Producing a Globalized Canadian Literature and Its Communities

The small modernist library in New Westminster, B.C., opened in the year that I was born.Its architecture, a modest variation on the International Style, and its open floorplan with a mezzanine, reflected the way in which culture was being brought into the Canadian public sphere, and signalled the centrality of print culture within the shaping of a national imagination.Around the centenary of 1967, all of the books produced by Canadian authors, which had previously sat discreetly on the shelves, suddenly grew a red maple leaf on their spine: as their number increased, the library became autumnal with CanLit.I worked my way, from left to right, across the shelves of the library, reading whatever red-leafed book lay in my route, an education drawn from the combination of architectural space and the library's cataloguing system.Sometimes I'd be pulled in by a particular author, and my brother and I would take out all of their books and swap them back and forth, coordinating our reading tempo.Sometimes the very strangeness of the language and of the world a book depicted kept me hooked.I still recall the cool prose and the fascinating alienating effect of John Metcalfe's prose, and Alice Munro's short stories-so tied down and domestic in comparison to our workingclass lives!Even the rock-hard lives of George Ryga's northern Alberta farmers and desk clerks felt more recognizable, even on the rainy coast.Occasionally, I would stumble on a book that made the local unfamiliar as well, such as George Bowering's Flycatcher & Other Stories-this other world of Bowering's Vancouver was a mere hour away.Rather than being nostalgic, I now look back at that moment, concretized so nicely in the architecture, not as a period when the contradictions of the state were hidden within a welcoming cultural nationalism, but as a moment when one's relationship to Canadian literature was mediated more by public institutions than by the forces we now rather casually generalize as "the market."Decades of strong literary criticism and cultural studies have done a good job of overturning the exclusions and distortions of Canadian life and history that the ordered modernist shelves of my public library contained.Were there any First Nations authors who crossed my reading route?I certainly read about them, but was there anything by them?Did I get a sense of the nearness of Hogan's Alley,

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