Literary Studies and National Ideological Trends: A Canadian Example

Abstract

The crisis of comparative literature – which was often hinted at following the publication of the Bernheimer Report and Tötösy de Zepetnek’s Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application – has undoubtedly been affected by the rise of poststructuralism and anti-essentialist tendencies. Especially Tötösy’s book and his work have been contradictory because one of Tötösy’s primary intentions was to improve the material status of comparative literature. Instead, his Comparative Literature has become the Comparative Cultural Studies. Although this development also has to be attributed to pragmatic reasons, comparative literature in Canada, where Tötösy had worked, was not specifically undernourished. Nevertheless, the “emotional and intellectual primacy” of the nationally oriented research of literature was clearly present even in the 1990s. Despite its earlier beginnings, the urge to define a single Canadian identity became dominant only in the 1960s and 1970s, with the criticism of Northrop Frye, and with the rise of nationalism, and especially with “thematic criticism”. Thematic critics were widely attacked in the 1980s and later, but many of their commentators have themselves used the research of literature to reflect national identity. Poststructuralist authors noted that, in the works of thematic critics, literary criticism had actually become cultural criticism, but they did not attack treatment of literature as a “discursive practice”. Instead, they attacked the notion of fixed cultural identity. However, although it did not specifically focus on reflecting the national identity, even the practice of poststructuralist criticism was still mainly oriented to the corpus of Canadian literature. Both tendencies – research on mainly Canadian literature and the tendency towards cultural criticism – are also evident in studies of multiculturalism, although here cultural differences are often put forth as a Canadian unifying principle. Systemic and empirical approaches to literature took this as a productive basis to study the intersections of Canadian literatures, largely within the context of the common Canadian framework. According to some comparatists (e.g., Blodgett), this literature is available to comparative research on its differing discourses and literary traditions.