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HUMANITIES 359 Frederick Philip Grove, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, and Urquhart) show genuine engagement with the complexities of the texts in question. At times it would appear that some of the texts chosen seem more appropriate and effective in substantiating and advancing the book's argument than others: the chapters on Richardson and Grove seem more convincing and more relevant than, say, the section on Watson, which seems to me perhaps a little forced in its attempt to accommodate The Double Hook within the theoretical framework of the overall argument. Although Turner, for example, tells us that Watson's 'determination to stretch and break the cormectionbetween language and referent makes her linguistic practice teeter in the gap between old and new world discourse,' the relations between Watson's modernist linguistic strategies and her involvement with articulating the New World discourse ofa settler society aren't mapped out as convincingly and as rigorouslyas discussions ofother works are here. Similarly, although Turner attends to what she calls the historical and cultural ambiguities of white settler societies, her treatment of the tension between the emancipatory potential and the hegemonizing effects of New World discourse in a Canadian context remains somewhat brusque. If, on the one hand, New World writers have been engaged in the construction of a postcolonial discursive space, if they have participated in an attempt to create an independent local identity separate from their inherited colonial cultures, then they have, on the other, also consolidated structures of oppression in relation to indigenous cultures. Turner, clearly, is aware of this ambivalence, but still I am left wondering whether the discriminating focus that gives this book its skilfully argued emphasis on the ways in which a culture represents and imagines both itself and other cultures may also preclude sustained analysis of the real material conditions reflected in the New World's imaginative constructions. (AJAY HEBLE) Marc Manganaro. Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice ofAuthority: A Critique ofFrazer, Eliot, Frye, and Campbell Yale University Press, 1992. X,214. us $30.00 There is an ancient myth in the Rig Veda that describes the creation of the tmiverse as a sacrifice of a cosmic progenitor named Purusha (Sanskrit for self or person). From the dismembered Purusha arises, among other things, the fourfold hierarchical caste system: from the mouth come the brahmins or priestly class, from the arms comes the warrior class, from the legs arises the merchant class, and finally, from the feet come the shudras, the lowestranking group, constituting agriculturalists and artisans. Read on one level, the story of Purusha is a cosmogonic myth, a tale that explains the origins of the universe and where sacrifice comes from. 360 LETTERS IN CANADA 1995 However, read on another, it is a story that institutionalizes and thereby authorizes the act ofpriestly sacrificeitself, so important throughout much of the history of Hinduism. Read on yet another level, the story not only explains but justifies and pOSSibly legitimates the very concrete and material divisions between the social classes in early Indiansociety. Indeed, the myth of Purusha is a complex narrative. It is not so much that these various readings contradict each other, as it is that this story provides a useful example of the multiple meanings and interpretations of myths. Myth is a term taken by many simply to mean a false tale, misconception (as in the many popular articles entitled, JThe Myth of...'), or possibly an early and unsophisticated attempt at explaining the events in the world at large. The latter is precisely what many nineteenth -century anthropologists thought (e.g., E.B. Tylor and James G. Frazer). However, from the above example, it should be evident that myths c~n Simultaneously function on a variety of levels: the symboli'c, psychologicaL sociological, political, ideological, and so on. Because of the great multiplicity and even ambiguity of mythic meaning and function, then, theorists of myth have great latitude in their interpretations. And because they are essentially involved in the art of interpretation, there is pretty much no way of appealing to an absolute authoritative standard: the interpreter is free to read the narrative in any number of ways, setting his or her own interpretive standards. The particular interpretation...

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