Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense: Critical Studies of Literature, Cinema, and Cultural History by Mario J. Valdés (review)

310 letters in canada 1999 anglophile awîyak ka takahkiyimat âkayâsêwa In Cree, awîyak means `someone'; takahkiyimat is related to a root meaning think positively of, and âkayâsimowin means English language, a related word. In using the dictionary, I moved easily between sections, but got stuck when I wanted to change grammatical subject. This is because much of what English contains in a sentence Cree puts into one word. For instance, pimihkiw means `S/he renders fat to grease, makes a native delicacy of dry meat mixed with moose fat.' To change subjects in English, the pronoun is changed and -s removed from the verb. In Cree, the verb itself changes, as subjects are marked by an affixation system which is complex for an English speaker. The dictionary is superb in derivational morphology, but does not provide the reader access to inflectional morphology, where an independent guide is needed. This dictionary represents an important achievement. Cree, like any language, incorporates the old and the new, changes to fit the times, and both reaches into the future and remembers the past. In illuminating the wealth of the Cree language, the dictionary more than meets its goal. (KEREN RICE) Mario J. Valdés. Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense: Critical Studies of Literature, Cinema, and Cultural History University of Toronto Press. xii, 170. $45.00 In World-Making: The Literary Truth Claim and the Interpretation of Texts, published in 1992, Mario Valdés argues that literary texts engage their readers in a reciprocal process in which the world is represented, reorganized , and reimagined. The world-making implicit in literary texts challenges readers to envision new possibilities whose intersubjectivity enters the creative lives of human communities. The theoretical investigation of this process is developed and extended in his new book, Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense: Critical Studies of Literature, Cinema, and Cultural History. Drawing on a wide range of cultural texts (film, novels, poetry), Valdés suggests that the creativity involved in aesthetic forms engages the reader in a process of non-linear thinking in which the play of the imagination can lead to new knowledges. It is within this creative art of world-making between reader and text that Valdés locates the emergence of the `poetic sense' of his title. Not surprisingly, then, the communities implied by the use of languages play a key role for Valdés. `The problem of meaning,' he writes,`... is, in fact, part of the more general problem of language as a collectively generated, individually realized, mode of living. In other words, my thesis humanities 311 is that the meaning of meaning lies in the relationship between individual discourse and the community of speakers.' The allusion to the title of I.A. Richards's influential book, The Meaning of Meaning, ironically underscores a movement away from the self-contained and self-sustaining texts of the modernist English scholar's `practical criticism' towards an always altering and open-ended process in which meaning is constructed in the interaction between texts and a diverse community of readers. Valdés's method is based on a Bakhtinian dialogics, stressing provisionality, exchange, and reciprocity. Some of the most striking aspects of Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense are the connections Valdés challenges his readers to draw, not only between different genres of cultural texts, but also between disciplines that rarely engage each other. His own experience of conversations with the French experimental physicist Etienne Guyon is opened out into an intriguing dialogue between the two disciplines: from one perspective, the element of convergence in the concept of `strange attractors' drawn from physics provides useful strategies for the analysis of poetry; from another, a scientist's pathbreaking research is described as `elegant haiku in physics.' Similarly, interdisciplinary conversations between film and literary studies stimulate comparative readings of Casablanca, the classic romance, and Frida, the Latin American biographical rendering of the life of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. In what is perhaps the most striking chapter of the book, Valdés reflects on `Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process.' Critiques raised by postmodernism and poststructuralism have questioned the teleological narratives of traditional literary history and the ethical claims of earlier literary theories...