Return of Thematic: Diversity as the New Survival in Canadian Literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article will show that in Canadian literature, once problematized thematic criticism has retrenched itself as an interpretative thematics cohering under the sign of diversity (racial and sexual), anticolonialism, and anticapitalism. Theoretically guiding my critique are Frank Davey’s classic essay “Surviving the Paraphrase” and the early work of Terry Eagleton. My article resends a signal first sent by Russell Brown, who in 2001 argued“ that some kind of reassessment of thematics is needed because of the incessant reiterations about the danger of reading for themes,” but with a difference. In Canada, thematic criticism that once valorized nation has become an anti-national thematic criticism. By considering a broad-based (albeit necessarily limited) sample of critical work on poetry from an academic journal, a literary journal, and a recent notable text in Canadian literary studies, I identify critical and cultural assumptions that inform casual and institutionally sanctioned professional practices in literary scholarship. Foremost among these assumptions is the incidental nature of poetry itself for the production of antioppression arguments. I argue that the means of this coverage has become a recapitulation of thematic criticism under the sign of a nation-hostile, programmatic, and yet sincere “diversity” that unintentionally limits the cohort it seeks to liberate.