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Correspondence The Editor, In your Spring 1983 issue, I expressed my concern in the Correspondence section that by publishing the writing of Keith Garebian you were doing something of a disservice to the field of Canadian studies. Mr. Garebian's writings on Canadian theatre, I indicated, were "unsupported by rational argument and almost hysterical in tone.'' I suggested as well that his writing was also "consistently antiCanadian in its point of view." My concern was that "pop journalistic judgements" have no place in a serious journal. Mr. Garebian responded to those charges ~ot by any rebuttal of my points but rather by name-calling. In seven paragraphs he insulted me personally for my viewpoints, terming me a defunct "loon" and "a Canadian Don Quixote." He suggested that my defence of Canadian theatre specifically and Canadian culture generally proved that I was somehow "paranoid," presumably about non-Canadian culture. He went on to call me a pronounced xenophobe, a "polemicist," "a cliche," "a well-funded drummer," an empire builder, and a "comic-strip commissar ." And this is, unfortunately, Mr. Garebian's usual intellectual artillery. All becomes ~ersonal with him and issues such as art and culture must always be reduced to personalities. Issues - when they are dealt with at all and especially as they relate to things Canadian - are things merely to be ridiculed as mere _ navel gazing (or as Mr. Garebian would put it in his personal literary style, "omphalos" gazing). All Canadian plays, he suggests, "are outdated," surely one of the most ignorant and insulting remarks anyone has yet made about our theatre and its playwrights. In one grand sweep, Keith Garebian has passed 174 the ultimate verdict on Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, on Simons' Crabdance, on Tremblay's entire opus, on Freeman, French, Cook, Herbert, Pollock, Reaney, Murrell, and Walker. When one speaks about the development of national culture, Garebian merely sneers, forgetting (if he ever really knew) that such men as Dryden, Lessing, and Stanislavski (among other practicing theorists) fought the same kind of battles for their cultures that some of us are fighting for our own. Mr. Garebian is clever with words, almost clever enough to give the impression in his writing that he is really saying something. Upon closer inspection, however, one generally finds that there is little content in his statements. What there is in abundance, however, is attitudes, and anti-Canadian attitudes in the extreme. Mr. Garebian seems not to understand that being pro-Canadian does not mean that one is antithetical to foreign culture or that one is being anti-American or anti-British or anti-French. Canadian culture, despite what he says, has not failed, certainly not by any yardstick that includes national self-awareness and national self-esteem. Only a writer determined to build up himself by tearing down everything around him could boast in print that he looks forward to a time when he can "cultivate an obsession with the failure of Canadian culture." The failure, I suggest, is only in his own confused mind. Or hadn't he noticed he was writing about Canada's supposed cultural failures in a distinguished journal of Canadian studies which consistently gives space to the very culture he seems so fond of demeaning. Sincerely, Don Rubin, Founding Editor, CTR Publications. Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 18. No. 3 (A11to111ne 1983 Fall) ...

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