Essays
Nation, homeland, religion, culture: franco-canadian literature in the examination of comparative literature
Dorothea Scholl
; University of Kiel
Abstract
Ever since Lord Durham’s infamous sentence concerning the French Canadians – “They are people with no history and no literature” – there has been a never-ending questioning about the origin, the genesis and the value of literature called Franco-Canadian or Québécois. Be it James Huston’s Répertoire national or the project Archéologie du littéraire initiated by Bernard Andrès – this interrogation is a characteristic strain of the majority of literary criticism in Québec which seeks to define the place and specificity of its literature in correlation to the surrounding or determining forces in order to represent a collective identity. In the present article, different critical attitudes towards the literary field of Québec with its long history will be identified and analysed by taking into account different criteria of canonization. The perception by Québécois criticism of its own literature, its origins and evolution will be examined as well as the perception of this literature by others. This will lead to a better understanding of the ideological, axiological and aesthetic presuppositions which underlie the critical discourse in Québec and to a better understanding of the problematics of the concept of “national literature” within the diversity of literatures in Canada.
Keywords
nation; homeland; religion; culture; canon; first nations; autohistory
Hrčak ID:
228946
URI
Publication date:
26.11.2019.
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