Nationalism and literature: The politics of culture in Canada and the United States

Corse, Sarah M. 1997. Nationalism and literature: The politics of culture in Canada and the United States. Cambridge Cultural Social Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press. $54.95 hc. $17.95 sc. xii + 213. GRAHAM FRASER

ST. MARY'S UNIVERSITY, HALIFAX Cultural nationalism is an exercise in differentiation, typically based on international differences in language, ethnicity, religion, history, and geography. Sarah Corse's comparative study of Canadian and American literature, however, asks why two industrialized, predominantly English-speaking neighboring nations should espouse such radically different images of their own national characters. The difference, she argues, is not only much less clear than cultural nationalists on each side would hope, but is also very much an artificial construction. Corse intends her work as an attack on the "reflection theory" of canon formation, the now largely discredited notion that national canons reflect the distinct, naturally arising values of a culture. Canons, she argues, are in fact fabricated by cultural elites in an ongoing political project of "imagining" the nation.

As a sociologist, Corse eschews the close analysis of individual texts characteristic of literary criticism, choosing instead an empirical strategy that digests a large number of texts in search of quantifiable evidence for her conclusions. This methodology, she feels, will "explicate the meaning of textual characteristics within an understanding of the social and economic arrangements surrounding the text" (4). Corse takes as her sample 184 novels, which she divides into three categories: twenty "canonical" novels selected from university reading lists; twenty-nine "prize winning" novels which represent contemporary high culture literature; and 135 "bestsellers" which represent popular literary taste. Corse then "codes" each according to certain thematic and formal criteria (the coding sheet is duplicated in an appendix, as are lists of all texts sampled). While literary critics may cringe at some of the high school abstractions that comprise Corse's criteria (for example: "Main plot is: 1) story of individual(s) 2) story of group. . . 3) story of situation" [178]), her methods are valid and consistent for the purpose of mass thematic criticism. However, the first significant drawbacks to her method also begin to emerge here. By excluding all literary forms other than the novel from her sample, Corse's methods magnify the exclusionary tendencies of the thematic criticism that underlies canon construction. Furthermore, because thematic criteria vastly outweigh formal and stylistic criteria on her coding sheet, her results shed little light on formal differences between Canadian and American literature. With regard to the canonical novels, Corse's findings generally support those of cultural nationalists. Her study becomes more interesting, however, when she compares the canonical themes to those of prize-winning and best-selling novels published between 1978 and 1987. Literary prizes both audition works for the canon and present opportunities to contest canonic values. Such contestation reveals the emergent power groups among the cultural elite who shape the canon, but Corse finds that these debates over "opening" the canon in fact only reinforce the canonic paradigm and the authority of elitist aesthetics. National canons, Corse concludes, are defined against other national canons; prize-winners are selected from within the literary parameters of the canon. While the political agenda of the canon requires exclusion and differentiation, the economic goals of mass-market publishing demand maximal inclusion and dedifferentiation from literature. Not only do Canadian and American bestsellers espouse the same values, Corse finds, but also the majority of them are the same novels. The lack of cross-national difference in popular literature, she argues, refutes the idea of naturally distinct literary values in either the United States or Canada. Although armed with these findings, Corse has surprisingly little to say about what they ultimately mean in terms of the "official" cultures of each nation or the processes that endow texts with cultural value. Instead, she posits a simplistic reactionary model to explain why particular values are canonized: for example, that American revolutionary nationhood rejected the values of social order espoused by British literature; and that Canadians valorized family and community to contrast them with American individualism. Despite the empirical evidence Corse musters, the binary nature of her conclusions is both disappointing and suspicious: disappointing in that the flip-flopping oppositions among British, American, and Canadian values reflect the easy generalizations of cultural stereotypes; and suspicious in that Corse never examines whether her startlingly binary findings might not be the consequence of binary oppositions within her own coding sheet. In an effort to refine her reactionary model, Corse proposes that nations draw on "national cultural repertoires" of themes and symbols, privileging different themes at different times to create a national literature in response to changing factors in the social world. This model acknowledges the dynamic interaction between the cultural elite which priviliges certain literary themes and the population which draws on literature for its self-image, as well as the reciprocal shaping of the thematic repertoire itself by the ongoing process of national "imagining." This fluid model, Corse concludes, explains the differences and similarities both among national literatures and within them, without accepting the static model of cultural mimesis posited by "reflection theory."