Inhabiting the Dangerous Middle Of The Space Between: An Intramodernist Reading of Kroetsch's Gone Indian

Authors

Mary K. Kirtz, University of Akron

Date of this Version

1994

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:3 (Summer 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

Robert Kroetsch, whose approaches to novel writing extend from the primarily realist novel But We Are Exiles (1965) to the clearly post-modernist What the Crow Said (1978) and the somewhat less postmodern Alibi (1983), has left equally wide..ranging impressions on the English--Canadian critical landscape. Responses extend from those who see, at least in his earlier novels, a sympathy for realist and modernist impulses towards synthesis (Turner, Schaefer) to those who have identified Kroetsch as a preeminent postmodern writer (Hutcheon, Neuman); indeed, Linda Hut.. cheon has called him "Mr. Canadian Post.. modern."2 Even within the two parts of Hutcheon's formulation, however, we see mirrored the opposition between two critical stances: "Canadian" suggests Kroetsch's search for some fundamental basis for differentiating Canadian writing from British and American, and "Postmodern" foregrounds his questioning of the validity of such fundamental categories.