Points of Departure

MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS AGO—in 1985—Reingard M. Nischik coedited a book that, despite its modest title Gaining Ground, was in fact ground breaking. It blazed a trail for Canadian Literary Studies in Europe while the field back home was still in the process of becoming part of the institutional grid. The volume, which Nischik co-edited with the renowned Canadian author and scholar Robert Kroetsch, brought together seventeen European critics from seven countries and provided insights on topics ranging from Canadian Postmodernism to “Found” Poetry. While the main thrust of the book was comprised of in-depth studies of individual Canadian authors and their works, its second part, written by Reingard Nischik, assessed the state of Canadian Studies in Europe by giving an overview of academic activities and publications as well as programs and institutions focusing on Canadian Literature in European countries. Nischik's first stocktaking laid the groundwork for much subsequent research in European Canadian Studies and became a milestone that is still frequently referenced today, see, for instance, Beyond “Understanding Canada”: Transnational Perspectives on Canadian Studies (Tanti et al., 2017). Nischik's motivation was “to make better known to an international audience how [and to what extent] Canadian literature is treated in Europe” (Kroetsch and Nischik 1985, 250). And indeed, Gaining Ground achieved in Europe what Margaret Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) did in Canada: it put Canadian Literature on the map and charted the territory of what was at the time still shaky ground.

The book was greeted enthusiastically on both sides of the Atlantic and considered “a breakthrough in the academic acceptance of Canadian literary studies abroad” (Keith 1986, 158). Not only did it testify to the quality of work European scholars had done on Canadian literature; it also made its Canadian readers reflect on their own creative and critical practices and traditions. Frank Moher thus considered it “an engrossing, and exotic, exercise in seeing ourselves as others see us” (1986, 44), while Renate Usmiani urged: “The book should make Canadian scholars sit up and take notice” (1986, 236). Such Canadian self-consciousness and (literary) soul searching, although even more dominant in the 1960s and ‘70s, was still paradigmatic for the time of Gaining Ground's publication— and is not surprising given the comparatively recent emergence and institutionalization of both Canadian literature as such and Canadian Studies as a field.

THIS BOOK IS A TRIBUTE to the longstanding work Reingard Nischik has done in Canadian and in Comparative North American Studies. It is published on the occasion of her retirement from the university— although she will continue to publish and be a voice in Canadian and Comparative Studies—and to take stock of recent work by Canadianists around the world. The focus is deliberately broad. Most pieces compare American and Canadian artifacts and range from literature to opera to visual culture. Reingard's exceptional endeavors in making Canadian literature known beyond Canada are honored by two prominent Canadian writers and academics, Margaret Atwood and Aritha van Herk, in their creative pieces in the coda to this book. Included in the coda are also a few photographs as visual testimony to a long academic journey. Both editors are former students of Reingard, and this book is also a token of their gratitude for decades of academic support and friendship. Throughout her career, Reingard Nischik has put enormous efforts into successfully promoting promising young scholars. We speak for all of them today in saying: thank you, Reingard!

Books are made of great ideas and contributions but also of thorough editing, proofreading, and attention to a plethora of details. We would like to thank Florian Wagner, Caroline Bündgen, and Amanda Halter for their conscientious and efficient proofreading and formatting of this volume. Last but not least, we would like to thank Jim Walker from Camden House who, as always, has been incredibly supportive, level-headed, and competent. This book was supported by funding from the Office for Equal Opportunity, Family Affairs, and Diversity at the University of Konstanz and the German Association of Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries.

Mapping the Terrain

Thomas King is among the best-known contemporary Native writers in North America. In the generation that followed the first wave of Native American Renaissance authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday, King, along with Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, and Louis Owens, is a leading voice. Through frequent public appearances at festivals, on radio shows, and most recently in the political arena, he is a highly visible personality on the literary landscape, and the sustained quality of his work has been appreciated not least through the numerous prizes and honors he has been awarded or nominated for. King was twice short-listed for the prestigious Governor General's Literary Award (for A Coyote Columbus Story in 1992 and for Green Grass, Running Water in 1993), and he received the Canadian Authors' Award for fiction for Green Grass, Running Water as well as the best novel award from the Writers' Guild of Alberta and the P.E.N./Josephine Miles Award for Medicine River, which was also a runner-up for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. King's film script for Medicine River won the Best Screenplay Award at the American Indian Film Festival, and his radio show, The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour, earned him the Aboriginal Media Arts Award. He was awarded the Ontario Trillium Book Award for English Language Prose 2003 for The Truth about Stories and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award 2006 for A Short History of Indians in Canada.

The following interview with Thomas King took place on 27 March 2011, in his home on Water Street in Guelph, Ontario. The conversation we had turned out much too long, so that it had to be edited for publication. I started the interview by quoting to him from the Fee/Gunew interview (1999), in which he said he wasn't going to give interviews to people he didn't know anymore, especially not to Germans. I'd read that shortly before our scheduled meeting and suddenly didn't want to do the interview any longer…

TK: Yeah, I'm sorry I said that about Germans.… At least they published my books in translation.

EG: Yes, they did. Green Grass, Running Water and Medicine River.

TK: I'm surprised they tried to do Green Grass, Running Water in German. I just cannot imagine.

EG: It loses a lot. I discussed it in an article on translating Native literature, and a lot of the wordplay, it's gone.

TK: When they translated Medicine River into French, there was a point when one character calls the other character a fruit, and basically it's a slang term for queer, a homosexual, and when they translated it into French, they translated it as vegetable, “You're a vegetable,” which made no sense in French and no sense to me whatsoever.

EG: [laughs] Okay. I thought that was too bad that a lot of the wordplay in Green Grass, Running Water was lost, but still I'm glad that they published it in German, because I'm so enthusiastic about the book.