In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

474 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 There is some solid research (including, for example, impressive analysis of Margaret Laurence=s unpublished papers) and a good deal of plain common sense in Cohen=s arguments. Much of his analysis is undermined, however, by his persistent failure to distinguish between what writers say about censorship and how they deal with the subject in their fiction. The Handmaid=s Tale is a novel, not a disquisition on >four arguments against censorship.= Cohen treats novels as sources of evidence to >show= a writer=s position on censorship, and is far too easily convinced of his capacity to extract authorial positions from creative work. While berating Findley for a rigid and narrow approach to censorship, Cohen seems oblivious to the complex ironies of novels such as The Handmaid=s Tale and Headhunter. There is a tendentiousness and repetitiveness (of the >I will show ...= >I have shown ...= kind) about Cohen=s writing that is, at best, irritating, and an occasional banality (>love scenes are fairly common in motion pictures=) that invites somnolence, but even if Censorship in Canadian Literature won=t settle the censorship debate quite as definitively as Cohen seems to think it should, his book is one to be reckoned with in any discussion of censorship in Canada. (L.W. CONOLLY) Helen M. Buss. Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xxv, 206. $39.95 This past Christmas I received The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs, which offers an impressive sampling of the memoir=s development by Canadian writers during this past century. No sooner had I added this collection to my bookshelf than I was asked to review Helen M. Buss=s study. I was delighted, as my reading of the Canadian memoirs highlighted the need for a full critical and theoretical study of the genre. Vintage Book editor George Fetherling notes in his preface that >People may not agree on what a literary memoir is but they know one when they see it, and they have created a demand, which writers and publishers rush to satisfy.= Buss makes the similar claim that the memoir has attained in the last few decades an unprecedented popularity in both commercial and academic arenas. Readers of her book, and by extension the memoir genre, will be well equipped with the analytical tools required for greater agreement on and appreciation of the form >when they see it.= I was doubly delighted to discover Buss=s study because it closely intersects with my own work on the diary. Buss makes me freshly aware of how the memoir is another important marginalized genre. Her aim is to >repossess= a respectable position for the memoir genre within academe, a directive now more crucial given that, as Buss notes, several female professors have lately chosen the memoir form for the telling of their life stories. Buss is concerned with tracing the memoir=s historical, cultural, and literary practices through a female-gendered and feminist tradition, for she humanities 475 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 rightly contends that the memoir is a particularly useful and liberating space where women can confront, explore, and >balance= their often dichotomous realities of selfhood. Buss begins her study with the requisite attention to the past in order to theorize the memoir in the present. Tracing the inception and development of the genre through Western literary history, she shows how it is both similar to, and distinct from, other life writing forms such as confession and autobiography, as well as more literary genres such as lyric poetry, biography, drama, and the essay. She then travels across a broad selection of memoirs to underscore the diversity of forms that constitute the genre, and the diverse ways women use these forms in the production and performance of their identities. She shows us, for instance, how women employ the memoir to explore their status as members of racial minorities and/or as postcolonial subjects (Maxine Hong Kingston, Meena Alexander, Shirley Geok-lin Lim); to reconcile domestic and public worlds, or relationships with parents, especially mothers (Elizabeth Ehrlich, Carolyn Steedman...

pdf

Share