Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

ingly has dismissed early ethnographic
works that incorporate modes of fiction or
autobiography. In ironic contrast to this
attempt at disciplinary self-definition
stands the practice of producing two
ethnographic documents of fieldwork: a
scholarly monograph, then a popular book
which incorporates elements of autobiography
or fiction. For example, Malinowski's
Argonauts of the Western Pacific set the standard
for scientific ethnography, while his
self-revealing journal account of his
Trobriand Islands fieldwork, published
posthumously as A Diary in the Strict Sense
of the Term, surprises the reader with
Boswellian promises to abandon novels and
to read ethnographies. "Experimental"
ethnography, in which the (male) ethnographer
problematises his experience of
fieldwork, seems to offer a challenge to
norms of objectivity that could include earlier
ethnographic works by women (such as
Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ruth
Underbill) previously dismissed as popular,
fictive, subjective. However, what literary
studies would call the canon of experimental
as well as a classical ethnography still
seems unable, or unwilling, to include
experiential, first-person accounts by
women; hence the need to add feminism to
the generic or disciplinary categories of fiction
and ethnography.
Visweswaran simultaneously interrogates
academic feminism for the assumptions
about women it brings to ethnography,
suggesting that in fictive accounts feminist
ethnography can break free of the disciplinary
restraints of positivism to examine
relationships among women. And so she
frames her "series of experiments" in
ethnographic writing using fiction. She
begins with "A Feminist Fable" and concludes
with "Sari Stories," a series of modernist
vignettes which "completes the move
toward fiction by presenting an autobiographical
short story as feminist ethnography."
Alternately, she characterises them
using a pun: "an ethnographic description
of the ways a gendered body is (ad)dressed
intimately by history and culture, age and
class." Documenting relationships between
women in the author's family in Madras,
the pleasures and perils of self-representation,
and the consequences of getting
dressed (up), "Sari Stories" offers a satisfying
account of the problems of reading and
writing across cultures. Stretching this
metaphor beyond nation to academic discipline,
Visweswaran's own "fiction of feminist
ethnography" captures the subtle
nuances of all three terms and, in so doing,
evokes both the difficulty and excitement of
cross-disciplinary cultural studies.
Rétro/Spectifs
Maurice Lebel
D'un livre à Vautre. Vesprit des livres. Editions du
Méridien n.p.
Réjean Robidoux
Fonder une littérature nationale. Notes d'histoire
littéraire. Editions David n.p.
Reviewed by Estelle Dansereau
II va de soi que, ayant fait carrière universitaire
et ayant fait oeuvre de pionnier au
Canada dans le domaine de l'histoire littéraire,
les professeurs et les critiques les
plus distingués, maintenant à la retraite,
jettent leur regard sur leurs premiers écrits
qu'ils offrent en rétrospective aux lecteurs.
Maurice Lebel (né 1909), critique et essayiste
ainsi que professeur de lettres anciennes
et modernes à l'Université Laval de
1937 à 1970, et Réjean Robidoux (né 1928),
enseignant à l'Université de Toronto, puis à
Ottawa d'où il prend sa retraite en 1990,
émettent pour l'édification d'une nouvelle
génération de lecteurs et de chercheurs des
textes qui représentent bien leurs contributions
à la critique universitaire de leur jour.
La citation de Sainte-Beuve présentée en
épigraphe, "Un intellectuel est un homme
qui sait lire et apprend à lire aux autres,"
127