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HUMANITIES 149 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 ofmy 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) K.P. Stich, editor. Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature University of Ottawa Press. xii, 176. $19.95 paper Critics of Canadian autobiography have focused almost exclusively on the two writers - Grove and Glassco - who used the genre most deceptively. Hoping for a major contribution to the study of Canadian autobiography from these proceedings of the 1987 Reappraisals Symposium , one is only occasionally rewarded. Three of the volume's fifteen essays return to Grove and Glassco. In the most sophisticated, Paul Hjartarson argues that the 'I' ofautobiography is dependent on and is the product of narration and is defined in part by its relations to discourse and power. He demonstrates the successes and failures of such 'self'-narration by a productive reading of what in less able hands would be an unlikely conjunction of texts: The Handmaid's Tale, In Search of Myself, and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's Memoirs. Timothy Adams reads Glassco's The Memoirs of Montparnasse as imock autobiography' and finds 'little psychological insight' there, whereas Michael Gnarowski derives just such insight by re-examining the process of its composition. His solidly researched literary history goes well 150 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 beyond Thomas Tausky's earlier demonstration of the hoax of the Memoirs in its assessment of Glassco's appeal to Leon Edel for an introduction, of Glassco's negligible stature and accomplishments in Paris, of the ways in which the Memoirs were self-serving, and of the meaning of Glassco's artifice in light of his problematic relations with his father. Only two essays discuss texts that are unproblematically autobiographies . John Lennox writes about arguably the most important Canadian autobiography written within traditional generic constraints, Gabrielle Roy's La Detresse et l'enchantement, and Heather Henderson writes about Inuit Minnie Aodla Freeman's Life among the Qallunaat. Each summarizes the work to reveal the ways in which linguistic and cultural divisions leave the 'I' of the autobiography irremediably split. Henderson's is the more satisfying essay, if only because the structural and imagistic complexities of Roy's work leave the reader craving more discussion than Lennox has been able to give us in this early essay on La Detresse. A third group of essays deals with genres related to autobiography and, often, with problems of generic categorization. Jack Warwick presents Gabriel Sagard, in the first Histoire du Canada, finding a 'je' in the events he narrates and in the act of narrating; Ray Ellenwood mulls, with no notable conclusions, over where the 'voice' of Louis Goulet is to be found in the several drafts of his transcribed oral memoir; and Michael Peterman reads RoughingIt in the Bush as part of a non-fiction tradition which values women's lives. However the most...

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