To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
stood/ And to be dull was constru'd to be
good," are Pope's commentary on the critics
who flourished in the aftermath of the
fall of Rome, an event Pope regarded as
concurrent with the end of true learning.
And the following couplet, which, incidentally,
is not commonly part of the anthologized
versions of the poem, is heavily
ironic: "Vain Wits and Critics were no
more allow'd/ When none but Saints had
Licence to be proud." What is curious in all
this is that the book does not appear to
have any satire; if satire was indeed Urry's
intention, then he has been altogether too
subtle about it. If one approaches the book
as an interpretative essay a further problem
arises, in that analysis is less in evidence
than narration. Urry implies as much
when, at the very end, he draws a parallel
between historical and fictional writing.
Problems of genre aside, None But Saints
is a thorough piece of work, and it has the
further virtue of being readable. The book
is therefore valuable to both general reader
and scholar; the latter will also be well
served by its eleven pages of bibliography.
Although Urry does not argue his thesis, it
becomes clear by the end of the book that it
has shaped the narrative. Thus, when he
describes the 1889 year of celebration, what
is celebrated is the triumph of progressive
over conservative colonists, of "open and
worldly" Mennonite communities over
"inward looking religious congregationalcommunities,"
and what he has put in place
is an account of the forces, internal and
external, that have brought about this
result. There is, finally, an interesting parallel
in this conclusion with that of
Schroeder's The Mennonites. Whether in
Russia or in Canada, the forces that have
moved the Mennonites toward assimilation
have been remarkably similar, and, at least
in 1889, before the communist revolution
destroyed the Mennonite colonies, a
changed but nevertheless distinct identity
has survived.
Voices in Context
Gary A. Olson and Irene Gale, eds.
(Inter)views: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on
Rhetoric and Literacy. Southern Illinois UP $19.95
Eve Browning Cole and
Susan Coultrap-McQuin, eds.
Explorations in Feminist Ethics: Theory and
Practice. Indiana UP $35.00/512.95
Reviewed by Judy Z. Segal
These two collections (one of interviews
and the other of essays) have little in common,
but both affirm the value of studying
the individual in context: (Inter)views
focusses on individual scholars in their disciplinary
contexts, while Explorations proclaims
each of us in our own contexts as the
motive and the site of a new ethics.
(Inter)views collects interviews with Mary
Field Belenky, Noam Chomsky, Jacques
Derrida, Paulo Freire, Clifford Gertz,
Richard Rorty, and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak. The interviews first appeared in the
Journal of Advanced Composition, and were
followed, as they are in this volume, by the
considered responses of well-known compositionists.
Referring to rhetoric and composition
studies, John Schilb quips in his response
to one interview, "Our particular field has
largely developed by selectively raiding others."
Herein lies the rationale for the book:
it brings together interviews with luminaries
of the raided. So (Inter)views becomes a
talking family album of rhetoric and composition.
There's Uncle Jacques, warning
that "rhetoricism" is a kind of logocentrism.
There's Aunt Mary with the story of
the collaboration that produced Women's
Ways of Knowing. There's Cousin Richard.
I'll never forget the look on everyone's face
when he asked, "what's a social constructionist?".
Oh, and there's Aunt Gayatri.
Remember what she said when we asked
her to "conceptualize" rhetoric?
While this collection of interviews and
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