers touches on some of Canada's leading twentieth-century thinkers as well as some of those who played important roles by the nature of the impact of their ideas on Canada's social and political evolution. Volume 34 • No. 4 • (Hiver 1999 • 2000 Winter) 9 ~-------------------- - - - 10 Introduction • Michael Behiels This collection begins with two revisionist essays on Northrop Frye (1912-1991), who, most assuredly, resides near the top of the growing list of Canada's original thinkers. Frye's most impressive corpus of literary criticism, including Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and The GreatCode (1982), is recognized and used around the globe, including places like China where Western literature was shunned until very recently. Jean O'Grady's paper, "The Poetic Frye," addresses the thorny issue of Frye's enduring legacy. She argues persuasively that Frye's legacy will not come from his pioneering role as a "social scientific" critic of Canadian literature. Rather, Frye has achieved a permanent place in Canada's literary hall of fame thanks to the exceptionally high literary quality of his 11 poetic11 critical writing. Second, he deserves this accolade by the paradoxical fact that his structuralist, logocentric literary criticism is truly a new genre of literature - an imaginative, aesthetic, visionary poetry of criticism- rather than a social "science" of criticism that initially he strove to construct as .a way of achieving respectability and recognition for his chosen field. For. O'Grady, Frye is "less the scientific critic than the seer, the Blake of the twentieth century, and his high and serious style speaks directly to us." Douglas Long challenges head on, and with considerable effectiveness, Frye's postmodernist critics who charge him with being a fraudulent, essentialist, universalist , "liberal humanist" who is ideologically blinkered and exclusionary, that is, an academic completely out of touch with fin-du-siecle conceptions and theories of reality and postmodernist literary criticism. Long accomplishes his demolition task by demonstrating that Frye's social and political thought, best characterized as a non-ideological and non-rationalist liberal humanism, was founded on the premise that humanity's shared primary concerns - life, happiness, freedom must take precedence over secondary concerns such as local loyalties, political and religious identities, and class interests that are generally rationalized by ideologies...