Posts from — September 2006

Sitting at my desk today at UVM’s Canadian Studies office, it’s hard to fathom that fall has arrived here once again. The classic signs are all there: the leaves are starting to turn colour (a bit early, I think, for this area), students have all been back in class now for nearly two weeks, and there’s that sense of excitement and anticipation in the air as we all dive into new classes, fresh projects, and find ourselves surrounded by many people we’ve never met before. The other familiar signs are there, too: that feeling in the pit of your stomach as you ask yourself “Where did summer go?” or “Whose bright idea was it to spend the every day of the last few months in the office and not at the beach?” For me there’s also that all-too-familiar pile of work from the summer I really needed to get done before classes started and the overflowing e-mail inbox (I’m sorry everyone. I’m getting there! I promise).

The best thing about the fall to my mind, and to every avid reader out there is getting to sample another crop of new books. Publishers usually save their best for the fall, and this year is no exception. New titles by some of the biggest names in Canadian literature hit the shelves this month, including books by Alice Munro (who says The View from Castle Rock will likely be her last book), Margaret Atwood (Moral Disorder), and David Adams Richards (The Friends of Meager Fortune), Wayne Johnston (The Custodian of Paradise). There are also many new books on the way from some lesser-known writers who deserve to be at the top of your list of books to read this year. The latest books, for instance, by Dennis Bock (The Communist’s Daughter), Richard Wagamese (Dream Wheels), and Michael Redhill (Consolation) are all getting great reviews (make sure to see our in-house-reviewer Meghan’s review of Bock’s novel on our NWP News page).

I’m not sure how many people saw Douglas Coupland’s rant on the state of “CanLit” a couple of weeks ago as part of the New York Times “TimesSelect” subscriber’s-only portion of their website. Coupland begins by defining “CanLit” as follows: “Basically, but not always, CanLit is when the Canadian government pays you money to write about life in small towns and/or the immigration experience. If the book is written in French, urban life is permitted, but only from a nonbourgeois viewpoint.” He goes on to say that “One could say that CanLit is the literary equivalent of representational landscape painting, with small forays into waterfowl depiction and still lifes. It is not a modern art form, nor does it want to be. [. . .] CanLit is not a place for writers to experiment, and doesn’t claim to be that kind of place. CanLit is about representing a certain kind of allowed world in a specific kind of way, and most writers in Canada are O.K. with that.” Reading this, I couldn’t help but ask “What CanLit is he reading?”

While one can obviously find fault with the fact that there’s clearly a lot of Canadian literature out there that Coupland has not noticed, that is not loaded with “grimness and despair” (though, as my students will tell you I happen to have a thing for books loaded with these two qualities), his characterization of Canadian literature is something I’ve heard from many a student back in Canada, and typically a student who hadn’t taken a Canadian Literature course, from me anyhow…. So where doe these stereotypes come from? Could those of us who teach Canadian literature actually be perpetuating these? Just look at the list of ten essential Canadian books that a panel from the Toronto Star came up with this past Canada Day. “Here are 10 novels and books of poetry,” they stated, “you need to read to understand the inner lives of Canadians, our fears and frictions, our cultural history.”

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
Stephen Leacock

The Tin Flute/Bonheur d’occasion (1945)
Gabrielle Roy

Poésies complètes (1952)
Émile Nelligan

The Watch That Ends the Night (1959)
Hugh MacLennan

Beautiful Losers (1966)
Leonard Cohen

The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
Margaret Atwood

Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
Alice Munro

Obasan (1981)
Joy Kogawa

In the Skin of a Lion (1987)
Michael Ondaatje

Green Grass, Running Water (1993)
Thomas King

Now, I wouldn’t deny that any of the works here are significant and indeed some of the most important books in my vision of the Canadian canon, but that’s also part of the problem. These books might be crucial in helping to understand our “cultural history” but do they all really illuminate “the inner lives of Canadians, our fears and frictions” today? A list of books that tells us something about Canadians today is something that I’d like to see someone publish rather than another list of classic Canadian books.

One of the roots of that perspective voiced by Coupland might be just how little contemporary literature we include in our Canadian Literature courses. One of the problems we face, especially in small department like mine where I’m the Lone Canadianist, is trying to balance our desire for coverage of the entirety of Canadian literary history with our interests in promoting the work of living authors. When we try to fit contemporary writing into a large survey course, we have one or two slots we can fill with a contemporary novel. Who does one choose? Do we stick with the big names? It’s hard not to feel obliged to create a class with a book by Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje on there. Or, do we try to promote a new and up-and-coming author?

In the three years that I’ve taught our Canadian literature course here at the University of Vermont, I’ve approached the class differently each year. The first year, I taught it as a course on the 20th century novel. The second year, I offered a survey course, starting with (transcribed) oral narratives and working our way in one semester right up to the present day. Both of those classes worked out very well. Students fell in love with everything from books like The Tin Flute and The Double Hook, to the excerpts we read from Moodie and Parr Traill and the poems of Dorothy Livesay. Last year, though, I decided that I wanted to do more to teach contemporary literature. So, I ditched the old classics and focused solely on books written in the last 20 years, with an emphasis on more recent work. That class was a great success, and this year I’ve tried to stick to works written within the last ten years.

For the final book on the course, each student has to go out and find a Canadian novel or short story collection published in the last two years. They will present to the class a short synopsis of the book and their reasons why they think the book would be a perfect complement to the others on the course. Then, the class will vote on which book we will read. It will be just as new to me as it is to them, and the students will have a much better sense of what Canadian literature is today. This, I hope, will keep anyone from leaving the course and saying that Canadian literature is primarily about people living grim and desperate lives in small towns.

If you want to follow the progress of our course, please feel free to stop by our course blog at http://pwmartin.blog.uvm.edu/180

Whenever a student asks me that, or something like “please let me know if I’ve missed anything important,” I always think first of Tom Wayman’s wonderful poem on the topic. Instead of answering, I think I’ll just have an autoreply for e-mails that directs them to Wayman’s poem.