Theories Of Culture, Ethnicity, And Postmodernism
Interview by Joseph Pivato
The life and work of Linda Hutcheon has many ironies. It is unusual for the daughter of Italian immigrants to become a professor at the University of Toronto. All the more so since Italian women of her generation were not encouraged to go to university at all. It is even more unusual to develop in the short span of 12 years such a diverse and creative body of work: eight volumes on subjects such as metafiction, formalism and the Freudian aesthetic, parody, and post-modern theory and fiction. More recently she has focused on feminist writing and theory, ethnic minority writing, and irony. More unusual still is for such a wide-ranging body of work to evolve into a hitherto unperceived unity.
As a university student, Linda did not follow a safe and predictable career. Rather, she pursued personal interests: B.A. in Italian and English (1969), M.A. in Italian (1971), Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (1975). Because of her ethnic background and her personal inclinations, Linda was naturally drawn to the study of literature in a broader context than that found in traditional English programs.She has brought this interdisciplinary approach to her teaching and her books.
Ironically, the time she has expended on creating this diverse and sophisticated body of work has not detracted from the energy and enthusiasm she puts into teaching her Comparative Literature and English courses at the University of Toronto. Her classes are overflowing, and students vie to have her as a thesis supervisor. Professor Hutcheon's achievements are eloquent testimony to the argument that research and teaching are symbiotic activities.
Aurora: Why and when did you decide to pursue studies in comparative literature?
Hutcheon: I really decided when I was an undergraduate, although that seems like a long time ago. In my third year of studying modern languages and literatures, we were told that we had to drop one of the three that we were studying. I really didn't want to do that. That was the first sign that I wanted to be involved with more than one literature. The second sign was that I started writing essays on topics such as Milton and Tasso, Hemmingway and Pavese, Ariosto and Spencer. I guess that's a bit of a give-away.
Aurora: You have strong interests in literature and languages. What would you advise a student who has similar interests?
Hutcheon: Read, read, read!
Aurora: When you were young what kinds of books did you read?
Hutcheon: I read fairly indiscriminately as a child. We didn't have many books at home, so I used to haunt libraries. My mother claimed that I read to get out of doing housework: I suppose that was true. I'm still trying to prove to her that reading books is legitimate. That's probably why I went on to graduate school and ended up teaching literature.
Aurora: Why did you study Italian and where?
Hutcheon: I didn't study Italian until I went to university. Here I had this very Italian name, Bortolotti, and I couldn't speak a word of Italian. I had a good “passive” knowledge from listening to my grandparents talk. I took Italian in my first two years of university, fully intending to drop it at that point, after getting the basics. But I got hooked. I think it was studying Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in second year that did it. I continued, finished a B.A. in Italian and English, and then I went to Cornell University to study Italian with Gian-Paolo Biasin.
Aurora: Is there such a thing as Italian-Canadian culture?
Hutcheon: What a question coming from someone like you! Yes, of course there is, and it's an increasingly vibrant one. There's always been a strong folk culture, certainly in my parents' generation. Mind you, by the time I grew up, my generation had become Canadianized. It's only really been, for me, in the last five or ten years, as I started reading Italo-Canadian writers and thinking about the experience of being a “hyphenated Canadian,” as we say, that I've started to think of it as a specifically literary culture. With writers like Frank Paci, Mary di Michele, Pier Giorgio DiCicco, Nino Ricci, Manco Micone, and so on, I think we have a very vibrant Italian-Canadian culture, as part of the multicultural identity that is Canadian literary culture today.
Aurora: Is there a place for ethnic minority writing in Canada?
Hutcheon: I certainly hope so. The book I just co-edited with Marion Richmond, called Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions, is an attempt to “make room” for ethnic minority writing in Canada. One of the points of the book is that Canadian literature has always been ethnic minority writing—our Jewish-Canadian writers, our Mennonite writers, our Sri Lankan writers, our Italian-Canadian writers are our mainstream writers. This does not mean that some writers, particularly those of colour, have not had a more difficult time getting published in Canada than others. I think we have to work on making the institutions of publishing and writing open to Canadian native, black, and Asian writers.
Aurora: What is the value of studying literature or another field in the humanities, as opposed to the more applied fields?
Hutcheon: I have trouble with this question. While I love and believe in what I do, I have always found it difficult to try and pinpoint where my enjoyment or my enthusiasm comes from. I know the standard global humanist response—that the study of literature is valuable to broaden experience and learn about human culture—and I certainly believe that. Part of the problem is that the answers I would have given ten years ago, which would have had something to do with the eternal and universal values literature passes on to us, is an answer that I can't give today.
The increasing awareness of ideology in literary studies has taught us that the things we always thought were universal and eternal have turned out to be very particular—specific to a particular place, time, sex, and race. I'm not saying that the great books of the canon shouldn't be studied. Of course they should be. But perhaps they should be studied in this context, and perhaps other kinds of literature should also be studied. Of course this is happening. It's one of the major changes to take place in the literary curriculum in the last ten years.
Another side to the value of studying literature is that we teach the “discourse” of literary studies, and part of that discourse is a mode of critical thinking that is transferable to life. Along with that we try to teach effective communication, and that, too, is a crucial skill to have in the twentieth century.
Aurora: What do you see as your role? Do you see it as a teacher?
Hutcheon: Yes, I certainly do see my role as that of teacher. I'm not sure I separate the role of teacher from that of literary scholar and critic. Both roles involve conveying enthusiasm and pleasure, as well as exercising critical skills to think through the issues of contemporary culture.
Aurora: Your many books on literary theory, such as A Poetics of Postmodernism and The Politics of Postmodernism, have focused greater attention on the movement of postmodernism in Canada, North and South America, and Europe. Is postmodernism in the novel different from that found in other art forms?
Hutcheon: In some ways, yes. In other ways, there are common denominators that one shouldn't forget—the major one being that in the novel, as in architecture or painting or photography, what we find in post-modernism is a form of art that is complicitous with the cultural dominants of our age (things such as capitalism, patriarchy, or humanism) but this is also an art which, however compromised, still wishes to retain its right to criticize that culture. That paradoxical politics of being complicitous but critical is characteristic of all forms of post-modernism.
The other common denominator would be a recalling of history, not in any antiquarian or nostalgic way, but in a critical way, in an often parodic way, looking back to the past of literature or to the built-up environment in architecture, for example, but looking at that past with irony.
Aurora: Should we be speaking about different postmodernisms?
Hutcheon: That all depends on who's defining the postmodern. I don't think so. There are common denominators that make sense of that word, post-modernism. A major one is its relationship to the modernism that came before it. It's both a break from, and a continuation of, it. The most common signs of continuity are self-reflexivity and irony.
Many people who speak about postmodernisms in the plural do so in order to make room for works of art that don't fit that model. There will always be works of art that don't fit any model. The exciting thing to do now would be to stop thinking about post-modernism and think about what's coming next.
Aurora: Most of your books from Narcissistic Narrative in 1980 to The Canadian Postmodern in 1988 have been primarily concerned with the novel form. Two titles seem to be outside that pattern. The 1984 book Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic deals with French psychocritique. Is this work a stage in your development from resolute formalism through reader response criticism to feminism and poststucturalism, or is there some other connection to your work on postmodernism?
Hutcheon: It's a bit of a fluke. It was the first major research project I had after my dissertation. I wanted to do something different, something comparative. I wanted to break away from working on self-conscious fiction. So, I chose to combine my interest in the Bloomsbury Group in England and psychoanalysis. I did this through studying the work of Charles Mauron, a French psychoanalytic critic whose very strange, personal brand of criticism (which is called in French psycho-critique) was influenced by the formalism of Bloomsbury art theorists like Roger Fry. This has no real connection with the rest of my work except that it enabled me to think through the relationships between formalism and psychoanalysis and between modernism and romanticism, as well.
Aurora: Your 1985 work, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, also seems to be outside this pattern, or are there links with postmodernism? Both books deal with literature and the visual arts and their use of parodic forms.
Hutcheon: I started working on the theory of parody when I was supposed to be finishing the book on Charles Mauron. I think it was the siren call of self-consciousness in literature luring me back again. I'd been interested in parody for a long time, and I was also, after working on the Bloomsbury Group's esthetics for the other book, very interested in visual arts. Looking at a theoretical question such as parody seemed the perfect way to bring together these interests.
Aurora: Do you consider yourself a feminist?
Hutcheon: Yes, I do. I think that in my life in general and in my teaching this is obvious. It is perhaps less immediately obvious in my literary criticism and theoretical work, though recently, in my work in Canadian literature and also in postmodern theory, I've worked on the relationship between feminist theory and postmodern theory. I would not be labeled by most people as a purely “feminist” critic, although I know that my work has been very much influenced by my reading in feminist theory and by my engagement in feminist social issues.
Aurora: Many writers see close relationships between feminism and postmodernism. Could you explain the similarities and the differences?
Hutcheon: The similarities on the surface are formal ones. Many feminist writers, for example (as well as post-modern writers), use irony, parody, and self-reflexivity. But I would say that there is a major difference, despite the similarity of strategy, and that difference comes on the level of politics. Feminism must have a theory of agency. In other words, it must go beyond subversive textual strategies to posit some mode of social action. Post-modernism, because of what I described earlier as its complicitously critical, paradoxical stand with regard to cultural dominants sits on the fence. I don't see any theory of agency in postmodernism.
Aurora: Postmodernism doesn't have a political agenda, then?
Hutcheon: Not as such. It is political, though. Its critique of contemporary culture is a very real and important one. It's the kind of discourse that enables change to take place, but it is not that change itself.
Aurora: What do you see as the future developments in feminism?
Hutcheon: The 1990 conference in Edmonton, “Imag(in)ing Women” made me see—both in the kinds of papers that were presented and in the tone of those papers—how far feminist theory and criticism have come in the last ten years or so. I don't just mean on the level of intellectual sophistication but in the confidence, with which feminists are engaging in their work.
Aurora: Recent attempts to develop a more general category of discourse tends to break down barriers between theory, criticism, and literature. Do you see your work contributing to this process?
Hutcheon: Yes and no. I don't think my work actually enacts that breaking down of barriers, but I think I have tried to think through the consequences of that breaking down of barriers in my work on postmodernism. In A Poetics of Postmoderism, I looked at a series of discourses— historical, architectural, literary, philosophical, theoretical—to see what happens when these discourses are studied together. In other words, I tried to look at the common denominators of those discourses.
Aurora: Is there a role for postmodernism in education? There are vast interests who do not want people educated about race or ecology or sexism or the media or about various forms of exploitation and domination. These forces are not located only outside the university. Any university teacher might acknowledge a certain identification with these interests. Do you agree?
Hutcheon: I've co-edited a book of interviews and short stories with Canadian writers of non-Anglo and non-French origins. One of the reasons I did this was because of a commitment to what I saw as the lessons of postmodernism and a desire to bring these into education.
Let me explain what I mean by that. If in a place like Canada, which has an official multicultural policy, we cannot study the writing of Canadian writers without homogenizing it, without making them into one pan-Canadian kind of writing, then there's something wrong. A multiplicity of viewpoints comes across in this book, be it in the actual interviews and short fiction by writers like Frank Paci or Paul Yee or Katherine Vlassie or in the perhaps more bitter interviews of someone like Himani Bannerji or Joy Kogawa. Similarly, when I teach contemporary American literature, I try to teach not just white, male, Anglo-Saxon, American writers. For a few years we've been adding Jewish writers to that list. Now it's time to add Afro-American writers, Chinese American writers, Chicano, Latino, and of course Native American writers.
Aurora: Is there a Canadian postmodernism, or is this a contradiction?
Hutcheon: No, it isn't a contradiction. It's just that Canadian postmodernism takes a different form than the American, for example, partly because one of the lessons of the postmodern is that the local, the particular, the different are what's important, not the universal and the general. For example, in the Canadian novel, where we've had a strong tradition of realism, realism doesn't disappear from postmodern fiction. It gets used, but it also gets abused: realism will be invoked in the text, it will be milked for all of its power, and then will get subverted. It's as if the Canadian postmodern wants to have its cake and eat it too.
Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Second edition. New York & London: Methuen, 1984. (first edition, 1980)
Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: The Example of Charles Mauron. London: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. London & New York: Methuen, 1985.
A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York & London: Routledge, 1988.
The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988.
The Politics of Postmodernism. New York & London: Routledge, 1989.
Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions. Co-edited with M. Richmond. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies. Toronto: Oxford, 1991.
Related Links:
Professor Joe Pivato of Athabasca University has produced a website on Canadian Writers, which includes a page on Ms. Hutcheon.
Updated July 2001
Aurora Online
Citation Format
Pivato, Joseph (2001). Theories Of Culture, Ethnicity, And Postmodernism: Linda Hutcheon. Aurora Online: