|
TDR Letters
Subject: Teaching
Canadian literature: IT SUCKS!
Read
what's new as of January 29, 2003
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 11th 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?
Perhaps I've lived through too much CanLit nationalism and am cynical
about its agendas, both apparent and hidden. You cannot build a
literature like a museum, brick by brick. The literature assembles
mysteriously, all by itself, without any help. Two of the best modern Canadian
books were well nigh hidden by their publisher M&S and they still
made it to classic status, just by word of mouth really. I mean Levine's
Canada Made Me and Cohen's Beautiful Losers. In '68 thru
'73, when I was Coming of age here, everyone I knew was reading Vonnegut,
Brautigan and Hesse: they'd get passed hand to hand and seemed to touch
us where it mattered most. Was that because of dope? Maybe. And maybe
because they were easily available in Vintage paperbacks or Penguin
Modern Classics. Oh, and I suppose Kerouac too. They certainly weren't
on highschool reading lists.
Maybe I'm just too bloody minded, but I still agree with Frank Zappa
after all these years: you go to college to get laid, for an education
you go to the library. The public library. That place where the books
are free and no-one tells you how or what to think, except maybe the
authors.
cheers for now: gord
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
LETTER #5: Great to get a response from you on this Michael: it's a touchy
issue, and as I far as I can recall, always has been. I remember it came
up during my stint at Paragraph; I recall writing a response to a
letter saying that reviews "were not meant to connect readers to
writers" (close quote maybe not exact), and I feel the same when
you say that kids should be told about good Canadian books. I just don't
buy it. My feeling has been, for years really, that kids get educated
despite what we do for them, not because of it. High schoolers will seek
out what they want in the community, be it alternative rock (as opposed
to the radio fare), or literature that touches them more than the
officially sanctioned stuff. Part of their trip, though, is to discover
this stuff for themselves. They want/need the adventure of that because
it fits in with their need to rebel and establish their sense of
identity and individuality. It's much more fun to go downtown on their
own and seek out, say, Bukowski or Nick Cave, to pick names they won't
find in the local library (probably) than to have some well meaning soul
tell them it's good (or hip) for them.
Lack of library funding touches on another issue, and that is,
artistic young people (just like gays and really anyone that doesn't fit
the mold) always have to leave the provinces and come to the city. Small
town libraries are underfunded, but the two systems I'm most familiar
with, Mississauga and Toronto, most definitely are not, they're bulging
with books/videos etc. The Jan/Feb Books In Canada has my review
of Curtis Gillespie's golfing book (can't recall title right now). The
Toronto system had both his earlier books (one a standard CanLit short
story collection and one a bunch of profiles of the developmentally
handicapped), and in one Saturday morning I was able to visit the two
branches and read sizable chunks of both books. You can't get much more
low profile than Curtis Gillespie. Have you even heard of him?
I agree, of course, that since my formative period, the number of
CanLit titles has shot way up, and that we are on the world stage now
for good, it's not just some flash in the pan, but with that achievement
comes a responsibility to quit our low down ways, established in the
nationalistic seventies, of shamelessly promoting second rate product
just because it's Canadian and the writer got some degree in creative
wanking in the Kooteneys. And by second rate I mean "sufficient
craft to articulate a cliche". (this also goes on with CanFilm: how
many times have I read a respectful review in the Globe and
shucked out ten or so big ones for some artfully shot evocation of
downtown blackleather existential angst circa Paris 1953, updated with
aids and heroin chic, and with a script penned by two poodles on Prozac?)
You know, the idea that some teenager in New Zealand might read Yann
Martel because he won the Booker is exciting, but how many teenagers (or
adults) that you know read Keri Hulme's The Bone People when she
won some years back? Or say, Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda? My
guess for most popular Canadian author with high school age kids would
be Doug Coupland. He's hip, ironic, vacuous, and his books are
everywhere. Just a guess though. When I'm in Chapters out here I always
look to see what the teenagers, who are usually waiting to go into a
movie or have just left one, are looking at. It's a fair mix of Rock
music bios, newage/witchcraft/wiccan stuff and a few scouting the
fiction section for certain titles they've been told are good. And you
know sometimes it's still Kerouac...
Me, I'm obsessed with non-fiction these days and read a ton of it.
Simon Schama's History of Britain is one of the best books I've
read in years. I wanted to use this in a reply to the essay on reviewing
in TDR, and I'm still contemplating that, but I just haven't had
the time. Life just keeps getting in the way: not to mention jobs.
cheers for now: gordon
LETTER #6: I wanted to make a quick comment
[on Gordon Phinn's comments] with respect to teaching can lit. especially the ideas that a) teaching involves forcing things down
teenagers' throats and b) that unlike museums, literature is mysterious etc
(which students need to rebel against).
The first proposition is accurate about a lot of teaching, of almost any
subject - and yet perhaps sometimes it's effective - after all, engineers
do build bridges, lawyers go to court & win/lose cases - but surely it's
possible to teach interesting/current/small press etc books w/out shoving
them down teenagers throats. I see the benefits of radical art being taught
all the time at the art school where I work - emily carr - students have a
grounding in contemporary conceptualism in the contexts of (post)modernity
that stands them in good stead for doing artistic work today. Teaching stuart ross or maggie helwig - as i've also done - just raises the bar for
the students - here's something wild - read it, reject it, whatever, but
see what's been done here. I think that anyone who professes to care about
how books are written & read & who has the kind of decision making you have
as an academic or teacher should use the work they're excited about.
Secondly, I don't see how literature, unlike museums, are some mysterious
entity, except to realize that this is the kind of romantic hogwash that -
ironically - the old school academy & contemporary lit publicity business
both propogate(d). Reading innovative work, whether recent or not, and
talking about it, would hardly "eliminate" mystery anyway - when students
encounter writing that seems relevant that's what counts. Perhaps "young
people" keep turning to the beats etc just because it seems like some artless "alternative" (kerouac wore khaki etc) to "straight society" ....
Clint Burnham, Vancouver
LETTER #7: For what it is worth I work as an
English Teacher at a French School in Mississauga. I teach that
expressions like 'dummer than a sack full of hammers',
'tighter-than-a-mouse's-hole-stretched-over-a-barrel' and 'baseball bat
and a field of ripe pumpkins' are literary devices such as imagery,
colloquialism and metaphor which belong to the rural region of my
upbringing: the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia.
Recently a fellow English teacher bought 25 copies of In the Skin
of the Lion by Michael Ondaatje and I noticed that it was taught
last year alongside: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and/or The
Handmaids Tale. On Valentines Day I passed out Love Poems by
Irving Layton, a recent gift to the school and the kids in my grade 11
class were interested to hear the story of how Patrick Woodcock and I
went to visit the old man in his Nursing Home in Montreal to bring him a
bottle of wine and he looked up at the nurse and said: 'Hey
Beautiful.'
Also, I have brought in a copy of Madeline Sonik's Arms and
read from it to teach alliteration and puns. It is a hysterical book,
funny, original and sad as well, though I had to carefully select
chapters that were appropriate. What I am trying to say is that Canadian
literature doesn't suck. Panels and committees don't do anything, as
they have lost touch, in my opinion, with what is happening closer to
the ground. Actually there is a lot of great literature happening in
Canada right now. Paul
Vermeersch, Sheila Heti, Michael Winter are all good writers in my
estimation. Get them into the classrooms and make it a publicly funded
mandate to have good writers visit schools. But keep the knitting
circles and self-congratulatory panel sitting fuddy duddies out of
it.
You want to get kids interested in literature, then get the writers
out into the classroom and let them talk about literature. To use a
hockey analogy: no one wants to listen to what Ron Maclean thinks. They
want to listen to Don Cherry. He fought in rinks. He actually played the
game.
John Stiles
|
