Further Reading

Cooper, Jane Roberta, editor, Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re-Visions, 1951–81, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984

Diaz-Diocaretz, Myriam, The Transforming Power of Language: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich, Utrecht: HES, 1984

Diaz-Diocaretz, Myriam, Translating Poetic Discourse: Questions of Fetninist Strategy in Adrienne Rich, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1985

Farwell, Marilyn R., “Adrienne Rich and an Organic Feminist Criticism,” College English 39 (October 1977):191–103

Flowers, Betty S., “The ‘I’ in Adrienne Rich: Individuation and the Androgyne Archetype,” in Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gabriela Mora and Karen S.Van Hooft, Ypsilanti, Michigan: Bilingual Press, 1981:14–35

Griffin, Susan, and Beverly Dahlen, Skirting the Subject: Pursuing Language in the Works of Adrienne Rich, Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1993

Keyes, Claire, The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986

Ratcliffe, Krista, Anglo-American Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

Templeton, Alice, The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich’s Feminist Poetics, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994

Richler, Mordecai

Canadian, 1931– Mordecai Richler has been a working essayist since the 1950s, appearing in virtually

every major Canadian, British, and American journal. Over that time, he has written mostoften about politics and social customs, travel and sports, Jews and Gentiles. He has alsoregularly reviewed books. Throughout, the touchstone has been his growing up onMontreal’s largely Jewish and working-class St. Urbain Street, which has also been central to his fiction. His success as an essayist has frequently supported that fiction,which remains the work on which he clearly wishes his reputation to rest. But Richlerwrites essays not merely to make a living: the genre affords him the obvious pleasure ofexercising his “sense of the ridiculous.”

Although Richler has appeared in journals like the New York Review of Books and the New Statesman, he has often written for larger audiences (in Playboy and Inside Sports,for example). Throughout, his voice has been that of a sane man in a world only intermittently sane. His ideal reader, although never surprised by human nonsense, is stillastonished by its variety. Critics have sometimes complained that Richler’s work lacks enough of a moral center to be satiric; indeed, he is more likely to puncture the ridiculousthan offer remedies. In Richler’s work there is no overarching political or religious

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“Truth,” but simply the individual, doing his best by family and friends. Richler’s style reflects the broad audience he has written for: it is readable, smart, and

occasionally bawdy, a mix of learning and street talk. It is also funny. A review of GayTalese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1990) quotes an understandably breathless Talese on thelife of the penis—“endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more.” To which Richler adds: “And not to quibble, but merely to introduce a personal note, in my case, it also pisses.” Discussing Canadian uneasiness that the world is always happening elsewhere, he notes that “the Canadian kid who wanted to be prime minister wasn’t thinking big” (“The October Crisis, or Issue Envy in Canada,” 1984).

Richler’s Jewishness is seldom absent from his work. His essays, however, do not dealin chicken soup yiddishkeit but in the absurdities of the comfortable Jewish middle classmaking its way in North America. He lets The Encyclopedia of jews in Sports, for example, self-destruct simply by quoting the jacket copy (“A noteworthy contribution to mankind’s quest for knowledge”); he then suggests it may be a precursor to other barmitzvah presents such as a “compilation of Famous Jewish Homosexuals, Professionaland Amateur, Throughout History.” An essay on the Catskills (a resort area with a mostlyJewish clientele) characterizes one hotel as “a Disneyland with knishes,” then deftly recounts how a militant black civil rights singer (inexplicably booked into the “All Star Friday Nite Revue”) is asked to sing “Tzena Tzena,” a popular Hebrew folksong—which he does.

Richler’s writing about Jews, is, in fact, highly sympathetic—indeed, with a hair trigger look-out for anti-Semites. But like Philip Roth, he has not been especially popularwith the pillars of the Jewish community: “‘Why,’ I was once asked … ‘does everybody adore Sholem Aleichem, but hate your guts?’” (“Hemingway Set His Own Hours,”1990). For Richler, of course, Jewish ridiculousness is merely a subgenre of the muchlarger human variety. It just happens to be the kind he knows best.

Richler has also written much about Canadian politics. As Quebec has become evermore nationalistic, he has attacked its laws which sharply limit the public display of anylanguage but French. For Richler, these laws do not protect French culture (as theirdefenders claim) but instead are merely spiteful and xenophobic. Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! (1992) begins with a self-appointed language vigilante solemnly taking photographs of a restaurant menu written illegally in English. Elsewhere, Richlercomments that “when thousands of flagwaving nationalists march through the street roaring ‘Le Québec aux Québécois!’ they do not have in mind anybody named Ginsburg.Or MacGregor, come to think of it.” Not surprisingly, Richer has himself become a target of Quebec nationalists, who see his attacks (especially in non-Canadian publications) as the typical arrogance and treachery of English Montreal. It is a very public debate, andquite a nasty one, with Richler characteristically dismissing one editorial denunciation ofhim as “the sort of letter many write in anger but have the wit not to mail” (Oh Canada! Oh Quebed).

Canadian nationalism fares little better, especially cultural nationalism. As EnglishCanada has itself become increasingly fixed on expressing its own distinctiveness,Richler has criticized that expression as mere anti-Americanism, parochialism, or greed masquerading as love of country: “The nationalists [were]…determined to win through

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legislation, for the second-rate but homegrown writer, what talent alone had hitherto denied him: an audience, applause” (“Pourquoi Pas—A Letter from Ottawa,” 1984). Not for Richler is it ever enough to be “world famous in Canada” (“The October Crisis, or Issue Envy in Canada”).

Richler, to repeat, wishes his reputation to rest with his fiction, not his essays, most ofwhich were written to deadlines. Nonetheless, as several collections show, his essays losesurprisingly little of their bite, even years after their targets have been forgotten. If thosetargets sometimes seem sent by Central Casting solely for his amusement and laceration,they are, Richler would no doubt remind us, not his invention but the world’s.

ARNOLD KELLER

Biography

Born 27 January 1931 in Montreal. Studied at Baron Byng High School, Montreal, 1944–49; Sir George Williams University, Montreal, 1949–51. Lived in Europe, 1951–52 and 1954–72. Worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1952–53. Married Florence Wood, 1959: three sons and two daughters. Writer-in-residence, Sir George Williams University, 1968–69; visiting professor, Carleton University, Ottawa, 1972–74; judge, Book-of-the-Month Club, 1972–88; columnist of “Books and Things,” GQmagazine; regular columnist, Saturday Night magazine. Awards: several, including the University of Western Ontario President’s Medal, for nonfiction, 1959; Paris ReviewAward, 1968; Governor-General’s Award, for fiction and nonfiction, 1968, and for fiction, 1971; Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear, for screenplay, 1974; Jewish Chronicle-Wingate Award, 1981; Commonwealth Writers Prize, 1990.

Selected Writings

Essays and Related Prose Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports, 1968 Shovelling Trouble, 1972 Notes on an Endangered Species and Others, 1974 The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays, edited by Robert Fulford, 1978 Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album, 1984 Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions, 1990 Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country, 1992 This Year in Jerusalem, 1994

Other writings: nine novels (The Acrobats, 1954 [published in the U.S. as Wicked We Love]; Son of a Smaller Hero, 1955; A Choice of Enemies, 1957; The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1959; The Incomparable Atuk, 1963 [published in the U.S. as Stick Your Neck Out]; Cocksure, 1968; St. Urbain’s Horseman, 1971; Joshua Then and Now, 1980; Solomon Gursky Was Here, 1989), short stories, screenplays, and books for children.

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Bibliography

Darling, Michael, “Mordecai Richler: An Annotated Bibliography,” in The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors, vol. 1, edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David, Downsview, Ontario: ECW Press, 1979

Further Reading

Brenner, Rachel Feldhay, Assimilation and Assertion: The Response to the Holocaust in Mordecai Richler’s Writing, New York: Lang, 1989

Brenner, Rachel Feldhay, “A.M.Klein and Mordecai Richler: The Poetics of the Search for Providence in the Post-Holocaust World,” Studies in Religion 19, no. 2 (1990):207

Craniford, Ada, Fiction and Fact in Mordecai Richler’s Novels, Lewiston, New York: Mellen Press, 1992

Darling, Michael, editor, Perspectives on Mordecai Richler, Toronto: ECW Press, 1986 Davidson, Arnold E., Mordecai Richler, New York: Ungar, 1983 Greenstein, Michael, “Breaking the Mosaic Code: Jewish Literature vs. the Law,” Mosaic

27, no. 3 (1994):87 Henighan, Stephen, “Myths of Making It: Structure and Vision in Richler and

Beauchemin,” Essays on Canadian Writing 36 (Spring 1988):22–37 Iannone, Carol, “The Adventures of Mordecai Richler,”Commentary 89 (June 1990):51–

53 McNaught, Kenneth, “Mordecai Richler Was Here,” Journal of Canadian Studies 26

(Winter 1991–92):141–43 McSweeney, Kerry, Mordecai Richler and His Works, Toronto: ECW Press, 1984 Ramraj, Victor J., Mordecai Richler, Boston: Twayne, 1983 Sheps, G.David, editor, Mordecai Richler, Toronto and New York: McGraw Hill

Ryerson, 1971 Woodcock, George, Mordecai Richler, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970

Rodó, José Enrique

Uruguayan, 1871–1917 “Superbly irritating,” “insufferable,” “admirable,” “stimulating,” are some of the

qualifiers offered by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes in his prologue to Ariel, the best known of José Enrique Rodó’s literary works and one of the most influential pieces in thefield of the Latin American essay. Despite its brevity, it has had a lasting impact on theevolution of Latin American literature in general, and Latin American thought inparticular.

Ariel may be irritating to some contemporary readers, for Rodó writes in a rhetorical fashion that defies the attention of today’s readers. This style is the culmination of

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