ESC: English Studies in Canada

READERS’FORUM A RESPONSE TO HENRY HUBERT’S REVIEW OF HEATHER MURRAY’S WORKING IN ENGLISH: HISTORY, INSTITUTION, RESOURCES NATHAN GREENFIELD Algonquin College Henry Hubert’s praise of Heather Murray’s Working in English in the June number of ESC is not entirely misplaced. The first two essays, focusing on the appointment of William John Alexander as the first Professor of English at the University of Toronto and the Margaret Eaton School of Literature and Expression, respectively, contain important information about how, at its birth, the profession of English intersected with the elite public. The final two of the book’s sixteen chapters, a Bibliography and Handlist, to­ gether chart almost a century of the profession in Canada. Murray’s more theoretical chapters, especially “Does Controversy Have a Rhetoric,” which Hubert discusses, and “From Canon to Curriculum,” which he ignores, raise important questions about Murray’s (and Hubert’s) attitude toward race politics, her understanding of E.D. Hirsch’s work, and the implications of post-modernism for her own historical work. According to Hubert, Murray’s Fishian claim that within English studies “controversy is reduced to debate, which is controlled by structure” that “leaves certain voices either appropriated or excluded” exemplifies her “his­ torically rooted, yet postmodern point of view.” Unfortunately, Hubert leaves unmentioned and—more importantly—unchallenged what Murray offers (in “Does Controversy Have a Rhetoric”) as a key example of this practice: In Canada today ... perhaps no other question is of greater cultural urgency than the controversy over the appropriation ofthe myths and sym­ bolics [sic] of Native people. This controversy is currently staged in both the newspapers and the alternative press as a ‘debate’between Europeandescent [sic] writers, in a mimetic rehearsal of the original problem. Both the issue and its selective staging raise the question of speaking on, for, and through, and its rhetorical and ethical reproductions. (179) ESC 24 (September 1998) Murray might invoke “polemical license” for her overstatements, but her reviewer (and before him her editor) should have pointed out that she is wrong to say that the “debate” was between “European-descent writers,” unless Ovide Mercredi be one. Hubert’s silence on this point suggests agree­ ment with Murray’s betrayal of the liberal democratic foundations of the academy through her embrace of race politics. (The most obvious sign of this betrayal, ironically enough, is the fact that I have had to use her own racialist categories to refute her.) Viewed from a distance, “From Canon to Curriculum” is one more plea for theory, for critical self-consciousness on the part of the profession, and for, if not the embrace of Pierre Bourdieu’s “social reproduction theory,” then, at least, of Murray’s interpretation of George Grant. “All university curricula in Canada serve the ‘primary purpose’ of Canadian culture: the need to ‘keep technology dynamic within the context of the state capitalist structure’” (Murray 125, quoting Grant). Three comments shouldbe made. First, pleasforgreater self-consciousness have been heard sooften since I did my graduate work at McGill in the 1980s that it is a wonder that everyone is not self-conscious by now. Second, it does, however, seem a bit presentist to think that academics like William John Alexander and Charles G.D. Roberts (who in the 1880s was lecturing at King’s College, Nova Scotia) were not self-conscious. Rather, here one could profit from Fish’s notorious adaptation ofJ.L. Austin’sspeech-act the­ ory to argue that the reason why these men did not specifically enunciate their theoretical assumptions was that they were situated within a commu­ nity ofinterests in which everyone who was likely to hear or read their words shared them. In short, since these men were as nominally Christian as their audiences, they could be relatively sure that everyone was familiar with that rather well-known book that sayeth what need saying. Third, there is nothing wrong with a literary historian pointing out how the “elastic departmental boundary of English has allowed a number of cul­ tural constituencies to find a first institutional base there, as is often the case with women’s studies or Afro-American studies in the United States” (128). It is odd...