to the codes of power, then continent discourse must be marked by confi dence and self-mastery. Lane gestures at a continental option whereby island discourse and psychology might pull themselves free from the eternal repeti tion of imperial, patriarchal texts. The island might participate with other islands in founding “a new postcolonial continent of islands—eternally dy namic, hybrid, and with a focus on “‘play’rather than overseeing” (160-61). The continent, then, stands as the liberatory promise underwriting islands’ infinite rehearsal of decolonization. It is an attractive formulation, but also worrying. For one thing, the massiveness of continents suggests power, and it is precisely massive continental power that islands might want to keep away from; for another, continents are likely to prove more stagnant than islands, or so much recent commentary about Europe suggests. Imperial ism, after all, was a continental rather than simply English project. Literary continentalism of this new kind would be as constructed and constricting as the island discourse that is the subject of Lane’s study. Students ofpostcolonial writing should find this a helpful book, especially for its readings of Caribbean and New Zealand writing. And readers wanting wider scope may well find it provoking some serious thought about islands and continents. Pa t r i c k Ho l l a n d / University of Guelph Winfried Siemerling, Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leon ard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje and Nicole Brossard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). viii, 259. $45.00 cloth. Surprisingly, there is a conclusion to Winfried Siemerling’s study of four contemporary Canadian novelists. Surprising, I suggest, because his topic is the way these novelists use fiction to break through the limits of know ledge and engage with the radically heterogeneous and indeterminate. His conclusion, on the other hand, affirms certain knowledge. It minimizes the differences among these novelists by identifying a shared concern with the way a subject is constituted through an encounter with alterity: “The texts by Cohen, Aquin, Ondaatje, and Brossard—although betraying different interests, perspectives, and approaches to writing—time and again ‘trans late’ (although incompletely) an unknown and invisible self in the process of ‘translating’ aspects of an unknown other. ... In these moments of per ceptual transformation, the self discovers in the other what is ‘real,’ yet unfinalized and open” (211). Such closure in the face of these “heterological possibilities” is possibly due to the institutional conventions of the thesis (the genre in which this 364 book had its beginnings) that insist on a Hegelian sublation in the name of “truth,” in contrast to the claims of these fictions that superimpose multi ple perspectives accommodating manifold vanishing points as simultaneous and partial aspects of the “real.” However, this assertion of the common pursuit of identification through estrangement is more likely a function of Siemerling’s theoretical framework, which focusses on the textual inscrip tion of the speaking subject rather than on its ideological interpellation in representation. In pointing to the laudable position of “real possibility” of being in alterity, he cites Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, rather than his theorization of a socialist utopia influential with Marxist approaches to narrative such as Fredric Jameson’s. Siemerling further frames this study within the philosophical rather than political dimensions of alterity by fo cussing on Michel de Certeau’s Heterologies: Discourse on the Other rather than on his Practices of the Everyday where he outlines in the micropolitics of the quotidian the radical alterity of praxis that exceeds representation. Writing itself becomes a praxis for Siemerling, change being produced “in poetic language,” in the formulation ofJulia Kristeva, whose concepts ofthe “speaking subject” and “intertextuality” provide his overarching theoretical framework. This focus on the narrating subject in relation to characters, and on fiction as a discursive practice on the other, orients the selection and analysis of material away from the rhetorical violence experienced by the other within unequal social relations of power. Within these contingencies, however, Discoveries of the Other offers intelligent and richly nuanced close readings ofdifficult fictions—several by each ofthe four authors—that per ceptively analyze their processes of writing. It lucidly synthesizes a body of complex...