What’s most exciting about this book to you?
This book was an opportunity to rethink some of my own assumptions about what Mennonite literature is, how it works, and what it might be in the future. I undertook the project in response to what I saw as a range of promising work that was underway in the field, which I thought might be fostered by a careful rethinking about the field as a whole. One of the most notable parts of doing the research for the book was how it broadened my appreciation for the broader range of work that had already been done in the field. One example will have to suffice: I begin the introduction suggesting the project can be read as a response to Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s 2013 call for new histories in the field, but late in the project had to rewrite the opening pages after I stumbled upon a compelling 1997 essay from Mavis Reimer, who had already made a remarkably similar call some 15 years earlier. The research process for this project, which was explicitly looking to broaden my understanding of the field’s critical genealogy, was full of these types of discoveries.
My goals, then, were to help articulate the concerns I had with ways in which the contemporary field continued to rely—mostly unintentionally—on terms and concerns that marked its emergence as a “minority literature” during the long 1980s; to offer a critical frame that might facilitate the wider range of work currently being undertaken in the field; and to undertake a series of case studies to explore the types of readings that are made available through this new frame. I’m not sure “exciting” is quite the right word here, but I left the project feeling that Mennonite creative writing is wonderfully rich and varied, with a longer and broader history than we often recognize, and fully convinced offers that there is a wonderful opportunity for scholars and readers interested in continuing to explore it. And of course, as always, I was excited to dive deeper into the literary works themselves. I’ve heard it said that critical analysis tends to disenchant literary texts, but my experience has always been just the opposite: it’s only through an extended examination of a work that I am able to fully appreciate its magic.
- Do you see it as a new departure for you, a continuation of earlier work/themes, or some combination?
There is no question it's a continuation of my earlier work, in the sense that it focuses a good deal on methodology and literary history, in its broad gestures across texts and contexts, and in its revisionary gestures. It is a continuation, too, in the sense that I return to some questions about the underlying assumptions of the field itself. At the same time, the answers I try out here differ from those I explore in my earlier work. In Rewriting the Break Event, for example, I made an argument about the significance of repeated narratives within the field, and focussed exclusively on Canadian fiction. I worked hard in that book to historicize the emergence of Mennonite literature in Canada, as well. I stand behind much of that project, but recognize that in keeping my focus on that repeated narrative, and in accepting the national frame, I stayed largely within the very limits to which I was trying to draw attention.
Here, in this latest work, I return to some similar questions about the field’s emergence, but have come to rather different conclusions. Although I have still tried to articulate some of the concerns I see with the broader field, in this book I’ve made a concerted effort to locate those concerns as part of the field’s ongoing debates, and to risk suggesting alternative frames and avenues for consideration.
Do you see your work as “Mennonite,” and how or how not? (We know this is a ridiculously broad and fraught question, so feel free to respond in whatever way seems right to you.)
This question may be “ridiculously broad and fraught,” as you say, but I think it is important to recognize that we as scholars have been happily answering it on behalf of the creative writers for decades, while rarely pausing to consider its implications for ourselves. Personally, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the idea that we can label all work by authors of Mennonite descent as “Mennonite literature,” regardless of whether the work in question directly engages Mennonite characters, contexts, or concerns. Of course, it is true that the vast majority of literary texts about Mennonite history, faith, or culture are written by authors who self-identify as Mennonites themselves – but that is not quite the same as saying all creative books written by Mennonites are best, or even appropriately, to be understood primarily as Mennonite works. I discuss this at length in the introduction to Reading Mennonite Writing, where I argue this view seems to rely on a Romantic understanding of literature as the privileged expression of identity, whether national or ethnic, and risks a reductive form of biographical criticism by which one reads from the text through the life of the author. This is the logic of literary fields as a minority or nationalized literary tradition – unquestionably effective and strategically enabling, but also limiting and risky in ways we need to better understand. The solution I explore in the book is to suggest that “Mennonite literature” should be understood less a clear and coherent category, or transparent descriptor of literature by Mennonites, and more as a critical frame that can be used to understand literary texts about Mennonites. Put differently, Mennonite literature, in this sense, at least, is not something that a text is, ontologically and definitively, but rather as something functional, as something readers choose to do with a text – a way of reading that engages the recognizably Mennonite elements within the work, and which foregrounds its relationship to other works that have done something similar.
What does this mean for my own work? Well, I see myself as Mennonite and as a critic, but I don’t see all my scholarship as “Mennonite criticism.” I’ve published essays on Renaissance drama, on book burning, and on Robert Service’s cottage in the Yukon, on the spatial politics of Canadian literature, on Derrida’s conception of violence, and so on, and none of this work seems categorizable to me as “Mennonite literary criticism.” That being said, I have no problem acknowledging there is work that is appropriately described in such terms, including much of my own work! Where my scholarship directly articulates and engages with Mennonite themes and concerns in relation to literature, and where it enters into conversation with the work of other scholars who have established the conversation ahead or alongside of me—that is, when I am taking up the frame of “Mennonite literature” in order to read literary texts—I am more than happy to have such work be categorized as “Mennonite literary criticism.” It just seems right to me that in criticism, as in literature, the content of the text should invite how it is received.
Before I leave this question, I should confess that I do recognize my answer to be insufficient. First, I should admit that I do think there is something fascinating about the fact that Mennonite communities in North America, with their roots in a conservative faith tradition that was often proven deeply skeptical of postsecondary education and of fiction itself, and which has worked hard to maintain boundaries between itself and the broader secular world, has somehow managed to produce a beautiful and rich tradition of creative writing that is widely read and celebrated both by Mennonites themselves and far beyond. How did that happen? And how did that same faith tradition end up fostering enough literary critics and academics to have established a vibrant and ongoing scholarly discussion of this writing, with essays and books about Mennonite literature being regularly published by reputable publishers. And how did it produce a wide and deeply invested group of readers across a range of differently positioned Mennonite communities in multiple countries? All this is remarkable, and it deserves serious consideration on its own terms. I’m just not sure these are questions for the methodologies that dominate literary studies; they seem to demand historical and /or sociological approaches. And I should add that I’m quite open to the prospect that the unique set of cultural, religious, and historical contexts that fostered the overlapping traditions of creative and critical Mennonite writing has produced, collectively, elements that are recognizable and specific to those traditions. I’m just not sure what they are!
Second, I should acknowledge it is true that Mennonite literature has often been received, and effectively functioned, as an expression of a broadly understood Mennonite “community”—a term I have learned to use with some trepidation. This point was driven home to me once again during my work on Distant Reading, Mennonite Writing, a large, searchable bibliographic database for Mennonite literature and criticism I recently completed with PhD students Kyle Gerber and Marion Grant. Grant, who has an extensive background in digital humanities, lead us through the process of establishing a set of data models that would guide the data collection, and we were forced to grapple with precisely the types of questions you have asked here. For this project, we came to a complicated conclusion: for literary texts, we included all works written by Mennonite authors, regardless of whether every text directly thematizes Mennonite characters or concerns, while for critical texts, we included only works of criticism that directly discussed Mennonite literature, regardless of the identity of the critic. That project looks to map a broader history of the field in quantitative terms, and it was pointed out to me that I don’t get to define the terms of field should be, and certainly don’t get to “correct” or revise the ways in which the field has actually functioned in the past – even if my goals in articulating that definition is primarily in order to open it to critique. It’s complicated!
What themes, issues, techniques, and/or other authors were most in your mind as this project came into being?
I think I’ve pretty much answered this question in my comments above, but to reiterate: my goals in coming to this project were less about exploring a specific set of texts or authors, and more about rethinking the foundations and boundaries operative in the field, including questions of geography, gender, nation, race, genre, media, and method. The project’s methodological choices went a long way to determining the texts chosen for analysis.
What part(s) of your writing process might other writers find useful, either to imitate or to avoid?
I’ll leave it to others to decide if there is anything worth imitating, but I will note that the “cross-sectional reading” method I undertook for chapter one – in which I set out to uncover and read every book of “Mennonite literature” published in a single year (1986) – took me the better part of a year on its own. I had completely underestimated the number of works I would find, and the challenge of meaningfully engaging them as individual texts while drawing conclusions from them as a set was very challenging. I had to get rid of pages and pages of close readings in order to cut it down to its final size, and it remains easily the largest of the book’s chapters. I try to make the case that the size of the chapter offers evidence of the chapter’s thesis – that our narrow definition of the field has led us to vastly underestimate its size – but I think it may also serve to convince others to avoid taking up the method for themselves.
I think these two paragraphs, taken from the book’s conclusion, exemplify the tone and argument of the book:
I began this study by recognizing that Mennonite literary studies is in a period of productive uncertainty. Any questions being asked of the field’s future, I have argued, cannot be about the availability of literature by and about Mennonites, and it certainly should not be about its broader relevance. Indeed, when The New Yorker paused its recent profile of Miriam Toews to earnestly define the practice of schputting for its highbrow audience—“There is a Plautdietsch term [. . .] for irreverence directed at serious or sacred things,” readers are told, before being informed that “Toews is a schputter” (Schwartz)—I felt a frisson of recognition, but also as a certain sadness to find the oral slang from my Mennonite childhood in the pages of the magazine. It seemed as if the field had crossed a Rubicon of sorts, as if our little family quarrel had landed in the pages of . . . well, The New Yorker. From Cannes film festivals to reality TV, from best- selling novels to experimental chapbooks to popular websites and Mennonite Twitter, there seems to be little question of the ongoing relevance of Mennonite characters, settings, and concerns to audiences today. It will be important for such work to have an informed critical reception, one that is concentrated enough to be able to speak to the work in its specificity, robust enough to be able to offer a range of interpretative readings, and comprehensive enough to be able to position it in relation to a broader history of related work. Indeed, a central aim of this study has been to suggest that substantial work remains to be done not simply to engage with the ever-expanding body of contemporary Mennonite writing but also to more fully engage the broader histories of the field itself. The question, it seems clear to me, is not whether there is a future for the field or work to be done but rather how that work can be most productively under- taken, and what that future will be.
Part of the argument of this book, as I hope I have managed to make clear, is that this work is already underway. Even as established venues like Rhubarb magazine are shutting down, new venues and new avenues of critical thought are being opened by established and emerging scholars alike, including work in “world” and queer Mennonite writing, on theopoetics, form, and aesthetics, as well as on underexamined genres such as documentary writing, romance, and speculative fiction. It is in an effort to foster and sustain these expansive efforts that I have called attention to the critical drive for “new histories” that routinely accompanies such projects, cautioning that a reinvestment in the field’s developmental literary history risks simultaneously reinvesting in the model of ethnic minority literatures and the patterns of critique so many of us are attempting to complicate. A strategic investment in the field as a case study in minor transnationalism, I have suggested, may be one way to help loosen its framing assumptions and continue moving the critical conversation forward. I am hopeful it might also encourage a deeper engagement with Mennonite transnational histories and lateral networks of intersecting identities in ways beyond those I have articulated here, even as others will rightly continue to historicize the field as it has emerged and functioned in its regional and national manifestations. What would happen, I wonder, if we were to continue thinking of Mennonite literature in functional rather than ontological terms, as a mode of reading, rather than of writing? (215-216)