In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Book Reviews specific.attention to language and translation theory as it produces a fiction of ethnic purity of the "homo quebecensis" or a "fetishizing" of identity (279), detennining the third translation strategy, "grapbemisation," or homolinguistic translation that gives a different graphic notation to the same signifiers to produce the "illusion" of an irreducible difference of Quebecois (295). Translation always involves a double communicative exchange involving two non-equivalent languages or codes: it operates a modification in the power relationships of these languages on both the symbolic or"er and in institutional hierarchies. In contemporary Quebec as in Renaissance Europe, a dialect takes on the authority of a national language in an act of reterritorialization that is a recentring of identity. "Translation into Quebecois" becomes the institutional criterion of acceptibility of a translation (299): Brecht, Tchekov, O'Neill, even Triolet are transliterated in the phonemes of Quebec speech necessary for the emergence of a new theatrical institution. In presenting Brisse(s work, Antoine Berman suggests its affiliations with the polysystem theory of Evan Zohar and Gideon Toury. Brisset herself cites the work of Foucault on ideology and power, as modified by Marc Angenot's work on presuppositions or ideologernes and Andre Belleau's development of Bakhtin's theory of the material constitution of the sign. In this, her study participates in a theoretical development of the field of sociocritique or discourse analysis that is a major Quebec contribution to literary analysis. Brisset's work is also considered highly influential-in the elaboration of a new paradigm in translation studies in what has been called by Andre Lefevere and Susan Bassnett "the cultural turn," that is a move from a positivist emphasis on text as a "translation unit" to focus on the imbrication of texts in systems of the literary, of history, of institutions, which produce them as signifying practices or discursive formations, as utterances within relations of ruling, generating the conditions of the translatable as constraints on both the choice of text for translation and the materiality of the translated text, its discursive strategies and range of allusiveness, the textual and ideological networks in which it is configured. Neither the foreign text nor its translation is an original unity: both are heterogeneous and derivative, exceeding the writer's or translator's grasp. Questions of fidelity are displaced when the translation is understood as interpretive transfonnation not transparent representation. Critical analysis then focuses on the ratio of loss and gain in the effect of the translation as it is mediated by social and cuhural conflicts, in Brisset's study, by Quebec's search for independence. BARBARA GODARD, YORK UNIVERSITY WILLIAM W. DEMASTES. Beyond Naturalism: A New Realism in American Theatre. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, Number 27. New York: Greenwood 1988. pp. 182, illustrated. $39.95. I'd just about given up hope. Theatrical realism, I'd long been told, was a lifeless form of the past. Rejected by Book Reviews 477 respectable rebel-playwrights as incapable of communicating anything profound La contemporary audiences, the fonn was hopelessly outmoded. Realism, like Monty Python's dead parrot, was no more: it was an ex-parrot. an ex-mode. Certainly, the drama textbooks available seem to confirm realism's demise. It is near-impossible to find an anthology of contemporary drama whose offerings venture much beyond loathsome characters in loathsome settings ".ttering loathsomely predictable sequences of sentence fragments (obscenity. obscenity, clumsy sexual pun and/or sexist and/or homophobic observation, cha-cha-cha until Unexpected, Violent Ending). Intensity of feeling is invariably presented as inversely proportional to comprehensibility of expression. People in the "real world" hungered for and attended realistic respites from the usual unusual - plays by Peter Shaffer, Beth Henley, and Marsha Norman, for example. And sometimes such plays were even lauded by academic critics, though usually with a reluctance and qualification not afforded the avant-garde. Popular audiences abandoned Meaningful Theatre, leaving its perfonnances to be staged for an audience consisting of only the playwright's mother, his significant other, freshman students who needed a "liberal arts culture credit," and the drarna critic from the local junior college. (So intense is the art community's prejudice against realism, Mr. Demastes tells...

pdf

Share