"It is startling to realize," Robert Lecker argues in "The Canonization of Canadian Literature: An Inquiry into Value," "that Canadian literature was canonized in fewer than twenty years" (25). According to Lecker, the process began in 1965 when the University of Toronto Press published the Literary History of Canada. Commenting on general editor Carl F. Klinck's acknowledgements in the preface to that volume, Lecker declares: "As they congratulated one another, government, academia, and the publishing industry joined hands to create a national canon. The institution called Canadian literature was born" (26). Lecker's argument is grounded in a widespread misconception: that Canadian culture itself was brought into being largely as a result of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (1949-51), better known as the Massey Commission. Credited with, among other things, the establishment of the Canada Council and the National Library, the Massey Commission is frequently cited as the most effective royal commission ever held. Although Maria Tippett has challenged the belief that Canada was cultural wasteland prior to the implemen-tation of the Massey Commission's recommendations; and although Paul Litt and others have questioned the effectiveness of the commission itself, popular wisdom still traces post-war Canadian literature and culture back to that royal commission. This course offers students an opportunity to study the develop-ment of national culture in Canada, to analyse the relation between culture and the state and to focus that analysis on two historical moments in the making of twentieth-century Canadian literature and culture: the first centred on the work of the Massey Commission; the second on the passage of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act. Whereas the Massey Commission commenced its work at the outset of the Cold War, the Multiculturalism Act was passed just prior to the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. Together these two events bracket a significant period in the development of post-war Canadian literature and culture. Although our analysis will focus on these two historical moments, we shall consider the development of national culture generally in this period and the challenges posed to it by, among others, post-war feminism, Quebec nationalism, regional identities, and the growing political strength of "other ethnic minorities" and of First Nations. Our inquiry is, in the final analysis, about the relation between culture and the state. The course will focus on the four decades from 1949-1988; we will need, however, to consider the emergence and consolidation of English-Canada's founding myths, its "national culture," and its immigration policy and legislation since at least the late nineteenth-century; we will also need to consider literary and cultural developments in the years following passage of the Multiculturalism Act.
TEXTS: (The following list is provisional. Consult the computer printout in the University Bookstore. If you would like to suggest texts for study, please contact me at the e-mail address listed above.)
Suggested background reading: