Encounters and Explorations: Canadian Writers and European Critics ed. by Franz K. Stanzel, Waldemar Zacharasiewicz (review)

156 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 what a 'subject' or 'writer' is 'up to or thinks she is up to' (p 31). Although this phrase appears to have something to do with 'social discourse: it quickly becomes a near synonym for theme or attitude. 'Love of the prairie landscape: for example, is 'a dominant structure of signification' (p 35). Without filling in the backgrounds and drawing the distinctions which her interest in cultural stance demands, Fairbanks is reduced to far too many banal descriptions which make her subject, and the books, far less absorbing than they should be: 'Another motif recurs in the fiction: women not only feared Indians but also hated them' (p 171); 'Open hostility and prejudice against newcomers is expressed in Salverson's Viking Hearf (p 180); 'On the basis of the town fiction reviewed thus far, we can conclude that female attitudes toward the town vary considerably' (p 194)· If other aspects of the structures of signification, aspects rooted in discourse, had been considered, Prairie Women would be a richer, more steadily engaging book. Fairbanks does not analyse narrative structures to any extent. She does not mention syntactical structures, prosodic structures, or etymology. From time to time we get glimpses of the ventures that might have been made to examine discourse structures which are evidently crucial to the topic: the temperance pamphlet, for example, or the Bible, or the women's autobiography as diary. Fairbanks might have speculated on the discourse patterns associated with quilting, an activity which she notes, interestingly, is important to prairie women's art. The limited discussion of Grove's Fruits of the Earth does not mention the novel's odd structure as it figures the shifting languages of Ruth (or the shifting myths of Ruth). Robert Kroetsch and Sinclair Ross are cited as male writers who have made significant contributions to mediating the reality of prairie women, but As for Me and My House is only discussed cursorily in a footnote, and Kroetsch is represented by one story, 'The Harvester'; no novel, such as Badlands, is mentioned. Fairbanks's tribute to Kroetsch might make us think, too, of another structure of discourse worth examining in this book. Fairbanks insists on the close and crucial identification of woman with flower and vegetable garden. In Seed Catalogue Kroetsch deconstructs the central written text expressing close concern with gardens and growth. In Kroetsch's poem and story lies a rich range of suggestions for approaching the patterns of language through which women expessed their roles on the frontier. (LAURIE RICOU) Franz K. Stanzel and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, editors. Encounters and Explorations: Canadian Writers and European Critics K6nigshausen and Neumann. iv. 157. DM32 paper In an introduction to this volume, one of the editors argues that for Europeans if not for Canadians one of the 'inescapable questions' to consider is 'the Canadianness of Canadian literature' (p 8), a point he enlarges upon in his final summation chapter. Suggesting that it is important for Europeans to be able to distinguish Canadian literature from its English or American counterparts, he advances a remarkable analogy: 'Directors of zoos know how newly acquired animals increase the attractiveness of a zoo if the newcomers can be described as belonging to a hitherto unknown species. If on closer zoological inspection these newcomers are found to be merely unusual variants ofalready familiar species no visitor to the zoo ... will feel cheated if the animal by its quaint appearance, unfamiliar behaviour or the peculiar noises it is able to produce charms him while he is watching it' (p 149). If Canadians had to choose between being 'quaint' and 'unfamiliar: or beinginvisible to the rest of the world, a point raised by bothJack Hodgins and Rudy Wiebe in their contributions to this volume, I suspect invisibility would win out. But fortunately, as this publication verifies, Canadian literature has achieved a sufficiently respectable international stature that all these labels are more pertinent to critical cliches or to conference summations than they are to the reality of our literature. The ambitiously named conference that generated this volume, 'The International Symposium of Contemporary Anglo-Canadian Literature,' is itself one measure of this reality. Held in Tulbingerkogel, Austria, in MaylJune...