TDR Letters

Subject: Teaching Canadian literature: IT SUCKS!

Read what's new as of January 29, 2003

• Letter #1 by "Name withheld by request"
• Letter #2 by Tony Thomas
• Letter #3 by Zach Wells
• Letters #4 & 5 by Gordon Phinn, with a response from Michael Bryson inserted
• Letter #6 by Clint Burnham
• TDR interview with Peter Darbyshire
• Letter #7 by John Stiles

Send your response to this piece to danforthreview@canada.com.

January - February 2003

LETTER #1: I am appalled at the conclusions drawn by The Writers' Trust of Canada report on the state of Canadian literature in high schools, but I am not surprised. I teach several Creative Writing courses in the Continuing Education departments at Sheridan and Mohawk Colleges and as part of each curriculum insist on a review of a current Canadian novel or short-story collection. This is less an academic exercise than a device to get people reading Canadian writers. Every semester I am amazed by the numbers of people who have never heard of Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Carol Shields and Alice Munro, never mind the legions of emerging writers and those in mid-career with two or three critically well-received books to their credit. 

Every semester I win a convert or two. Sometimes more. I get no greater charge than hearing someone say that (fill in pulp fiction/blockbuster writer) just doesn't satisfy them anymore, that they're going to read more Canadian writers, and in general books with more tooth. Although I have to meet certain course objectives, I do have more freedom in the classroom than the high-school teachers and can feel their frustration. Also my students in general have money to buy books. As for the teachers who think Canadian literature is sub-standard, it's time to lose the 1970s mentality. The rest of the world has already realized the literature produced in this country is moving, timely and well worth reading.


Name withheld by request

LETTER #2: Does this mean Canadian schools teach English lit or American lit or World literature as opposed to Canadian literature courses? Or does this mean that no literature is taught in the schools?

In all deference to my dear friends in Canada and its unnecessarily neglected literature, I tend to think that the volume of literature involved is rather typical of the retreat of public high school education in North America, rather than any weakness of Canadian literary sovereignty. The parallel facts you mention --except for the idea of your literature being substandard--are true for American high schools about American literature and were certainly true when I went to high school back in the 1960s.

Very few American high schools teach American literature courses, and then only as advanced courses for honor and advanced placement students essentially as introductions to advanced literary studies in college. Usually there are only "English" courses which combine grammar, rhetoric, and some reading. What is read is a pastiche of English, American, and European literature. Because there has been a pressure in the direction of "multiculturalism" as a result of opposition to the dominant culture by oppressed nationalities, there might be a higher quotient of US literature than in the past, due to steps to include African American, Hispanic, Asian-American, or Native writers which is more analogous to reading Quebecois, Native, and Dene literature in Canada. However, there also seems to be a growing motion in US high schools to drop the literary aspects of English classes except for the supposedly college bound.

I graduated from high school in 1965 in Hartford, Connecticut, but I don't think we read six novels of any kind in the four years of high school. I read hundreds of novels when I was in high school, but most all of them were books I chose to read from libraries and from a Marynoll Books subscription my mother got for me (awful books about pure hearted Catholic missionaries in various Asian and Eastern European places being persecuted by evil Communists). I also bought a lot of novels and collections of short fiction at the corner drug store: back in the early 1960s the corner drug store even in our working class neighborhood had a rack filled with contemporary novels and classics as well as lots of genre fiction with trashy looking covers.

My deepest memories of fiction in high school were books I read on my own: the Russians--Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Gogol-- and Robert Graves' Claudius series. Neither was an American text, although I do remember discovering Dos Passos and Whitman because we had my father's old college American literature textbook lying around the house.

In actual high school classes, I can remember us doing one novel a year along with poetry and an annual assault on poor old Shakespeare.

The books I remember reading in high school were a rewritten-in-prose- for-dumb-students version of the Odyssey (when I entered high school, I was placed in the dumb English class because I was Black and my handwriting was miserable, but, luckily, my uncle was a guidance counselor at the high school and got me rescued to college and then honors English where I achieved B's and A's although I hated English which is why I am now an English professor), Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop, Tale of Two Cities, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in my four successive years in high school. You will note that only one of these, the Cather, is an American text.

I also read Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil--not Americans-- in successive years in Latin class. Curiously enough, I don't remember us reading anything of any literary nature in my three years of French!

I tend to think Canadians have an unnecessary inferiority complex based on imagining that everything short of being as narrow minded as they imagine the USA to be is cultural imperialism. How much Belgian or Luxembourgeois literature do you think is taught in high schools in those countries as opposed to Dutch, French, and German literature?

Tony Thomas, Miami, Florida

LETTER #3: Dear Danforth Review,

I laud Tony Thomas’ eminently sensible comments on the supposed crisis of CanLit in our high schools. To me, this alarmist nationalistic ballyhoo is a trivialization of far more significant troubles our schools (and consequently our students and citizens) are suffering.

The question should not be "What are we reading?" but "Are we reading?" The answer, more and more, seems to be no. And, institutionally speaking, who is to blame for this state of affairs? The schools make an easy target, but as was the case with Mr. Thomas, I read voraciously as a youth, and most of that reading was extra-curricular. If I read a lot, it had far more to do with influences in my family than any inspirational teachers or texts I encountered in school. I had the ‘luxury’ few young people (including my contemporaries) today enjoy of growing up in a stable nuclear family in which one of my parents opted to stay at home. I was read to daily as a child, and took up reading myself well before my first day of school. How common is this scenario now? Not very, I’d say, in spite of Pottermania. The proliferation of such electronic babysitters (purchased by parents either out of guilt for lack of attention given to their children, combined with fatigue created by the attempt to balance career and domestic duties) as movies, videogames and the internet has made serious incursions into the time required for this sort of formative reading.

Which is not to say that the public school system, and the governments that underfund and thereby devalue it, are blameless. Because of the sorry state of that system (in my case in the province of PEI), which is more concerned with making sure that anyone, no matter how limited their capacities or interest, can graduate than with providing the kind of education that leads to intelligent, critically-minded citizenship, my parents and I decided that I would pursue my secondary studies at a private school in Ottawa. There, it is true, I read only a handful of Canadian books (The Stone Angel, A Bird in the House, and Mad Shadows are the only books I remember reading in English, though I read others in my French classes), but was also introduced to the classics of antiquity, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Conrad, Lawrence, Dostoevski, and Yukio Mishima. Before this exposure, I’d been mostly interested in science fiction and fantasy, but became, quite unconsciously at the time, a lover of ‘literature’ from the 11^th grade on.

One must first be literate before one can love literature, whatever its country of origin. Both my spouse and I have worked as Teaching Assistants at a Canadian University, and the overwhelming impression we had is that people are barely literate (in the simplest sense of the world), and are allowed to graduate from university still barely literate. If the Writers’ Trust was motivated by anything other than self-interest, they would conduct studies from the perspective of writers rather than as Canadian writers. Many literate Canadians will read Canadian books. But so what if they don’t? What is more important, that we cheerlead for indigenous talent, or that we develop the sort of intellectual acuity and ethical sensibilities (or perhaps more realistically, the bare minimum of being able to read and write competently) required of democratic citizenship? Rather than establishing quotas for homegrown work in the classroom, teachers should be given MORE leeway to teach the books that they love, whether these be English, American, Scandinavian, African, Asian, or Canadian. There is no substitute for pedagogical enthusiasm when it comes to getting students turned on to books.

The fact is that very little CanLit (and I say this as a fan of, and contributor to, our literature) is at the level of the best the rest of the world has to offer. And that which is exceptional is often not taught. Two of the best Canadian novels I’ve read are Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and Leonard Cohen’s The Favourite Game. These books are given short shrift in CanLit courses. Instead, we get mass doses of Atwood, Ondaatje, Laurence, Findley, Richler, Davies, MacLennan. To be diplomatic, each of these writers has his or her own particular talents, and some of them I quite enjoy reading, but none of them is world class, and some of them are downright bad (so much for diplomacy!). It’s this steady diet of middling prose that leads Canadians to make the altogether too-common sweeping statement: "I hate Canadian literature." If I read Canadian books today, it’s more in spite of those I read in school than because of them. Critics like Marchand and Henighan have touched on this, but their views remain at the fringe, since they’re of little interest to the CanLit apologists and Writer’s Trust/Canada Council jobbers. In spite of international praise for Canuck books, ours is a literature still in its infancy. If we persist in being so insecure and isolationist, we are doomed to remain infantile.

Zach Wells, Montreal

LETTER#4: Michael, does this sort of stuff really bother you? Do you think that forcing CanLit down teenagers throats will make them more knowledgeable and Canada a better place to live?

MICHAEL BRYSON RESPONDS: Does it bother me? Yes, but for a complicated host of reasons, which cannot be boiled down to "nationalism". Might more easily be boiled down to "self-interest" (i.e., wouldn't it be great if one of my books landed on the curriculum?!).

No one said a word about forcing anything down anyone's throat.

You mention 1968-1973. How many literary titles were published in Canada in those years? Far fewer than will be published between the years 1998-2003. That is to say, the Canadian literary world has gone through a massive transformation in the past thirty years and the CC report says, nothing has changed in Canadian high schools. Something is amiss here.

Far from forcing teenagers to read more Margaret Lawrence, I think it's clear that these kids -- as well as the rest of the country, surely -- should be told that there are lots of interesting books being written and published. Again, self-interest comes into play here. We all need readers, and wouldn't it be better if kids knew where to search out cool stuff and plop down some coin to get some of it...

mb