Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 1987"

The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction

Abstract: Detective fiction, particularly of the classical formula, seems to be unique among narrative genres in that it thematizes narrativity itself as a problem, a procedure, and an achievement. In fact, its very constitution as a genre is based on the complicated employment of certain narrative strategies: the point of a classical detective novel typically consists in reconstructing a hidden or lost story (that is, the crime); and the process of reconstruction (that is, the detection), in its turn, is also usually hidden in essential respects from the reader. Furthermore, as I shall attempt to show in detail, narrativity is inscribed in detective fiction in yet two other forms. The stories that are narrated in detective novels can profitably be described as stories of writing and reading insofar as they are concerned with authoring and deciphering \"plots.\" And ultimately, the detective novel hinges on the social effects that the concealment and the \"publication\" of a particular story, namely that of the crime, will have. Thus detective fiction affords clear examples of the possible social dimensions of narrativity, and the history of the detective genre is marked, on one level, by growing doubts about the possibility of telling the story.

Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction

Abstract: What is a historical fact? A spent shell? A bombed-out building? A pile of shoes? A victory parade? A long march? Once it has been suffered it maintains itself in the mind of witness or victim, and if it is to reach anyone else it is transmitted in words or on film and it becomes an image, which, with other images, constitutes a judgment. I am well aware that some facts, for instance the Nazi extermination of the Jews, are so indisputably monstrous as to seem to stand alone. But history shares with fiction a mode of mediating the world for the purpose of introducing meaning, and it is the cultural authority from which they both derive that illuminates those facts so that they can be perceived. E. L. Doctorow, \"False Documents\

The Cinematic Novel: Tracking a Concept

Abstract: When Virginia Woolf drolly proclaimed that "in or about December, 1910, human character changed" ("Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" 320), it is doubtful that she was thinking of D. W. Griffith. In late 1910, the director had just moved his production company to Hollywood and made His Trust, Griffith's first two-reeler and one of several works in which he was inventing a syntax for the infant medium. Woolf was not enamored of the movies, though they would reflect, embody, and shape precisely that revolution in consciousness that she associated with modernism and with the novel. The history of cinema is congruent with the history of the modern novel, as it is with the development of the airplane, the

For (Against) a Theory of Rereading

Abstract: My contradictory title is explained by my contention that literary theory needs to take account of the ways an audience's experience changes when we reread a work of literature or watch a film for the second or tenth time but that a general theory of rereading is impossible. Even so, given the observation that no one ever reads the same work twice in quite the same way, it is important to attempt some theoretical account of the process of rereading, especially because virtually all criticism is based on readings that are actually rereadings—one might plausibly define literature as that which is rereadable—and because our experience of a given work changes with each subsequent rereading. A theory of rereading would seem necessary to all discourse analysis. How does our eighth reading of a sonnet or a soup recipe differ from our first, and which reading, if any, is normative? Such questions may be posed for any repeatable utterance in any discursive mode. The problems raised by rereading are particularly acute, however, in narrative theory, because although the leading features of narrative, and indeed the only aspects of narrative many readers notice—that is, the plot and the characters—are presumably available on a first reading, the interpretation of narrative, especially in the classroom, is typically based on features unavailable, or available to only a few readers, except in rereading. In other words, the difference between the first reading of a story and subsequent readings is likely to be more complete, and more completely regulated by generic rules, than the difference between the first reading and subsequent readings of an essay or lyric poem. This difference depends

The Indian English Novel: Kim and Midnight's Children

Abstract: \"Is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality?\" (75), asks Salman Rushdie in Midnight's Children. The answer is, I think, yes, but it is a disease to which only those like Rushdie, who write about India in English, are vulnerable. To write about India in any of its vernaculars, even in Hindi its national language, is inevitably to divide it. Rushdie knows as much. In 1956 Nehru divided India into

Deconstructing the Logos: Don DeLillo's End Zone

Abstract: The deconstructive ideas and operations of Jacques Derrida have found an amenable target in American experimental fiction of the last decade. Three recent books on postmodern fiction—Allen Thiher's Words in Reflection, Charles Caramello's Silverless Mirrors, and Jerome Klinkowitz's The Self-Apparent Word—provide Derrida-influenced readings of Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Gass, Pynchon, and those novelists, most of whom are associated with the Fiction Collective, that Klinkowitz introduced in his Literary Disruptions: Ron Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Walter Abish, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Steve Katz. Although the names of some new writers—Kenneth Gangemi, Frederick Tuten, Stephen Dixon, Guy Davenport—do surface in these three books, for the most part criticism repeats, covers the same texts with the same approach, a procedure at odds with Derrida's own methods. What I offer here is a Derridean

Sister Carrie and Industrial Life: Objects and the New American Self

Abstract: Carrie, they generally focus on the disagreements between the author and his publisher, the Doubleday and Page company. The production history of the novel, in brief, begins with Doubleday and Page accepting the manuscript in the spring of 1900. In the summer of that year, Walter Hines Page sent a letter to Dreiser attempting to renege on the contract to publish. Apparently, Dreiser's treatment of Carrie's sexuality made him apprehensive, as the fictional character lives \"in sin\" throughout a good deal of the narrative. In addition, the author vexed Page by using actual names and places in his fiction. Both of these objections are comprehensible: the former due to fear of public censure, the latter out of deference to those who would have preferred that their names and establishments not appear in such a scandalous work. Dreiser persisted in having the publisher honor its acceptance and left many of the real names and places in the book. It was published in 1900, sold half of its run of 1,000 copies, and went out of print. In 1907 B. W. Dodge and Co. reissued it, and it has remained in print ever since (Pizer 433-470). In this explanation, the work, although not actually suppressed, is

The Mimetic Language Game and Two Typologies of Narrators

Abstract: In recent theories of narrative, there is a controversy about the validity of the \"person\" distinction in the construction of typologies of narrators. It seems to me that this controversy is rooted in different approaches to the act of narration: the mimetic versus the nonmimetic (or what I call, for lack of a better term, narrative) approaches. Those theorists who have a structural model of narrative—the Genettian model1 (Genette, BaI, Rimmon-Kenan)—do away with the traditional typology, which distinguishes between narrators according to the criterion of person, that is, firstas opposed to third-person narrators. Conversely, the theorists who continue to hold onto a mimetic approach (Stanzel, Cohn) maintain the validity of this criterion. My purpose is to explain the mimetic and narrative biases, respec-

Autobiography as Fiction: The Example of Stop-time

Abstract: Sartre is no doubt right, at least in philosophical terms, in stressing the difference between living one's life and viewing it from the outside as if it were a work of art. To treat oneself, while alive, in a definitive or posthumous manner, to endow one's existence with the finality of a completed artifact, signifies a denial of life. One must be either inside or outside—one cannot be both.1 When the life in question is cast in the form of autobiography, the disjunction between living and telling becomes even more acute. As Sartre himself discovered, the task of recalling one's

The Work of Play: Anger and the Expropriated Athletes of Alan Sillitoe and David Storey

Abstract: \"At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost,\" Karl Marx observed in Das Kapital, \"it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity\" (422). Nowhere has this observation been better exemplified than in the English novels of workingclass life since the late 1950s. Whether toiling at lathes like Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Arthur Machin in David Storey's This Sporting Life or at a milling-machine like Smith's in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, the protagonists of such fiction typically find that their actions soon became automatic, reducing them as workers (and, more importantly, as human beings) to mere operative extensions of the factory's machinery in exactly the way that Marx described. For virtually all of these working-class protagonists, the body and its pleasures provide refuge from the workaday monotony, fragmentation, and dreariness of factory-bound life in a class-ridden world. At the end of the week, having received their pay packets, they leave behind the factory with its noise and smells, eager to have \"the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory . . . swilled out of [their] systemfs]\" in the \"cosy world of pubs and noisy tarts\" (Sillitoe, Saturday Night 7, 33) for which such novels are renowned. For many, however, sports provide

The Problem of Pattern: Nabokov's Defense

Abstract: THE DEFENSE,1 Nabokov's third novel and first masterpiece, is also the first in his career in which patterns pervade in every direction. Hypersensitive since childhood to pattern and to threats lurking in the world around him, Luzhin commits suicide to escape the mysterious combinations encroaching upon him and in so doing alerts even the unwariest reader to their presence. The Defense can therefore become a test case for the patterns Nabokov weaves in time. Does he expect us merely to marvel at their intricate interlacement, as if they were so much Celtic knotwork? Does he tease us to strain nail and finger to unravel the inextricable, as readers such as Douglas Fowler suppose ("the private systems of correspondence . . . the 'wayside murmur of this or that hidden theme' . . . are annotated red herrings" [74])? Or does he overcomplicate the design inadvertently so that it can never be untied? Strother Purdy typifies many readers at first lured by the promise of significance in Nabokov's fictional patterns

Absalom, Absalom!: Telling Scratches

Abstract: And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something—a scrap of paper—something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, to be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch. . . . (Absalom, Absalom! 127)

Recent Books on Narrative Theory: An Essay-Review

Abstract: Contemporary narrative theory is concerned with the analysis of narrative discourse and narrativity in order to explain the many forms and structures of storytelling in world literature and their implications. It also focuses on possible relations existing among mythic, historical, and fictional narratives, and it reflects on the possibility and implications of reconceptualizing these relations for literary, cultural, and historiographie theory. The books under review here* are too diverse to allow for an integrated account that would make possible a hierarchical or some other larger context in which to place precisely and without distortion the theory presented, or the theories criticized, by each of the books in relation to one another. My attempt in the limited space here is to identify some of the central threads in each book in order to remark rather generally

Approaching Postmodernism: Papers Presented at a Workshop on Postmodernism (review)

Abstract: Ever since Frederico de OnÃ-z coined the label \"postmodernismo\" in 1934, its increasing appeal for criticism has led to a certain terminological inflation. A password in architecture, the visual arts, film, communications, music, and literature, it stands variously as a generic, typological, period, and cultural designation. Writers as widely diverse as Randall Jarrell and Jacques Derrida have been lumped under the rubric of postmodernism. Not surprisingly, such a popular usage is, for some, highly suspect on its face. Like other controversial and contested terms such as \"deconstruction\" or \"feminism,\" postmodernism names at once a critical carnival, labyrinth, and minefield. Fortunately, the recent University of Utrecht festschrift Approaching Postmodernism provides an indispensable map of the postmodern terrain. The volume comprises essays in theory and practical criticism by twelve contributors to a 1984 workshop on \"Postmodernism\" sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association. Especially useful, Hans Bertens's exhaustive introduction surveys the evolution of the postmodern epistà ̈me from 1934, taking into account its links to American counterculture in the mid-1960s and existentialist thought in the 1970s. By the 1980s, Bertens explains, the postmodern Weltanschauung in America underwrites a vast field of literary, critical, and cultural discourses. Quarreling with critics such as Frank Kermode who join modern and postmodern writings, Brian McHaIe uncouples them. Theorizing a fundamental \"change of dominant,\" McHaIe defines modernism as essentially an epistemological mode whereas postmodernism is ontologically grounded in existence and the projection of fictive worlds. For his part, Douwe Fokkema argues that postmodernism functions rhetorically to oppose modernism's penchant for hierarchic orders of meaning and value. Building on the work of critics such as Hassan, Lodge, and others, Fokkema provides a detailed semantic and syntactic analysis of postmodern

Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling

Abstract: In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":

Tim O'Brien's Myth of Courage

Abstract: My concerns," novelist Tim O'Brien told an interviewer in 1982, "have to do with the abstractions: what's courage and how do you get it? What's justice and how do you achieve it? How does one do right in an evil situation?" (Schroeder 145). O'Brien went on to say that while he does not presume to answer these questions in his writings, he does try to give them dramatic importance. He distinguished his own work in this respect from much contemporary writing, which seems to him to be "aimed at rather frivolous objectives." In the four books he has published to date—If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973), Northern Lights (1975), Going After Cacciato (1978), and The Nuclear Age (1985)—O'Brien proves to be both a master of his craft and a writer engaged thoughtfully and emotionally with the big issues. The biggest of the big issues in his first three books is the one he places at the head of his list of what he calls "abstractions": what is courage and how do you get it? It is a question that places him in the tradition of our great war novelists—Crane, Hemingway, Jones, Mailer, Heller, and Vonnegut. O'Brien has learned a good deal stylistically from

The Story in the Image: Rhetoric and Narrative Invention

Abstract: Narrative theory has devoted much of its energy to the problem of how stories are told, but relatively less to what one might suppose would be the equally important question of where the ideas for stories come from. In a sense this is understandable, for critics have been generally prepared to agree that the issue of narrative technique is theoretical, whereas it has seemed equally evident that the question of narrative beginnings is historical. Narrative theory, in such a view, would have little to say about the genesis of narrative ideas, and what it could say would necessarily have to be rather general. Furthermore, the critical community has accepted the notion that theories of narrative technique can be tested on the basis of evidence to be found in the narratives themselves, but it has not appeared clear that the same might be true of narrative ideas. Since the New Critical revolution, then, when the "poem itself became the exclusive object of critical scrutiny, narrative theory has tended to shy away from attempts to examine the narrative imagination. Before the New Critics, however, some of the most celebrated research in literary studies pursued just such a goal. John Livingston Lowes, in

Stephen Crane, and: New Essays on "The Red Badge of Courage", and: Realism, Writing, Disfiguration on Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (review)

Abstract: Crane scholarship continues to advance steadily, and three recent books (actually two books and a long essay) contribute to this advance in very different ways. Although all three texts concentrate predominantly on Crane's fiction, they differ markedly in their aims and methodologies. Bettina L. Knapp, for example, provides a general introductory overview of Crane's life and work, an overview aimed primarily at readers who are unfamiliar with Crane's writings. Lee Clark Mitchell's collection of six essays offers an updated perspective on some of the more recent critical approaches to The Red Badge of Courage. Finally, in the most provocative and theoretically sophisticated of these three texts, Michael Fried deconstructs Crane's "thematics of writing," and, as might be expected in such a reading, he discovers the paradox that Crane's writing must efface and repress itself in order to be writing at all. Bettina L. Knapp's Stephen Crane contributes to the "Literature and Life: American Writers" series, and, for the most part, it speaks to a popular audience. The book provides a general introduction to Crane's life and works, and it includes segments devoted to Crane's biography, the novels, the poems, and the tales. The first segment relates the well-known story of Crane's life: his picaresque journey through different educational institutions; his trials and tribulations as a young reporter; his development as a writer; his financial problems; his sickness and his death. For readers who know next to nothing about Crane, this account provides an adequate and readable sketch of his life. The final three segments address Crane's works, and these segments are divided into chapters that give short publication histories and general summaries of the major texts. "Part II: The Novels" contains chapters on Maggie, The Red Badge of Courage, George's Mother, The Third Violet, Active Service, and The O'Ruddy. Part III discusses Crane's collections of poetry, The Black Riders and War Is Kind. Part IV includes chapters on Tales of Adventure, The Monster, and The Whilomville Stories, and other tales of war.

Three on: An Interview with David Carkeet, Mark Harris, and W. P. Kinsella

Abstract: Wi? thought it only fair to give a few novelists the opportunity to respond to what Michael Hirschorn in The New Republic once described as the \"swamp of cliches and rhetorical overkill\" with which \"would-be egghead populists\" confront sport and, one presumes, the literature of sport. Because we thought the chance to compare answers would add to the interest of these brief interviews, we decided to ask our questions of three authors of some of the best recent baseball fiction: David Carkeet (The Greatest Slump of All Time), Mark Harris (The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly, Ticket for a Seamstitch, and It Looked Like Forever), and W. P. Kinsella ('Shoeless Joe, The Thrill of the Grass, and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy^). We have run the questions and responses to simulate a roundtable discussion, but the format was otherwise. Each author responded separately, David Carkeet and W. P. Kinsella choosing to reply in writing, Mark Harris agreeing to be interviewed by phone, which permitted a dialog to grow, part of which has been retained. Scissors and tape eventually created the text presented here. We are at best only partially sympathetic to the sort of attitudes expressed by

Narratology and Thematics

Abstract: In the past sixty or so years, Russian, French, American, and other analysts of narrative have formulated an impressive array of technical concepts to classify the multifarious aspects of story, plot, characterization, narration, point of view, speech representation, and so on. Much of this work has concentrated on the abstraction of basic plot summaries. This paper will argue that all such attempts fail to account systematically for the inevitable shift from a sequence of actions to an underlying theme. The absence of an adequate conceptual bridge between narratology and thematics suggests that the former is an intrinsically limited discipline; paradoxically, some of its exponents are now choosing to limit it further by concentrating on \"discourse\" alone rather than \"story\" and by denying that narratives actually consist of sequences of causally related temporal actions. One of the earliest narrative analyses of modern times (a qualification that saves going back to Aristotle) is Viktor Shklovsky's \"constituent structure\" analysis of the Sherlock Holmes stories, published in 1925. This essay does not seem to have been translated into English, but L. M. O'Toole excerpts Shklovsky's nine-point summary, which can be further reduced as follows: Holmes and Watson are sitting around; a client appears and narrates evidence; Watson interprets wrongly; they travel

Art and Life in James's "The Middle Years"

Abstract: \"The Middle Years\" has been called one of James's best short stories and one of his weakest. But critics generally agree that it has a good deal of autobiographical content, perhaps more than any other of James's many stories about writers and artists. Published in 1893,' it belongs to a period of his career when, like his hero, James could look back on an impressive body of work already produced: novels, short stories, criticism, travel essays. But, as he was to write to William Dean Howells, he had fallen on evil days. Although his reputation among critics and fellow writers was more than respectable, he felt that few readers were willing or able to give his work the careful attention it required and that most failed to recognize his underlying intentions, just as Doctor Hugh in our story fails to guess those of Dencombe, the protagonist. James found it increasingly difficult to place his fiction in the magazines, and he chafed under their space limitations. Like Dencombe, he \"aimed at a rare compression\" (56); in other words, he regarded succinctness as a virtue to be striven for. But his usual focus on the subtle movements of the mind and the emotions did not naturally lead to brevity; his narratives as a rule turned out longer than he planned. \"The Middle Years\" is an example. It is one of his shortest tales, and in his pride at having achieved the difficult feat he actually underestimated its length: it is not 5,550 words long, as he says in the preface, but more nearly 8,000. Like Dencombe, too, James was a \"passionate corrector, a fingerer of style\" (63), and as Dencombe felt that he had achieved mastery only at the end, so James was to develop to the end of his career. One further autobiographical element has been noted in \"The Middle

Counter-Ethnicity and the Jewish-Black Baseball Novel: The Cases of Jerome Charyn and Jay Neugeboren

Abstract: First, a brief look at sociology; second, a glance at the history of a genre; third, a view of two novels that twist the genre into a postmodern, parodie, antirealist form. Jews play major league baseball? Well, Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax. And, recently, Mike Epstein, Ken Holtzman, Steve Stone. But surely Jewish boys were never supposed to become ballplayers: a worried father writes to Abraham Cahan's Forward in the early years of the century, \"What is the point of this crazy game? It makes sense to teach a child dominoes or chess. . . . The children can get crippled. ... I want my boy to grow up to be a mensch, not a wild American runner.\" And yet. One Lipman E. Pike in 1866 earned the title of the first American professional ballplayer. One of us. Before Koufax there were many pitchers—Scissors Mayer, Barney Pilty (\"the Yiddishe Curver\"), Harry Feldman, Saul Rogovin, Larry Sherry, Ed Reulbach (who won 181 games for the Cubs and Dodgers). Catchers: the Cubs' great Johnny Kling, the

From Jane Allen to Water Dancer: A Brief History of the Feminist (?) Sports Novel

Abstract: I am interested here in an obvious fact: that women have written very few sports novels in America for the equally obvious reason that from the 1920s until the 1970s they were largely excluded from what seemed an essentially masculine world of sport. They were not excluded from sport itself, of course, but from that sporting world in which sport mattered as more than physical health, that world where sport was viewed as a training ground, where sport was thought to teach valuable lessons for conduct in life generally, where sport embodied a cultural myth and ideology. In this world, not only did boys and men play athletic games, but men wrote books for boys to read that made the moral lessons of the playing field clear, and occasionally a male author transformed these masculine athletic experiences into a novel that the world welcomed as "literature." Women neither played the same games nor wrote about them in the same way, when they wrote at all. This essay examines the fiction they did write. More particularly, I want to make a case for Jenifer Levin's novel about marathon swimming, Water Dancer (1982), as a major breakthrough in the genre of sports fiction. In the first place, it is a fine novel, but, more important here, it offers a feminist alternative to the masculine sports myth, the first important novel to do so that I am aware of. Water Dancer

Faustian Athletes? Sports as a Theme in Modern German Literature

Abstract: German critics have repeatedly wondered that sports, an important part of modern culture, have not appeared as a major theme in literature.1 If one considers American literature and European literature other than that written in German, one realizes that the wonder is somewhat misplaced. Sports have been a major theme in twentieth-century literature. Within Germanic bounds, however, the critics are closer to the mark. There have been sports-related works by writers of repute, but they are fewer than in American, British, or French literature. The number of such works is less interesting, however, than the fact that they tend to focus on a single theme: failure. The athletes who appear in modern German literature are driven men, striving with an intensity and passion conventionally referred to as Fausdan. They inhabit \"the kingdom of endless struggle,\" and they pursue impossible goals (Torberg 141). They are rarely team players whose success depends on skillful cooperation. They are more likely to be loners—

Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fiction (review)

Abstract: In Discourses of Desire Linda Kauffman gives us a comparative study of eight works spanning a period of about two thousand years, from Ovid's Heroides to The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters (1972). The common thread is that all these works are in—or can be slipped into—the category of letters from women to men who have abandoned or ignored them. Such real or feigned love letters (Kauffman insists on calling them \"amorous epistolary discourse\") form a coherent body of literature that is here profitably analyzed, diough a reader may well feel that the sample is not only small, but also skewed. Kauffman subscribes so thoroughly to the current doctrine that literature grows out of other literature and has nothing to do with life that once, when she kicks over the traces a bit, she feels called on to defend herself against an assumed charge of \"naive mimeticism.\" The inclusion of some letters from actual jilted semiliterate women would have improved the credibility of her study without altering its findings except by the admission that the genre is based on life as well as literature. The correspondence between Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (plus a few \"Dear John\" letters and the replies to them) might unisexify the subject and moderate her chip-on-shoulder assumption that men are the constant betrayers and women the inevitable victims. Surely a study of literature that has wide range in both time and place should aim at an Olympian point of view rather than a trendy one, but Kauffman's trendiness is pronounced. She knows and refers to a wide range of critics, but they are considered to be of primarily historical interest. When she wants truth, as opposed to the dead notions of earlier times, she always goes to Bardies, Genette, Lacan, Derrida, and their epigones. We are not surprised, then, to see that she combines the virtues and faults of her models. She is subtle, but sometimes far too much so, as in the assumption that any word may have simultaneously (without any hint from its user) any or all of its own meanings and suggestions plus those of its homophones or any other words with a vague phonetic resemblance. The discussion of the name of Miss Jessel (in The Turn of the Screw) and the jesses of trained falcons is a bravura piece of irrelevant erudition. The word \"naive\" is the automatic and inevitable putdown for any idea that is to be dismissed without a hearing. But even subtle discussions can sometimes be very loose. In the latter part of the book \"sentimental\" is an important word, but we are never told whedier the corresponding noun is \"sentiment\" or \"sentimentality.\" Occasionally, astonishing pronouncements are simply unsupported assertions. Ipsa dixi. Since if it is read with due caution Discourses of Desire is both fascinating and highly informative, it is unfortunate that it is unnecessarily tied to a critical fashion so faddish that one is tempted to compare it with the Cabbage Patch dolls. But that would be unfair. The fashion has been around longer than the dolls and is not fading as fast. Still, it is neither so established nor so venerable as Barbie.

Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (review)

Abstract: a form suited to complacent bourgeois life has been retooled in Soviet or Cuban literature. On the other hand, his points about commodification and the end of \"natural narrative\" are not always convincingly linked to the novel specifically. The problem is often not the novel and politics, but art and politics, and the role of the \"utopian\" in social change. Nevertheless, although Davis probably joins many others in wanting to go from the \"implied reader\" to the \"informed reader,\" unlike those others, he has actually written a book that can help take us there.

Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s (review)

Abstract: idea of a center and that of Derrida, Kim focuses too much of his discussion on a commonplace in Pynchon criticism—the concept of entropy. Furthermore, his examination of the conclusion of The Crying of Lot 49 neglects a basic feature of poststructuralist fiction, the frustration of closure. Generally, Journey into the Past is plagued by a sophomoric methodology and frequent typographical errors. There is little extended discussion of the examples cited, and the theoretical applications are often inadequately substantiated. Kim's work ought to be recognized for what it is—a dissertation, an apprenticeship work—and not be imposed on the scholarly community until it has undergone the necessary seasoning.

The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below, and: Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel, and: The Novel in the Victorian Age: A Modern Introduction (review)

Abstract: Bruce Robbins describes The Servant's Hand as an attempt to make historical and literary sense of the place servants occupy in the Victorian novel. The result, which in some respects continues, and acknowledges, the political and contextual perspective of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, is a scholarly work to be commended for several reasons. Not only, as a professor of English, does Robbins try to reinstate the often overlooked servants in this literature—to bring them in from the margins—but as a trained historical critic he also questions the authors themselves concerning their use of and their prejudice toward these particular characters. Here Robbins departs from Auerbach's focus on writers who apparently chose individuals at random from daily life to serve as subjects and even the protagonists of their narratives. In doing so, writes Auerbach, these novelists broke with a classic tradition—we see this often in Shakespeare—in which style and social caste were interrelated. Although Robbins concedes that servants in the novels he looks at also are not discriminated against in terms of style, he does not share Auerbach's view of this democratized literature as a single entity moving toward egalitarianism. For Auerbach that entity is the product of a group of authors holding shared intentions; for Robbins the randomness of literary servants is such that even the