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Comparative North American Studies: Transnational Approaches To American and Canadian Literature and Culture 1st Edition Reingard M. Nischik (Auth.)
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Comparative North American Studies
SELECTION OF EARLIER BOOKS
BY REINGARD M. NISCHIK
The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature (2014)
Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood (2009)
History of Literature in Canada: English-Canadian and French-Canadian (2008)
The Canadian Short Story: Interpretations (2007)
New York Fiction (2000)
Comparative North American
Studies
Transnational Approaches to
American and Canadian Literature
and Culture
Reingard M. Nischik
COMPARATIVE NORTH AMERICAN STUDIES
Copyright © Reingard M. Nischik 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-56422-1
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS.
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137559654
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nischik, Reingard M.
Comparative north american studies : transnational approaches to
american and canadian literature and culture / Reingard M. Nischik.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1 Comparative North American Studies and Its Contexts 7
2 Modernism in the United States and Canada: The Example
of Poetry and of the Short Story 27
3 Border Studies, Borderlines, and Liminal Spaces: Crossing the
Canada-US Border in North American Border Narratives 61
4 On Imagology, Canadian-US Relations, and Popular
Culture: National Images and Border Crossings in
Margaret Atwood’s Works 93
5 Reviewing Atwood in Canada and the United States:
From (Inter)Nationalism to Transnationalism 121
6 “The Writer, the Reader, and the Book”: Margaret Atwood on
Reviewing in Conversation with Reingard M. Nischik 179
Notes 191
Selective Bibliography: Comparative North American
Studies and Its Contexts 227
Works Cited 237
Index 257
Figures
T
his book has been my ink-and-paper companion for quite some
time. Crossing the borders separating me from this project’s
completion within some six years was a united effort. And so
it is with great pleasure that I thank those who have joined me on this
transnational, challenging, and illuminating journey.
First, thanks are due to my student assistants for their help in research-
ing relevant literature, a substantial task for the present project, which
over the years Srdjan Perko, Ingrid Kaplitz, Alena Schmidt-Weihrich,
Rene Reichert, Bettina Mack, and Bernadette Schroh accomplished reli-
ably. It was particularly the research for chapter 5 of this book—locating
and obtaining reviews of selected novels by Margaret Atwood—that
turned out to be daunting. Srdjan Perko, my Canadian student assis-
tant, proved an excellent, highly motivated, and invaluable help in this
long-term logistic challenge. With his preparatory help, we eventu-
ally branched out to other university libraries in the United States and
Canada, where student assistants were on exchange, and who were kind
enough to scan reviews that were available at the libraries they worked
at abroad: Rene Reichert and Alena Schmidt-Weihrich at the University
of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, and Cora Schomburg at the
University of Arizona at Tuscon. At the end of the time-consuming
review-collecting stage, when we had succumbed to a perfectionist col-
lector’s ambition to be as complete as possible under the circumstances,
Srdjan Perko, with financial means provided, valiantly stepped onto
a plane bound for Toronto and cheerfully unearthed “the rest” of the
available reviews at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (Atwood
Papers), which proved quite an adventurous undertaking.
Speaking of chapters 5 and 6 , I am indebted to Margaret Atwood;
not only is she one of my favorite “topics,” she was also most gracious
and helpful in three recent meetings we had, among other things, on
the topic of “Reviewing Atwood”—in particular with the interview I
xii ● Acknowledgments
A
merican Studies has historically dealt almost exclusively with
the United States. This nation-centered approach is what
“American Studies” as originally conceived in the 1930s and
1940s was all about, and it has remained the dominant approach to
American Literature for a long time. Toward the end of the twentieth
century, however, in the wake of globalizing tendencies not only in eco-
nomics, politics, and technology, but also in the context of literature
and culture and in the resulting “transnational turn,” American Studies
has opened up to a transnational view of American literature and cul-
ture. Americanist scholars’ investigations have thus started to also reach
beyond the borders of the United States and to examine the connec-
tion between American Literature and other literatures and cultures, or
sometimes even to take a “postnational” approach to literature (i.e., con-
testing the conceptual validity of nation-states in a globalized world),
thereby recognizing both the effects of complex migratory movements
and the way national borders have suppressed Indigenous conceptions
of what is now designated “North America.” Canadian Studies under-
went a similar development, though with a time lag of a few decades
(the establishment of Canadian Studies programs at universities in the
1970s, and transnational Canadian Literature Studies since the 1990s
and particularly in the new millennium).1
One particular kind of transnational American Studies and trans-
national Canadian Studies is a comparative view of their respective
literatures and cultures. In fact, comparing these neighboring North
American cultures is particularly worthwhile because these two coun-
tries are similar enough to clearly invite comparison, yet, at the same
time, also different enough for a comparison to yield telling, indeed
remarkable, contrasts. My previous book, The Palgrave Handbook
of Comparative North American Literature (2014a), is the first to sys-
tematically develop a comparative analytic approach to the literatures
2 ● Comparative North American Studies
and cultures of North America (mainly the United States and Canada,
including Quebec, with occasional consideration also of Mexico). The
handbook charts relevant methodologies and major theoretical issues of
Comparative North American Literature and helps this approach find
its place in the ever-changing manners of dealing with the United States
and Canada and studying these cultures across the disciplines.
The monograph at hand, with its focus on text-centered and genre-
centered case studies within the theoretical approach charted in the
earlier book, extends this novel approach to the study of the United
States and Canada in a complementary fashion. The text- and genre-
centered case studies in this book (chapters 2–6 ) exemplify an array
of selected rewarding approaches within Comparative North American
Studies (period-oriented, generic, thematic/border studies, thematic/
imagological, receptionist), as will be sketched out in this introduc-
tion. In this book, “Canada” mainly refers to Anglo-Canada (although
various chapters do consider Quebec and, to a lesser extent, Mexico),
a somewhat more restricted—though, compared to earlier research on
both countries, still broad—focus that seems viable for a single scholar
(see also the constitutive chapter 1).
Considering that there are relatively few methodological publications
on Comparative North American Studies so far, chapter 1 broaches
the topic by first embedding it into the context of American Studies,
Canadian Studies, hemispheric studies, and global studies. It then deals
with the method and value of comparative literature studies, before out-
lining the key reasons why Comparative North American Studies, and
Comparative North American Literature in particular, form a promis-
ing, timely paradigm for dealing with the literatures and cultures of the
United States and Canada, and, finally, charting particularly relevant
areas of concern. While the contextualizing, theoretically oriented
chapter 1 delineates the wider fields within which this project is situ-
ated, the analytical chapters that follow in an exemplary manner take
various approaches to literary and nonfictional as well as visual texts
as their prime objects of analysis within selected areas of Comparative
North American Studies.
Chapter 2 takes a literary-historical approach, investigating the state
of literature and literary criticism in the United States and Canada
in one particular period, which proved to be particularly crucial for
the cultural and literary developments in both countries, namely, the
modernist period. At the same time, the approach in this chapter is
largely generic: While a comparative study of modernist literature in the
United States and Canada is yet to be written, the chapter focuses on
Introduction ● 3
other cultures view the United States. That is, what is the image of the
United States as seen in literatures from outside the United States? In this
context, the chapter investigates what Canadians think of the United
States (and, at the same time, of their own country) as seen in Canadian
literature and culture. As already mentioned, I focus this question on
the works of Canada’s leading writer Margaret Atwood. Surveying just
a small portion of Atwood’s enormous and multi-generic oeuvre, we
become aware of not only her “Canadian” view of the United States (as
well as her view of her own country), but also how she has moved from
a national and international stance toward a transnational and partly
postnational stance in her view of cultures over the decades. Often,
particularly in her early and middle period, “the Other” for Atwood
has been the United States. The text analyses in this chapter predomi-
nantly deal with Atwood’s nonfictional treatment of the United States
and Canadian-US relations in her essays and speeches, as well as with
her humorous tackling of the topic in her comic strips. Considering
how much popular culture contributes to our view of other countries—
Atwood’s comics being an example of a popular culture genre here—the
chapter also takes a comparative look at popular culture and popular
culture studies in the United States and Canada.
Chapter 5 focuses on an entirely different transnational and com-
parative involvement with Margaret Atwood—who in several respects
is, arguably, Canada’s most “North American” writer—in using a recep-
tionist approach. More specifically, this chapter analyzes and compares
print reviews from Canada and the United States of four selected novels
from Atwood’s early and middle creative periods, namely The Edible
Woman , Surfacing, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Alias Grace. The chap-
ter asks whether the different national origins of the reviewer and the
different national contexts of the readers for whom these reviews were
written and published in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals
have a demonstrable impact on the reviews, depending on whether they
are from Canada and mainly composed for Canadian readers, or from
the United States and mainly written for US readers. To some extent,
this chapter continues the imagological approach of the preceding
chapter through a different lens, because in a few US reviews a certain
stereotyping of Canada is noticeable. Such a receptionist comparison
analyzing one author’s reception in these two North American coun-
tries is implemented here for the first time on such a considerable scale,
based as it is on a large number of texts in order to garner valid com-
parative results: altogether 451 researched reviews—172 from Canada
and 279 from the United States—form the basis for the comparative
Introduction ● 5
analytical part of this chapter, which initially also deals with essential
aspects of reviewing in general as well as with Margaret Atwood’s scat-
tered statements on the reviewing of her works. This case study provides
illuminating answers to questions such as these: How were Atwood’s
early- and middle-period novels received and evaluated in Canada and
the United States? Are there considerable differences in the number of
reviews the books received in one or the other country and has this
changed over time? Do the reviews address similar aspects of the novels,
or are there striking differences that may be put down to the country/
cultural context of the review? As to praise, criticism, or lack of evalua-
tive judgment of the individual novels, are there significant differences
from country to country, and if so, what are plausible culture-related
causes for such differences in the reception of one and the same work?
The penultimate chapter 6 is linked to the previous chapter in that
it also deals with reviewing and, in particular, with reviewing Margaret
Atwood’s works in North America, yet here the reviewed author her-
self has a say. In an interview I conducted with Atwood in London,
the United Kingdom, in October 2014, Atwood at length discusses her
views on reviewing, also from a comparative North American perspec-
tive. Whereas chapter 5 deals with North American reviews of novels of
Atwood’s earlier creative periods as well as her scattered statements on
reviewing in earlier interviews, in this recent interview printed in chap-
ter 6 , we get both a retrospective and a current view by Atwood herself
of her long and wide-ranging experiences as a heavily reviewed Canadian
and North American writer. It is interesting to see in both chapters 5 and
6 how the reception of Atwood and her works has tended to develop from
earlier national and international toward increasingly transnational pat-
terns of reception. The very terminology used in reviews from Canada
and the United States, for instance, claiming that Atwood has managed
to produce “the Great Canadian Novel” or, in a US review about the
same book, “a genuine Great American Novel” (see chapter 5) also dem-
onstrates in nuce, however, how the concept of nation is of continuing
significance, not least in a North American context.
The Selective Bibliography presents a first-ever focused list of publi-
cations of Comparative North American Studies and its contexts, com-
piling essential contributions to the field. As this bibliography contains
close to 60 items not included in the Works Cited list at the end, the
two bibliographies in this book fulfill two different functions for the
reader.
To conclude, chapter 1 and the Selective Bibliography, in their fun-
damental, theoretical orientation, provide a bracket for the interjacent
6 ● Comparative North American Studies
D
elineating and contextualizing Comparative North American
Studies, this chapter approaches the topic by first embedding
it into the context of American Studies, Canadian Studies,
hemispheric studies, and global studies. It then deals with the method
and value of comparative literature studies, before sketching the key
reasons why Comparative North American Studies, and Comparative
North American Literature in particular, form a promising, timely par-
adigm for dealing with the literatures and cultures of the United States
and Canada as well as, finally, charting particularly relevant areas of
concern.
American Studies does not really deal with “America” (but with the
United States only), Canadian Studies does not really deal with (all of )
Canada (but mainly with the English-speaking part of the country),
and North American Studies do not really deal with “North America”
(but mainly with the United States and Canada only), depending on
one’s definitions of these terms. In the following paragraphs, I sketch
such problematic terminological and conceptual issues, before briefly
dealing with more established transnational approaches potentially
encompassing “North America.”
Diana Taylor went to school in Mexico, then moved with her
Canadian parents to Toronto, and is now a professor in New York, thus
having lived in all three countries that are, at least in a geopolitical
sense, regarded as constituting “North America.” Taylor describes the
American hemisphere as an “oddly shaped landmass misidentified, mis-
labeled, and misrepresented from the moment of the first European
explorations” (Taylor 2007, 1416). The trouble is indeed still notice-
able with the designations “America” as well as “American Studies” 2
and “Canadian Studies.”3 As Taylor reports, in Mexico she was taught
“that Am é rica was one, conceptually singular. Nuestra Am é rica , we
shared a continent” (1416).4 In Canada, Taylor’s classmates wondered
where Mexico was anyway. And in connection with the United States
she learnt that “America” really designated (only) the United States,
while the rest of the hemisphere, which should include Canada, was
referred to in the plural form, “the Americas ” (1416). Taylor mentions a
Mexican cabaret artist who once sarcastically joked about this confu-
sion of terms, with both the United States and the whole hemisphere
being called “America”:
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