“I Admit to a Slight Ambiguity”: Reflecting upon Canada’s Creative and Critical Literary Inquisitors

Abstract

"the self-reflexive nature of Canada’s writers of all cultural origins has proliferated and done immense work in posing, precisely, questions that attempt to understand-and, in doing so, construct-what being Canadian means in various respects. Other than Blodgett, the sheer number of well-known Canadian authors who have taken up these questions both creatively and critically speaks to the importance of “ambiguity,” as Blodgett claims: Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch, Nicole Brossard, and Thomas King are but a few of numerous authors of Canada’s literatures that have written in both genres-critical and creative-to take up the ambiguous literary sites that they occupy.... This essay reflects upon ... Blodgett, Atwood, Kroetsch, Brossard, and King in a survey that looks back and compares their creative and critical bodies of work to understand the questions they pose, how they pose them, and how they relate to one another and contribute to our understanding of and ongoing search for the literatures of Canada."