The subject 'English' has always been about more than acquiring basic skills. As an inherently political enterprise, 'English' is concerned with issues of representation of the world outside the classroom, dealing with ideas about society through the study of language and of selected texts. Language and literature are inextricably linked with notions of citizenship, society and the ways we get along with one another in the world. Today's English language arts classrooms can be the sites of new discourses that question the 'taken-for-granted' views of the past and create spaces for new bodies of knowledge and social relationships alongside the old, traditional and familiar.

Historically, 'English' as a discipline is steeped in concerns about national identity and culture and about shifting notions of national communities. The discipline evolved in the nineteenth century from the British East India Company's desire to teach the native population in colonized India how to follow an 'English way of life' and become good Company servants. As Eaglestone (2000) explains:

The literature of England was seen as a mould of the English way of life, morals, taste and the English way of doing things: why not teach Indians how to be more English by teaching them English literature? Studying English literature was seen as a way of 'civilising' the native population (11).

This idea of the study of English literature as a 'civilising force' was carried over into nineteenth century Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Educational advocates such as Matthew Arnold recommended that literary culture should be part of the school curriculum in order to educate the British 'common man' in 'civilised English'. Although the earliest degrees in 'English' in Britain focused more on the study of language, by 1917, Cambridge academics changed the degree to allow the study of English literature. These academics supported the study of literature as an invaluable way to promote the 'civilising' values of 'Englishness', believing "that the study of literature would restore a sense of humanity to the world, in the face of the rampant growth of technology and the 'machine age'" (Eaglestone, 2000, 14).
Arnoldian ideas about literature study as a humanizing activity were further mediated through the mid-twentieth century by T.S. Eliot, the American (and later naturalized English) critic, poet and dramatist. Eliot supported the idea that certain literary texts have intrinsic artistic worth and should be read and studied without reference to history or time. As Widdowson (1999) explains,

Eliot's notion of 'The Tradition,' while being highly selective …nevertheless harks back to Arnold's dictum of 'the best that has been thought and said in the world.' It is central in constructing the received mid-Twentieth-Century conception of 'Literature': a canon of great works which most successfully hold an essence of human experience in their poetic 'medium' (49).

This notion of a canon of great works to be studied detached from their social and historical contexts became entrenched in universities and schools throughout Britain and the colonized world. Reinforced by the work of the critic F.R. Leavis, 'English Literature' became the centre of the education syllabus, enshrining the qualities of an essential "Englishness' and attempting to hold "at bay the worst evils of contemporary life" (Widdowson, 1999, 56). A parallel movement in the United States, entitled 'New Criticism' similarly celebrated the uniqueness of the literary art object in and for itself while valuing the concept 'Literature' as "a select(ive) and valuable aesthetic and moral resource to replenish those living in the spiritual desert of mass civilisation" (Widdowson, 1999, 59).

In North American classrooms today, the discipline of 'English' has expanded beyond a focus on literature and language to include multiple strands of the language arts. Yet, there remains in many classrooms a lingering nostalgia for the idea of 'authoritative texts' with assumptions of value and authenticity that clearly link the study of literature with the values of Western culture and life. These values, entrenched in a canon of literature still being taught in many contemporary classrooms, are "unquestioningly assumed to be universal human values, the most important values that apply to all people at all times and in all places" (Eaglestone, 2000, 54-55).

A curriculum of English language arts that relies on canonized Western texts and standard forms of English may appear universalist and apolitical on the surface, yet is in reality culturally specific. Historically bound and embedded within a Eurocentric framework, this static kind of curriculum reflects a narrow view of a democratic society by authorizing narratives that consciously or unconsciously work towards a single voice, thereby repressing understanding of difference. Many such narratives work to develop unity through emphasizing symbolic differences between "ourselves" and "others" and exaggerating perceived distinctions of race and ethnicity.

The canonical cultural narratives of Western 'great books' exemplify this tendency by defining a particular and limited sense of collective national identity. The self-perpetuating nature of the canon means that the same texts tend to be taught again and again, year after year, and that these continue to play a significant role in creating a sense of national identity. The notion of the Western canon is further entrenched by contemporary literary critics such as Harold Bloom (1994) with his list of the thousand books that he believes all 'cultured' North Americans should have read. Bloom's list of texts, written predominantly by male, white writers from Britain, Europe and the United States, reinforces a narrow view of citizenship and ignores the voices of writers and critics outside the white, middle-class mainstream. Despite the opposing views of African-American critics such as Toni Morrison (1992) and educators such as Arthur Applebee (1993), Bloom's list has helped to reinforce the teaching of canonized literature in North American schools.

In Canadian schools over the past twenty years, English language arts teachers have been encouraged to balance the teaching of canonical British and American texts with Canadian literary texts that narrate their own story of nation. In many classrooms, the Canadian texts being taught are a handful of novels, short stories and poems by white writers, most of which were published or anthologized during the 1970s and 1980s. Immigrant writers such as Arun Mukherjee have critiqued the choice of these school literary texts. Mukherjee (1995) suggests that Canada's "story of nation" was created through a national literature constructed "by powerful professors, bureaucrats, editors, publishers, and reviewers, the majority of them white males…under the aegis of nineteenth century European notions of nationhood" (8). According to these ideas, "a nation is considered as racially and culturally 'uniform', and a nation's literature has to reflect the 'soul' of the nation, its history and traditions" (8). Much of the literature that was published in the 1970s and is now being read in Canadian classrooms privileges what Mukherjee describes as "an all-white canon of works about small towns and wilderness, about white settlers pioneering on the frontier with the RCMP maintaining law and order" (9). Presented in universalist terms, this canon has been able to discount its whiteness and to hide its ability to shut out other voices and traditions.

A more fluid and hybrid curriculum of English language arts considers literary texts as having potential for critiquing ideas of the uniformity of nation. Such a curriculum has been made possible over the past three decades by destabilizing forces that have helped to problematize the notion of innate 'literary value' and to highlight the subjective and often arbitrary nature of literary evaluation. Foremost among these forces have been the feminist and postcolonial movements. Widdowson (1999) elaborates:

[F]eminism and postcolonialism simultaneously deconstruct 'Literature' and the 'Western Canon' by exposing their partial and ideological nature; allow for a creative re-reading of past 'classic' works; and bring into view other literatures (especially, but not exclusively, contemporary ones) which articulate hitherto occluded areas of experience from those who are constrained within conventional conspectus of 'Literature' (69).

A more open curriculum makes room for fictions of identity that provide a new perspective on the politics of identity and possibilities for resistance and transformation. In this curriculum there is always room for new stories, for narratives that allow for the power of the imagination to break through the 'taken for granted' metanarrative of nation, that present new realities and provoke questions that allow for new learning.
Maxine Greene (1996) suggests that a curriculum that encourages diversity and openness is one in which students are invited into a democratic community where there is always space for new narratives and for personal engagement with the literature read in class. Greene elaborates:

Engaging with works of fiction - children's literature, adult novels and stories - can contribute to the shaping of experience in the form of a story. There is great interest today in approaches to reading that encourage the participation of readers in the production of meanings, rather than the unearthing of hidden meanings in texts….We must, as Jean Paul Sartre has said, lend the book our lives. The meanings that we produce in so doing bring to light relations, patterns, and connections in our experience; we see more; we advance somehow in our quests….[T]his kind of participation just described eventually may activate in readers the desire for communitas with others (37).

Students in such classes are welcomed into a "community-in the-making," a plurality of experiences where the "ragged edges of the real" (Greene, 1996, 40) demand representation and open up new spaces of possibilities for democracy and citizenship.

Greene's ideas resonate with those of Toni Morrison (1992) who reminds us that for decades the experiences of people outside the white mainstream have been the "invisible presence" in North American literature. This absence becomes visible when students are introduced to literature by previously marginalized writers and have opportunities to discuss different ways of understanding the world. Greene (1996) explains:

We and those we teach must have opportunities to make "different" experiences objects of our experience as we open texts - diverse stories, telling stories hitherto unknown and telling them well - and try to recognize what we have pushed aside. Opening spaces in our classrooms that enable all kinds of persons to appear before one another articulating the nature of their searches, we have to make available works that legitimize ways of being once disqualified, too long scorned: works by women, works by the newcomers streaming into this country, works by artists and writers displaying their own visions of what Dostoyevsky knew, and Flaubert, and Kant, and the Brontes (41).

Much of this literature opens up the question of citizenship and national identity. Canadian students who read texts such as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony, Anita Rau Badami's Tamarind Mem, or Pauline Johnson and Rudy Wiebe's Stolen Life can begin to question what it means to be a Canadian citizen in the twenty-first century. Controversies over national identity in the English classroom enable students to critically question previously taken-for-granted literary understandings. They can begin to challenge linear historical views of Western literature as the special provenance of white male writers and begin to see Canadian literature as more than a portrayal of the perspectives of Loyalists on the Canadian Shield or pioneers on the frozen prairie.

Literary texts operate within culturally-specific contexts. There is always a convergence between the textual and extra-textual in literary representation. As Marino Tuzi (1996) suggests, "Literary works, especially minority texts which are infused with references to historical and social realities, continue to perform as acts of imaginative representation" (88). Today's English language arts classrooms can move beyond the historical view of subject 'English' as a civilizing force that promotes unity and shuts out difference. Literature study today offers the potential for a creative re-reading of past 'classic' works and an exploration of contemporary texts in ways that expose their ideological nature and allow for dialogue on the multiple ways we understand ourselves as citizens and members of a democratic community.

References

Applebee, A. 1993. Literature in the Secondary School. Research Report No. 25.
National Council of Teachers of English.

Bloom, H. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York:
Riverhead Books.

Eaglestone, R. 2000. Doing English. London and New York: Routledge.

Greene, M. 1996. "Plurality. Diversity, and the Public Space." In Can Democracy be
Taught? ed. A. Oldenquist, Bloomington, Indiana: Phi Delta Kappa Educational
Foundation, 27-44.

Morrison, T. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New
York: Vintage Books.

Mukherjee, A. 1995. "Canadian Nationalism, Canadian Literature, and Racial Minority
Women." In Essays on Canadian Writing, Fall. Issue 56, 78-96.

Tuzi, M. 1996. "Theorizing Minority Texts: Cultural Specificity, Agency and
Representation." In Canadian Ethnic Studies, Vol. XXVII, (3), 85-94.

Widdowson, P. 1999. Literature. London and New York: Routledge.

English Language Arts, Citizenship and National Identity