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372 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Susan Knutson. Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xii, 234. $32.95 Narrative in the Feminine posits that gender-related ideology and values are located not just in the substantive concerns of various writings but at the level of narrative structure itself. Although Susan Knutson suggests that each of the three sections that make up her text can be read either separately or as a whole, the first and last sections provide the tools necessary to locating her feminist narratological approach to the writing of Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard. Drawing on a substantial range of complex theoretical materials, Knutson develops an intriguing argument about the challenge that Marlatt and Brossard pose to what Knutson calls the >masculine generic= B by which she means a privileging of the male universal that has severely limited female agency at the level of narrative. Knutson suggests that Marlatt=s How Hug a Stone and Brossard=s Picture Theory construct instead an enabling and liberating [+ female] generic that challenges the symbolic impasse constituted by the binary gender divisions that are foundational to Indo-European stories. In the first section of her book (entitled >Gender and Narrative Grammar =), Knutson clearly sets out the key aspects of her theoretical framework. She begins by asking: >Can we formally describe narrative in the feminine?= Shadowing this question is, of course, the barrage of criticism levelled at a number of feminist theorists and practitioners of so-called écriture feminine that have posited a material correspondence between a woman=s writing and her gender; thus, Marlatt and Brossard have both been variously accused of replicating the >problematic concept of Awomen@= in their writings. However, Knutson suggests that feminist thinkers and writers, especially in Quebec, have moved well beyond the essentialist impasse targeted by such criticism to now treat gender not as a natural but as a semiotic product. This first section also makes very useful links between evolving language practices in both anti-sexist and anti-racist discourse. Knutson demonstrates just why the disruption and denaturalization of common-sense sexist and racist language has become a key political task. Then, citing narrative=s role as an >instrument of the mind= which both represents and constitutes reality, she outlines how, in her view, feminist and anti-racist narratology can usefully work together to interrogate the universality of classical narrative theory. These are the tools she then brings to her readings of Marlatt=s and Brossard=s works in the second section of her book. Reading each text at the levels of fabula, story, and text, Knutson describes how Marlatt and Brossard each find useful ways to deconstruct the [+male] hero and HUMANITIES 373 [+female] obstacle opposition and thus provide new stories about women. In How Hug a Stone, for example, an inclusive >we= breaks apart the traditional narrative paradigm based on the singular male hero at the level of fabula, in this way allowing for a gender-inclusive human actant. At the level of both story and text, Marlatt=s >i= narrative means that the >focalization = is channelled through a non-dominating >I= or ego. The last chapter on How Hug a Stone illustrates how Marlatt=s use of intertexts serves to rearticulate canonical (masculinist) texts, challenging their status and authority. Knutson=s chapters on Picture Theory argue that Brossard completely reimagines the fundamentals of narrative form by structuring her text around the image of the hologram, a >high-tech fantasy of women=s being in a post-patriarchal age.= Drawing on Brossard=s own theorizing of the spiral as a non-linear and non-causal structure, Knutson explains how Brossard=s text rewrites narrative grammar as >plural and interactive.= At the fabula level, the narrative features a female actant traversing the matrix of the continent. At the story level, her text is focalized through a group of women rather than through a singular dominant male >I.= Like Marlatt, Brossard uses intertextuality actively to recontextualize both canonical and noncanonical works and to foreground a [+male] cultural heritage and its set of symbols and codes. Knutson concludes her text, in the third section, by reflecting further on the positioning of...

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