Outsider Notes

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University.

Lynette Hunter is a feminist Canadian citizen who lives and works in
England. A transnational, transcultural, transhistorical,
reader-response critic, she attempts to balance her often-described role
as teacher at the University of Leeds with the floating identity of a
person “born at an airbase between Africa and Australia,” in order
to construct a viable, authoritative voice for herself. Implied as the
ultimate ground for her authority is that being an outsider confers on
her special status as a (no doubt objective) reader: a nifty
postmodernist spin on the usual meaning of the term “marginal,” if
there ever was one.

This volume of essays is divided into three parts. Part 1 deals with
recent publishing history in Canada, focusing on the ideological aspects
of Canadian government subsidies, which have been instrumental in the
creation both of works that have entered the canon of writing in English
and of works that have attracted few readers. Part 2 presents readings
of noncanonical works by such authors as Dionne Brand, Claire Harris,
and M. Nourbese Philip, while Part 3 offers commentaries on canonical
writings by the likes of Atwood, Ondaatje, and Munro. Hunter, who works
from general “elements in contemporary western cultural and social
life” to the specificities of Canadian writing, admits that “[t]here
is no over-arching argument to this collection.”

Hunter’s own writing style often undercuts her attempted
communication. Sentences like the following are all too common: “If
the relationship of power between the individual in the nation state,
which underlies much current political philosophy, is shifting as
effective power is put in the hands of the multinationals to which
nations then become subject, then the strategies of individuals
responding to nation states become an important source of analogous
action for the nation state itself.” I’m still back at the start,
wondering “Between what?” The result is a

book that makes some interesting, if difficult-to-access, observations.