discusses and uses in her critical analysis may not speak to all readers. It is not that Buss is unaware ofthis, but that it is nevertheless her experience as mother/daughter/sister that constitutes the basis of her reading. It may be that the experiential component of critical analysis needs even more mon itoring than that which Buss is careful to provide. Finally, compelling as the mapping metaphor is, the question arises as to whether all women get a chance to hold or make a map. Intriguing queries such as these underscore the provocative nature of Buss’s study and the degree to which it is sure to foster more work on the important fieldofCanadian women’sautobiography. christl verduyn / Trent University Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). xii, 261. $45.00 cloth. This study investigates ideological meaning in some literary texts of the First World War. Using a deconstructionist approach, Cobley contends that in contrast to the “traditional view of war narratives as a literature of protest,” authors such as Blunden, Graves, Sassoon, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Jones were deeply compromised by the prevailing values oftheir culture, and their works exhibit (often unconsciously) the ambiguities and contradictions oftheir ostensibly oppositional attitudes. Through a detailed analysis of description, narration, and plot construction, Cobley argues that the narratives of war reveal an ideological complicity with the sources of social and political power. From several perspectives, the First World War is the most significant fact ofthe twentieth century: the loss oflife was unprecedented, the conditions of trench warfare were hellish, the contrast between the efficiency of weaponry and the futility of infantry tactics was almost impossible to contemplate or rationalize. The testimony of those who fought and wrote to make sense of their personal nightmare reflects the difficulties of representing this ex perience: their accounts, faced with reproducing the unimaginable, retreat inevitably into varieties of irony. Realism is a difficult option; textual dis continuity, descriptive incoherence, or comedic strategies arebarely adequate devices to contain and distance the chaos of the event. As much for the pe culiar problems that this question ofrepresentation raises, as for the content of the texts themselves, the literature of the First World War continues to attract academic attention. As an exercise in applied theory, Representing War is a superior, even a distinguished work of criticism. While Cobley draws on a spread of 1 0 2 structuralist and poststructuralist theorists (from Barthes, Foucault, and Bakhtin to Peter Brooks, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton), her main focus is on narratology and deconstruction. At the centre ofher thesis is her contention that literary form is the carrier ofideological meaning; here in the untangling of descriptive and narrative imperatives her chief resources are Gérard Genette, Teresa de Lauretis, Derrida, de Man, and Hayden White. She is eclectic in her use of theoretical positions; she takes only what she needs to substantiate her arguments. Representing War is too closely argued to be easily or fairly summarized. Cobley applies her elaborate theoretical apparatus to a short list of prose narratives from Goodbye to All That to Farewell to Arms; refreshingly, these include German and French texts such as Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern, Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues, Ludwig Renn’s Krieg, Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, and Roland Dorgelès’s Les Croix de Bois. She has apersuasivechapter on David Jones’sIn Parenthesis, locatingthe ideological complicity ofthat modernist prose-poem within its nostalgia for the chivalric tradition. She begins with a detailed analysis ofdescription and the problems ofmimesis, and ends her study with a “theoretical epilogue” on twoVietnam texts, Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato. For this reader, Cobley’s most successful chapters are those on narrative situation and narrative structure. Dividing her literary texts into auto biographical and fictional narratives, Cobley analyzes the ideological impli cations of each. The narrative strategies of the autobiographies show “the erosion of the self-possessed bourgeois subject” (116), clinging desperately to values that no longer make sense. The war seems to be beyond human agency, but can be constructed optimistically in an imagery...