Relocating Praise: Literary Modalities and Rhetorical Contexts ed. by Alice G. den Otter (review)

Works Cited Toner, Patrick. IfI could turn and meet myself: The Life ofAlden Nowlan. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2000. Alice G. den Otter, ed. Relocating Praise: Literary Modalities and Rhetorical Contexts. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’Press, 2000.184. $19.95"paper. Composed ofeleven essays on a variety oftexts, periods, and issues, the rich diversity of this collection may seem to limit its usefulness to scholarship in any one area. But the purpose of the collection is less to inform than to transform, less to provide tools than to offer alternatives. The product of a conference on the “Literary Modalities of Praise” at Lakehead University (1998), the book remains true to the original project of “asking how praise could modulate, deconstruct, and recreate our pleasure in reading and writ­ ing literary texts” (2). The essays demonstrate that praise, and attention to the practice or representation of praise, can be revelatory, discerning, and generative; the collection as a whole, due to den Otter’ s editorial contribu­ tion, urges an intellectual generosity and receptiveness lacking in the critical environment today. The book, in other words, is an apologia for praise. Den Otter sets the trajectory with her introduction. Using as a unifying device “Call for Papers: An Apology,” a poem written by Rick Watson in response to the original call for conference papers, she continually sug­ gests the non-discursive, transformative power of praise: “praise requires and yields an openness (14).” As the papers unfold, “praise continuously shifts locations, imaginatively beginning anew without starting over.... In the words of the Praise Singer [Rick Watson], never doubt that something else, somewhere else I will make the praise your tongue cannot complete’” (14). She maintains this emphasis by placing the essays most congruent with her apologia first and last, and by naming each of three subsections with a derivative of the word “location,” sometimes at the risk appearing precious. The first two papers in “ Allocations: The Practice of Praise” uncover the noetic power of epideictic rhetoric. In “The Temporality of Praise,” Karmen MacKendrick exuberantly engages the works of St Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Rainer Maria Rilke to explicate the “epistemological” (20), even mystical function of praise: non-linear and non-discursive, praise does not inform or narrate, does not deliberBook Reviews | 249 ate or persuade (20). Rather, by “intensifying” the moment, it enables us to participate in the eternal now (25-27). J. Douglas Kneale sustains the level of vibrant, nuanced discussion in “Coleridge and Epideictic.” Stress­ ing the meaning of epideixis as “the language of show or demonstration” (34), Kneale examines the oscillations between light and dark, stasis and motion, presence and absence, octave and sestet in Coleridge’ s “Effusion xviii” (later retitled “To the Autumnal Moon”), to show that the “effusive, even proto-Spasmodic rhetoric”of Coleridge’ s youthful poetry, manifested in apostrophes and exclamations (33), actually reveals Coleridge’ s awareness ofthe “hermeneutic leap”involved in the “invention”of “meaning” (44-5). Joan Dolphin and Sandra Sabatini continue to explore the positive function ofpraise but shift the focus to the social arena. Dolphin finds that identifica­ tion with Shakespeare empowers the protagonist in Kate Grenville’ s Lillian’ s Story; Sabatini, employing the socio-linguistic theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, finds in the letters of Margaret Laurence a strategy of praising “to make connections” and create “community” among “Canadian writers” (63). The papers gathered under the subtitle “Dislocations: The Price of Praise”balance the collection, investigating the darker side ofpraise. Nicole E. Didicher and Ken Paradis each discuss the self-serving epideictic rhetoric of Robinson Crusoe in Daniel Defoe’ s The FartherAdventures ofRobinson Crusoe and Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, respectively, both of whom twist praise and blame according their own needs and anxieties. Kathleen McConnell illumines the “different social functions”and cost ofthe “mutual praise”between Felicia Hemans and Wil­ liam Wordsworth (87). Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson critique Ian McKellen’ s film Richard 111and A1Pacino’ s Lookingfor Richard in terms of the “epideictic dilemma” faced by those who would bring Shakespeare to the screen—that is, the need to strike a balance between obedience to “tradition” and...