Robert Kroetsch Critical Essay | Critical Review by David Creelman

Critical Review by David Creelman

SOURCE: A review of A Likely Story: The Writing Life, in Canadian Literature, No. 156, Spring, 1998, pp. 145-46.

In the following review, Creelman praises A Likely Story, although he admits the book contains little new material.

For decades post-structuralists and cultural historians have been reminding us that the subject/self is an unstable construct of an unstable language, and that the author—if alive at all—is a function of the culture and not an independent creative identity. Yet despite these admonitions, we are still tempted to explore the inner-workings and reflections of the besieged writer. A collection of essays by Robert Kroetsch and two volumes of interviews by Jean Royer and Eleanor Wachtel sharpen this sense of temptation as they promise to inform us about the writer’s life.

Although promotional materials refer to the collection as “confessional,” the acknowledgement page of Robert Kroetsch’s A Likely Story distances the text from the...
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