The Living Prism: Itineraries in Comparative Literature by Eva Kushner (review)

350 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 contexts within and through which it operates. Keppel-Jones looks at the rhythmical patterns of selected lines apart from their thematic contents, the shifting emotional and ideational currents that they help define and are defined by; the structures of the whole sentences and paragraphs that contain them and that construct the mental sets through which we respond to them; and the governing interests of the whole poems in which they are found. The reader longs to find out how the patterns matter, how they contribute to meaning. Surely there must have been a way to present the purely prosodic >evidence= more efficiently B far too many pages consist of mere lists of lines B and to pursue the tension and counterpoint between form and content, speech and metre, that constitute what Shakespeare called >the life of our design.= (JOHN REIBETANZ) Eva Kushner. The Living Prism: Itineraries in Comparative Literature McGill-Queen=s University Press. xii, 338. $70.00 This book B a selection of lectures, papers, and previously published essays B is about comparative literature, a pressing topic especially in Canada, where it has been squeezed between the monoliths of English and French studies. Paradoxically, in a country with two official languages, no matter how multicultural and multilingual its inhabitants, the investment in the literature and language departments of the two primary founding European cultures presents comparative literature with a double challenge rather than the usual resistance it meets in many countries that have one official language. Being interdisciplinary and moving between cultures and languages has made life exciting and difficult for comparative literature. Eva Kushner B long active, influential and productive nationally and internationally in this cross-disciplinary field B is well placed to set out problems and offer ways ahead for those interested in literature and culture in Canada and elsewhere. This collection is a retrospective that also looks forward. I am sympathetic to comparative literature and to Kushner=s journey as a scholar because they are mediators that cross boundaries: she began in Protestant theology and moved through philosophy and French literature first of the twentieth century and then of the sixteenth B >widely separate disciplines, guarded by specialists who would view any border trespassing with suspicion= B before arriving at comparative literary studies. Kushner disavows any allegiance to a particular school of thought and to any discipline in the humanities but maintains that she was drawn to >their common relationship to the understanding of the human person.= She moves in the borderlands between the modern and postmodern. The Living Prism is divided into five parts, the first being >Legacies and Renewals.= Here, Kushner asks about the possibility of universals, of humanities 351 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 seeking knowledge or truth through particulars, and suggests that universals in the global village are already at work in various literatures. She sees the comparative method as fostering the postmodern, by which she means >generously pluralistic and respectful of others.= How valid comparative literature will be depends >on our ability to serve all cultures in ways that will ensure and enhance their membership in the world system of literatures.= Systems are for exposition, not something of >universal validity.= Kushner sees the human at the centre of literary and cultural studies, so that they complement each other. As Canada is a diverse but sparsely populated country and as its education is a jurisdiction of the provinces and >Because of Canada=s multicultural character, Canadian comparativists are well prepared to handle fragmentation of perspectives in the global village.= Kushner also represents a brief and useful history of the institution of comparative literature in Canada, calls attention to the important sub-field of comparative Canadian literature, which Université de Sherbrooke focused on in one of its programs, and insists on the significance of separating the political and cultural grounds of comparing literature in French and English in Canada and of placing these literatures in a North American context in addition to examining their European origins. She has a specific interest in universals and argues for the need for demonstration and...