Canadian Appeals to Genre: West/Border/Road

West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative by Katherine Ann Roberts is a series of close readings of cultural texts as they relate to one another and to Canadian culture at large. The book battles predominantly American genres of the west, the border, and the road in order to challenge, assert, and evoke ideas specific to Canada. The book is robust and covers numerous canonical Canadian tropes from Tim Horton, to Molson’s “I Am Canadian” advertising campaign, to the Stampede, and Hockey Night in Canada. The collection is divided into three sections, each with two chapters relating to the aforementioned genre topics. The book stands as a series of explorations of dissimilar albeit interrelated topics, and as a result, the book lacks a cohesive and sustained argument. What Roberts delivers is a uniquely Canadian study of three largely American tropes, two of which are quintessential Americana in their development (the road and the western), with the third coming into the fold as another form of territorial assertion.

Not emanating from any particular school of thought or discipline, West/Border/Road will frustrate the disciplinary purists but will find an eager interdisciplinary audience. For this I praise the work. The work offers solid contributions to Canadian studies, critical nation theory, mobility studies, genre studies, communication and culture studies, and by virtue of opposition, American studies. The book, framed by genre and embracing postnationalists concepts, adequately furthers what Roberts defines as the field of critical nation theory, providing sites for struggle, negotiation and plurality. As Roberts explains in her introduction, the work “aims to make a contribution to filling this gap in scholarship on the Canadian-American cultural relationship by gathering together a body of isolated texts from different disciplines (literature, film studies, culture studies) to form a more substantial tableau” (12). This tableau stands as a document designed to confront Canadian national imagining(s) in a postnationalist world. In its use of genre the book follows a long history of Canadian theorizing (Flaherty and Manning 1994; Ostry 1994; Kalant 2004; Cohen 2007; Berland 2009) that looks outward to understand that which is within. We often speak of ‘the’ genre as an American one. For example, the American landscape, the American photographic eye, the American frontier as proposed by Turner, are deployed with little reference to or development of Canadian versions. Roberts’ deployment of west, border, and road as genres is established on the grounds that these are national genres, not specific or determined by regional or social-economic grounds. Even the west, which commonly speaks to a region, is tied to its symbolic meaning (the landscape of the mind) rather meaning that is fixed in an actual location. This guiding premise could use more development, these genres have significant meaning to western and central Canada, however the argument falters when discussing the far north or eastern Canada, this oversight is interpreted by the lack of exploration of cultural texts from these regions.

In the first two chapters, Roberts argues that “the western is central to North American Culture” (27), challenging how we think about the western, asserting that the Canadian psyche internalizes and employs the residue of the classic western form differently. To show this difference, Roberts discusses the literary trilogy of Guy Vanderhaeghe and the prose of Aritha van Herk (novel and short stories), both of which offer alternatives to the master narrative of western place(s). These chapters are timely as since the 1990s the western has undergone a cultural revival, something that can be similarly said about the growth in documentary photography of western environs since the 2000s.

Robert’s analysis of Vanderhaeghe’s trilogy offers a way to expand our understanding of the western genre and counter its dominant and longstanding norms. Similarly, the analysis of van Herk’s recent work is about modifying and challenging ideas of ‘the west’ in North America by disrupting gender norms and minimizing the fantastical nature of the...