Anarcho-Modernism: Toward a New Critical Theory, in Honour of Jerry Zaslove ed. by Ian Angus (review)

358 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Ian Angus, editor. Anarcho-Modernism: Toward a New Critical Theory, in Honour of Jerry Zaslove Talon. 384. $29.95 This collection of thirty-eight pieces honours the work of Jerry Zaslove, the founding director of The Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Through personal and academic essays, translations, short stories, and poems, former students and colleagues of Zaslove reflect on the legacy of his thought and on the impact of his intellectual practice. Based on the wide-ranging pieces that Ian Angus has collected here, Zaslove=s influence has been profound and multifaceted, extending into literary criticism, modernism, contemporary social and political theory, pedagogy, activism, and the politics of the university. Even for those unfamiliar with Zaslove=s work (as I myself must admit to be), this is an excellent book, one which offers insight into some of the central dilemmas facing critical thinking today, while offering simultaneously a glimpse into the dynamic intellectual milieu that he has helped to create in Vancouver. Though few of the pieces deal directly with Zaslove=s work B there is no true synopsis or overview offered of his theories B collectively they produce a clear sense of both his theoretical interests and commitments, and the personal and political energy that fuelled them. Anarchy and modernism are not concepts that are usually or easily linked together. For Zaslove, the aesthetic sensibilities of literary modernism offer an exemplary site for critical engagement in a world characterized by the increasing atomization and rationalization of both individual and collective experience. Modernism has often (and not incorrectly) been characterized as an elite discourse; more recently, attention has been drawn to the ways in which its supposed aesthetic and political autonomy were in fact linked to capitalism and modernity more closely than its oppositional rhetoric might suggest. Nevertheless, as many of these pieces make clear, the sensibilities of modernism still offer an unparalleled model of the kinds of personal expression and creativity that might constitute the forms of real freedom and community that we so desperately lack today. As Angus makes clear in his moving (and theoretically compelling) account of their friendship, Zaslove fused anarchism and modernism by traversing the landscape of twentieth-century theory in his own unique way, weaving Bakhtin and Arendt (among others) into the work of the Frankfurt School to produce a highly original body of thought. There are a number of pieces that explore this terrain in interesting ways, such as Robert Hullot-Kentor=s fascinating exploration of some important gaps in Walter Benjamin=s >The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.= But what comes across most powerfully in this collection is Zaslove=s dedication to radical pedagogy and his struggle to make the university live up to its promise as a place of true learning and a force for humanities 359 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 the public good. In their contributions, former students Kath Curan and Kirsten McAllister discuss the ways that Zaslove helped them to embark on a lifelong voyage of critique, while several colleagues describe Zaslove=s interventions in the development of their own thinking. John Doheny and Richard Day write explicitly about the decline of critical thought in the university, as it becomes more and more beholden to a corporate agenda and to discourses stressing efficiency and measurable outcomes. In >The University as Anarcho-Community,= Day argues forcefully for a fundamental reconceptualization of the task of the university that would depend in part on the recognition that >social research can be most valuable precisely when it fails to produce its intended result.= Such a university can be seen as both the project of the new critical theory the subtitle announces, and the space where Zaslove=s anarcho-modernism might be given room to flourish. What is perhaps missing from this collection is Zaslove=s own voice. There aren=t many intellectual figures whose work inspires poems and stories: after reading through these testaments to the power of Zaslove=s teaching and writing, I was left with a craving to encounter his work...