Genre, Trope, Gender: Critical Essays by Northrop Frye, Linda Hutcheon, and Shirley Neuman

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

The annual Munro Beattie Lectures at Carleton University commemorate the
man who founded the English Department there in 1942. This book is made
up of three lectures delivered between 1989 and 1991 by three
distinguished Canadian literary critics. Despite the pretentious title,
these lectures have little or nothing in common—each commentator is
doing his or her own thing.

Northrop Frye’s contribution, “Henry James and the Comedy of the
Occult,” is the most unexpected—and the lecture most clearly related
to the occasion, since Beattie and Frye both studied James under Pelham
Edgar. Aware that he would be addressing a broadly based, nonspecialist
audience, Frye assumes little, takes his hearers and readers on a
lightning tour of James’s novels and stories, raises a few provocative
thoughts, and defies academicism by offering neither notes nor a “List
of Works Cited.”

Linda Hutcheon, on the other hand, is forecastable. In “The Power of
Postmodern Irony,” she goes over ground that she has considered
several times before. The essay is close-packed, decidedly academic,
chock-a-block with secondary references. Those in her audience who
already knew her work would have been comfortable enough, but, unless
the essay was revised for publication (and there is no hint of this),
others might have been bemused.

Shirley Neuman has been a pioneering commentator in the area of
autobiography or “life-writing.” In “‘Your Past . . . Your
Future’: Autobiography and Mothers’ Bodies,” she focuses on
autobiographical writings (not always “literary”) in which daughters
or sons speak (or fail to speak) intimately about their mothers and the
curious relationship that birth from another’s body implies. Her
audience might have been uncomfortable, but would certainly have learned
something. She is original, formidably learned, wide-ranging, polemical.

The editorial introduction, by Barry Rutland, is, alas, sloppy in
detail (two errors occur in one entry about Neuman’s other writings),
and attempts to impose a nonexistent unity by means of rigid
categorization (hence the desperate title). Moreover, Rutland too often
writes a barbarously abstract prose that would have saddened Munro
Beattie himself. Which is a pity.