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556 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 theme, style, and attitude, with a special focus on Cronenberg=s treatment of and attitude towards male sadism. He concludes that, while the later films are increasingly self-aware explorations of the consequences of such sadism (both for suffering women and for self-recriminating men), they remain just as apolitical as the earlier ones. He puts this most bluntly when he declares that >the moral= of Cronenberg=s early films is >you can=t fix human nature,= while the moral of the later films is >you can=t fix your own nature.= There is, of course, an implicit assertion here that Cronenberg believes that there is such a thing as human nature, and that there is something like an essential self. So, clearly, Beard=s Cronenberg is no postmodernist. Indeed, Beard makes this explicit at several points. The description of a nonpostmodern Cronenberg is an important element of The Artist as Monster. So is the story of the filmmaker=s development that the book tells. And these two elements are, in fact, closely related. To read this book is to follow Beard on what he treats as Cronenberg=s more and more courageous journey towards self-recognition. Videodrome (1982) marks an important turning point, according to Beard. He greets the depiction of the dereliction and despair of Max, the central male protagonist, approvingly: >in stepping forward to occupy this agonized role, Max embodies a great act of courage in the evolution of Cronenberg=s work.= Beginning with Videodrome the films become sadder. This coincides, Beard argues, with the end of a certain type of displacement. Cronenberg=s earliest art films and his first horror features tend to feature a group of people suffering from a >plague.= In these films we often see an >attachment of catastrophe to the woman.= The later films, however, tend to be >first-person= films featuring a central male who is (in some sense) an artist, a sadist, and a monster. The earlier films= ironic distance from the group of plague-sufferers serves to protect the filmmaker and his male audience from painful feelings, as does the displacement of monstrosity away from the sadistic male and onto the >catastrophic= female. Beard sees the despairing self-blame that marks films like Videodrome, Dead Ringers, and Naked Lunch as an artistic and a psychological advance. A drawback of Beard=s approach is that he can sometimes come across almost as if he were Cronenberg=s therapist: although he takes a detached, analytical stance while patiently following the filmmaker through (especially ) the earlier films, he almost glows with approval whenever he sees Cronenberg attain certain kinds of insights into male sadism. This attitude may irritate some readers. That said, Beard=s book will nevertheless impress even readers with a sharper political bent and different theoretical tastes or investments as compelling and thoughtful interpretation and commentary. (KEIRA TRAVIS) Dionne Brand. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging Doubleday Canada. 230. $32.95 humanities 557 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Because I am writing this review in Barcelona, Spain, I know writing begins with a rupture: the author attempts to salve a wound, to negotiate a breakage or a ruin, to conjure either a fresh home for her rootless imagination (and ruthless emotion), or to map a way to some fancied domicile, one which may not even exist anymore B if it ever did. For writers whom African Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip calls >Afrosporic= and >sister= poet Dionne Brand dubs >Black Diasporic,= the distance to bridge, the wound to cauterize, is even more traumatic, for the site of loss, of original dispersal and dismemberment, is impossible, now, for most, to identify or acknowledge. Indeed, the medieval conceit of the Wandering Jew is now joined by the (post)modern(ist) one of the Exiled (or Imprisoned) Nigger, at least in the Occident, where Africans have been valued, traditionally, only for their labour and their sex, a gold mine productive of even greater labour. African slavery and its diaspora of culture-haunting images is what Brand...

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