Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

IJCS/RIÉCBibliography of Canada’s Major Authors. While Canadian Canons attemptsto document a relatively heterogeneous tradition, deconstructing rigiddefinitions, Lecker argues that even questioning canonic values maystrengthen their centrality. At the same time, by including essays on bothEnglish-Canadian and Québécois literature, the collection advocates dialogueand stresses the ways in which canons, often reflecting the taste of imperialpowers, dictate a country’s cultural life.The essays open with a discussion of literary histories. Because these oftentransform fragmentation into apparent coherence, actual sectionalism intounity, and reliance on the taste of colonizing powers into authenticnationalism, they need to be questioned, even though such questioning may, inCanada, result in what Dermot McCarthy calls a permanent “tradition ofcanonic anxiety” (45). Other critics investigate the marginalizing effects oftraditionally conservative dominant paradigms. Carolyn Bayard, in “CriticalInstincts in Québec,” contrasts English Canada and Québec, arguing that inQuébec, criticism is more “historically grounded in cultural determinants”(125) than it is in English Canada. In support of her argument, she cites thework of critics as wide-ranging as Casgrain, Roy, Nepveu and Smart. In“Conflicted Vision,” Donna Bennett describes the ways in which what areactually preferences for specific genres (the novel, the short story, poetry ordrama) become evaluative, thus giving rise to the erroneous belief that valueresides in the texts themselves rather than in the reader’s perception of them.Bennett’s warning—not heeded by every contributor to this collection—isexemplified, she tells us, in Eastern Canada’s glorification of poetry, theWest’s of fiction. “Conflicted Visions” concludes with a question underlyingmany of these essays: should canons be established at all? One of the moreperplexing dilemmas facing post-colonialism is precisely canonization’spotential undercutting of a literature’s subversive potential. Although, asBennett suggests, shifting the parameters of value may help national literaturesavoid the kind of conservative rigidity critics complained about in the 1978Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel, the shifts themselves may leadonly to aimless relativity.The last two essays illustrate different approaches to contradiction. SheriSimon contrasts Pierre Nepveu’s L’Écologie du réel with Patricia Smart’sÉcrire dans la maison du père (published in English as Writing in the Father’sHouse), suggesting that Nepveu’s challenge to contemporary Québec’sdefining myths is heterogeneous, while Smart’s feminist response to culturaldefinition is dualistic. Simon uses these differing approaches to show “how thecultural arena is in fact a field of overlapping and competing versions ofreality, and that power consists precisely in the ability to create and sustainrepresentations and their interpretations” (179). On the other hand, in the finalessay, Lorraine Weir appears less willing than Simon to accept the idea ofcompeting interpretations or to acknowledge overlapping versions of reality.In a sustained attack on Linda Hutcheon’s work (particularly The CanadianPostmodern and A Poetics of Postmodernism), Weir argues that Hutcheon156