The basis for national literature

Here is a draft for ideas I want to present as part of my lecture on March 30

The Five Foundations of National Literature 

Langue: A nation's literature should embody the best written expression of the nation's language. Hence the ideal situation would make the borders of the state coincide with the area in which the language is spoken and printed. I suppose Italy and the Scandinavian countries come close to this ideal. Colonialism destroys this discreet boundedness and thus problematizes national literatures. British history is illustrative. Until 1707 when England annexed Scotland, the term Great Britain was not used. (Wales became part of the same kingdom centuries earlier but I guess was smaller and didn't count.) And yet today we continue to use the term "English literature" for anthologies and courses of study, and include within those many works by Scottish authors, as well as Irish. The word for the language is habitually confounded with the word for the place.

Enseignement: If a national literature contains the best expressions of a given language, this is what schools will want to teach their students in literature classes. A nation that speaks and teaches a cosmopolitan language will be caught in a subordinate position: extolling the writers of a distant land as its cultural models. So both Canada and the United States were stuck teaching English writers as the supreme literary geniuses. Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia felt compelled to explain why Virginia had not produced a Shakespeare, a Milton, or a Newton (the land was too new, and its population too small). The New Canadian Library was begun in 1958 to publish inexpensive editions of Canadian authors so that these works could be assigned in Canadian schools and read by its students. The language of the collection was English, and the small proportion (just over 10%) of texts by Francophone Canadians were published in translation. Classroom anthologies also exist for teaching the great works of literature.

Territoire: In the 1990s I learned that a fellowship program had been created at Harvard for LOWINUS: Literatures of What is Now the United States. A similar motive lay behind the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project based in Houston, whose website announces its mission as "a national project to locate, preserve and disseminate Hispanic culture of the United States in its written form since colonial times until 1960...in what today comprises the fifty states of the Union." Thus the imperial state and language that has subjugated the people of another recognizes their "contribution" to the new cosmopolitan or multicultural national literature. The project publishes books mostly in English translation, although some titles are in spanish and a few are English-language works by hispanic authors.
A related phenomenon concerns how the editors of classroom anthologies of American Literature define the works  that deserve to be included. We have seen in the last 20 years or so that the Heath and then the Norton and other major anthologies have abandoned the "langue" rubric and included more texts originally written in Spanish or French or Dutch, or even oral tales from Native American languages. But should Hernan Cortes and Christopher Columbus be included even though they never set foot on LOWINUS? The Norton said yes, as did Schweitzer and Castillo in their Blackwell Anthology of Early American Lit., whereas the Heath, and Carla Mulford in her anthology opted for LOWINUS criteria and so chose Cabeza de Vaca instead.

Politique: Whatever underwrites the existence of a nation, the creation of a state is a political act. A structure of government must be established and a sense of sovereignty recognized by the world's other states. In the United States the documents of the nation's foundation serves as the origin of its literature. The Library of America series, begun in 1979 (first volumes appeared in 1982) includes 246 volumes, but only 16 by authors born before 1787. Of these 4 are anthologies of 17th and 18th century writings, and 8 of the remaining 12 are collections of writings by founding fathers: Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Marshall, Paine and Washington. Several other politicians and historians are included: Henry Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Parkman, and William T. Sherman. The only volume translated from another language is Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America!

Explorateurs:
The nations of America are post-colonial states. In preserving and transmitting the texts of their foundations the states have met the challenge of establishing sovereignty and indigeneity in various ways. Mexican mestizo ideology, wherein Vasconcellos' raza cosmica is rather like Riel's Méti, are two examples. A nation's "founders" may be its political or its territorial discoverers. In the United States at least since Washington Irving, great effort has been expended to make Christopher Columbus an heroic founder. So many places are named Columbus or Columbia. Italian-Americans mounted a successful campaign to give Columbus his own holiday and make him the "first American." I observe that in Quebec the explorers such as Cartier and Champlain have enhanced status, because they were francophone founders of Quebec and by extension of Canada. Quebec can claim these men and their writings as the foundation of a national literature, which explains why in the Bibliotheque du nouveau monde, roughly 20% of the texts and the authors published so far are explorers from before 1759.

Hemispheric American Literature and Quebec

I have enjoyed several essays in a 2010 collection entitled Canada and its Americas: Transnational Connections. The introduction reviews some of the arguments that I have heard about the "hemispheric turn" in American Studies, such as in the review essay by my friend Ralph Bauer in PMLA a few years back. Does this turn represent an admirable effort by heretofore monolingual and nationalist scholars to reach out and study other traditions? Or is it another instance of American imperialism, as U.S. American Studies scholars seek to become specialists in other national traditions? Why does the term "American" seem to be used as a synonym for United States? Editors Wilfried Siemerling and Sarah Philipps Casteel complain in the introduction that U.S. scholars who have become interested in Mexico show little interest in Canada.

An essay by Monica Giacoppe compares Chicano and Quebecois literature and culture. These arose in regions where Spain and France colonized for decades before "The vagaries of colonialism turned the tables on both the Spanish and the French colonizers: anglophone Protestants who saw their rise to power as proof of their superiority of their 'race' religion and culture displaced" the habitants (189) and peonized them. In both cases "the claiming of a privileged link to the land is a valuable move for budding nationalist movements, it is nevertheless a problematic gesture" because of the dispossessed native peoples (191).

Giacoppe even compares Gloria Anzaldua with Quebecoise writer Anne Hébert, for whom Hannah's primary school is named. In the latter's 1975 novel Les Enfants du sabbat overturns the gender politics of the traditional Catholic culture, as the protagonist is a practicing witch, who "offers her own daughter up to her husband for ritual sexual initiation into the cult" (194). Yikes, I hope they don't teach that book in her class in la quatrieme année!

But even more interesting, given my interest in Louis Riel, was the essay by Albert Braz, professor at U. of Alberta, who has also written The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture. Come quotations from Riel show how he defined Metis identity in a rather utopian and evangelical way. "l'expression anglaise correspondante, Halfbreed, fut a la première génération des mélanges des sangs...Le mot français, Métis, exprime l'idée de ce mélange d'une manière aussi satisfaisante que possible" In this sense the Métis were not the mixture of any particular bloods, but the mixture of all the world's races into one new one. It also suggested how Riel did not see himself as a Canadien Français, but as something new. And indeed, the Quebec francophone catholics did not look kindly on him.