What do scholars of Canadian literature want for and from the field? The Canadian LLC asked these questions of MLA members, inviting their insights amid a moment defined by significant doubts concerning the production, teaching, and canonization of literature in Canada.
CanLit is in a bad place. Scholars’ exhaustion following the COVID-19 pandemic and the mounting demands of the AI-saturated classroom compound long-standing financial pressures faced by literature programs in Canada. Years of reduced funding for the Arts and Humanities, university’s economic dependence on foreign students, and narrowing job prospects do not help; in the last five years, there have been (only) three job postings for Canadian literature scholars across the country. Such infrastructural problems are not unique to the field of Canadian literary studies, of course, and yet contemporary scholars of American and British literary are not experiencing the same crises of conscience: why?
One answer lies in the last ten years of well-publicised scandals and institutional failures—the UBC Accountable debacle and Margaret Atwood’s resultant fall from grace; calls for a national appropriation prize in the Writers Union of Canada’s magazine; #MeToo revelations from across Canada’s Creative Writing programs; the institutional and familial protection offered Alice Munro and withheld from Andrea Skinner, her daughter, following Gerald Fremlin’s confirmed sexual abuse; York University’s spring 2025 announcement that it will suspend admissions to eighteen programs including Indigenous studies, East Asian studies, and Gender and Women’s studies—that have dismantled CanLit’s notions that social or infrastructural change can stem from scholarly critique. As the editors of Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (2018) reflect, “CanLit is in trouble, and it is the trouble” (McGregor, Rak, Wunker 12-13). CanLit’s failures, they contend, are not aberrant glitches of a gracious and inclusive national culture, but the predictable outcomes of a hetero-patriarchal and colonial one.
What, then, can critique do? How do you solve a problem like CanLit? As the field’s sense of itself ruptures, generational divides have begun to emerge. Interestingly, senior scholars—Rinaldo Walcott and Julie Rak are two prominent examples—appear more comfortable binning the field than their emerging and precariously employed colleagues. Indeed, those with the least institutional purchase are also most insistently reimagining CanLit. This work, as Larissa Lai contends in Land / Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures (2023), refuses to conflate the “White straw man” of “CanLit” with all literatures in Canada. Drs. Tavleen Purewal (Assistant Professor at UNB), William Brubacher (Sessional Lecturer at McGill), and Claire-Marie Brisson (Preceptor in French at Harvard) are at the forefront of this (un)disciplinary work.
Dr. Purewal’s “Facing Disciplinarity: Racial Entanglement in Canadian Literary Studies” sees the past ten years as a paradoxical moment wherein anti-racist logics have gained inclusion across the study of Canadian literature anddemonstrated the tenuous nature of such inclusion. By comparing the policing of Indian migrants (those detained on the Komagata Maru in1914) and policing by the Punjabi Canadian officers (those who assaulted Jamiel-Moore Williams, a Black Canadian, in 2020), Purewal challenges arguments that champion identity studies’ social utility and the value of inclusion within Canada’s neoliberal institutions.
Dr. Brubacher’s “Listening to Gail Scott's Furniture Music: Pondering Economic Crises from Literary and Academic Perspectives” approaches experimental poetry as a hopeful rejoinder to narratives of economic crisis. Like Purewal, Brubacher focuses on solidarity amid economic and political uncertainty; however, he reads Furniture Music, a chronicle of Scott’s time in New York during the 2008 economic crisis, as exemplifying experimental poetics’ capacity to recontextualize CanLit from without. The precariat can similarly, he proposes, recontextualize this scholarly field from without by parsing CanLit’s “background noise” from its sonorous futures.
Finally, Dr. Brisson addresses CanLit’s value outside of Canada. In “Beyond the Neighbo(u)r Next Door: Canadian Literature as Literacy for Canadianness,” Brisson reframes CanLit’s complexities—fluid geographies, linguistic hybridity, relational ethics among them—as antidotes to simplifying or monolithic understandings of national literature. While these complexities and the debates the fuel unsteady the field of Canadian literature studies, they also spur the field’s critical insights into (trans)national identity.
In our CFP, the Canadian LLC also described this as a “blue sky” conversation: our desire is for CanLit scholars to gather in Toronto and, guided by brief research presentations (max 18 min. each) that address the field’s limits andpossibilities, begin to articulate novel futures. Indeed, at this moment of rupture, conversation and collaboration are CanLit’s way forward.