Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada

AFTERWORD: Homeward Bound?

I When Mavis Reimer invited me to join this project in 2002, she asked that I work as a “metacritic,” along with Australian metacritic Clare Bradford; we were to provide a kind of oversight of the group’s work, commenting on how their inquiries into the meanings and functions of home operating in Canadian children’s books might resonate in the wider context of more general discourse and scholarship on Canadian and Australian writing . Of course the prospect of working in this way presented several questions , first among these, what the relationship might be between writing for children—and the scholarship attending this writing—and Canadian and Australian writing and scholarship in general. And what kind of oversight might Clare and I bring to bear? These questions remain very much alive. “Metacritic”: then as now, the term led to another series of questions. It seems to me that scholarship in Canadian children’s literature—a good deal of which I have had the privilege of observing at close quarters for nearly twenty years at the University of Winnipeg, which now has, without doubt, the largest and most productive cohort in the country of scholars in the area—has a distinctive ethos that precludes, at least in theory and certainly in practice, the aerial point of view implied in “oversight.” What I believed entering the project, I believe more strongly as we finish this stage, four years later: there is no simple position available to this° A F T E R W O R D Homeward Bound? Neil Besner 225 metacritic, or indeed a critic by any other name, as he thinks through the work exemplified in this collection of essays. What might be available, though, is a series of responses to the riches of the various discussions, some of which seem to me to be engaged in a dialogue with each other that is strikingly similar to the kinds of conversations that have been resonating across Canadian criticism over the last twenty years. Before I address these remarkable echoes, however, a word about the three years and more leading to this collection of essays. Every summer, the working group assembled in or near Winnipeg for a mini-conference of two days at which members presented progress reports, discussed each other’s projects, and talked about the shape of the collection of essays. (Of course, there was extensive e-mail conversation at all times between the meetings, and since the majority of the group lives and works in Winnipeg , there were also countless opportunities for ongoing conversations in smaller subgroups.) These intense summer meetings produced, cumulatively , a growing sense of familiar conversation; of the provenance of our agreements and our disagreements; and a growing familiarity, too, with the discourse of the whole group, which shaped a conversation inflected and engaged with difference at every level—a discourse that encouraged difference. I’m struck now by how that tacit agreement, never explicitly articulated, has survived, even thrived, in these essays, which at once bristle with cross-talk and cohere in their difference. How this alchemical and paradoxical state was reached remains mysterious. But it has been and is invigorating. And last, another word about metacriticism, oversight, and scope. I have not pretended to respond to every essay, or to every argument in every essay in what follows, both because that would be tedious and because such a response implies a position I am quite uncomfortable with, and implies as well a hierarchy that I do not subscribe to, in which scholarship on Canadian children’s texts might be understood to circulate in a location accessible to “oversight.” What follows, rather, is a sideways series of comments in which I have tried to articulate an outsider’s perspective and at the same time—in keeping with the spirit of the collection— to ask, as often as possible, where, when, and whether “outsider” is the most accurate position or perspective from which to write. II Even a glancing familiarity with Canadian criticism in general since well before the turn of the last century will reveal a striking focus on the mean226 Neil Besner ings of “home” now available, or lost, or in the process of being redefined. Rewriting and rethinking “Canada” in postcolonial terms; writing on race and interrogations of multiculturalism; redefinitions of region and nation; the reinscription of local senses of space and place in the context of the global; the...