Contemporary Literary Criticism | Kroetsch, Robert (Vol. 132) - Douglas Reimer (essay date Spring 1993)

Douglas Reimer (essay date Spring 1993)

SOURCE: “Heideggarian Elements in Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue,” in Canadian Literature, No. 136, Spring, 1993, pp. 115-28.

[In the following essay, Reimer locates Heidegger's notions about authentic truth and being in Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue.]

Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue is neither phenomenological nor structuralist, to borrow a distinction made by David Carroll in The Subject in Question (15). That is, it is neither subject-centered nor language-centered, but belongs, instead, to a third, rare, more sylleptic mode of writing aware of and making use of the conventions of the other two. As David Arnason has shown in “Robert Kroetsch: The Deconstruction of the Metanarrative of the Cowboy,” Seed Catalogue deconstructs ideologies which have become familiar to us concerning the Western hero and the purpose and function of the poem and the poet on the...

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