Pulling against Gravity: Economic Development in New Brunswick during the McKenna Years by Donald J. Savoie (review)

504 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 German Literature includes writers from Spanish, Italian, and Turkish diasporic communities (Franco Biondi, Renan Demirkan, Zehra Çirak, José Oliver, Akif Pirinçci, Feridun Zaimoglu) as well as German-Jewish writers (Lea Fleischmann, Barbara Honigmann, Richard Chaim Schneider), authors of the former GDR (Kerstin Jentzsch and Thomas Brussig), the Austrian writer Barbara Frischmuth, and West German writer Hanne Mede-Flock. What unifies these authors and texts from disparate cultural and sociopolitical contexts are, in Fachinger=s view, their positions on the margins of mainstream German society and/or literature, their opposition to dominant constructions of what constitutes Germanness, as well as the literary strategies they employ in reaction to the >exclusionary politics of the dominant [German] culture.= Unlike Taufiq, Fachinger is careful not to claim oppositional narrative strategies as a universal feature of minority writing. This, she rightly points out, would be to obscure the range of approaches present within such a category. Her aim, however, is to locate and define specific paradigms of oppositional strategies that exist in some minority writing in Germany. Without losing sight of the specificity of German cultural and political contexts, Fachinger applies conceptual frameworks developed by a number of postcolonial theorists outside the borders of German studies: Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Sneja Gunew, Emily Hicks, and Helen Tiffin, to name a few. She thus identifies the following modes of >oppositional aesthetics=: rewriting (of a specific canonical text or traditional genre), postcolonial picaresque, grotesque realism, and linguistic strategies such as allusion, code-switching, interlanguage, neologism, and syntactic fusion. While Fachinger considers a number of authors and texts, the decision to consider a broad range of >marginal= writing necessitates a relatively small sampling from each of the groups she includes. This provokes some questions for further consideration: for instance, can one locate additional examples of the counter-discursive strategies that Fachinger identifies here? Can other modes of oppositional aesthetics be added to Fachinger=s list? More important, do these examples constitute the sort of unique poetics or literary program that B as the theorists Fachinger employs have so persuasively argued B exist within English-language postcolonial literature? Put differently, can we find in these texts strategies which form a distinct practice within contemporary German literature or the German literary tradition? Furthermore, how do the vastly different political and cultural contexts from which these texts emerge affect the counter-discursive strategies they employ? Finally, what other voices could be productively included in such an analysis? These questions extend beyond the scope of Petra Fachinger=s study; however, she has made an important contribution which paves the way for such future research. (CHRISTINA KRAENZLE) Donald J. Savoie. Pulling against Gravity: humanities 505 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Economic Development in New Brunswick during the McKenna Years Institute for Research on Public Policy. vi, 200. $29.95 In this excellent work, Donald Savoie, a distinguished authority on regional development, sets out to evaluate the record of Frank McKenna, premier of New Brunswick from 1987 to 1997, in promoting economic development. This was McKenna=s passion, and he made no secret of his desire to change his province and its people. His objective was to make the province less dependent on the national government and to make its people less dependent on government. This required, he believed, changing the image of New Brunswick in the minds of both its inhabitants and others. It is one of the major strengths of this book that Savoie recognizes the importance of historical context (>history matters,= he writes). He provides a brief account of the impact of the National Policy on the Maritime region (negative, at least since 1890), assesses New Brunswick political leadership in the decades preceding McKenna (favourably, by and large), and gives a critical review of a number of royal commissions, inquiries, and the like, which have been charged, over many decades, with making recommendations regarding the economic problems of the region. Taking the Duncan Commission of the mid-1920s as an example, he notes that the commissioner was instructed not to deal with the tariff, the foundation stone of...