Antipodean Hybridity and Canadian Prairie Literature: Towards an Intercultural Pedagogy
Debra Dudek, University of Wollongong
Canadian Prairie Literature and its analyses are produced and consumed from primarily the physical space of the Canadian prairie itself. What happens, however, when Canadian Prairie Literature is taught in Australia to people who have never seen, and often never heard of, "the prairies"? On the one hand, my pedagogical philosophy rests upon a notion that literary criticism must begin with close readings of texts, that readers must approach a text with the attitude that they have something to learn from the narrative through their engagement with the events and characters and through their willingness to embed themselves in the narrative frame of a particular text. On the other hand, I find myself wanting to fill that experiential gap with words that describe my body in that space. This autobiographical and nationalist (and regionalist) impulse, however, may build a metafiction of personal experience around Prairie narratives that might overdetermine students' perceptions. In this paper, I shall map some of the ways in which Prairie literatures are pushed and pulled through these processes of personal investment/de-vestment and shall argue that Australian readings of Canadian Prairie literature shift discussions away from geographical determinism and towards Antipodean hybridity.