SOURCE: “The Canadianness of David Cronenberg,” in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1994, pp. 113–33.

In the following essay, Beard discusses Cronenberg’s work in the context of the debate on what English-Canadian culture is and means. He asserts that Cronenberg’s male protagonists mostly resemble “the long line of Canadian cinematic and literary unheroes and their pattern of failure, powerlessness and hopeless waste.”

It is becoming more difficult, in a postmodern environment, to speak with any confidence of “national character” or to define nationality in broad cultural (as opposed to sociopolitical) terms. In English Canada, where “national character” is famously weak and ill-defined, especially in contrast to the clearer and more confident cultural nationalisms of the United States and Québec, what was always uncertain has now become theoretically impossible or at least undesirable. The “what is Canada?” debate is a relatively recent...