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394 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 that it is not sensitive to the things to which Rigelhof is sensitive. Other essays simply assert which book by an author is his or her best one: Cohen=s The Favorite Game, Laurence=s A Jest of God, Richler=s St. Urbain=s Horseman. Hugh Hood and Norman Levine are praised for the ways they use Montreal as a setting for their stories. The essays are replete with long quotations, which implies that the intended readership is not an academic one. There is no bibliography, index, or footnotes. The final criterion for judging a passage or an author is so vague, subjective, even arbitrary, that one wonders why Rigelhof bothers with this game of evaluation in the first place. Is it to recommend to the unwashed class what books they should read for enlightenment and which ones they must enjoy? The questions are not directly addressed. In fact Rigelhof avoids them by shifting ground to descriptions of his past, his neighbours, and to gossip about who or what was really behind various passages. One gets the impression that his primary interests are matters of taste and not matters of literary critical theory. The impression that the reader is left with is that these essays are written by a widely read gadfly who has strong opinions but only a vaguely articulated critical apparatus to bring to his analysis. The result is often exasperating. Rigelhof can dismiss the writings of Northrop Frye in a sentence or two. He ignores poetry as >writing= but includes the essays of a philosopher. He admires the works of Mavis Gallant, Brian Moore, and Malcolm Lowry (our?) in the same breath as those of Carole Corbeil. He all but ignores writers from the Maritimes or the West. He mentions Emily Carr briefly and lists The House of All Sorts as her best work B arguably the weakest of all her books. In his final list of >bests= he places Margaret Atwood=s Life before Man and Alice Munro=s Selected Stories though he has very little to say about either writer in the main body of his book. He also includes Wiebe=s The Blue Mountains of China, arguably a prose stylist as weak as F.P. Grove. He ignores writers before 1960, which precludes Sinclair Ross, Sheila Watson, Ernest Buckler, Raymond Knister, and a host of others. Discussing one list, Rigelhof asserts that Fifth Business is Robertson Davies=s >best book and the only one I=ll ever recommend to anyone who feels obliged to read him.= What if someone thinks What=s Bred in the Bone is his best work? Will such a debate be fruitful? Discussing the merits of individual works is often helpful. Pitting one work against another, or one author against another, is still canon fodder in a mug=s game. (JOHN ORANGE) Rowland Smith, editor. Postcolonializing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture Wilfrid Laurier University Press. vi, 216. $44.95 HUMANITIES 395 Postcolonializing the Commonwealth is the product of the triennial conference of the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. Proceedings are always limited. More than independent collections, the papers tend to mix apples and oranges, with often an armadillo. Still, I have edited and participated in many such collections. The energy produced by a good conference needs some lasting record. Rowland Smith=s introduction states, >postcolonial studies occupy desirable ground in university literature departments.= Presumably with irony, Smith uses the language of territorial expansion to suggest the position of postcolonial studies as a >hot topic.= Yet postcolonial studies has shown that territorial expansion is constantly vexed. A paper by one of the originators of Commonwealth Studies, Jamaican Edward Baugh, regrets the encroachment by theory. Yet he also notes, perceptively, that the rise of postcolonial theory cannot hide the failure of the original hope of Commonwealth Studies, that amalgamating lesserknown literatures in English might expand their presence beyond their parts. Instead, the actual literature taught remains primarily a local version of the national or regional, Nigerian in Nigeria, Caribbean in the Caribbean, etc. Where there is a significant presence of another literature it usually reflects various diasporas. Thus African is of interest...

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