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154 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 from representation - and that very movement away from 'mimesis' may be a device of metanarrative to maintain authority. Reaction against the idea of 'canon' is creating many canons. Tedmiques of these essays include narration, examination of specific texts, engagement with critical theories, discourse analysis, genre criticism, historicism, cultural analysis, and semiotic analysis. Hutcheon tells the story of the furore over the publication of Other Solitudes, and wonders why a scholarly community would not welcome discussion. Wqlfgang Hochbruck looks at pan-Indian metanarrative through discourse analysis. Gerald Vizenor explores post-Indian autoinscriptions to find the cultures of tribal identifies. Winfried Siemerling assesses Houston Baker's contributions to the analysis and production of narratives of culture. Kathryne V. Lindberg looks at the ironic personae which Jean Toomer creates, refusing Black stereotypes. John Lowe examines the strategies of humour in etlmic autobiography by Zora Neale Hurston and Jerre Mangione. Monika Kaup finds, in writing by Gloria Anzaldua, especially in Borderlands, the quintessential border-crossing text, multiple in genres and voices. Ernst Rudin examines the changes in mearung of the term mestizo, its cultural shifts. Michael Wachholz considers Faulkner's Light in August as a marginal text. Gert Buelens traces the richness of multiple voices in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Werner Sollers, avuncular, then comments on the whole collection. No one proposes solutions, but the volume does arrive at a series of insights. Identity is a power relationship. Identity is constructed, an effect grotmded in discourse, not in essence. Identity is also performative, varying with context. Cultural identity is complex, shifting and ambiguous, not fixed and absolute. Heteroglossia, polyglossia, intra- and inter-language differences add to the strength of a text, and by extension, to a body of literature. No one wants monolith. There seems, throughout the volume, much sympathy for Kristeva's statement that 'we are all strangers.' (JUDITH MILLER) Antonio D'Alfonso. In Italics: A Defense ofEthnicity Guemica Editions. 265. $20.00 paper One of the most important Italian-Canadian authors, Antonio D'Alfonso has collected thirty-two essays in this volume, a testament to his role as writer, translator, and editor. Most are short essays; all deal with aspects of writing, publishing, and reviewing books in English Canada and Quebec. 0'Alfonso is very familiar with the culture and politics of Quebec, since he was born and spent the first twenty-five years of his career there and published mostly in French. By 1994 this trilingual writer and editor had HUMANITIES 155 moved to Toronto and began to work primarily in English, though we still detect the influence of French and Italian in his choice of many words and phrases. Some of the French essays are translated into English here for the first time. The earlies,t essays appeared in 1980; the latest, 'There Is No Proper English,' is from Paragraph in 1996. Each piece is ofhistorical value, since it is a snapshot of the development of Italian-Canadian writing over the last two decades. The essays express opinion and factual information on a variety of topics from cultural appropriation and film to the problems of being a minority writer in Quebec and the funding for small presses. Guernica Editions was a bilingual English-French press in Montreal which also published books in . Italian. D'Alfonso explains, for the record, why it was necessary to move to Toronto and focus only on English-language books. This was a very serious decision for D'Alfonso, as one of the few successful bilingual writers and editors, and many who looked up to him were disappointed but understood that the economic reality of small press publishing gave him little choice. D'Alfonso epitomizes the minority writer in Quebec caught in the maze of separatist and federalist politics. 'This political dimension is so allpervasive in the book that we begin to take it for granted, like the intrigue in a spy novel. It seems clear that for D'Alfonso writing in French was often not enough to be accepted in Quebec. Despite the politicaldrama oftwentyyears, there areliteraryessays such as 'The Road Between' and 'A Literary Culture in Search of a Tradition,' which examine the work of fellow bilingual...

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