Voices in Search of a Conversation: An Unfinished Project

Abstract

Interdisciplinary Canadian Studies emerged in two distinct phases. The first was launched with the birth of the Instititute of Canadian Studies at Carleton University in 1957, and provided a bridge from the age of the metanarrative and the canon to phase two, originating with the first issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies in 1966, and encountering the discourses of the postmodern and the post-colonial. As we begin the new millennium the second phase is beginning to give way to a third. This paper investigates phase two, particularly the interval 1966 to 1975. During these years the idea of diversity was institutionalized as a resistance to the meta narrative. The period is characterized by the liberation of a multiplicity of voices. Throughout its brief life, interdisiciplinary Canadian Studies has consistently favoured the collaboration of the disciplines in a spirit of widening intellectual boundaries. In phase two it proved to be uncomfortable with the fragmentation of imported critical theory, in its very nature conflicted by an intellectual commitment to the nation state and to notions of community and citizenship. Throughout phase two there has been a tension between interdisciplinarity and theory. Phase three might, it is suggested be characterized by a renewed collaboration of the disciplines, and a conversation of the voices, in defence of the relationship that makes them possible.