Giant Despair Meets Hopeful: Kristevan Readings in Adolescent Fiction by Martha Westwater (review)

382 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 work, community, place, locale, commerce, and practice in the visual arts? Surely this is first and foremost a political question. As such, Capital Culture raises issues the substance of which remains unresolved and, therefore, contestable. Pressing, demanding of our attention. Timely. (MARQUARD SMITH) Martha Westwater. Giant Despair Meets Hopeful: Kristevan Readings in Adolescent Fiction University of Alberta Press. xx, 190. $29.95 In Giant Despair Meets Hopeful, Martha Westwater proposes to >demonstrate the literary value of several modern fiction writers who dared to unmask for the young the constructed nature of reality and to question the unitary nature of the self,= and at the same time to >celebrate the psychoanalytic theory of Julia Kristeva.= Concentrating on fiction >whose antagonists [sic] are mostly adolescent,= Westwater proposes to present >Kristevan meditations= on young adult novels by Patricia Wrightson, Kevin Major, Katherine Paterson, Aidan Chambers, Robert Cormier, and Jan Mark. Westwater argues that the destablization of society, through the loss of the influence and structure of church and family, and a related loss of >the passion for absolutes,= has brought about a condition of adolescent despair. She claims that Kristeva and the writers listed above confront this despair undaunted because they recognize the >ongoing process of subject identity.= After a brief introduction to Kristevan theory, Westwater interprets works by each writer in the light of a different aspect of Kristevan vocabulary B Patricia Wrightson and the semiotic/symbolic dyad; Kevin Major and the chora; Katherine Paterson and abjection; Aidan Chambers and melancholia; Robert Cormier and monumental time; and Jan Mark and the subject-inprocess . Westwater=s interpretations are at their most cogent when she pares down the Kristevan terminology; at times, her personal reverence for Kristeva=s writings overwhelms her ability to convince by argument rather than enthusiasm. An adulatory tone suffuses the study (in one footnote Westwater refers to the >gracious, generous Julia Kristeva=) and obscures insights that need not be Kristevan at all. It is not so Kristevan, after all, that these novelists show >a deep appreciation not only of the interpretive power of fiction on life but also of life on fiction= B or that they have a >profound conviction that literature can help us in our pain.= That said, at her best Westwater combines close textual analysis and a sparing use of Kristevan language to cast a useful light on the works under discussion. This is particularly true in her treatment of Katherine Paterson=s novels, where she points out repeating patterns of >abjection= involving an adolescent protagonist and two contrasting parents, usually mothers and HUMANITIES 383 mother-figures. Her discussion of Jan Mark is also enlightening, balancing Mark=s more emotionally difficult novels with those in a lighter vein. Her treatment of the works of Robert Cormier is less convincing B partly because in choosing to discuss >monumental time= she avoids treating Cormier=s deep disgust for the body, and partly because hope is harder to find in his relentlessly vacuous characters. Even so, her interpretation of these texts is a respectable response to those many critics who have condemned them as irremediably bleak. It is annoying that Giant Despair, one of the few studies to apply literary theory to children=s literature, is marred by many small flaws and inaccuracies. Ultimately these infelicities accumulate to become a barrier to the reader=s reception of the work. The statement >Michael ... becomes the prototype of a Major novel= doesn=t make sense. The novel Handles is mistakenly identified as a >lead story= in a collection of short stories (published by >Kestral,= not Kestrel). At times quotations of Kristeva are so merged with Westwater=s analysis that one might think, wrongly, that Kristeva was originally referring to the text under discussion. Technical errors in spelling and grammar mar a text that otherwise has useful insights to offer. (DEIRDRE BAKER) Brian J.R. Stevenson. Canada, Latin America, and the New Internationalism, A Foreign Policy Analysis, 1968B1990 McGill-Queen=s University Press. xiv, 290. $55.00 In the wake of the Quebec City Summit of the Americas and last year=s General Assembly of the Organization of American States in Windsor, events that stimulated increased awareness of...