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

Zoning Canada’s Zeitgeistspeculation in textual analysis, and demonstrates the value of establishingdetailed relationships between historical conditions and cultural analysis. Likethe other two works discussed, Söderlind emphasizes cultural analysis as aliterary project and, like them, illustrates how political power affects languageand structures hierarchies. Each stresses marginality, seeing in both postmodernismand post-colonialism a practice and aesthetics situated on theedges. And each understands some of the connections between ideologicaldefiance and literary subversion.Söderlind is, however, particularly concerned with substantiating differencesbetween the literatures of English Canada and Québec and, more so than theother two works, hers specifies rhetorical devices and representational stancesthat result from a reading of post-colonialism as rooted in language. She doesnot specifically address canon formation, nor does she make broad claims forthe significance of post-colonialism to current critical practice. Some of herconclusions are open to debate: that literary and political radicalism may workin opposition; that the author’s relationship to the nation may determine thework’s degree of post-modernism or post-colonialism; that in AnglophoneCanada, marginality is an aesthetic choice rather than a political reality.Nevertheless, they are clearly significant issues. She introduces gender from aperspective that differs from much feminist theory. Seeing that the metaphorof rape as it appears in the novels she discusses necessarily marginalizeswomen, she also admits that her choice of books by male writers emphasizes apatriarchal ideology that, ironically, puts her in the masculine position ofparticipating, as a reader, in each novel’s sado-masochistic dynamics.Margin/Alias, then, concentrates on demonstrating in careful detail a specificperiod of history as reflected in the language of five particular novels, whileboth Canadian Canons and Past the Last Post present arguments moregenerally meant to problematize current post-colonial theory and criticism.Together, however, they suggest an increasingly political agenda for Canadianletters. Brydon writes in Past the Last Post: “Far from separating it from otherpost-colonial nations, Canada’s pluri-ethnic composition allows for points ofconnection with some experiences elsewhere which when analysedcomparatively may yield insights into how power operates, other than by sheerforce, in our own fairly comfortable world” (195). Looking between andbeyond Canada’s borders, the arguments presented in all three booksparticipate, as Lecker insists Canadian criticism must, in the “necessaryprocess of undoing” (16). Söderlind implies that multi-culturalism, with itsvariation of languages, necessarily detracts from territorialism. Other criticsassert that multi-culturalism may encourage an interpretation of postcolonialismmore global than nationalistic. Most important, however, is thatsuch controversies about identity and power continue, and that critics developa wide range of approaches to Canadian and Québécois literatures in a NorthAmerica in which the North is all too often ignored completely.159