ENG252Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Nationstates, Canadian Identity, Imagined Community
Canadian Lit – Intro
• CanLit as an institution, as a distinct disciplinary field
• CanLit and its complex relation to the Canadian nation-state
• Exploration narratives & colonialism
• Post-colonialism
• Multiculturalism/racialization
• Gender & Sexuality
• Land – wilderness – the natural environment
• Politics of representation
• Formal & aesthetic concerns
• Material conditions
• Literary movements (modernism, regionalism, postmodernism, etc.)
• Larger contexts (globalisation, transnationalism, etc.)
CanLit
• As a national literature: assumed to reflect Canadian identity
• Suggesting a homologous relationship between human subjects – citizens –
as reflected in
• literature and their community
Iagied couity Beedict Aderso
• A community that is socially constructed
• Different from an actual community
• Because it is not based on daily interactions between its members
CanLit as an institution
• Constructed as a literary field, a tradition, that has been instrumental in the
making of the nation-state’s identity ut that has also been
instrumentalized by the nation-state
• How we understand a body of words
Nation-state
• Not a stable category
o Canada means different things to different people
• Often a result of complex negotiations
o Internal contradictions within the nation state
o Leads to conflicts and resolutions
National imaginary
• Refers to the visible and less apparent ways in which a nation express what it
takes to be its distinctiveness
• The result of how a nation-state exercises its dominant self-identity
o Tries to educate people and create citizens
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