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HUMANITIES 241 them Kroetsch): the idea of Canada as a historically postmodern nation, and, by inference, the 'desire to see ... Canadian literature as somehow always already postmodern.' Tiefensee seems to be interested in countering the facile overuse of 'postmodernity' as a kind of catchword for whatever presents itself as avant-garde. In this sense, she aligns herself with such astute cultural observers as art historian Victor Burgin, who has noted that 'in an art world ever eager to decant its old ideological wine into new terminological bottles, there has been much critical discussion of, and greater uncritical use of, the idea of a 'postmodern' aesthetics' (The End of Art Theory). Kroetsch could certainly be identified as one of the un(der)critical in his elevation of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye to the status of resistance fighters against High Modernism. The bibliographical significance of Tiefensee's work should also not be underestimated. Copious endnotes and an impressive list of primary and secondary sources make this a study Kroetsch scholars will find useful in their own archaeology of a career that has spanned more than three decades. A rather programmatic approach to her own material, however, mars Tiefensee's analysis, and her unquestioning appeal to the authority of Derrida is, for me, extremely problematic. It must strike any reader as contradictory that, while excoriating those critics who situate Kroetsch 'as the authority according to whom his work is to be read,' as the postmodem ground-breaker, she herself should consistently monumentalize Derrida, at one point even establishing him as the sole source of a particular kind of knowledge: 'we must never lose sight,' we are warned, 'of the blind violence by which metaphysics accomplishes the reappropriating gesture of mastery and exclusion through which the self seeks to achieve the Presence that we have always, until Derrida, found so reassuring' (my emphasis). It is possible that, finding in Kroetsch's oeuvre 'a stance that is decidedly not Derridean,' Tiefensee has attempted to arrogate for her own touchstone, the 'father' of deconstruction, an eminent and unassailable position that she believes Kroetsch has not earned. (PETER SINNEMA) Nadine McInnis. Dorothy Livesay's Poetics ofDesire Turnstone Press. 114. $12.95 If Dorothy Livesay's poetry has been accorded less critical attention than that of her male modernist contemporaries, part of the reason may be her gender. Male critics have not ignored her, of course, but according to Nadine McInnis they have not generally been successful in addressing Livesay's central concerns, particularly her treatment of erotic subject matter. McInnis says little about Livesay's overtly political and documen- 242 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 tary poetry, arguing that 'Livesay's initially feminine and subsequently feminist vision remains the compelling force behind her poetic output.' Not surprisingly, McInnis draws heavily on contemporary feminist literary theory, referring to Kristeva, Cixous, Showalter, and Pamela Banting, among others. As a result, she suggests that Livesay's love poetry is implicitly social; it is not only about the relationship between a man and a woman, but also about 'the forces that determine the relationship between the individual woman artist and her male-dominated culture.' Love exists, then, in a social and political context. Making these assumptions leads McInnis to the recognition that in much of Livesay's love poetry, even that which seems most obviously celebratory, there is a dark undertone of struggle, suffocation, and potential violence as the woman seeks to resist the domination of the male and to express her own experience in her own voice. It also leads her to question the biographical emphasis of much previous criticism of Livesay's poetry, an emphasis which has been encouraged by Livesay's own autobiographical writing; the poems often seem almost occasional poems, rendering a particular love affair, a particular stage in childrearing , a particular moment in an individual life. McInnis insists - and in this insistence, perhaps, lies the true originality of her contribution that the poems are not only the record of a life, but the working out of an aesthetic and an attitude to language, a process of freeing herself from patriarchal, canonical notions of literature and articulating the experience of the body - or, in the language of...

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