An American Critic in Canada by Morton L. Ross (review)

HUMANITIES 529 There are questionable readings (for example, of Countess Diana von Mass as low-born) and inaccurate translations. The 'picaresque beauty' refers not to Sophie but to her way of scoring points in the tournament; the 'doble maltes treinta anos' is 'a double thirty-year malt whisky,' not a 'double Maltese thirty years old'; 'la trompeta con sordina' is a 'muted' (not 'muffled') trumpet; 'me detengo en una palabra' is 'I dwell' (not 'I detain myselI') 'on a word.' Other examples could be cited. In brief, I believe the chosen works could more profitably be examined within the poetics of postmodemism rather than within concepts of picaresque that evolved between 1900 and 1970. (PETER N. DUNN) , Morton L. Ross. An American Critic ill Oznada NeWest. 216. $22.95 Morton Ross's posthumous literary memoir takes the measure of a life in teaching and reminds us of how enriching - and confining - such a life can be. These essays, lectures, and fragments prove that Ross, a faculty member at the University of Alberta and an editorial board member of NeWest Press, had greater range than most. Unfortunately, what is best here are selections from an unfinished literary memoir: four sketches of generous humour that prove Ross never stopped growing as an essayist and was at work on his strongest contribution to North American letters - the record of his own intellectual life - when he died in 1995. An American midwesterner whose teaching took him first to the American and then to the Canadian West, Ross had all the virtues of a liberal imagination honed by New Criticism. Ross's writing makes readerly sense not only of colonial American literature, but of Playboy magazine and does so in a single 1967essay on Franklin's Poor Richard's Almal1ack and Hefner's magazine.Ross's style moves easilybetween these 'brothers under the flesh,' explaining that 'Franklin's ethics of production served an infant capitalism; we now need an ethics of consumption to maintain a mature one,' provided by Playboy. Ross narrows the gap between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries to a mere six pages, and performs the essential pedagogical function for which a student praises him in the foreword: 'Mort demonstrated his care for us ". by showing us how to read.' The ability to reconcile remotes is the distinguishing feature of Ross's most important criticism on Canadian literature from an American point of view. In 'What Do You Know about Canadian Literature? Shame on You!,' delivered as a conference paper in 1979, Ross moves beyond the 'gee-whiz!' recognition that Canada has a literature to the more important point that America can learn much about its favourite topic- 'national articulation on the North American continent' - by turning to its neighbours. By doing so, Ross suggests American readers will gain insight into the 'unthinking, 530 LETTERS IN CANADA 1999 unexamined nature of [American] nationalism ... especially as it is allowed to dictate choices about what should be read and studied by American students.' Ross's critical range in Canadian literature did not stray far from the prairies and the work of Sinclair Ross and Robert Kroetsch, but his fearlessness in the face of an expanding literary and critical canon is still tonic today. In 'Toward the Margin: Notes in Passing: Ross echoes Whitman and Marvell in declaring himself 'a male of Anglo-Saxon heritage at the beginning of the seventh decade of my life, and at my back I have heard Postmodernist's [sic] winged chariot hurrying near: but he goes on to praise'poststructuralistcriticism in Canada, concluding with the warning that when 'the text becomes just a footnote to the theory, I will ... seek asylum on the margin.' Ross never pushed the text to the margin in his own writing, Certainly his Edmund Kemper Broadus lectures from 1982, a series entitled 'American Public Styles: Community and the Private Heart: are evidence of the text-bound tradition of American exceptionalism Ross both eschewed and practised.In taking on the American Puritans, Franklin, Emerson, and Hawthorne, these lectures sketch the contradictions in American literary discourse between individwilism and community, without saying anything new or interesting about either. What is missing in Ross's distinguished lectures - his...