“A pack of cards”

EDITORIAL EDITORIAL “a pack of cards” O ne d a y in Ja n u a r y 2000, I spent part of a “golden afternoon” wandering through “All the golden afternoon: the inventions of Lewis Carroll,” the exhibition selected from the Joseph Brabant Collection of “Alice” material that was shown at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. Somehow, the image of Alice with the “pack of cards ... flying down upon her” reminded me of the life of an editor of a periodical as s/he is chased by, and chases, mate­ rial that needs sorting out and that tumbles down in often confusing patterns. I have especially felt this way recently as I have tried to or­ ganize this special millennium issue on the past, present, and future of English studies in Canada, public policy, and the public good, and to answer myself some of the questions posed by the contributors. There are, I suspect, no easy solutions to the challenges faced by English studies, and there is no reason why there should be. Heather Murray’s checklist of writings on English studies in Canada in the last decade, however, grounds the two articles, the two pieces in the read­ ers’ forum, and the eight reviews that follow. Thus, while it is not usual to privilege systematic bibliography in this way, I have done it deliberately to suggest that there are historical contexts for the discussion of our present and future. The interrogations of our profes­ sion by Len Findlay, Mervyn Nicholson, Laura Robinson, and Sharon Hamilton are remarkable, it seems to me, both for their courageous — some might say reckless — stances and their provocative invitations to throw up the cards of English studies and to analyse in fresh ways how they land. We are not the only discipline, of course, undergoing a process of self-examination and attempting to achieve new insights by writ­ ing “outside the box,” to use a current expression. The first review, which focusses chiefly on the university past, and the last, which looks mostly on the university present and future, frame the other six so that they may be read both in the context of the university at large and the academic enterprise in general. Although these half-dozen reviews have Canadian literature as their chief subject matter, they deal with books that themselves reveal many different approaches in the scholarship and criticism of English studies in Canada. The readers of English Studies in Canada, not the writers and the organizer of its material, will finally have to judge the success of this special issue. But if it stimulates more thought and elicits more 249 EDITORIAL discussion on our profession, its place in Canada, and our place in a North American environment, then throwing up the cards, even though they fly wildly around, will have been worth the editor’s oc­ casional “little scream.” Mary Jane Edwards Editor, ESC 250 ...

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