The Bishop and His Deacon: Smith vs. Sutherland Reconsidered

Abstract

On the stage of Canadian literary history, A.J.M. Smith and John Sutherland are usually seen as protagonist and antagonist. They should also be viewed, however, as successor and precursor, and — in the terms they used to describe each other — bishop and deacon. To reconstruct the debate between them is to discern that their early opposition gradually collapsed, as Smith incorporated Sutherland's view of Engtish-Canadian poetry into his own. Because both ultimately seek to validate a present unity that harmonizes conflicting past traditions (native and cosmopolitan), the evaluative ideal that informs their anthologies and criticism might well be called literary confederation

Amériques transculturelles - Transcultural Americas

“…But our belief is that these examples can be multiplied beyond those cited here, and that the discourses themselves which structure our fields of study should be as much the subject of our research and attention as the objects that they constitute and analyze. (Smith 1943); for detailed discussions, see Kokotailo (1992) and Sugars (2001 T his text takes as its location the Argentine province of Corrientes (in the north-east of the country bordering Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil), and as its object of inquiry a hybrid saint, San La Muerte, Lord of Good Death. Through an analysis of the way a colonial legacy of mixing between indigenous and European cultures is embodied in the popular belief in San La Muerte, and of the way this saint "stands in" to protect those bodies marked by the state as marginal and excluded, I demonstrate how transculturality can be understood as a social imaginary that transverses historical time to imbue objects, such as San La Muerte, with a bodily and spiritual…”

Amériques transculturelles - Transcultural Americas

“…Hence the current attempts at critical reconstruction of these terms by many theorists-such as in Walter Mignolo's "critical cosmopolitanism" (2000) or Anthony Appiah's "rooted cosmopolitanism" ( 2005)or the recent Canadian critiques of cosmopolitanism by Brydon (2004) and Moyes (2007). Instructive in this respect remains the older Canadian native/cosmopolitan debate, launched by John Sutherland's "Literary Colonialism" (Sutherland 1944), in which he attacks A. J. M. Smith's use of that distinction in the introduction to his 1943 Book of Canadian Poetry (Smith 1943); for detailed discussions, see Kokotailo (1992) and Sugars (2001).…”