Our project engages in a reading from the ground up that attempts to understand how readers respond to this “ideological work” or “national pedagogy.” Keeping in mind the institutional goals of the CBC and publishers, we are interested in understanding the shape of the public discourse in and around Canada Reads. This reading from the ground up is particularly relevant to Canadian literary discourse which has struggled, virtually from its inception, with an inclination towards a single unifying thesis. Whether in the early articulations of Northrop Frye’s “cruel north thesis” (as described by Sandra Djwa) or more recent assertions that CanLit is a dumpster fire, critics of CanLit have attempted to unify a diverse and fractious cultural field with a single organizing metaphor.
In place of this top-down approach to reading, we attempt to understand the numerous, simultaneous discourses that emerge around Canada Reads as they speak in a range of voices, across varied institutional settings, and with often contradictory goals. We read tweets, newspaper articles, interviews with book club participants, text from the Canada Reads broadcasts, reports from publishers and industry representatives, and the books themselves against the logic of a single interpretation and in the interest of understanding the complex and fractured nature of the field.
Our methodology combines critical discourse analysis, traditional forms of close reading, and digital modes of differential reading. In attempting to sketch a general picture of the state of Canadian literary discourse, we are confronted with the challenge of how to locate each of varied, overlapping, and often conflicting discourses in relation to one another. The discussion of books in Canada is mediated through the CBC, BookNet Canada, Canadian publishers, digital platforms, book clubs, readers, critics, and casual observers; these groups rarely speak in the same terms.
We therefore take our cue from Tanya Clement’s notion of differential reading and Susan Brown’s call to Not Mind the Gap between digital forms of analysis and humanities-based modes of interpretation. Clement adopts Marjorie Perloff’s notion of differential reading as a method of reading which “positions close and distant reading practices as both subjective and objective methodologies.” Moving between the digital analysis (what Clement calls “the objective”) to acts of close reading (“the subjective”) enables Clement to “read differentially”—putting the computational, the literary, the social, and the historical into a troubled yet productive dialogue.
Brown argues for “our need in Canada to work toward a research climate that acknowledges serious engagement in humanities research with digital methods, dissemination, and interfaces constitutes a pressing priority.” For Brown, “the gap” between digital technology and traditional forms of humanities research is a productive space of possibility that requires researchers to invent novel approaches and push at the limits of their traditional disciplines. Brown writes, “We should not mind the digital-humanities gap, in the sense of being put off by it; instead, we should mine it: recognize it as an abundant site for innovative research endeavours, and make it our own.”
We follow Brown’s attention to the space of “the gap” and to Perloff’s differential reading, and we to attempt to put multiple discourses into dialogue with one another while also theorizing on the relations between them. Our goal is to resist a simple transparency between digital and textual but rather draw attention to how both are transformed in their engagement with one another and how the conception of “text as data” requires a renewed understanding of textuality. For us, this involves a combination of macroanalysis, using software to determine patterns in a large dataset, and traditional forms of close reading and textual interpretation. Comparing the results of our software-driven macroanalysis with our own investigation of what people are saying allows us to approach our research questions from multiple angles.
This method of differential reading places digital humanities and traditional humanities modes of analysis into a critical and productive dialogue with one another. This ensures that we are not just using the tools at our disposal but are also thinking critically about those tools as a kind of methodology. Just as we simultaneously employ and critique Critical Discourse Analysis and close reading as methods that both illuminate and obscure dimensions of our work, we also identify the limits of the digital tools that we employ. This allows us to pose a number of questions, such as:
- How do Twitter posts speak back to CBC broadcasts?
- How are identifications of Canadian-ness and other nationalist discourses transformed by their expression online?
- How do readers’ call to decolonize CanLit or account for anti-black racism in CanLit square with Canadian publishers’ stated interest in “diversity”?
- How do sales reports and demographic data align with Canadians’ own conception of their relation to literature?
We are also attuned to the manner in which calls to address racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression in Canadian literature are subsumed within institutional calls for “diversity.” The language of diversity can often reduce calls to transform institutions into mechanisms by which institutions absorb their challenges without meaningful transformation. This has implications for both our attention to the language of oppression that our interlocutors employ as well as for our digital approach to Canadian literature, as we ask: How do the very digital methods that we employ neutralize strident critiques of power and how do we develop new categories of analysis that foreground these critiques as part of the digital?