The Rise of English, eh?

Abstract

Thank NORTHROP FRYE. No, really, thank him, light a candle, make a toast, whatever. For all of his astonishing professional accomplishments--his landmark texts, his founding role in our organization, his mentorship of generations of students, etc.--the one that we should all appreciate is a timely intervention whereby the wise old sage urged his colleagues to avoid the folly of the inane acronym. At the time, they were trying to figure out what to call our then-fledging association and the choices were between CAUTE (to my ears falling somewhere between cough and gout) and CUTE (cue derisive laughter). Frye, though, cleared his throat and wondered if there might be an improvement ... That's how we ended up with ACUTE (no second C for colleges at the time, though). Sharp, perceptive--what's not to like about that? Details, details, I know, but it is the details that give history if not its shape then certainly its texture. In between the official history of conference-going and the commissioning of reports on the state of the discipline, Marjorie Garson's review of the first twenty-five years of our collective venture (1957-1982) is rife with such seemingly inconsequential details. Given our mandate in this Readers' Forum of using Garson's piece to consider the future and direction of ACCUTE, I first toyed with the idea of using her work to imagine what ACCUTE might look like at its centenary in 2057. Beyond witticisms about rigidly adhering to the 140 character limit for conference tweets and marveling at how our membership dues fell to 1958 levelsone dollar!--thanks to the depreciated North American currency, I felt ill-equipped to forecast the state of discipline. Better instead to look forward by going back. Garson's history is an invaluable document to assess the state of the discipline in our state, which is to say the particularly Canadian preoccupation with professing literature. Like many Canadian literary scholars, I was first introduced to institutional histories of our profession via Terry Eagleton and Gerald Graff, which admittedly focus on the British and American experience. As an Americanist, though, I had never thought particularly deeply about the Canada-sized gap in my understanding. What Garson makes quite clear is the unique challenge posed to the Canadian experience, perhaps most evident in the false starts that preceded the founding of acute as a Learned Society. As a recently transplanted Westerner, I was intrigued to discover that the first attempt at a national gathering of Canadian literary scholars took place in the West during the early 1920s, while Edmonton was the site of ACUTE'S first annual meeting in 1958. In between, efforts to found a national organization that would meet regularly waxed and waned, in no small part due to unstable funding sources (sound familiar?). During the early 1950s, for example, a precursor to ACUTE secured funding from American sources. Even though there were Canadian cut-outs (the University of Toronto and the Humanities Research Council--a precursor to SSHRC), we have the Carnegie Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation to thank for footing that initial bill . and for refusing to do so on more than a one-time basis, forcing acute to adopt self-sustaining practices (those aforementioned dues), thus hastening its entry into the roll of learned societies. Here, I thought, we have the Canadian experience nicely encapsulated. On the one hand, we have the perennially vexed relationship with America, where fears of cultural hegemony are exacerbated by the fact that any given province tends to have more in common with their southern neighbours than they do with each other. On the other, we have the insistence on east-west national ties stretching from Dalhousie to UBC. It goes without saying that the fate of Canada itself depends on such lateral connections (the most obvious example being, of course, the famous last spike of the CPR to which our national future was pegged). …