Spring 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 1 · pp. 101–102
Book Review
On Mennonite/s Writing: Selected Essays
Hildi Froese Tiessen. Winnipeg, MB: CMU Press, 2023. 309 pages.
This book is a collection of essays by Dr. Hildi Froese Tiessen which spans her nearly fifty-year career as a scholar of contemporary Mennonite literature. She is widely considered the “founder” (6) of the field of Mennonite literature criticism having contributed instrumentally to its inception, shaping, texts, conferences, institutions, and trajectory. This collection provides a comprehensive overview of Froese Tiessen’s thought on Mennonite/s writing throughout her long career. It reflects changes both in her own thought and in those of the broader critical and sociopolitical communities. These include movements from New Criticism’s reliance on the text alone and close reading toward post-colonialism, the importance of context in literary criticism, and identity politics (15). The book also documents the history of Mennonite/s writing: the shift to writing in English, the rise of Rudy Wiebe as a starring Mennonite writer, the move to secularism in Mennonite/s writing, as well as the “Mennonite Miracle” (161) of the ’80s and ’90s that was buttressed by an increased interest in “ethnic” literature encouraged by Canada’s multiculturalist policy and supported with financial literary awards and prizes. The book also points forward to today’s new Mennonite writers who represent diversity, worldliness, and variety.
Among the many overlapping themes of the essays in this collection, one concept stands out as central: identity (see chaps. 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17). In many of the essays, Froese Tiessen turns over the notion of identity, probing its usefulness as a tool for understanding Mennonite literature. She discusses, for example, the importance of Mennonite literature in shaping, defining, and reflecting Mennonite culture to the “Mennonite Community” (171). She refers to this variously as “cultural memory” (165) and a “homeland” (165, 191)—something that helps the reader “identify m[yself] to myself” (172) because of the particular mental image it evokes of what “Mennonite” means. She quickly complicates these notions of literature as an identity-creating machine, insisting that these communities are “imagined” and performed (172); they are not real now nor have they ever existed in the past, nor do they speak for or to the experience of all the varied Mennonitisms that exist. This is especially true given the prevalence of Mennonite writers of Russian Mennonite background coming from the Canadian Prairies. Although they are important voices, they cannot represent the full diversity of history and culture found within Mennonitism as a whole—for example, Swiss Mennonites or Mennonites from Africa, Asia, or the Global South (171). She pushes past what has become a standardized and monolithic understanding of “Mennonite {102} Community” to broaden conceptions of who and what is Mennonite, ultimately asserting that the category is extremely “divergent, inconsistent, [and] unstable” (222). She urges the reader to move beyond discussions of identity as a primary category (209, 226).
This collection is a landmark for the study of Mennonite literature as it condenses the work of one of the key figures in the field into a readily accessible form, which is likely to make it the central resource for courses in the discipline.
Froese Tiessen’s summative coverage of the history of the field of Mennonite literature and its criticism and her ability to synthesize research from outside Mennonite literature to inform the field are strengths. Additionally, the essays identify applicable themes, questions, and issues from beyond the field of literature and connect them to the lives of general readers. Finally, her friendly and personable tone as well as the breadth of audiences she writes for make this work largely accessible to any general reader. Essays such as “The Case of Dallas Wiebe: Literary Art in Worship” are emotive and perfect for the reader who is interested in church worship. Chapters based on her public talks and lectures (see chap. 10) as well as the highly personal essays (see chap. 16 and the afterword) provide accessible background information for the general reader. Text-specific chapters such as 1, 7, 9, and 17 with their emphasis on close reading, or chapter 15 with its intense discussion of literary criticism, have scholars in the field or readers interested in those specific texts as their primary audience.
Like any essay collection spanning the course of a fifty-year academic career, this work is not a page-turner. As might be expected, the essays cover overlapping territories and are therefore repetitive; the ideas, especially in older essays, can feel dated. But this merely attests to Froese Tiessen’s bold leadership in making once revolutionary ideas—like the concept of the Mennonite writer as an outsider—so foundational and ubiquitous that they now seem “overdone.” This collection does what it sets out to do: it documents at once the unfolding of Mennonite literature and the remarkable journey of an intellectual giant in the field of Mennonite/s writing.
