Reviews for Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature

The average rating for Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-10-14 00:00:00 Mark Hersch Ms Atwood is as magnificent a reader as she is a writer. And she's read more Canlit than I probably ever will. Perhaps I'll read less than I might have done after this: she doesn't make it sound terribly cheery. A point that she freely acknowledges. For example on page 281 she asks the question; " What happens in Canadian literature when boy meets girl? And what sort of boy, and what sort of girl? If you've got this far, you may predict that when boy meets girl she gets cancer and he gets hit by a meteorite...." And then, endearingly, admits that this is more than just a bad joke, it indicates the danger of cliché writing once there is a defined tradition. And what is this tradition, as she discovers and defines it? She detects a pattern in the poetry and fictional prose of Canadian writers of the earlier part of the twentieth century: grim and bare survival, a failure to do anything but stay alive. Unrelieved gloom. A disproportionate toll of death and failure. "Given a choice of the negative or positive aspects of any symbol - sea as life-giving mother, sea as what your ship goes down in; tree as symbol of growth, tree as what falls on your head - Canadians show a marked preference for the negative." (p.45) Actually, it's hard not to just go on quoting great wads of her wonderfully muscular, smoothly flowing prose that contains the occasional bright rip of a self-deprecating sardonic remark - so superior to anything that I might cough up. And it is extremely hard not to stand in awe of her intellect: here she was in 1972, six years before Orientalism, which is generally seen as the founding text of post-colonial theory, and yet she sees the key pattern of Canadian literature in terms of its position as a colony, and therefore as exploited - a colony as (more quotation I'm afraid) " a place from which a profit is made, but not by the people who live there: the major profit from a colony is made in the centre of the empire." Thus a victim: of economic exploitation and of cultural oppression, first by the British and then later by an invading Americanization. And then the other key feature of the model she proposes is that Canada never had that American idea of the Western Frontier, the push westwards to escape the confines of governmental legislation and discover freedom. When Canadians pushed westwards the Mounties were already there. The push west was into exile (outside) or the garrison (inside). It's a seductive theory that she proposes and naturally she has chosen the novels and poetry that support her theory. It will add title after title to your TBR list, as long as you have a taste for the morbid, but even if your interest in Canlit is minimal, it is at the same time a magnificent exercise in how to read, how to see the larger pattern behind the minutiae of narrated events, how to recognize the patterns of metaphor and language. And it is also a stirring encomium for the value of national literature in creating identity and a sense of self in the world.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-04 00:00:00 Robert Stockman Although I both appreciate Margaret Atwood as an author and also realise that she is probably the one Canadian author the most universally, globally recognised and liked, personally, I have ALWAYS found her 1972 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature considerably more interesting and enlightening than the vast majority of her novels etc. And truly, ever since I (in so-called Senior High) first perused Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature in 1983, when we used Atwood's book as a guide and textbook in grade eleven English, which that year featured primarily Canadian fiction, drama and poetry, I have been simply amazed and in awe at how spot-on Margaret Atwood usually is with her analysis of Canadian literature themes (and that indeed, these presented themes continually seem to repeat themselves in much of both current and past Canadian literature, and both in anglophone and francophone offerings equally). Therefore, even though Canadian literature as a whole and as an entity is of course now considerably more numerous and varied in scope than it was either in 1972, when Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature was originally published or in 1983, when it served as our grade eleven Canadian literature textbook, Margaret Atwood's musings on specifically the standard "Canadian" themes (including the unfortunate tendency of us Canadians to regularly tend to have a rather dismally low level of self esteem in particular with regard to the merits of our literary achievements as a nation) are as relevant and as commonly encountered now as they were then (and with in particular the thematics of nature as a potential monster, of artistic paralysis, of death and generational family dysfunction very much, very often being as much part of today's Canlit cannon as they were in the past). And yes indeed, if you do desire a well-written, academically sound, astutely observational but nevertheless also basically and for the most part penned and conceptualised for lay, for everyday readers (and thankfully thus not for primarily individuals with advanced university graduate degrees) introduction to Canadian literature and its main and often recurring themes, I do wholeheartedly and warmly recommend Margaret Atwood's Suvival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (but of course also with the necessary caveat that although as mentioned above, the Canadian literature themes portrayed and analysed are both universally Candian and also relevant for today's Canlit, since Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature was published in 1972, the specific literary examples Margaret Atwood uses to cement and point out her findings, views will naturally be pre 1972).