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138 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 and repetition. A strong editor would have produced a better book. A writer whose Preface notes that the text 'suffers from randomness and incoherence' disarms his readers. He worries them, however, when he then justifies this looseness by opining that '[m]odern critical theory ... distrusts system and structure, the logic of development' (x). Do I really want to read someone as confused as I? . The other price a reader (willingly) pays springs from Mandel's encyclopaedic allusiveness: 'In the "Preface" to the translation ofJacques Derrida's OfGrammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak cites Jean Hippolite 's essay on the "Preface" to Hegel's Phenomenology ofMind to the effect that no preface should be taken seriously' (135). As a parody of Borges, the sentence is unbeatable. To speak more seriously, consider an essay as illuminating on the subject of recent (read 'trendy') Canadian criticism as 'Strange Loops.' The reader's delight at the breadth of allusion and insight declines into impatience. Could the writer please light, pause upon a single piece, show us the all that lies in each? Avoid opera houses if it is basketball that you want to watch. Mandel's critical vigour lies in his power to sense the wider implications of a cultural gesture. Would he not scorn the close analysis of a particular text as outmoded, humanist, New-Critical? He quotes more than once Charles Olson's aphorism on Poe vs Melville: 'Soine men ride on American space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive. As I see it Poe dug in and Melville mounted.' In choosing that quotation, Mandel describes his own critical path. Readers who want to avoid the bumps along the way should stay at home. (DENNIS DUFFY) George Bisztray. Hungarian-Canadian Literature University of Toronto Press. 116. $18.95 Cyril Dabydeen, editor. A Shapely Fire: Changing the Literary Landscape Mosaic Press. 175. $24.95; $12.95 paper Since the 1960s, the Canadian literary landscape has changed. Now there are writers working here whose backgrounds are Chilean, Caribbean, Hungarian, Czech, Indian, African, Chinese; etc. Such writers are often characterized as 'ethnic,' and subsumed under the umbrella of multiculturalism . But after twenty years, some writers are beginning to ask whether an official policy of multiculturalism hasn't led to their being ghettoized, hived off from the national community. As Rohinton Mistry says, 'ethnic' is a word like 'resident alien'; it is 'phraseology that clings to difference.' Unexpectedly, George Bisztray's Hungarian-Canadian Literature, while HUMANITIES 139 it is essentially an academic study of Hungarian writers in Canada, confronts the issue of how to incorporate the immigrant writer into the context of Canadian culture. Bisztray's scholarly book addresses the theoretical problem of what it means in the 'geocultural field of literary inquiry if the object of research is the literature of multicultural societies.' For Bizstray feels the global literary map has changed. World War II saw the uprooting of tens of millions of people and a new age of migration. And in the decades since, innumerable economic and political crises have led to further north- and westbound migrations. 'There is reason to believe,' he writes, 'that the concept of the nation, as well as the definitions of national culture and literature, will soon be radically reinterpreted - not only in large multicultural countries butin some ofthe traditionally quite homogeneous nations as well.' Bisztray is honest about his dilemma as a critic. How do you incorporate Canadian literatures in the non-official languages into the context of the adoptive culture? To discuss ad infinitum the so-called Canadian immigrant experience is no solution. And meanwhile the writer languishes in an empty space. He/she is denied an identity as fully there (the country of origin) or here (the new space). Having posed the problem, Bisztray does not presume to solve it, since he feels this must involve a collective undertaking by the literary community. Instead he offers, perhaps as a paradigm, an analysis of the evolution of HungarianCanadian literature since the first large migration in 1956. The work of the first generation of writers, among whom the best known is George Faludy, is, not unexpectedly, characterized by cultural pessimism...

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