What’s Happened to CanLit?

By the time a Canadian graduates from high school, there is one Canadian poem he or she is likely to know: “In Flanders Fields.” We might mistake McCrae’s poem for the central text of Canadian literature, so unfailingly can our students intone it. If one aim of mandatory schooling is to guarantee basic knowledge of one’s country, the Canadian literary education cannot claim success. ((For the purpose of this essay, only English-language literature and education will be treated.)) Insufficient resources are compounded by conspicuous indifference and confusion about which authors are essential. Whose place in the Canadian canon is firm enough for teaching? Who can challenge McCrae?

Setting out to map not the ideal, but the de facto Canadian canon, by examining the basic texts of a Canadian’s education—and by talking to the instructors who teach them, or do not—we find our curricula strangely untouched by the 1960s and ’70s, decades that saw the sustained efforts of...