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The Question of the Corpus: Ethnicity and Canadian Literature
- University of Ottawa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The Question of the Corpus: Ethnicity and Canadian Literature FRANCESCO LORIGGIO A here are, ofcourse, many reasons why ethnic writing should interest anyone whose field is literature, even before he or she makes the association with the Chinatowns or the Little Italys or the native groups that are or may be part of his or her everyday life. To start with, ethnic texts exist. They are published, appear, injournals, anthologies, are reviewed. And in literature, no less than in any other domain, phenomena have a way of enduring. They call for recognition, and sooner or later we cannot avoid stumbling on them. This most elementary of gestures—mere acknowledgment—would already carry us into the thick of the theoretical debate. Along with the rise of feminist consciousness, the success of South American or African or Commonwealth fiction and the reduced resistance towards mass-cultural forms, the arrival of ethnic authors—playwrights, novelists, poets—on the scene has been one of the events that have shaped the culture of the last twenty years. If literature is also a body of works whose scope is institutionally confirmed and institutionally modified, then it is these types of texts that have most directly challenged established perceptions. No other occurrences have had a more concrete impact in those places wherein decisions are made about which titles are to be passed on (are to be placed on teaching curricula) and will therefore count as literature. In comparison, the most talked-about topic on the academic circuit—postmodernism—will seem of more limited range, an in-house transformation that can be dealt with chronologically, by adding a few names on a tested roster, but that will leave basic matters well enough alone. Let me be precise. That courses on ethnic writing, for example, or women's studies or paraliterature are tacked on in provisional programs hanging in-between disciplines, that they are often tokenized, tolerated as a concession to Realpolitick and the enrolment crisis, does not detract from their role. On the contrary, their marginality is symptomatic. It is the best T 54 indication of the problems they pose. The developments I have mentioned contest, on different grounds (gender, geography, culture), criteria hitherto male-oriented, eurocentric and elitist in nature. But in so doing they do not just undermine the prestige of the canon and the notion of literature which it helps to propagate. They are difficult items to manage, intellectually and administratively, for the critic and for the teacher; perhaps, primarily, because they put severe constraints on the premises. In spite of the many divergent internal allegiances, literary studies have, by and large, at least in more systematic versions, accepted the view according to which the theorist should concern himself or herself with literariness, with the general principles presiding over the text, rather than with the text as such or with literature conceived as a series of works. The result has been a division of the epistemological labour: in recent formulations of the composition of the discipline, theory is supposed to take place at maximum remove from the reality of the texts and is fully separated from criticism , which is more open to contingency and involves direct, participatory action in literature and its history.1 As it happens any time we encounter texts whose first and most urgent claim to attention is their being there, the writing of women or of ethnic or of Third World writers encourages us to reverse priorities. In order to properly assess these writers, to determine whether they fit,disavow or generally impinge on current models, we must first read them. And we must attempt to read them on their own terms, bottom-up fashion, or we will be confirming readymade norms. In short, we must think not of literariness but of literature, of a corpus ofworks whose extension is enlarged or restricted by circumstances (i.e., by the conjoint action of the consumers of texts and those—ultimately editors and teachers—who propose or sanction official definitions). Thus, these texts and these authors force us to operate at a closer distance from them and the works we will be integrating them to or from which we are to keep them asunder. Thus, too, we are obliged to reconsider the role of observation, of critical experience in theory. Most of all, we cannot but wonder whether observation re-acquires status only in emergency situations, when models break down and we must revise borders and fortunes, or whether some sort of observation...