Across the “Ocean of the Page”: Nischik and Kroetsch Gaining Ground

Summary

THE WORK THAT Reingard Nischik and Robert Kroetsch accomplished together in editing and publishing Gaining Ground: European Critics on Canadian Literature was remarkable for its initiative and its instigative impulse. The Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch—then at the height of his “Mr. Canadian Postmodern” moment—complemented Reingard Nischik's extraordinary comparative perspicacity. The result was a volume that anticipated the shift of twenty-first-century Canadian literature from a regional and thematic arena to a globalized realm, one that does not isolate Canadian writing but positions it in discourse with multiple other movements and ideas.

I planned to revisit the work of Gaining Ground as an historical discussion in the context of that collection: I thought I would evaluate Nischik and Kroetsch's editorial dialogue, the rationale for their choices, and the consequences of their selection. I expected that I would be able to shift to the suggestive arena of how that work might have occurred today or if its concerns would differ significantly in light of the changes that have measured Canadian literature's international profile and how the narrative of Canadian literature, as read by Europeans, has changed. As I should have predicted, the lines between expectation and outcome were blurred and over-written.

When I visited Konstanz University in July of 2017, I wanted to interview Reingard Nischik about this unusual and original collaboration, and then to combine that interview with an archival examination of the traces of the editing of the volume in the Robert Kroetsch Fonds (held at the University of Calgary's Archives and Special Collections). Since he died in an accident in 2011, Kroetsch is not available to interview. But my plan was diverted. My “interview” with Reingard Nischik became an intense conversation about expectation, women in academia, mentorship, supervision, exclusion and inclusion, as well as the influence and reception of Canadian Studies, where Nischik has been a key player for some thirty-five years. We exchanged stories about the development of a new generation of European scholars of Canadian literature, and agreed that working with young scholars is the most rewarding aspect of academic work, personal connection alongside the traces that writers and critics leave. She had found her file of correspondence on Gaining Ground, and re-visited the process with nostalgic excitement, both re-living the challenges of the work and reveling in the incredible achievement that it ultimately manifested.