Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference is a book of both practical and theoretical criticism. Some chapters are feminist deconstructive readings of a broad range of the writings of contemporary Canadian poet-critic-novelist Robert Kroetsch, from But We are Exiles to Completed Field Notes. Other chapters self-consciously examine the history and possibility of feminist deconstruction and feminist readings of Kroetsch’s writing by analyzing Kroetsch, Derrida, and Freud on subjectivity and sexuality; Neuman, Hutcheon, and van Herk on Kroetsch. As such, the book speaks out of and about a number of contemporary theoretical discourses, including particular positions within Canadian literary criticism, feminism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism. Written by a woman reader whose theoretical and methodological orientations are both feminist and poststructuralist, Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference problematizes notions of writing, reading, gender, sexuality, and subjectivity in and through Robert Kroetsch’s writings. In this critical study of one writer’s work the author also challenges the traditionally subservient relationship of reader to text and so empowers the feminist reader as well as, if not rather than, the male writer.

Susan Rudy is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She has served as Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Research and Teaching on Women at McGill University, as a Killam Resident Fellow at the University of Calgary, and as President of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures / Association des literatures canadiennes et québécoise (1994-96). She is author of Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference, as well as several nationally distributed articles and reviews.

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