Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 82 generell, da es in den Ausführungen zumeist deutlich spezifischer um Prozesse des Widerstands, der Subversion und der Abgrenzung geht. Diese Kritik trifft allerdings lediglich die Einführung, die hier durchaus programmatisch deutlicher hätte ausfallen können. Rive Gauche ist ein Blick auf viele Facetten und Winkel der spannungsreichen Konstruktion des Paris der années folles. Von seiner Anlage her ist der Band damit zwar innerhalb der kulturwissenschaftlichen Städtestudien sicher nicht Teil der Avant-Garde, doch ist das Ergebnis ausgesprochen lesenswert. Jeder, der ein Interesse an Paris hat (und wer hätte das nicht? ), findet in den perzeptiven Lektüren dieses wichtigen Bands viele Anstöße zum Lesen, Betrachten und Revidieren. Stephan Laqué Institut für Englische Philologie Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Jutta Ernst and Brigitte Glaser (eds.), The Canadian Mosaic in the Age of Transnationalism. (Anglistische Forschungen 406). Heidelberg: Winter 2010. Martin Löschnigg Since the late 1920s, the multi-ethnic make-up of Canadian society has been rendered through the model of a mosaic, in contrast to that of a ‘salad bowl’ or ‘melting pot’. In particular, the institutionalizing of multiculturalism since the 1970s has made this model, together with its associations of antiassimilationism and the peaceful co-existence of ethno-cultural groups within the national framework, part of Canada’s collective consciousness. Under the impact of cultural and economic globalization (or ‘transnationalism’), however, the contours of the mosaic’s individual pieces have been blurring. This process of transformation is investigated, from various perspectives, in the present volume. The editors’ introduction provides a lucid and balanced review of historical aspects of Canadian multiculturalism and of pertinent theoretical positions. With great critical acumen, Ernst and Glaser outline the cornerstones in the ongoing debate on multiculturalism as a socio-cultural policy, an ideology and discursive phenomenon, and a model for the structure of a diversified society like the Canadian. As they note, however, “[d]iaspora connections and other cross-border structures, which can all the more easily be sustained by advanced media technology, ultimately challenge older models such as the Canadian mosaic” (13). Indeed, as many of the essays collected in this vol- Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 83 ume demonstrate, the transnationalism and trans-cultural concepts of identity which increasingly apply in a globalized world would call for more dynamic models. Thus, for instance, Canadian writer and critic Janice Kulyk Keefer (1991) (unfortunately not mentioned in either the introduction or any of the essays) has proposed the more flexible model of a kaleidoscope, which renders a dynamized version of the mosaic by emphasizing the changing of shapes of the individual components through their interaction within the overall frame that is Canada. The essays in the volume draw on various disciplines such as history, sociology and political science, but mostly pertain to the fields of literature and cultural studies. A sociological and cultural-historical focus is most prominent in the three essays by George Elliot Clarke, Patrick Forbes and Patrick Imbert at the beginning. Clarke (“Canada: The Invisible Empire”) puts present-day Canada in an unorthodox historical perspective by emphasizing the imperialist associations of the Dominion as a “deputy empire” (29) or “shadow Empire, a sub-Empire, to the British parent” (20), whose raison d’être, as Clarke argues, was to prove a bastion against US-expansion. In addition, Anglo- Canada’s internal colonization of indigenous peoples in the West and North, and the Dominion’s political and economic relations with Africa and the Caribbean, must surely be regarded, according to Clarke, as imperialist, too. Patrick Forbes (“Authenticity/ Recognition: Charles Taylor in Theory and Practice”) compares philosopher Charles Taylor’s seminal discussion of Canadian multiculturalism in his essay “The Politics of Recognition” with the report of a commission on multiculturalism in Quebec co-headed by Taylor. As Forbes shows on the example of this report, French-Canadian positions on multiculturalism have always been sceptical, to say the least, since the original intention of multicultural policies “to subordinat[e] [the] dualism [of French and English in Canada] to a broader pluralism” (41) has amounted, in the eyes of the Quebecois, to a reduction of their political and cultural status. As the commission’s report further indicates, this scepticism has remained in spite of the damper which French-Canadian nationalism received through the unsuccessful referenda on Quebec separation. On the other hand, Forbes’s statement that in the case of the dominant group, i.e. English-speaking Canadians of European origin, multiculturalism is part of their social imaginary (cf. 47), needs to be qualified. Indeed, it seems that the Anglo-Saxon ‘mainstream’, if one may still use that term, tend to set themselves apart as they associate multiculturalism with recent immigrants especially from non- English-speaking countries. While Clarke and Forbes concentrate on the two ‘charter groups’, English and French Canadians, Patrick Imbert (“The Valorization of Geographic, Cultural, and Economic Displacements in the Literary World of Canada”) deals with broader issues as he discusses contemporary Canadian writing with a view to the way in which it reflects the transition from multito transculturalism, thereby undermining notions of the homogeneity of cultures. There are clearly many connections here to other essays dealing with writers who have been critical about the tendency of multiculturalism to ascribe ethno-cultural identities and to view individuals primarily as representatives Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 84 of their respective groups (Till Kinzel on Neil Bissoondath, whose Selling Illusions, published in 1994, has become the classic critique of The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, thus the subtitle; Dagmar Dreyer on Bharati Mukherjee; Sabine Kim on Fred Wah, whose poetic autofictions, according to Kim, transcend essentializing conceptions of ‘origins’ and of ‘heritage’ as does his redefinition of the hyphen in the context of trans-cultural transformations). As the essays deal with the identity-related consequences of the “movement of people between countries, cultures, and languages” (151), however, they sometimes tend to neglect the class factor as emphasized most prominently by sociologist John Porter’s early critique of the Vertical Mosaic (1965). In particular, Elisabeth Damböck’s concept of ‘transmigration’, which is to denote the empowering rather than traumatic aspects of migration and which she illustrates on the example of South Asian Canadian writers, would seem to depend very much on class. Throughout the volume, essays intersect and overlap in a fruitful manner as they deal with groups within the Canadian national spectrum, like First Nations and Chinese Canadian writers, with narrative technique, or with renderings of cultural spaces (Maria Moss on Richard Wagamese’s way of reaching back to indigenous culture; Renate Eigenbrod on simulations of oral story-telling in the writing of Dionne Brand, Thomas King, and Rohinton Mistry, whose backgrounds are Caribbean, First Nations/ European, and South Asian respectively). Reingard Nischik analyses Vancouver stories by First Nations and Chinese Canadian writers, emphasizing aspects of compartmentalizing vs. the rendering of open spaces, the latter being illustrated for instance by the “rooted cosmopolitanism” (149) of the protagonist in Madeleine Thien’s “A Map of the City.” Some of the same ground is covered by Eleanor Ty’s essay on ‘settler narratives’ in Chinese Canadian writing, which uses the term in a provocative manner to point to different conceptions of space with regard to immigrants of European and of Chinese origin. Spatial and cultural correspondences are highlighted by the juxtaposition of contemporary Scottish novels dealing with Canada (Frauke Reitemeier) and of the portrayal of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton, a region profoundly shaped by its Scottish heritage, under the auspices of ‘transformation’ in Ann-Marie Mac- Donald’s novel Fall on Your Knees (1997) (Kirsten Sandrock). The concluding three essays deal with the rendering of transnational, open spaces by different authors, genres and media: Michael Ondaatje, Canada’s ‘international’ writer par excellence, and his novel Divisadero (2007) (Anca Raluca Radu), cyberspace in the works of science fiction writer William Gibson (Markus Reisenleitner), and popular television (Susan Ingram). The present volume assembles contributions by established and emerging scholars. Without exception, the essays maintain a very high academic standard, and disregarding a few minor errors (“west Indies”, 26; “lead” [recte: led], 51, 52; “May [recte: My] dear” in the quotation on p. 70; “prophesized” [recte: prophesied], 123; “works” to be deleted in opening sentence on p. 169), editorial work has been painstakingly careful. As it is, there is a very wide range of topics and of literary examples, all of them well chosen as reflecting current developments in Canadian multicultural literature. If one Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 85 feels at times that the volume would have profited from more systematic cross-references, there is an index in compensation. All in all, the editors are to be congratulated on having compiled an impressive collection which clearly represents the ‘state of the art’ in the scholarly analysis of their subject. References Kulyk Keefer, Janice (1991). “From Mosaic to Kaleidoscope: Out of the Multicultural Past Comes a Vision of a Transcultural Future.” Books in Canada 20/ 6. 13-16. Martin Löschnigg Institut für Anglistik Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz Christoph Bode, Der Roman. Eine Einführung. (UTB 2580). 2., erw. Aufl. Tübingen: Francke, 2011. Doris Mader Christoph Bode legt mit dieser Auflage von Der Roman eine um minimale editorische Mängel bereinigte, um ein nützliches Personenregister erweiterte und bibliographisch aktualisierte Version seines “UTB 2580” vor. Der ursprünglich 2005 erschienene Band wurde mittlerweile von James Vigus ins Englische übersetzt und, ebenfalls 2011, bei Wiley-Blackwell als The Novel. An Introduction verlegt. Dieser ‘einführende’ Band über das Erzählen und dessen Analyse und Theorie anhand von Beispielen vorwiegend englischer, aber auch anderer europäischer und der amerikanischen Literatur stellt die seltene Form eines durchaus kurzweiligen Lehr-, fast ist man versucht zu sagen, ‘Belehr-Buchs’ dar. Verspricht der Titel eine eingehende Beschäftigung mit der Gattung Roman, so löst der Band insofern mehr ein, als alle ‘einführenden’ sowie auch die darüber hinausgehenden Betrachtungen zu narratologischen Diskussionen mutatis mutandis auf sämtliche Formen neuzeitlichen bis heutigen Erzählens, wenn auch in unterschiedlicher Gewichtung, anwendbar sind. Schon der Klappentext kommt hier ganz zur Sache, wenn der Band der UTB-Reihe sich “Studierende[n] aller neuphilologischen Literaturwissenschaften” anempfiehlt und festhält, dass er “[n]arratologische Begriffe und Methoden […] mit grundlegenden literaturtheoretischen Fragen verknüpft”. Die Vielfalt erzählender Texte, mit deren Hilfe - vor allem in den ersten Kapiteln - Grundlegendes bezeugt wird, reicht allerdings von Romanliteratur bis zu Epen und