Introduction: Points of Departure

This book is The ProdUcT of nearly two decades of reading and research, taking and teaching courses on the literatures of Canada, and a coast-to-coast journey to visit twenty-eight university literature departments and interview nearly one hundred professors. 1 Much of the formal research for this book began with that exploratory trip in 1997-98 and became a core part of my 2001 PhD dissertation.That text, however, was only an intermediary point to this revised and expanded volume.On its own, the dissertation provided an important snapshot of what I found on my trip and my observations of how the shapes and functions of courses on our literatures are inextricably linked with our literary histories and institutions.The data I gathered in 1997-98 is a valuable historical record in itself, for no one else has ever made an effort to assemble such information in so complete a way.As I demonstrate in Chapters Three and Four of this book, the course data and interviews from that year reveal a tremendous amount of information about what we teach, how we teach, and why we teach the courses that we do.Looking at that snapshot of our field in isolation, however, can only tell us so much, which is why I have not published the results of that initial research until now.Incorporating, as I do in Chapter Five, corresponding data from a full decade later enriches our understanding of that first data set significantly.It is only when we have an understanding of Chapter Four, many professors during that era struggled with the challenge of fitting in newer and more diverse works within the course and department structures that had been in place for some time.The challenge of removing "classic" works that had been on the syllabus for years in order to make room for newer and in some cases "unproven" works was a dilemma that professors raised with me again and again.tional questions that, conveniently, remain unasked.This book asks, what happens to our understanding of the complexity of Canada as a site of literary production when we confine its study to university departments organized (and deeply compromised) by the premises of Romantic nationalism that were so fundamental in their founding?In other words, to paraphrase John Willinsky, how has the history that continues, as it did in the nineteenth century, to reflect "a considerable sense that Canada was a unilingually anglophone country, in which francophone culture was a minor phenomenon, something like Welsh in Britain" (Davey, "'and Quebec'" 10).In other ways, however, the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the authors whose texts are included in both English and French courses on the literatures of Canada indicate that the parameters of our fields have also expanded since the early 1970s.As many professors who began their careers during

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