The Creating Word: Papers from an International Conference on the Learning and Teaching of English in the 1980s ed. by Patricia Demers (review)

'40 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 cautionary tale' which exposes the bleak dehumanization behind the conservative dream of Marabel Morgan's Total Woman. Though plausibly argued, the article seems dated. Its references draw largely on the early texts of the women's movement at the beginning of the '970s, and it includes no acknowledgment ofJessica Benjamin's sophisticated feminist psychoanalytic analysis of Reage's book. Judith Fetterley, author of The Resisting Reader, an important contribution to feminist literary theory and practice, draws on the autobiographical origins of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night - Scott and Zelda's marital and literary struggle for survival- to explore the novel's complexities and limitations. Tender Is the Night, she argues, 'proposes that American men are driven "mad" by the feminization ofAmerican culture which forces them to live out the lives of women and which purchases the sanity of women at men's expense: In so doing, it dishonestly inverts and perpetuates the sexual power imbalance ofFitzgerald's world. Fitzgerald, she suggests, cannot transcend a sexual economy of scarcity and mutual parasitism. Nevertheless, the ambivalence and complexity of the novel also produce a subliminal subtext subverting its arguments for male dominance. Fetterley's article is a satisfying example of a non-reductive feminist approach which sacrifices neither a female perspective nor the text's richness. Mosaic's interdisciplinary orientation makes itself felt in a number of the articles in 'For Betteror Worse.' Frequently this produces a curious disjunction , with quantitative sociological evidence adduced to support accuracy of characterization. Statistical likelihood and literary authenticity, however , inhabit different worlds. Interdisciplinary awareness is more useful in these articles when feminist philosophical, sociological, psychological, and linguistic analysis (work by Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone , Nancy Chodorow, and Luce lrigaray, for example) contribute to new theoretical approaches to the literature. As a critic of literature, of marriages, and of marriage, I approached 'For Betteror Worse' with real eagerness. In the end, the collection left me with a sense of having been taken on a few quick tours and a number of random door-to-door searches within a densely populated territory. Given the centrality of marriage and its alternatives in our lives and in our literature, such patchiness may be inevitable. (HELEN HOY) Patricia Demers, editor. The Creating Word: Papers from an International Conference on the Learning and Teaciling of English in the 19805 University ofAlberta Press. viii, 215. $24.95 Like most books deriving from conferences, The Creating Word offers a mixed collection of papers, but - despite the enormous embrace of its titular terms - not an incoherent one. The volume's miscellany is ordered most obviously by the sequence of its contents. It begins with three more or less theoretical essays, but none of them is so abstract that practical consequences for the 'learning and teaching of English' are left undeclared . Jacques Barzun attacks several kinds of linguistic permissiveness, associating them with a falsely scientific attitude that views the English language as a 'collective work of art' deserving preservation. In the volume's longest and most scholarly essay, M.H. Abrams, by testing divergent readings of Wordsworth's 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal; measures deconstructing against more traditional construing to the advantage of the latter. And Louise M. Rosenblatt sketches her theory of reading - the cognitive and affective 'transaction' between reader and text described in her The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978) - a theory which attempts to allow for what the individual brings to the reading experience without surrendering the possibility of determinate interpretation. The remaining papers are more immediately devoted to matters of pedagogy, and have an order of their own. Attention to the teaching of genres - Robin Skelton on poetry, Norman Page and Rowland McMaster on the novel, with special attention to The Mill on the Floss and Great Expectations respectively - is followed by Rudy Wiebe's reflections on whether and how best 'creative writing' can be taught and John Dixon's on correspondences between certain features of narrative and the developmental stages of adolescent consciousness. Next and fittingly, Martha King advocates a primary-school language arts curriculum derived from current knowledge about the uses of language; she surveys several such uses and...