Comparative Canadian/Québécois Literature Studies

Abstract

Comparative Canadian/Québécois literary studies are alive and well in Canada. Marie Carrière and Albert Braz, the guest editors of a recent issue of the usually international-in-focus Canadian Review of Comparative Literature , confidently claim in their introduction to the special issue devoted to the topic that, “despite its politically problematic name, comparative Canadian literature remains as vital as ever at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” ¹ They do go on to note, however, that “the unicultural orientation of the criticism of both English Canadian and Québécois literature is particularly surprising” (Carrière and Braz 2009, 6, my emphasis). While I would agree with Carrière and Braz’s observation that “what are still tentatively branded the country’s two ‘littératures offi-cielles,’ or ‘official literatures’” ² tend to be studied separately in the fields of literary criticism, I would argue that there is—and has been over time—a group of productive scholars of Canadian/Québécois literary works who have devoted their careers to the comparative study of Canada’s two major literatures—today most often called, in their separate manifestations, “Canadian literature and cultural studies” and “lettres québécoises.” In this chapter, I will begin with a chronological journey through comparative literary analyses, and then engage with some scholars’ suggestions about twenty-first-century work in “comparative Canadian literature”—a truncated term that means scholarly works that analyze the literatures in the two official languages of Canada. Before doing so, however, I want to lay bare my position.