Showing papers in "University of Toronto Quarterly in 1989"

The History of Private Life

Abstract: A major adept in the art of perspective by incongruity, Kermode in these later works adopts an occult mode of reading and in The Genesis of Secrecy compares The Gospel of St. Mark with such texts as Ulysses and The Crying of Lot 49. As Gorak puts it, 'Kermode does not simply write about uncertainty: he actually tries to wrap us inside it.' In his search for the 'secrets lurking in the tale-bearing text' (The Art of Telling, 31), Kermode merges criticism with creation. Concise, lucid, and articulate, Gorak's Critic of Crisis is a superb introduction to Kermode's works and a cogent analysis and evaluation of his ideas. It contains a wealth of illuminating references to other critics and theorists, it furnishes the relevant biographical details, and it delineates the intellectual and cultural climate in which Kermode works. Both the literary scholar and the general reader will find it to be interesting, informative, and insightful.

Listening to Encolpius: Modes of Confusion in the Satyricon

Abstract: The Satyricon of Petronius simultaneously fascinates and mystifies, and the difficulties of interpreting it are intensified by the fragmentary nature of its text and the uncertainties of its authorship. The identification of its author with the Petronius Arbiter described by Tacitus is an unverifiable probability. The significance and even the spelling of the title have been subject to debate. The text survives in imperfect manuscripts, most of which do not contain the Cena, others little else. There is little evidence, beyond the numbering of books in several manuscripts, the existence of a handful of quotations in later writers, and several references in the text to lost episodes, that the original work was completed in the very long form traditionally supposed.

The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction by Linda Hutcheon (review)

Abstract: it. There is too much categorization here, and not enough discussion of individual works of fiction. This leads MacLulich into some curious statements. At one point he refers to 'our early works of realistic or modernist fiction,' and has previously presented modernism as the champion of realism against idealism. I do not see how a useful discussion can be conducted on these terms. On page 88 he appears to link Ernest Buckler, W.O. Mitchell, and Davies (surely an odd trio) as having made 'sociological realism a primary goal in their fiction.' (The argument is far from clear, but I cannot interpret the page in any other way.) Later, Ostenso's Wild Geese, Stead's Grain, Grove's Settlers of the Marsh and Our Daily Bread, Frank Parker Day's Rockbound, and Knister's White Narcissus are all lumped together as 'early realistic novels.' MacLulich's realism must be broad indeed if it can encompass Ostenso's larger-than-life Caleb Gare and Stead's anti-heroic Gander Stake, the structured artifice of Settlers of the Marsh and the Gothic atmosphere of so much of White Narcissus. Literary-critical distinctions tend to blur. Thus he can refer to 'such books as W.O. Mitchell's Jake and the Kid (1961) and Who Has Seen the Wind (1947)' as if the extraordinary difference in quality between the two books was of minor significance. Although it is offered as a continuing argument, Between Europe and America is best read as a series of separate essays about different aspects of Canadian fiction. Thus there is a chapter on historical romance, one on the regional idyll, one on the image of Europe, one on the critique of material success, and so on. Towards the end, MacLulich has some interesting (if controversial) things to say about the relation between popular fiction and what he calls 'the art novel,' and the book ends with a lively epilogue, 'The Academy and the Literary Tradition.' MacLulich is both an enthusiast for Canadian fiction and someone troubled by many of the trends he sees in the current literary situation. I am not at all sure that I have succeeded in coming to grips with his book, but I also suspect that the reason for this lies in a certain slippery quality about MacLulich's arguments. For readers interested in the inner politics of contemporary Canadian fiction, the book offers much to think about and perhaps to disagree with. But I confess to finding the argument as a whole indefinite and frustrating especially since, after a thorough reading and several agonized returns to various parts of the text, I'm still uncertain what he means by 'The Canadian Tradition in Fiction. ' Between MacLulich's conception and the book itself has fallen an obscuring shadow. (w.J. KEITH)

Proxy and Proximity: Metonymic Signing

Abstract: In Book II of The Mill on the Floss the narrator pauses to lament the association of intelligence with the ability to wield metaphor. "Aristotle! if you had the advantage of being the 'freshest modern' instead of being the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor, —that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?" In the context of the narrative, this critique of metaphoric privilege is a plea for valuing different ways of seeing things and saying things. George Eliot does not name this different perspective; I suggest it is a concern with the metonymic. In contemporary, post-structuralist criticism the scrutiny of metaphoric privilege has often meant a reconsideration or defence of the 'other trope,' metonymy. My interest in metonymy here is to consider what relationships exist between the various ways in which ...

'The Other Side of Dailiness': Photography in the Works of Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Laurence by Lorraine M. York (review)

Abstract: journey 'home from exile into identity,' 'by taking one direction, through memory, from the ironic \"junction\" at which history and memory seem to stand still in the Pegnitz Junction stories.' As the first map to steer our readings into and through the interstices of Gallant's explorations of history and memory, Besner's The Light of Imagination establishes rigorous standards for those planning to chart alternative 'interpretative journeys.' (LESLEY D. CLEMENT)

Standing for Sacrifice: The Casket and Trial Scenes in The Merchant of Venice

Abstract: Few readers of The Merchant of Venice would be likely to contest the claim that two scenes occupy positions of crucial importance in the dramatic structure of the play. The scenes I have in mind are those hinging on Bassanio's solution of the casket-riddle in act III, and Portia's decisive intervention in the case Shylock prosecutes against Antonio in act IV. On the face of it, these two episodes appear to have very little in common other than the personages involved in them. One has as its setting an idealized community situated somewhere beyond the sea, and represents the triumph of romantic love through a mysterious ordeal which seems to partake more of the remoter realms of dream or myth than of the brutal world of common experience; the other unfolds in the more sinister, though at the same time also much more familiar, context of a Venetian courtroom, and depicts the discomfiture of the impulse of hatred by means of a very agile exercise in juristic reasoning. Despite the obvious differences, howeve...

Hectic Stasis: The War Poetry of Keith Douglas

Abstract: Since his death in 1944, Keith Douglas's reputation as a poet has grown considerably, but fitfully. Largely disregarded for his imaginative daring by the Movement writers, he appealed to poets a half-generation younger than himself, who found in him a stark vitality, a counterforce to what was, for them, the drably mechanical verse being written in the 1950s. Ted Hughes hailed Douglas's 'burning exploratory freshness of mind'; Geoffrey Hill praised a 'fearlessness of the imagination.' Yet Hill's assessment in 1964 of Douglas's ambivalent stature—'at once "established" and overlooked'—remains relevant today. 'Established,' one might say, and 'avoided,' for it is the particular ability of Douglas's art to disconcert. The best of the war poems exhibit a coolness, a bracing diffidence and restraint. The sort of stoic verve that Yeats captures in his 'Irish Airman' Douglas can match in the icy bravura of 'How to Kill.'

Science under Siege: The Myth of Objectivity in Scientific Research by Beth Sayan (review)

Abstract: of the whole conference, the significance and art of lobbying (this might well have been the subtitle), with papers on the science lobby in Canada ijohn Crowe, Ottawa), the social science lobby in the United States . (Roberta Miller, National Science Foundation, Washington), and by the executive directors of the Social Science Federation of Canada (Christian Pouyez) and of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities (Viviane Launay). There are also commentaries on these papers by James Edwards, an Alberta MP, Donald Savage, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and Marion Vaisey-Gesner (Manitoba). Finally, as an appendix, there are the presentations at the day-long workshop on strategic grants made by the representatives of the Medical Research Council, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the SSHRC. While there is genuine disagreement among the twenty-two contributors as to what should be done and how it should be done, there is no doubt that the case for additional support for research in the humanities and social sciences in Canada has been persuasively made. But the conference reached no formal conclusions and made no specific recommendations. More support, yes, but not how much more. This was a wise step. Research/scholarship is only one of the two primary functions of universities in Canada, as elsewhere, the other being instruction in all its many forms undergraduate and graduate, liberal and professional, adult and continuing and without studies, comparable to this one on the human sciences, on the 'inhuman sciences' and on the role in society of instruction and therefore of the needs in this area, it is impossible to decide how much time, effort, and money should be devoted to research/scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In the long run the greatest value of the conference and the published . proceedings may well be that they lead to the organization of other conferences which focus on the role in society and therefore the needs of the other disciplinary groups and of the basic elements of instruction. The likelihood of this occurring is enhanced by the existence of this volume, which provides a model as to how such conferences can be organized. It is an important book. (ROBIN S. HARRIS)

'Exil'd from Light': The Darkened Moral Consciousness of Milton's Hero of Faith

Abstract: Disagreements are still liable to arise over the heroic status of Satan in Paradise Lost, but perhaps the most serious division of opinion among readers of Milton for some time to come will be over another questionable heroic figure, his Samson. Most readers still consider that Samson is a tragic hero intended to command admiration and respect, and that Milton presents him as a model for Christian imitation. However, the questions and doubts are increasing. When Anthony Low pictured Samson as a gloriously triumphant Christian hero, 'the image and example of the champion of God' (Low, 117), he dismissed objections to Samson's violence by turning to Milton's prose where force seems to be justified if it is used by the Christian magistrate against God's enemies. Mary Ann Radzinowicz concluded that the destruction of the temple is 'a human imaging of God's might ... an exemplary act which teaches how God gives freedom' (346). Many scholars have turned to typological hermeneutics to explain Samson's behaviour....

Critic of Crisis

Abstract: desire for literary and economic substance and staying power that, I believe, is where its wistfulness comes from. This doubleness of desire is generally the circumstance of Stevens's writing, but circumstance only; not explanation.' This statement, which speaks of something being produced by something else, and then denies that this is an explanation, reflects the doubleness of Lentricchia's own position throughout the book: contrary to his own stated aims, he too suffers from the desire to explain everything by one thing; but he also suffers from a perhaps incompatible desire the wish to criticize others for the systematic attempt to theorize in the first place.

The Scene of Writing

Abstract: liberal aspects of the atmosphere of late seventeenth-century theological currents in England are explored. I wish that Winn had read Tavard, a modern student of continental Catholicism. Much of this material belongs to recent discovery. Winn has made his way to the work of Fr Godfrey Anstruther. Even more would have come through the Catholic Record Society. I understand the difficulties Mack may have had during the years when he was using Mapledurham House. It would have been helpful if he had cited titles from the exceptionally large library there and, more critically, studied them for a charting of Pope's position, one less casual than is usually thought. Obviously every serious student of Dryden or of Pope should possess both these books. But we still need biographies, pared from the higher rhetorical turns of both these performances, so that we can look at what we know, what we think we may know, and what, regrettably, is simply lost to us.

Le Journal intime au Québec: Structure, évolution, réception by Pierre Hébert (review)

Abstract: links between Therio's anthology and those prepared by Boivin and Emond: Louis Dantin's 'La Messe de Florent Letourneau' presents, like many of the stories found in Boivin's anthology, the supernatural punishment inflicted on a character who has deviated from orthodox Catholic observances. Clement Marchand's 'La Montre' also shows some resemblance to the fantastic tale. All in all, Therio presents twenty-five stories by fourteen different authors, including, as do Boivin and Emond, short biographical and bibliographical notices. A minor shortcoming of Therio's anthology should be noted: it includes a considerable number of typographical errors. For instance, a bibliographical reference on page 10 should read 'Librairie Deom' (and not 'Libraire Deom'), whereas a biographical notice on the following page should refer to 'une librairie' (and not 'un librairie'). However, these mistakes do not of course interfere seriously with the usefulness of Therio's anthology. Boivin and Therio both attribute the popularity of the short story in nineteenthand early twentieth-century Quebec to the moral dilemma posed in a conservative society by the novel, presenting as it did a love story. This reason can, of course, have little to do with the continuing popularity of the fantastic short story in contemporary Quebec, as is evidenced by Emond's anthology. Whatever the reasons behind the development of short fiction in Quebec, these collections present an interesting sample of the genre over a considerable time span, and will be of interest to many readers. In publishing these three anthologies, Aurelien Boivin, Maurice Emond, and Adrien Therio have made the gamut of Quebec short stories of the last 150 years, from the fantastic to the realistic and the humorous, much more accessible. (MARY ELLEN

Resistance and Retreat: A Laclosian Primer for Women

Abstract: In the past ten or fifteen years the assessment of Choderlos de Laclos's treatment of women has undergone significant revision. For if during decades he was celebrated as the first feminist writer and continues to be so called by some critics, male especially, in recent years an increasing number of others have asserted new judgments. Various critics now suggest that, far from being feminist, Laclos's work in toto reveals a misogynist mentality (arising out of the imaginaire viril, a sort of ambivalence towards women best defined as 'reductive misogyny,)' the kind of writing that poses as femino-centric but whose ideological subscript is really that of female vulnerability and the re-establishment and ratification of the male order.

Pastoral and Ideology

Abstract: Lowest on the Renaissance ladder of literary genres, pastoral in twentieth-century criticism seems to have overleaped a few confining stiles to assert a claim to a certain magnification of its retiring nature. The book under review is very much a case in point. Annabel Patterson has had the happy notion of tracing the changing fortunes over several centuries of one of the most famous of all pastoral texts, Virgil's Eclogues, with special attention to the most poetically resonant of the ten poems, the opening dialogue of Tityrus and Meliboeus; and, matching the open-handedness of the gesture, the University of California Press has accorded her text an elaborate, indeed, in these bad days of diminished authorial expectations, a positively sumptuous, presentation: six colour plates and forty figures delight the reader's eye, providing an opportunity to actually see the artistic materials being scrutinized, materials that form an essential part of the critical discussion and are not merely an occasional adornment of the tale. The work proceeds according to an ambitious plan. Patterson exploits the contemporary vogue for the theme of power by treating the Eclogues as a text in which the impact of the political world upon the privileged world of ease, retirement, and meditation is overtly and repeatedly registered. That much is clear in Virgil himself, with his initial diptych of exiled and favoured shepherds shadowing a world where godlike, distant Caesars dispense otia to some, hardships to others. The author then proceeds to illustrate the remarkable adaptability of this apparently transparent text by reading it as peculiarly adaptable to political manipulation from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, and in a wide variety of cultural circumstances. Fundamentally, the book resolves itself into a series of inquiries into the social premises underlying the constant manipulation of Virgil's pastoral art. Five long complex chapters with numerous subdivisions trace the evolution of this movement from Petrarch through Landino and Poliziano, move searchingly into Marot and Spenser, track its appearance in Pope, Voltaire, Chenier, Goldsmith, Crabbe, and Wordsworth, and conclude with glances at the Virgilianism of Frost, Gide, and Valery. (This is a highly selective listing on my part.) In addition, the author ranges knowledgeably into the world of the illustrations by which the various versions of the Eclogues were accompanied and illuminated over the centuries, and the art of Simone Martini, Sebastian Brant, William Blake, and Aristide Maillo!, among a good many others, is 'read' as part of the total Virgilian picture. The richness of the materials offered the reader is undeniable; nevertheless, it makes difficulties for the reviewer attempting to cast some kind of critical net over the variety and comprehensiveness of it all. For one thing, the author's comparativist expertise in Latin, English, Italian, French, and German literature is

The 'Viandier' of Taillevent: An Edition of All Extant Manuscripts ed. by Terence Scully (review)

Abstract: Zeus, who commits the rape, who is unfaithful to his wife, but who is godly more powerful and male, goes unpunished.' She affirms, among many other claims, that Hawthorne demonstrates through Dimmesdale's parallel experience to Hester's that man more easily than woman weathers the conflicts between private experience and the mores of society. My thumbnail sketch hardly does justice to Wall's comprehensive analysis of The Scarlet Letter, but it demonstrates the length and breadth of her analytical procedure. Wall's exhaustive and insightful study paradoxically satisfies and whets the feminist scholar's appetite. Referring to Joseph Campbell's classic work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Wall remarks, 'if the hero has a thousand faces, the heroine has scarcely a dozen.' Her study of the Callisto myth carefully presents the contours and colours of one heroine's face, but, simultaneously, it is embryonic. Indirectly, Wall pans the entire portrait obscured, indeed obliterated and demands a drawing-out of the other eleven faces of the feminine family portrait. However, like Campbell's, Wall's is a landmark study. As Campbell reveals one all-enclosing myth, so, too, does Walt but Campbell describes male and Wall female experience. Her conclusions are indisputably germane to future feminist myth criticism. (CAROLYN D. HLUS)

La Visée critique: Essais autobiographiques et littéraires by Andre Brochu (review)

Abstract: cette conscience qui est Jl'apanage de l'homme' (sic) (Dupre) est revendiquee encore pour Ie sujet feminin. Ce qui semble se passer, c'est premierement une confusion theorique entre /femmes/, subjets d' action et d' enonciation et /Femme/, pole de la division semiotique et ideologique des sexes (donc discursive et variable). C'est done une metaphysique de la presence qui continue de s'ecrire, en faisant d'une part, des discours mediatiques des 'informations brutes,' misogynes 'essentiellement,, contre lesquelles il nous faut lutter, et qui, de l'autre, Jincarne' et singularise les textes ecrits par des 'lesbiennes radicales' d'une presence positive; l'auteur est mort, mais pas l'auteure. Les discours masculins n' ont pas de sujet d' enonciation; en tant que produits et non productions, ils proviennent de la force occulte J des hommes' non identifiee quant a sa provenance; quant aux textes de femmes feministes radicales, ils sont avant tout productions de femmes; leur interpretation est ainsi deja bouclee par leur 'intention' et leur signature. C' est ici une hermeneutique 'double-standardisee' (mot de Bersianik) qui traverse Ies probIematiques. D'un cote, les nuees ambiantes des discours mal-intentionnes des medias et des critiques Jhommes' restent non analysees en tant que possiblement nostalgiques aussi d'un temps passe, angoissees devant de desert des roles socio-sexueis ouvert, et cherchant des pistes; et de I' autre, on s' abreuve a Ia Jbonne eau' des livres des femmes identifiees comme radicales. Le manicheisme inverse ne permet pas de penser ailleurs Ia di-vision sociopolitique des sexes et d' envisager comment elle est ce qui fonde toute entreprise epistemologique et toute objectification, dont Ies femmes et leurs corps (identique a lui-meme, opaque et desirable, il permet l'analogie primaire de l'objet de la science) ont toujours fait les frais. Vu Ie format de cette lecture, nous ne pourrons elaborer plus amplement en proposant des questions aux questions de ce groupe de femmes. Le debat continue dans d'autres Heux. Nous remarquerons, pour finir trop rapid erne nt, comment Ies entreprises theorisantes contredisent (sauf dans Ie cas mentionne de Gail Scott) Ie's pratiques poetiques qui, elles, semblent rester dans Ia noirceur et l'impossibilite qui fonde la poesie; impossibilite d'une parole du desir, car ecrire Ie corps, n' est-ce pas creuser en me me temps sa sepulture? Ainsi, les textes poetiques construisent une fiction de I' ecriture comme geste et jouissance (de l' arne, les seuls permis?), tandis que Ies fragments theoriques continuent de faire du feminisme (qui est d'abord un cri du corps opprime), un roman historique realiste, OU I' omniscience de la narratrice (sujete utopique et desiree) tente de recreer I' autorite paternelle et legale de I' auctore qui n' en finit pas de ne pas mourir. (ANNE-MARIE PICARD)

Hello Out There! Canada's New Music in the World, 1950–85 ed. by John Beckwith and Dorith R. Cooper, and: Musical Canada: Words and Music Honouring Helmut Kallmann ed. by John Beckwith and Frederick A. Hall (review)

Abstract: preserved; recordings are the principal repositories of jazz musical history. In the absence of enough truly representative recordings of jazz as it was played in Montreal, Gilmore has chosen to concentrate on the social, political, and economic forces which governed the lives of professional musicians who sought in the playing of jazz more artistic fulfilment than their regular jobs usually provided. Few of the many talented musicians who lived and played jazz in Montreal ever received much notice at home or elsewhere; most practised their art in relative obscurity. It is their lives Gilmore seeks to illuminate. While the best-known products of the Montreal jazz scene Oscar Peterson, Maynard Ferguson, and Paul BIey are not ignored, Gilmore discusses them mainly in terms of their activities while resident in Montreal as part of the local jazz community. Afro-Americans have always been of central importance to the development of jazz, and Gilmore believes that jazz in the authentic sense was not performed in Montreal until the arrival of black musicians from the United States around 1920; despite racial barriers, blacks, such as the Canadians Myron Sutton, Steep Wade, and Nelson Symonds, along with many American expatriates, continued to make significant contributions to the Montreal music scene. Gilmore's study also adds important details to the recorded history of Montreal's black community. Jazz is a group activity, and Montreal was unique for the collaborations and tensions between the musicians who played together anglophones and francophones, blacks, Asians, and whites, Canadians, Americans, and Europeans. More than just the story of jazz in Montreal, Swinging in Paradise is essential reading for those interested in the social history of Canada's most cosmopolitan city. (DOUGLAS ROLLINS)

Mythe et reflet de la France: l'image du Canada en France, 1850–1914 by Sylvain Simard (review)

Abstract: l'iconographie (photos, dessins, gravures) est etonnante, une image valant parfois un chapitre entier. Viennent enfin s'y ajouter un tres utile 'Index detaille des productions de la N. c. T. de 1964 a 1988' et un 'Index des titres de pieces cites.' En somme, un precieux volume pour Ie critiquehistorien, comme aussi pour l'etudiant-amateur, Ie fanatique et Ie professionnel de la scene. (L.E. DOUCETTE)

English Drama: Shakespeare to the Restoration 1590–1660 by Alexander Leggatt, and: Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and The Roman Plays by Alexander Leggatt (review)

Abstract: dualism and subsequent alienating reification of nature, both certainly consequent upon one strain of Renaissance humanism. For these 'meditations,' Spenser's epic serves rather more as occasion than subject, providing a gloss or parallel discourse to the one Kane develops through an 'interweaving of traditional and modern contexts of interpretation' into a pattern of intriguing diversity where Augustine shares prominence as Spenserian 'context' with Gregory Bateson, Hooker with C.N. Cochrane, Aquinas with Lorenz, Fieino with Freud, Neoplatonism with Darwinism. Source texts accumulate, strike sparks off one another, surge and converge into innovative, often stimulating and provocative patterns. Kane attributes these patterns to Spenser, but his evidence to support the attribution is typically unspecific and vestigial, thus making it difficult to judge whether he has discovered them in or imposed them on Spenser's text. This methodological 'tendency,' Kane acknowledges in his preface, 'may be frustrating to textual scholars,' but I hope any 'frustration' with his methods will ,not distract Spenserian scholars, 'textual' or otherwise, from careful consideration of Kane's work: if it lacks conventional persuasiveness, it provides sources of stimulating 'aporia' in abundance. I think it noteworthy that both authors independently and warmly acknowledge classes taught by William Blissett as the seedbed in which the roots of their studies generated: clearly Spenser and Blissett represent a potent combination. Both books are important contributions to Spenserian commentary, and Bieman's will repay attention not only from students of Spenser but also from anyone who values Renaissance culture. (MICHAEL F. DIXON)

Textual Criticism and Non-Fictional Prose: The Case of Matthew Arnold

Abstract: In 1983 Jerome McGann declared that 'textual criticism is in the process of reconceiving its discipline' and cited revisionist views of copy-text, authorial intention, and textual authority to support his claims. McGann further argued that the social dynamic between an individual author, his work, and the method of literary production was crucial for a printed text, and should be studied more closely by textual critics. In addition, he noted that an author's intentions towards his manuscript may differ from his intentions towards his published text. For McGann, the textual critic becomes an archaeologist because he must reconstruct an entire literary past through the recovery of a literary text (McGann, 2, 41, 81, 68, 89, 93). The consequences of these changes for the editing of Matthew Arnold's prose are the specific concern of this paper; but of equal importance is the impact of such revisions on the general study of Victorian non-fictional writing.

Yarmarok: Ukrainian Writing in Canada since the Second World War ed. by Jars Balan and Yuri Klynovy (review)

Abstract: significatif: fragmentation de l'univers male, stable et coherent, Ie journal tout particulierement permet a Angeline de s'ecrire comme femme. A cote de son histoire a lui, s' ecrit, se vit son histoir~ a elle. Trente arpents, Le Survenant, la poesie de Saint-Denys Garneau et d' Anne Hebert, Bonheur d' occasion, Neige noire et l' oeuvre de France Theoret sont abordes avec la meme originalite et la meme perspicacite. Dans chaque cas, des lumieres nouvelles sur les oeuvres contribuent a placer cette etude dans une niche a part. Toutefois, selon Smart, c' est Bonheur d'occasion qui doit eire marquee d'une pierre blanche: les aleas qu' elle a connus font com prendre a Florentine toute la signification de son destin de femme, et sa prise de conscience peut etre consideree 'comme un point tournant dans I'histoire du personnage feminin quebecois. ' Tous ces textes qu' elle etudie, Smart les considere comme un microcosme culturel ou chacun des personnages feminins qui s'y debat fait partie d'une meme grande famille: 'Tous, dirait-on, ont grandi dans une meme maison, ou sous Ie regard du Pere severe, les fils se sacrifient ou s' endurcissent a leur tour, tandis que les filles resistent, sachant comme par un instinct sur que c' est a leur emprisonnement dans l'Image-Mere que Ie systeme doit sa perpetuite.' La methode employee par l' auteure se resume en un mot: l'intelligence. Chaque oeuvre est exploree avec tout Ie respect du a sa singularite et, si Ie present compte rendu manque de nuances, l' ecriture de Smart, elle, ne simplifie ni ne caricature les problemes: 'Les oeuvres d'art ne sont pas des messages ideologiques, mais des explorations de la contradiction.' Le choix des oeuvres, pour sa part, est excellent en ce qu'il s' agit de textes majeurs, commentes a I' envi, et sur lesquels Smart projette malgre cela de nouvelles lumieres. En fait, il n'y a qu'un roman dont il m'a semble qu'll aurait pu figurer de maniere avantageuse dans ce parcours: Poussiere sur la ville. II aura it ete interessant de prendre connaissance des propos de Smart sur cette oeuvre qui est a la fois l' aboutissement ultime du discours male, et Ie point de depart d'un nouveau discours feminine Ecrire dans la maison du pere: un prix du Gouverneur general merite, parce qu'll s'agit en I'occurrence d'une etude ou, a chaque page, surgissent de nouvelles interpretations litteraires toutes riches en resonances humaines. 'La litterature, c' est la vie' ecrivait Du Bos; la critique aussi, quand elle etale une lecture intelligente dans un langage accessible. (PIERRE HEBERT)

'The Drama Discouraged': Judgment and Ambivalence in The Madras House

Abstract: Harley Granville Barker's The Madras House is a particularly frustrating play for audiences and critics, the more so for its strengths. Performed in 1910 during the first and only season of the Frohman Repertory theatre, The Madras House is usually seen as an important and impressive failure. Critics and audiences frequently find the relentless but lively debating to be one of the work's most engaging features; at the same time, however, they claim that the play is 'coldly ventriloquial,' and complain of a 'fixed, static quality' in the characters. Responses to the first production would set the tone for most later commentary on the play. Max Beerbohm insisted that 'any one who leaves the Duke of York's Theatre after the third act of The Madras House will feel that he has derived an immense amount of amusement and instruction. For here is a debate that has unity.' Unfortunately, the play has a fourth act, a fact which severely qualifies Beerbohm's praises. A.B. Walkley, writing for The Times, is more fort...

Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature ed. by K.P. Stich (review)

Abstract: discusses Rudy Wiebe, an author who would probably disavow any post-modern intent, or when she considers Clare Blaise, or even the early Atwood. If we delete the few post-modem tags, Hutcheon's account of The Edible Woman could stand as a good, orthodox reading of the novel. The slippery notion of literary judgment is also at issue here. George Bowering's Burning Water provides a fine example of self-reflexivity, but it is still a cumbersome, contrived novel. I realize that one might object to the partiality of my judgment; post-modernism disputes all formative and evaluative terms. But Hutcheon is content with the novel because it makes her point about self-conscious authors and narrators. A final related point concerns the unresolvable dialectic that Hutcheon continually and cleverly exposes. The key logical discovery of the 'postmodernism paradox' is that competing concepts cannot be synthesized, as Hegel naIvely proposed, but must remain forever suspended in 'an unresolved but productive tension.' Thought never truly advances because conceptual opposites never co-operate or merge. What then does the tension produce when thought enthusiastically embraces contradiction? Hutcheon is vague here, because she seems to be promising a radical new truth, but realizes that Truth is a provisional fiction. Their tension 'problematizes' understanding. In ways not sufficiently pursued, it encourages a highly unstable, self-conscious revaluation and an enlightened (but not higher; that would be too Hegelian or too romantic) scepticism. (I.M. KERTZER)

Northrop Frye on Education by Northrop Frye, and: Some Reflections on Life and Habit by Northrop Frye, and: Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources by Robert D. Denham, and: Northrop Frye by Ian Balfour (review)

Abstract: (We know, because it is concocted out of Glassco's own journal entries in 1960.) But even in the papers, we cannot trust the teller or the tale. 'Did Ezra Pound accept the second chapter of his memoirs for The Exile?' (There is no trace of evidence that he did.) 'Did Glassco have one-night homosexual affairs with Jean Cocteau and A.E. Housman?' Did he have homosexual relations with Lord Alfred Douglas? Probably -none of the above. And yet the revelations of this book do not discredit the Memoirs as a literary work. Despite the technique of prevarication throughout, Glassco is in a profound sense, taking the manuscripts and the published book together, far more honest than other writer of his generation he reveals more of his inner conflicts and his sexual perversity than any Canadian writer before him. And he is a very deft and skilful manipulator of the word. He is an artist to his fingertips. Kokotailo's best critical insight, moreover, is that Glassco 'artfully constructed a sequence of events whose implicit moral he then denies.' The pattern of the Memoirs shows a life of youthful indulgence ending in suffering and near-death; yet the author claims throughout that this is truly how life should be lived. 'He is arguing for a youth of wine and roses' but 'the pattern he designed for his memoirs argues against it.' This is a conflict that leaves future critics much to puzzle at, concerning the folly or the inner conflicts of this artist. Kokotailo's final chapter places Glassco among the dandies, decadents, and aesthetes of the last century, showing how all his sexual and artistic peculiarities are typical of that literary camp. This is all very fine, but one would have wanted a more searching account of the Canadian origins of this variant of decadence. Actually, the late-aesthetic branch of decadence in Canada -Smith, Gustafson, . Glassco which I have sometimes called 'the flower of gentility' is a rebellion from within against the puritan tradition of the ruling culture. And such Memoires d'artifice,.as they might be called in part fraud, in part high artistry are thus counterpointed against another branch of literary development where truth is paramount. This latter is a movement of social criticism and reconstruction from below, which is far more thoroughgoing than that of the aesthetes, and which has a larger future. But that is to place Glassco and Kokotailo's study in a much wider historical perspective. (LOUIS DUDEK)