The Author, Art and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics

“Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one person can do against the enormous array of the world's ills, misery, ignorance, and violence. Few will have the greatness to bend hist...

A Response to Isabel Allende's Tanner Humanities Center Human Values Speech

Don DeLillo's Latin Mass

Teller and Tale in Joyce's Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives

Cartographies of the abyss: Tropics of sublimity in the fictions of Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe

Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship and DeLillo's Mao II

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v037/37.2.osteen01.pdf

Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel. Robert Stone/Isabel Allende/Charles McCarry/Marge Piercy/Gore Vidal (review)

The "Eumaeus" episode of Joyce's Ulysses marks the beginning of the Nostos, or return to origins. Likewise the reader, after the dizzying transformations of "Circe," begins the sixteenth episode with some relief: we seem to have returned to recognizable novelistic prose and to a homely world of sandstrewers, brooms and cups of coffee. Along with this apparent realism the narrative is also imbued with the economic ideology of realismÂ—a bourgeois economism in which all objects carry price tags (Vernon 67). Indeed, the narrator foregrounds economics as both form and intent, finding "the money question ... at the back of everything" (.1114) in a dual sense: habitually employing economic terms to explain behavior, the teller also relies (perhaps unwittingly) upon homologies between money and narration in hopes of discovering a stable economy of meaning.1 The reassurances these homologies promise soon dissolve for, beneath the appearance of realism, beneath the narrator's bourgeois ideology and entrepreneurial plans, a counternarrative emerges that challenges conventional economies of meaning, subverts stable identity and undermines the belief that money explains and stabilizes value. As part of the Nostos, "Eumaeus" is also much concerned with origins and originality. In this regard, too, the very homologies that seem to reassure actually problematize the relationships among origins, value and authenticity: here money and narratives are counterfeit; identities are

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v038/38.4.osteen.pdf

The Money Question at the Back of Everything: Clichés, Counterfeits and Forgeries in Joyce's "Eumaeus"

Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics (review)

Radically different in scope and method, both of these books attempt to rehabilitate nonrealist fiction. Whereas Alexander surveys a wide spectrum of texts, Varsava selects but a few; and if Alexander's book lacks a strong thesis, Varsava's is forcefully argued. Both, however, are limited by their centrist approaches. Most surveys sacrifice depth to breadth, and so does Alexander's; but she succeeds in ranging widely, treating experimental and conventional texts with equal clarity. She is strongest on moderately innovative texts such as William Golding's Pincher Martin and Pavel Auster's New York Trilogy, where her common sense style best fits her subject. Other highlights include a persuasive defense of Samuel Beckett's Trilogy and an honest analysis of the flaws in The White Hotel. But despite her title she only sketchily defines the realism from which her texts supposedly fly, and even this definition would be more helpful had it been integrated into her individual readings. Each chapter is loosely organized around a theme such as desire or history. But because Alexander seldom compares the texts within chapters, the organization often seems desultory. Her choice of texts is also occasionally mystifying: why, for example, is David Lodge's Small World placed in a chapter on society, when the world it portrays is by definition insular? Sometimes her quest for comprehensiveness further adulterates the already loose structure, as in her final chapter, which begins with a fine discussion of three postmodern revisions of The Tempest, but then detours to discuss other \"game-playing\" texts, dissipating the chapter's cohesiveness.

Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction, and: Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader (review)

Mark Osteen

Papers

Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship and DeLillo's Mao II

Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel. Robert Stone/Isabel Allende/Charles McCarry/Marge Piercy/Gore Vidal (review)

The Money Question at the Back of Everything: Clichés, Counterfeits and Forgeries in Joyce's "Eumaeus"

Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics (review)

Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction, and: Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader (review)