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HUMANITIES 239 however, is that, in attempting to understand the enigma of Klein's premature silence as a consequence of his failed attempt to juggle his two contradictory loyalties - his Jewishness and his attraction to modernity the work seems to diminish Klein's genuine achievement and stature. Klein may have been silenced by his own sense of failure to accomplish his ambitious aim. His best work, however, satisfies most precisely when it tries to express his deep pain and frustration in the face of the tragic incoherencies of modern Jewish experience. (ADAM FUERSTENBERG) Dianne Tiefensee. The Old Dualities: Deconstructing Robert Kroetsch and His Critics McGill-Queen's University Press. viii, 232. $44.95 cloth 'It is clear,' Dianne Tiefensee remarks at one point in her study of a much lionized guru of the Canadian postmodern, 'that Robert Kroetsch's mode of thought does not go beyond the boundaries prescribed by metaphysics; it does not take the plunge into undecidability, even though he attempts to take that plunge by espousing incompleteness, fragmentation, multiplicity , carnival and doubleness.' This statement summarizes concisely the hortatory pretensions of The Old Dualities: a rigorous, indeed a tenacious, disclosure of Kroetsch and his critics as false practitioners of deconstruction , unwittingly reaffirming a metaphysics of Presence at the very moment they disclaim any adherence to transcendentalism and logocentr-'ism . The referential pole-star in Tiefensee's own deconstruction of Kroetsch and his many admirers is Derridean undecidability - a concept denoting a shaking and displacement of dualistic modes of perception which neither resurrects nor simply inverts binaries, but accounts for the radical alterity inevitably operating in all thought. Ultimately, the reader is pressed into acknowledging that 'deconstruction is not to Kroetsch what it is to Derrida.' But the question remains: Is Kroetsch himself obliged to remain faithful to Derrida's texts with a degree of conscientiousness that, Tiefensee implies, is philosophically, perhaps even morally, incumbent? In other words, does it really matter that, after a close perusal of his knowledge and criticism, we, along with Tiefensee, 'can legitimately say that no deconstructing is taking place' in the work of a Canadian writer widely aggrandized by the academy? Such questions require consideration in part because the Kroetsch/Derrida debate fabricated in The Old Dualities appears somewhat forced. It may be that Tiefensee has not looked hard enough, or has failed adequately to contextualize her study within the broader framework of poststructuralist /postmodernist debate, when she notes in her introduction that, 'at this time, there is no other mode of thought available to me by which the metaphysical presuppositions that ... govern Kroetsch's (our) 240 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 thought can be uncovered' than 'from a Derridean point of view.' An unrelenting negativity, however, also pervades the pages of this tenchapter investigation. Divided into two parts (part 1 deals with Kroetsch's influence on Canadian literary theory, part 2 focuses on the metaphysical assumptions governing his criticism and fiction), the book is a sustained attack on both Kroetsch's Hegelian dialectics and those of his 'proponents' who are, like the subject of their esteem, actually grounded in traditional (read: unDerridean) thought. Following an admirably lucid recapitulation of Derrida's deconstructive theory in the first chapter, chapters 2 through 4 undertake an extensive critique of the academic and novelistic labourers in the Kroetsch industry. Aside, perhaps, from Susan Rudy Dorscht and Barbara Godard, no one is spared from allegations of metaphysical complicity. Linda Hutcheon, Stanley Fogel, Peter Thomas, Frank Davey, and Robert Lecker are among those challenged for their frequent lapses into essentialist paradigms. The remaining six chapters interrogate Kroetsch's frequent slippages into narratives about progress, unity, and quest. They uncover the author's interest in conventional theme, his prioritizing of speech over writing, his reference to origins, and his obsession with the male hero. Tiefensee is quite right to suggest that such categories actually re-articulate a metaphysics against which Kroetsch reacts in his own theory, most vociferously in the series of recorded conversations between himself, Shirley Neuman, and Richard Wilson published as Labyrinths of Voice in 1982. But,locating in nearly every utterance nefarious traces of intention, the Subject, identity, or some other centre, Tiefensee's argument takes on...

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