To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
time to time call "conventional."
Kadar harnesses this variety in "subject
matter" and approach with introductory
paragraphs for each section. She achieves
coherence also from the very attractive
indications within numerous essays that
she and her contributors have discussed life
writing at length, that the essays are specific
aspects of a colloquium. Evelyn J. Hinz
concludes with a magnificent Poetics of
Autobiography that identifies thoroughly
and persuasively the dramatic lineage of the
genre. Her suggestions feed back into the
essay collection as we consider both the traditional
appeal of autobiography and its
constant reworking in text and critical
practice as each generation moves onto
centre stage. Shirley Neuman's essay concludes
the collection by calling for a "poetics
of differences." This poetics, which
"cannot be systematized" opens out the
discussion in important ways that are likely
to have far-reaching impact on work in this
field. Neuman suggests "that the theorist
and reader of autobiography enact a series
of simultaneous and multiple gestures" that
acknowledge the value of separate and
oppositional poetics but recognise "a complex,
multiple, layered subject with agency
in the discourses and the worlds that constitute
the referential space of his or her
autobiography, a self not only constructed
by differences but capable of choosing,
inscribing, and making a difference." (This
very exciting collection needs good proofreading
before it goes into inevitable multiple
reprintings.)
Genre * Trope * Gender is a collection of
the Munro Beattie lectures given by
Northrop Frye in 1989, Linda Hutcheon in
1990, and Shirley Neuman in 1991. It's a
slim volume and a rivetting read—on disconnected
subjects that do, in one volume,
connect, in part because they represent pioneering
work and in part because these
thinkers and writers are preeminently
teachers. Frye speaks on two unfinished
Henry James novels and their working
notes. With all the encyclopedic knowledge
that we associate with Frye, he identifies
the ghost story as "the type of story [James]
had been telling all his life." In "The Power
of Postmodern Irony," Hutcheon challenges
reading that suggests the postmodern and
its ironies are trivializing. She takes
Calvino's phrase, "lightness of thoughtfulness,"
and identifies the ironic as usefully
"destabilizing and dismantling," capable of
historicising and politicising and, maybe
constructing something new. Finally,
Neuman deals with the paradoxes inherent
in nonrepresentation of the mother in
autobiography. She reads a cross-section of
very recent autobiographies for their complex
and often painful recognitions of the
mother as physical source identified by
reproduction and, indeed, as reproductive
of mothering. Working with psychoanalytical
and cultural causes for repression and
expression, Neuman identifies serious work
that needs to be done in writing and reading
the body.
Ringing the Changes
Neil K. Besner
Introducing Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and
Women. ECW n.p.
Jeanne Delbaere
Multiple Voices: Recent Canadian Fiction.
Dangeroo n.p.
Reviewed by Christine Somerville
Two recent books of literary criticism show
how Canadian literature has developed as
an academic discipline. Multiple Voices, the
published proceedings of the fourth
International Symposium of the Brussels
Centre for Canadian Studies held in 1989,
resembles the collections of short stories
and critical essays that appeared in the sixties
and seventies. Thirty years ago, however,
few would have predicted that our
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