Angeline O'NEILL
Comparatist Postcolonial Studies: A Review Article of Books by
Coundouriotis, Matthews Green, Yeager, and Gould, Vautier, and Canadian Literature

Richard A. CARDWELL
A Postmodern Look at Modernism: A Review Article of Books by
Pera and López on Modernista Writers in Hispanic Literature

Comparatist Postcolonial Studies: A Review Article of Books by
Coundouriotis, Matthews Green, Yeager, and Gould, Vautier, and Canadian Literature

1. In this review article, I discuss Eleni Coundouriotis's Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), Marie Vautier's New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction (Montréal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1998), Mary Jean Matthews Green, Jack A. Yeager, and Karen Gould, eds., Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), and Postcolonial Identities, a thematic issue of the journal Canadian Literature (1996, Issue Number 146).

2. With increasing awareness of the value of a comparative approach to literature and culture, texts such as Marie Vautier's New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction, Eleni Coundouriotis's Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel, and the collection of essays in Postcolonial Subjects and Postcolonial Identities demand a readership for a better understanding of ourselves, each other, the world we live in, and the way we represent each of these. Together, such texts wrestle with some of the most stimulating issues and difficult problems facing all interested and working in the humanities today. Foremost among these are issues of national, cultural, and individual identity viewed in the context of cross-cultural interactions -- from Vautier's concern with the interaction between Quebec and English-speaking Canada to the focus on a cultural and linguistic métissage borne of the position of Francophone women writers writing from "beyond the hexagon" in Postcolonial Subjects. Coundouriotis addresses what she describes as "an urgent need to theorize a practice of history within postcolonial studies" (19), suggesting a paradigm of dissidence rather than resistance. In so doing, she focuses on both literary history and history in literature. Interdisciplinarity features in each of the texts, as language and identity engage issues of gender, race, ethnicity, culture, and nation. Relations between literature, language, anthropology, and history are foregrounded alongside what can be described as cross-cultural borrowing and a new theory of comparative poetics. In this way, some of the major problems facing comparatists come to light and are dealt with in a thought-provoking manner. Readers are invited to consider the diversity of topics, authors, disciplines, and intellectual traditions crucial to comparative studies and its manifestation in the tensions between such as the individual and the collective, autobiography and history, and writing and orality.

3. Comparatist Jola Skulj writes that "comparatively speaking, the creativity of individual cultures exists through permanent re-interpretations of their own image of identity" (see Jola Skulj, "Comparative Literature and Cultural Identity," CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 2.4 [2000]: <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb00-4/skulj00.html>) and this is indeed so in each of the texts under consideration here. Before examining them and their respective methodological approaches in detail, however, I refer to the discipline of comparative literature and those issues central to comparative studies many of which concern the authors and editors whose texts are reviewed here. In particular, their various approaches to the Self-Other paradigm and the implications of this for notions of race and nation are of importance. To start with, if we agree with the proposition that "Comparative Literature means the knowledge of more than one national language and literature, and/or it means the knowledge and application of other disciplines in and for the study of literature ... Comparative Literature has an ideology of inclusion of the Other, be that a marginal literature in its several meanings of marginality, a genre, various text types, etc." (see Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998. 13), the editors of and contributors to Postcolonial Subjects explore their fields of study precisely in this context. The papers demonstrate the use and impact of the knowledges proposed in comparative literature competently. With focus on the Self-Other problem, the authors of the papers discuss diverse notions of "border crossings" -- whether physical or resulting from a diversity of languages, ethnicities, and races co-existing in a single national territory. In particular, the female body is seen as "a space of cultural exchange … a site of literal métissage for the blending of race" (xix). The areas of study are with focus on contemporary women writing in French from as far afield as Africa and the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, Quebec, and other French-speaking regions of Canada, for all of whom the French language is a site of struggle against both colonization and "the more subtle imperialistic forces at work in postcolonial situations" (xi). The editors are quick to point out, however, that the collection is neither an attempt to define francophonie nor to create an alternative canon but rather to provide a forum for the wealth of work by Francophone women from various regions and cultures. So too, they are sensitive to the temptation to promote "a reductionist, composite, female francophone 'Other' that would deny distinctions among these writers" (xv). The approach is cross-cultural and transcultural and a multiplicity of positions and modes of critical analysis are evident. Accordingly, the collection is organized into three sections: "Situating the Self: History, Rememory, Story," "Border Crossings," and "Engendering the Postcolonial Subject." The fact that the editors themselves as well as the contributors include both women and men, and that the analyses range from specifically historical contextualisation to contemporary feminist theory, further strengthens the collection.

4. Marie Vautier's New World Myth challenges the simplistic and politically correct approach to the Self-Other paradigm, arguing that in fact such an approach hinders attempts by some mainstream writers "to open up textual space in which to explore various manifestations of differing cultural representations" (xvii). In particular, Vautier focuses on non-Aboriginal representations of Amerindians, developing her thesis simultaneously that we must be aware of "the limitations of  the self/other argument in critical appraisals of the multitiered postcolonial situations in English-speaking Canada and Quebec" (xx). By carefully examining in the light of theories of postcolonialism and postmodernism the reworkings of some historical, literary, and religious myths and political ideologies in six historiographic novels from Quebec and English-speaking Canada (published between 1975 and 1985), Vautier explains what she terms "New World Myth," a notion that "works against traditional assumptions about the universality and transhistoricity of myth" (ix). New World Myth reclaims the past, characterised by "postmodern indeterminacy, complex postcolonial attitudes, a questioning of history, and a developing self-consciousness that creates provisional and relative identities" (xi). In so doing, the concept advocates the existence of many postcolonialisms and challenges the assumption that all postcolonial texts are writing back to a single center.

5. Similarly, Eleni Coundouriotis is interested in extending understandings of colonialism and postcolonialism in her study of several African novels written in French and English. In Claiming History Coundouriotis focuses on the relationship between history and literature. As Coundouriotis acknowledges, the text could be described as literary history but it also examines history in literature and the processes by which her chosen authors reclaim it: the processes of reclamation, resistance, dissidence, and transgression are crucial. Interestingly, in Claiming History dissidence is a more immediately useful notion than resistance. It proclaims difference from within and, like Vautier's concern with "multitiered postcolonial situations," directs our attention towards the internal dynamics of a community (20). By "transgression" Coundouriotis "a deliberate crossing of the limits of representation to invent new terms beyond the Manichean opposition of colonial and anticolonial" (165) which, she argues, inevitably followed a period of "oppressive nationalisms" that in turn had followed colonialism. With a series of well-chosen examples from the novels of René Maran, Paul Hazoumé, Chinua Achebe, Yambo Ouologuem, and Ben Okri, Coundouriotis examines the difficulties encountered by Africans writing historical novels in the face of previous acts of narrative oppression whose historicism as subjects of history has always been to some degree prefigured by the historiographical enterprises of the European colonizers. In discussing the relationship between history and fiction, Coundouriotis traces the development of a hybrid discourse wherein new authorial positions are established through narratives which challenge established perspectives.

6. Recognition of the dynamism of literature and language is integral to our understanding of  history and our place in it, whether in an oral or written tradition. As Bakhtin writes in "Discourse in the Novel," "stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is alive and developing. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralisation and disunification go forward" (Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel." Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Critical Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971. 665-78. 668). The implications of this view for a sense of identity are significant. In the 146th issue of Canadian Literature, devoted to Postcolonial Identities, Neil ten Kortenaar explores this question in his paper "The Trick of Divining a Postcolonial Identity: Margaret Laurence Between Race and Nation." According to Kortenaar, Laurence's novel celebrates future creolization resulting from a challenge to the colonial status quo in the form of a union between the settlers and indigenes in Canada: "a union not a dilution" (21). The novel sets out to replace race by nation, maintaining that identities are human constructs. Yet Kortenaar asks: "Why should the national identity be more valid than class, regional or racial identity? Why should the national narrative be accepted as the truest one?" (30) and he proceeds to argue that the field for a comparative study of identities "must belong to different orders: nations and empires; nationalisms and sexualities; genders and classes" (30). As we know, each of these orders is, to a certain extent, possessed by its own language, literature, and interpretation of history -- centrifugal forces working against while at the same time, Bakhtin would argue, ultimately contributing to the "unity of the reigning conversational and literary language" (669).

7. Issues of race, nation, and nationalism and their implications for the Self-Other paradigm interest all authors in the texts under discussion here. In a chapter devoted to "Temporality and the Geographies of the Nation" and taking Okri's The Famished Road as a test-case, Coundouriotis explores Nigerian novels that dissent from official narratives of nationalism while yet "recommitting to the nation, a nation reshaping in postindependence" (142). In a fascinating discussion of the relationship between geography and historiography, she asks where history fits between geography and state politics and whether, as Neil ten Kortenaar asks in his paper, history must be "invented anew to make sense of geographical boundaries and forge a nation? Or must be accountable for the incoherences of real circumstances?" (144). Should history expose myth? If so, Coundouriotis suggests, geography becomes a storytelling paradigm, a way of divining meaning from the points of contact of a variety of places. She proceeds to explore several theories of nationalism -- specifically those of Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, and Mikhail Bakhtin -- and decides that the Western world's paradigms of historicity have been "used up," resulting in a "constant presentness" requiring the invention of a new historical paradigm (156). Okri, she contends, exemplifies this process.

8. So too, in Postcolonial Subjects, the editors and the contributors to the volume focus on history and nationalism. In her interesting essay "The Past Our Mother: Marie-Claire Blais and the Question of Women in the Quebec Canon," Matthews Green examines the important role women writers have played in Quebec in recent years; a role apparently made all the more problematic considering the centrality of the patriarch -- whether father, the pope, or a (male) god -- in traditional Quebec society. Blais is given as an example of a woman whose work has "give[n] form to a reality that is recognised by [her] readers not as exclusively feminine but rather, as essentially Québécois" (76). In a thesis that is complemented by the final essay in this collection, Françoise Lionnet's "Logique métisses," Matthews Green argues convincingly that, at a time when women writers are increasingly important cultural voices, their representation of the mother-daughter relationship "enacts issues at stake in evolving concepts of Quebec identity" (62). While exploring the same broad issue of Francophone women writers taking possession of the language of Racine, Voltaire, and Proust and using it to communicate their own experiences, C. Makward discusses in her paper "Cherchez la Franco-femme" Francophone women writers from the Caribbean, French-speaking Switzerland, and Algeria who initially appear to have little in common, other than  the fact that -- metaphorically and/or physically -- they have been "driven into exile, to preserve their freedom of thought, lifestyle and writing" (118). Initially, they seem to lack a common feminist ideology. Makward proceeds, however, to uncover a shared "gynocentric and constructive vision, a positive feminine identification that short-circuits maternity (not in the lives of the writers but in their fiction)" (120). In this way, both Matthews Green and Makward explore the vanquishment of archetypes of femininity and the corresponding emergence of postcolonial identity.

9. In considering the role of the Other in defining the Self, in Postcolonial Identities Neil ten Kortenaar argues that the issue of cultural identity moves far beyond one's own national borders and that, in fact, national cultures assume their form on the borders of other influential cultures -- a point with which both Matthews Green and Makward would agree. Vautier considers this at a more individual level when she expresses her concern that "in politically correct academic circles [the Self-Other paradigm] appears to be working against the postcolonial practices" in some mainstream texts (xvii). So too, it is central to Coundouriotis's discussion of the (re)claiming of history by African writers. This brings us to the question of cross-genre and cross-disciplinary writing: in particular to the realm of anthropological and ethnographic works as literature, an important area in the work of comparatists in general. If we agree with Foucault that new narratives arise out of the silences of the previous episteme, then what we find in this body of literature is a snapshot of the anthropologists and ethnographers themselves, which now offers others in their profession, as well as artists, scientists and critics, an opportunity to contribute to the body of knowledge borne of the interpenetration of disciplines. As Frantz Fanon is quoted as saying by the editors in Postcolonial Subjects, "to speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (xi). In the introduction to her Claiming History, Coundouriotis gives an example of this when she describes the way that, "cast as travelogue, the ethnographic monograph diminishes the distance between self and other by the observer’s travel to the space occupied by the observed" (12). However, she continues, "in the written account, the distance travelled is metaphorically converted into temporal distance" (13). In this way, ethnography may be seen as an attitude which establishes narrative authority and privilege, an attitude called into question by practitioners of comparative studies. And this link between history, ethnography, and literature underlies Vautier's discussion of métissage in the works of Jovette Marchessault, Rudy Wiebe, and Joy Kogawa, among others. In dealing with the construction of identity, however, Vautier mentions "the practice of métissage in historical French Canadian/Amerindian relations" (107), by which she means a movement between groups resulting in "a constantly shifting, blurring, blending, conflation and reconfiguration" of them (216). She calls into question the view of language as a barrier, a sign of absolute Otherness. In fact, she maintains, the practice of métissage ultimately leads to a less confrontational notion of difference and multiplicity. I would add that the cross-disciplinary reading of anthropological and ethnographic works as literature in recent years has contributed to this same process.

10. Jola Skulj writes in her above cited paper that the "problematic of cultural identity undoubtedly refers us to a question of cross-cultural interactions. Considered this way, it is pre-eminently a concept belonging to the field of comparative literature" (<http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb00-4/skulj00.html>). For Skulj, literary works, genres, trends, and periods of artistic orientation in a given nation, as manifested through history, cannot exist as isolated events of the closed national existence of cultural history and cannot be understood without contacts with literary phenomena of other national cultures and it is precisely this problematic of identity which concerns Françoise Lionnet in her essay, "Logiques métisses": Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Representations" in Postcolonial Subjects. She describes the practice of métissage as "the global mongrelization … of cultural forms [which] creates hybrid identities, and interrelated, if not overlapping, spaces. In those spaces, struggles for the control of means of representation and self-identification are mediated by a single and immensely powerful symbolic system: the colonial language and the variations to which it is subjected under the pen of (Francophone) writers who enrich, transform and creolize it" (322). Lionnet concerns herself with Francophone women writers not only within France but, significantly, in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean, describing their "incessant and playful heteroglossia" as "a site of creative resistance to the dominant conceptual paradigms" (321). The dynamism of these border zones constantly challenges our academic preconceptions and the desire to categorise. In fact, Lionnet argues that such literature actually predates the issues which concern cultural anthropologists. The examples of her chosen novels promote a better understanding of the cultural configurations studied by social scientists as they present us with the transformative processes of writers and their characters as subjects rather than the objects of scientific study (323). Her quarrel, she says, is with history and the negative connotations accorded to such terms as "assimilation" and "acculturation" in the postcolonial context. Thus, herself exemplifying the very process she describes, Lionnet states that a new vocabulary is needed to describe "patterns of influence that are never unidirectional" and suggests the term "transculturation" as a means of rejecting the binarism of Self and Other, nationalism and internationalism, for example, and acknowledging reciprocal influence (325). Such is the contemporary dialectic, according to which the local and global are increasingly interrelated and must be understood in relation to each other, although simultaneously "universality would be an empty proposition without the gendered specificities offered by particular writers representing different cultural configurations" (339). And this is the foundational premise upon which the writers in this collection operate.

11. In their efforts to highlight the contemporary dialectic, the editors of Postcolonial Subjects have chosen a diverse range of essays. In "Writing (Jumping) Off the Edge of the World," for example, Lori Saint-Martin discusses the problematic relationship to feminism in the work of some new women writers from Quebec whose narrative strategies nevertheless focus on the feminine, resulting in what Saint-Martin terms "metafeminism." Nicole Houde, Louise Bouchard, and Francine Noël are given as examples of women who deal with such issues as women and language, women's place in culture and history, and relationships between women. However, they "contain few theoretical elements or political statements on women," preferring to approach the political through the personal (286). Approaching the contemporary dialectic from a different angle in "Rewriting 'America': Violence, Postmodernity and Parody in the Fiction of Madeleine Monette, Nicole Brossard, and Monique LaRue," Karen Gould examines the ways the writers she discusses refigure "America" from the point of view of gender, francophone minority culture, and transculturalism. In so doing, Gould like Lionnet signals "a break with the closed space of Quebec and a new form of 'continentalism' in Quebec letters" (189).

12. So far, we have seen the frequency with which issues of identity and ideological, metaphorical and/or physical "border crossings" recur. There is, however, another sort of border crossing, the impact of which must briefly be considered. In Postcolonial Identities David Williams opens it for inspection in his article "Cyberwriting and the Borders of Identity: 'What's in a Name' in Kroetsche’s The Puppeteer and Mistry's Such a Long Journey?," when he questions "whether the nation state, or local culture, or even the concept of a substantial self can survive the communications revolution?" (55). Drawing on Derrida's gloomy observation that the "cybernetic program" has destroyed "all metaphysical concepts -- including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory" (qtd. in Williams 56) and Roland Barthes's prediction that we are being "plunged into a false Nature" (qtd. in Williams 56), Williams states that contemporary readers and critics must question what really are "facts of nature." He gives the example of the exposure of transcultural systems of domination by raising questions about race and gender. Taking the issue one step further, he asks where we "re-draw the borders of an identity once based on the book?" (56) In order to deal with this difficult question, he chooses Robert Kroetsch's The Puppeteer and Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey, considering them in the context of the movement from the spoken to the written to the computerised word. He considers the ability of alphabetic writing to interfere between the author and her/his idea. Indeed, the very act of naming "forcibly erect[s] boundaries which seem natural" (59). Yet, drawing on Kroetsch and Mistry, he attempts to show that "story does -- has always done -- what is not unique to the new technologies: it blurs the boundaries between subject-object division, does away with borders, displaces the binary of Self and Other" (71). In other words, there is no need to re-draw the borders of identity as they were never clearly defined in the first place. This is an interesting argument, particularly when considered in the light of Kitzie McKinney's essay "Memory, Voice, and Metaphor in the Works of Simone Schwarz-Bart" in Postcolonial Subjects: Schwarz-Bart, a Guadeloupean writer, privileges Caribbean, African, and European oral traditions in her work, as she "creates her own narrative métissage of Creole and French, oral and written sources, sound and image, history and myth" (22). In this way, she seeks to "recenter traditional oral genres" such that the speaking voice is no longer automatically Other. In this reading of Schwarz-Bart, McKinney is both agreeing and disagreeing with Williams: she is using the power of story to overcome the Self-Other opposition, but in doing so asserts that, in the previous instance, the opposition was clearly defined. According to McKinney, women's storytelling becomes a powerful site of  "difference, resistance, endurance, and courage" (38). Rather than erecting barriers, it becomes a means of breaking them down, encouraging an acknowledgment of difference within a context of universality and what McKinney describes as "a difficult, delicate and endless process of initiation" (39).

13. Williams and McKinney are engaging with the same issue that fascinates most of the other scholars whose studies are reviewed here: that of the Self-Other paradigm, which introduces issues of race, ethnicity and nation, and the role of history, historiography and geography in their representation. As we have seen, Coundouriotis examines in her book the need to theorize a practice of history as well as the role of historical criticism within postcolonial studies. In discussing the relationship between history and fiction she discusses the development of a hybrid discourse wherein new authorial positions are established through narratives which challenge established perspectives. At this point the relationship between history, literature, and ethnography is foregrounded, as is the notion of authenticity. Vautier in her book approaches the question from a slightly different angle, by examining theories of postcolonialism and postmodernism and the reworkings of some historical, literary, and religious myths and political ideologies in recent historiographic novels from Quebec and English-speaking Canada. Vautier explains that the New World myth reclaims the past by working against traditional assumptions about the universality and transhistoricity of myth, which in turn leads to the creation of  provisional and relative identities and reveals the existence of many postcolonialisms and challenges the assumption that all postcolonial texts are writing back to a single centre. We are, then, faced with a seemingly infinite number of border crossings -- whether physical or resulting from a diversity of languages, ethnicities and races co-existing in a single national territory. The editors of and the contributors to Postcolonial Subjects explore these possibilities in all their fullness, focusing in particular on the female body as a space of cultural exchange and a site of literal and/or metaphorical métissage. Regardless of the site, however, each of the texts discussed here functions as a border zone, and, as Lionnet explains, "In border zones, all of our academic preconceptions about cultural, linguistic or stylistic norms are constantly being put to the test by creative practices that make visible and set off the processes of adaptation, appropriation and contestation that govern the construction of identity in colonial and postcolonial contexts" (321-22).

Reviewer's Profile: Angeline O'Neill teaches comparative Indigenous and world literatures at The University of Notre Dame, Australia. She has published in the areas of Australian literature and comparative Indigenous literatures and co-edited, with Anne Brewster and Rosemary van den Berg, Those Who Remain Will Always Remember: An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000). E-mail: <angeline@nd.edu.au>.

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A Postmodern Look at Modernism: A Review Article of Books by
Pera and López on Modernista Writers in Hispanic Literature

1. The label modernista has, until recently, been used to describe a reduced group of finisecular writers, both Spanish and Latin American of the period 1885-1910, who devoted themselves to the establishing of a displaced Theology of Art (the religion of beauty) and of a style appropriate to its expression. The modernistas were perceived to pursue, through a consciously artificial language and exotic and cosmopolitan themes and motifs, the realisation of their dreams of the Ideal and the evocation of worlds distant in time and in space. They were also circumscribed, from the outset in the fin de siglo and, later, in the literary histories of the Hispanic Academy (and thus, in universities, colleges and schools) by a specific discourse which, far from being aesthetic or literary, employed the powerful discourses of medicine, determinism, and evolutionism to create an image of the modernistas as degenerate, enfermizos, neuróticos, etc. and, in a crude use of sexual and nationalist binary formations, to label them as femeninos (as against masculine and vigorous) and cosmopolitan (as against patriotic). They were seen to lack seriousness while other writers of the period were seen as oráculos.

2. Yet, over recent decades, the discursive hegemonies and misrepresentations of these writers have been challenged to demonstrate that the modernistas on both sides of the Atlantic were much more than decadent escapists and that they were as much -- possibly more -- engaged with the real social, political and cultural world in which they lived as their more conservative contemporaries. That is, they were not only concerned with Art and the creation of Beauty but with the realities of their age and questions of identity, origins, and civic responsibilities. In part the revision in attitudes in the academy began with the literary reappraisal of central figures (Darío, Martí, Machado, Valle-Inclán, etc.), by the publication of bibliographies of newspaper articles, by an assessment of minor figures, and an exploration of the relationship of writer and society in the fin de siglo. Scholars began to know more about the modernista writers within a social, political, and literary context rather than through their works alone. But it is even more recently that these new assessments and new materials have been submitted to more radical critical techniques with the most interesting results.

3. Since the post-structuralist revolution in the 1960s, given huge weight by the foundational conference in Johns Hopkins University in the autumn of 1966, the employment of critical theory in literary history has become fashionable, first in the academy of English Studies and, later, in Hispanic Studies. Initially, the latter was reluctant to employ the new "theologies," but by the late 1980s and early 1990s, a post-structuralist approach, based on the work of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Barthes, Bloom, etc., on the work of feminist critics (Irigaray, Kristeva), and comparativist scholars (Remak, Even-Zohar, Bhaba) has become fashionable and, in some corners of the Anglo-Saxon Hispanic Academy, de rigueur.

4. Two recent studies have radicalised the way in which we read the modernista world vision: Dolores Romero López's Una relectura del "fin de siglo" en el marco de la literatura comparada: Teoría y praxis (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998) and Cristóbal Pera's Modernistas en París. El mito de París en la prosa modernista hispanoamericana (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997). Pera, whose approach is shapedinitially by the pioneering work of Rama, Rodríguez Monegal, Paz, and others, chooses to employ the notion of "discourses" from Foucault's L'Archéologie du savoir (1969) to consider the way in which the cultural capital, Paris, is evoked in the prose of a group of Latin American modernistas. Dolores Romero López adopts a post-structuralist comparative approach to a number of finisecular Spanish writers and, at the same time, offers her own critical model for comparative study, teoría y praxis. Rather than follow rather dated "influence-based" models for comparison, Romero offers a bolder post-structuralist methodology. She proposes, and very successfully accomplishes, a "revisión de los objetivos específicos de dicha disciplina y de su aplicación al ámbito modernista" (10). Chapters two to seven, therefore, form the ground for the practical exposition of Romero's reformulated comparative theories "para tratar de asentar en la diversidad compartida esta relectura sobre el modernismo hispánico" (10).

5. The object of Pera's study is narrower than the introductory "Prólogo" (by Aníbal González) suggests and narrower than Romero's study. Nevertheless, Pera is able to raise a whole range of issues which, hitherto, have rarely been mooted in modernista criticism. "El objeto de este trabajo," Pera writes, "consiste en perseguir la imagen de una ciudad, París, a través de la prosa hispanoamericana. No pretendo explorar la ciudad física, empírica, sino la imagen percibida, la imagen literaria de una ciudad que llegó a convertirse en un mito" (13-14). He dissects this myth through a Foucaultian analysis of the discourses that are created, through textual accounts, images, metaphors, etc., to lay bare the contours of "lo que se podría llamar ciudad literaria" (15). The writers whose discourses are analysed are Sarmiento, Gómez Carrillo, Silva, Quiroga, Güiraldes, and Rivera (the last three compressed into a single chapter). Through their literary visions of Paris, Pera follows changing moods and perspectives over a period of fifty odd years and charts how the mesmerising image of Paris emerges as a mapa textual rather than a real topography. From the early visits of Sarmiento, where Paris offers a model for a new society and an escape from the realites at home, Paris becomes the source point for a sought-for cultural (European) identity. Inevitably, with the years, that mesmeric effect wears off setting up a mood of disenchantment and a dialectical engagement with another
myth: nature and the natural, giving birth to the major preoccupation of the Latin American novel after 1910. Thus the writer is confronted with the questions of self- and national identity. The search for European roots and models by the newly-founded nations leads to the recognition that the writer is poised between two cultures: the old and the new, the myth and the reality. Thus the psychological bonds are slowly broken; Paris is seen as artificial, degenerate and without identity whereas Latin America offers itself as natural, vigorous and a place of origins.

6. A figure who appears in both studies is Gómez Carrillo whose vision of Paris (Pera) and the Orient (Romero) is fundamentally the same, that of the a flâneur whose gaze takes in both the boutique and the bibelot as much as the colourful and exotic world of Japan. In essence, Gómez Carrillo is like the great Exhibition of Paris itself; he, too, offers a window on the world. One lacuna in both studies is the "gaze" of Rubén Darío. The Nicaraguan poet appears in both studies, of course, but, as a recent fully annotated reprint of 1902's La caravana pasa. Libro primero (2000) demonstrates, Darío's articles for the Buenos Aires La Nación offer an inclusive, incisive, vivid and informed picture of fin de siglo Paris, from the Great Exhibition to low-life boîtes as well as articulating the concerns of a generation of de-centred writers. Darío's "gaze" and his knowledge of and engagement with the most progressive French writers of the day would seem to be a sine qua non in either of these studies.

7. Romero's study is much wider in scope. As the title suggests, her study is a re-reading, that is, a critical review and revision, of work on the Spanish fin de siglo since the 1970s from the point of view of a comparativist approach. Romero argues that Spanish modernismo forms part of a larger international movement rooted in German Romanticism and European Symbolism. As such, her work offers both a contrast and a complement to Modernistas en París. Romero revisits the various interpretations of modernismo over the last twenty five years but takes a wider, international view of its impact "para incidir, una vez más, en el hecho de que la interpretación del fenómeno modernista no debiera prescindir de los acontecimientos, fuentes e influencias de la cultura universal contemporánea que asientan la base de su actual coetaneidad" (9-10). Pera's analysis through "Foucaultian" discourses of a ciudad literaria and a mapa textual and Romero's "revisión de los objetos específicos de dicha disciplina (post-structuralist comparative theory) y de su aplicación al ámbito modernista" thus form a new and exciting critical and analytical panorama of modernista concerns.

8. In her Introduction and first chapter, Romero offers a critique of past and present practice in modernista studies. A survey and exhaustive list of "influence" studies clarifies a number of problems with comparative pairings as well as illuminating the way in which finisecular writers related and reacted to one another. At the same time, in the second part of her chapter one, she offers an  extraordinarily lucid definition of current comparative literary practice. From this theoretically informed basis Romero elaborates and applies her own practical model to a series of problematical areas. She chooses to examine authors and texts generally considered as  marginal to the canonical list of Spanish modernismo and, traces the impact of Symbolist practice through to a living poet, Trapiello, to underline the persistence and survival of Symbolist practice, emphasising at the same time, the presence of intertextuality as a theory of cultural formation. She also embraces the problem of marginal cultures in the fin de siglo (Galician and Catalan) that form a part of the modernista experiment. In so doing Romero presents a far more complex scenario than is suggested in literary histories. The same is true of her chapter two where Francis Jammes and the Krausist-influenced writers (Jiménez, Pérez de Ayala, and Unamuno) are studied together and of chapter five where lexical similarities between French and Spanish Symbolism conceal very real cultural differences. In chapter six she places Gómez Carrillo, Loti, and Kipling within the post-structuralist context of "Otherness" to lay bare the conscious and subconscious Western ideologies which permeate and inform the finisecular view of the Orient and modernista exoticism.

9. Both studies, from their distinct but complementary points of view, combine a keen critical mind with a well-digested and informed theoretical model. Both break the mould of established approaches to the modernista movement in that they concern themselves as much with canonical as with marginal figures. Both demonstate the instabilities, the psychological traces and supplements of modernista discourses, the constantly shifting, unconscious, cultural and ideological forces at work in literary practice to offer the reader a challenging and illuminating perspective on a literary movement which has been, until recently, seen as monolithic, limited, over-shadowed by European rivals and, as Díaz-Plaja put it in 1951, a Cenicientas.

Reviewer's Profile: Richard A. Cardwell holds the Chair of Modern Spanish Literature at the University of Nottingham. His main field  of study is the literatures of Spain in the period 1800-1936 with special interest in the fin de siglo. He lectures widely in Europe and the Americas and has published many papers and books on Romanticism, modernismo, and the Generation of 1926. Presently he is writing a study of the impact of the medical sciences on the Spanish fin de siglo and is editor of the Byron volume in the Reception of British Authors series of the British Academy (Athlone Press, forthcoming in 2003). E-mail <richard.cardwell@nottingham.ac.uk>.

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