Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 1989"

The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative)

Abstract: Do social struggles give rise to new forms of literature, or is there more a question of the adequacy of their representation in existing narrative forms like the short story or the novel as in, for example, Gayatri Spivak's articulations of the stories of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi or the debate around Fredric Jameson's notion of national allegory in Third World writing?2 What happens when, as in the case of Western Europe since the Renaissance, there has been a complicity between the rise of \"literature\" as a secular institution and the development of forms

Figures of Colonial Resistance

Abstract: As AN ETHICS OF READING THAT BEGAN BY EXCAVATING the Colonial past stratified in Western forms of knowledge, colonial discourse theory is currently contending with the problem of articulating resistance.1 Because Western authority over the representation of its colonies involves the narrative containment of anticolonial insurgency, an attention to native disruptions and restructurings of eurocentric discourses is now recognized as crucial to any critical investigation of colonialism. Edward Said's Orientalism, a pioneering study of the power/knowledge relations in a "disciplining" of the Arab-Islamic world, remains a paradigmatic text for the nascent field of colonial discourse theory. However, Said has also come under criticism for over-estimating the success of Orientalism in confining the whole East to a theatrical staging of "the Orient."2 Are the colonized

Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Postcolonial Women's Texts

Abstract: What is the critic's society? For whom does the critic write? For Mr. Dele Bus-Stop of IdiOro? Or for the Appointments and Promotions Committee and Learned Journals? Unquestionably there is an intellectual cop-out in the career of any critics who cover reams of paper with unceasing lament over the failure of this or that writer to write for the masses of the people, when they see themselves assiduously engage—with a remorseless exclusivity—only with the incestuous productivity of their own academic, bourgeois-situated literature. —WoIe Soyinka

Molly's Flow: The Writing of "Penelope" and the Question of Women's Language

Abstract: If Bloom and Stephen, in their singularity and in their interchange, seem to represent language's two principles, Molly might represent the extreme of language at its loosest and most flowing. (Gottfried 35) To enter the mind of Molly Bloom after so much time spent in the minds of Stephen and Leopold is to plunge into a flowing river. If we have hitherto been exploring the waste land, here are the refreshing, life-giving waters that alone can renew it. The flow is the flow of Nature. . . . (Blamires 246)

Resistance and Identity in Beur Narratives

Abstract: On 17 October 1961 an unknown number of Algerian immigrants were killed when police went on the rampage against a peaceful demonstration in Paris. That day, members of the normally docile immigrant community had marched in large numbers to protest against the highly repressive measures to which they had been subjected under emergency regulations imposed during the Algerian war, then in its seventh year. The physical ferocity with which the immigrants' challenge to the might of the French state was broken was matched by the thoroughness with which news of these events was suppressed in the French media. Although memories of 17 October have been transmitted orally through the years among immigrants and their families, it was not until almost a quarter of a century later that the full extent of police violence against the Algerian community was brought home to the French public in a spate of printed and broadcast narratives, both documentary and fictional. Among these was the first novel of a young author, Nacer Kettane, titled Le Sourire de Brahim (1985). The opening chapter of the novel describes the death of the eponymous protagonist's younger brother in his mother's arms during

Stifled Back Answers: The Gender Politics of Art in Joyce's "The Dead"

Abstract: Although the first sentence of \"The Dead\" tells us that 44LiIy, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet\" (D 175), Lily does not complain about her lot. Indeed, that is why she gets on so well with her mistresses. We learn a little later, \"But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders so that she got on well with her three mistresses. They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers\" (176). If we decode the bourgeois agenda of the narrative voice1 at this moment, its intention to offer a politically complacent representa-

Minimalism and the American Dream: "Shiloh" by Bobbie Ann Mason and "Preservation" by Raymond Carver

Abstract: I was sick of reading about the alienated hero. I think where I wind up now is writing about people who are trying to get into the mainstream, or they're in the mainstream, just trying to live their lives the best they can. . . . When they go to the shopping mall, and many of them go just to window shop, they're looking at deliverance from a hard way of life. . . . Many of my characters are caught up in the myth of progress; from their point of view it means liberation, the promise of a better life. —Bobbie Ann Mason

Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson, and: Ellen Glasgow's Reasonable Doubts: A Collection of Her Writings (review)

Abstract: The opportunity to know more about two of America's most intriguing women writers of the twentieth century is richly—though differently—afforded by these two recent books. Oppenheimer's Private Demons is the first full-length biography of the author best-known for her short story \"The Lottery,\" and Raper's is a collection of previously uncollected nonfiction and one short story written by Glasgow between 1895 and 1941, the most productive decades of the novelist's career. The differences between these two books derive from more than genre, however: Oppenheimer, a journalist, has invested herself in the frequently painful life of Shirley Jackson, attempting with considerable success to understand her subject's unhappy childhood, her deeply committed though tumultuous marriage to critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, and the mystical turns of mind that led Jackson to write such works as The Haunting of Hill House and \"The Lottery.\" Raper, on the other hand, is so detached a scholar of Glasgow's work that despite the usefulness of his collection, the sexism of his introductory remarks and the intrusive over-documentation of the text threaten to obscure Glasgow's own work. Private Demons successfully revises the only other extended account of Shirley Jackson's life: Hyman's introduction to The Magic of Shirley Jachon (1966), a paean of praise that belies the fact that at the time he wrote it, two years after Jackson's death at the age of 48, he was married to the much-younger woman he married immediately after her death. Jackson and Hyman had a relationship that would now be termed a codependency; their mutual reliance on alcohol, food, cigarettes— and, in Jackson's case, stimulants and tranquilizers—left scars on their four children, about whom Jackson wrote so amusingly in Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Interviews with Jackson's children, along with letters she wrote to the parents from whom she professed to be estranged after she—an overweight, unattractive adolescent—rejected their upper-middle-class values, are important sources for this biography, and Oppenheimer uses them well, bringing a journalist's trained objectivity to bear on essentially subjective material.

Resistance to Paralysis in Dubliners

Abstract: As everyone knows, paralysis reigns supreme in Joyce's Dubliners. Or does it? Even Joyce himself was concerned to suggest a way out of the paralysis that blocks all exits in the first fourteen stories: \"The Dead,\" by celebrating Irish hospitality, as Joyce put it, was supposed to redress the balance by offering some glimpses of light. Criticism has then divided, conventionally, over whether the snow symbolism connotes purification and rebirth or rather a massive reassertion of paralysis. I want to argue in this essay that, from a marxist-feminist viewpoint, \"The Dead\" does indeed offer ways out of paralysis that have nothing to do with that final symbolism. And not just in \"The Dead\"; other stories also occasionally flicker with small signs of resistance to the deadening paralysis. But (a question not often enough asked) where does the paralysis come from? Perhaps the answer—Catholicism and colonialism—is too obvious to be stressed, yet it does no harm, I think, to politicize the obvious and recuperate it from the dark realm of patriarchal \"common sense\" into the light of a feminist analysis. Besides paralysis, two of the key effects of catholic/colonialist oppression are, first, what Georg Lukács calls \"the contemplative stance\" (further defined below) and, second, a loss of linguistic ownership. Adapting this term from Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, I

An American Messiah: Myth in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep

Abstract: Henry Roth's Call It Sleep has moved and delighted—and puzzled— two generations of readers. Sometimes regarded as the best of American proletarian novels or as the best novel growing out of the Great Depression, it is in fact neither proletarian in any strict sense nor directly concerned with the economic depression of the 1930s. Since its publication in 1934 and particularly since its reissue in 1960, a succession of commentators have produced something approaching a consensus that the novel is at its core the record of a religious experience and that the novel is a distinctly Jewish work.1 I would suggest that the religious theme developed in Call It Sleep depicts the birth and childhood of a New-World messiah whose story con-

Joyce's Modernist Woman: Whose Last Word?

Abstract: undetermined space, readers of Ulysses finally collide with the novel's obscure object of desire: we are in bed with Molly Bloom.1 The text and its ending are designed to please an audience of heterosexual male readers, especially those who perceive themselves as \"womanly,\" sensitive, postDedalian, those for whom Leopold Bloom can stand as Everyman. Certainly Joyce recognized this pleasure of the text, having created a private code that equates the chapter's four key words with parts of a woman's body that excited him sexually. With characteristic irony and suggestiveness, in Finnegans Wake he even parodies the response his feminine ending may provoke in that difficult audience, the male scholars:

D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel: Mirrors, Triangles, and Sublime Repression

Abstract: The horror of D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel is also its passion. Its narrative structure propels the reader backward and forward in an obsessive quest to explain the convergence of contraries that constitutes the novel's motifs. Sex and violence parallel and coalesce as the narrative movement conflates the pleasure of the text with its terrifying vision. The reader moves through the dizzying succession of narrative voices, each undermining its predecessor, and seeks an authoritative interpretation through repetitive clues. However, the notions of authority and repetition become attached to a death force, culminating in the Babi Yar chapter, which defies the closure of each of the previous chapters and is in turn

Narrative in Prison: Stories from the Palestinian Intifada

Abstract: The stranger-than-fiction story of Um Khadr tells the life of a Palestinian woman living under Israeli occupation. When she had been married for ten years, Um Khadr's husband, Abd al-Rahman, traveled to Brazil where he hoped to earn enough money to support his wife and their two sons and two daughters at home. Um Khadr did not hear from the man she married for another thirty years. Her youngest daughter is a deaf mute. Her first daughter was abandoned by her own husband who left her behind with five children when he married a Syrian woman. Khadr, the Palestinian mother's eldest son, is in an Israeli prison, sentenced to ninety-six years behind bars. His younger brother Ghazi spent ten years

Jewish-American Literature's Lost-and-Found Department: How Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Reimagine Their Significant Dead

Abstract: Herzog's compulsive letter-writing is, of course, an index of his psychic agitation and of his tragicomic effort to "have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends" (2) After all, he is a man whose previously sustaining roles—as husband, as father, as intellectual— have failed; he is a formerly brilliant scholar with more scribbled notes than manuscript pages His compulsive letters are, in effect, a desperate effort to shore up fragments against his ruin But that said, Herzog's letters—unmailed and often mental, filled with the alternating currents of high comedy and Big Ideas—are also the very stuff of experimental fiction If, as Bellow once suggested, Ulysses is a "comedy of information,"1 a novel in which popular science, snatches

Roger's Version: Updike's Negative-Solid Model of The Scarlet Letter

Abstract: As Frederick Crews has noted, John Updike carefully parallels his characters and events in Roger's Version to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (7). Professor Roger Lambert shares a name and role with Roger Chillingworth as the cuckolded older husband; Esther Lambert resembles Hester Prynne enacting the younger adulterous wife; as for Pearl, Updike gives us Paula, an elfin illegitimate little girl who asks the same question of every man who enters her mother's life: \"Da?\" Like Pearl, she accuses her father figures: \"Da bad\\\" (258). Dale Kohler's occupation of the Arthur-Dimmesdale post derives from more than their sharing the syllable \"dale\"; Dale also expresses the Hawthornean Puritan concept of the wilderness as the Devil's country. Speaking of a vacation in Idaho that plays no other role in the novel, Dale says: \"with these woods all around, to the horizon on all sides, and the little noises they would make—it just seemed all so hideously Goifless, if that makes any sense. I mean, I could feel the Devil. He was out there\" (203). Although the novel contains another major character, Verna, whose place will be examined later, the similarity of names, roles, and attitudes can key us, in reading Roger's Version, to note Updike's reversal strategy. Words addressed by Dale Köhler to a panel deciding whether or not to fund his scientific search for God provide an apt metaphor for Hawthorne's concept as applied in Updike's novel: \"In computerized industrial design, such as the making of a die or a mold, negative shapes have an importance equal to that of their positive counterparts\" (216). We can have a metaphor for realistic fiction because Dale plans, like a fiction writer, to \"simulate our actual world, not in its [total] content so much as in its complexity\" (216). In a two-character story, the operative image would be the photograph and its negative. The protagonist's story, the glossy color print, seems much superior to the ugly negative of the antagonist's story—until we consider that the negative actually produced the print. The negative seems ugly only because it is a step closer to the world, one step less finished by artifice. A guide to the literary impact of the image is Roger's study of the Early Christian heretics whose writings, although effectively suppressed, continue to fascinate scholars through their negative images in stern attacks upon them by the Church Fathers. However, a photographic negative is flat and is thus an inadequately complex model for a great novel; we need at least two more dimensions. Dale's computergraphic die or mold adds the third dimension needed to accommodate the third

George Moore on Parnassus: Letters (1900-1933) to Secretaries, Publishers, Printers, Agents, Literati, Friends, and Acquaintances (review)

Abstract: Through the letters and commentary in this volume, the Irish writer George Moore is revealed as a man and artist far more complex and important than most works on him suggest, one who played a significant role in the Irish Literary Renaissance.

Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner, and: The Crossing of the Ways: William Faulkner, the South, and the Modern World, and: Fiction, Film, and Faulkner: The Art on Adaptation (review)

Abstract: behaviour. Every fisherman who ever lived has experienced that feeling of injured pride when the fish just aren't there. In Hemingway the feeling took on colossal proportions.\" Clearly, the Sotolongo photographs, \"the majority never seen before,\" are the raison d'Ãatre of this book. Many of them are full page (10 χ 121, showing Hemingway drunk, lounging in a rocking chair, embracing Mary, sitting naked on a beach, standing beside an elephant (and looking somewhat elephantine himself), and so on. The effect, in short, is like going through Hemingway's private photograph album, had he had one, which we are assured he had not. The concluding set of photographs by Pairault are of the sort one might expect to find in an expensively got up cathedral catalogue—in color and artfully composed shots of Hemingway's Cuban house and its various relics, including one of a table napkin, Hemingway's shoes, boots, glasses, and vest. There is even one of his toilet.

Molly's Resistance to the Union: Marriage and Colonialism in Dublin, 1904

Abstract: What can James Joyce's character, Molly Bloom, tell us about AngloIrish politics at the turn of the century? If we agree with M. M. Bakhtin that the "internal politics of [a novel's] style (how the elements are put together) is determined by its external politics (its relation to alien discourse)" (284), then it is interesting to ask what elements of Molly's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses can act as indexes of the external political situation of women in Dublin in 1904. A soliloquy is not a dialogue, but it can be a form of responsive speech that reacts to and reflects upon other relationships. Seen dialogically, Molly's knowledge, her silence, her biases, and her dissatisfactions can all signal much more than they might if we considered them in isolation. Even her relationships with men can reveal something about the conjugal suppression of Irish women in 1904 as well as the more general civil suppression of the Irish under George Wyndham's Unionist government during this part of her lifetime. Not surprisingly, Ireland's status as a colonial nation, with England playing "the predominant partner" in the Empire, affected the institution of marriage within Ireland where questions of autonomy within partnership could also be at issue. We might say that the Irish nationalist drive toward Home Rule in the early 1900s left its mark on the ideas

In Our Time as Self-Begetting Fiction

Abstract: In 1923, one year before Ernest Hemingway published the first in our time, T. S. Eliot proclaimed that the novel had \"ended with Flaubert and with James\" (482-483). > Any writer responding to the atrocities of World War One at that time could have complained, as Philip Roth did in 1961, that \"The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist\" (224). Whereas conditions of crisis in the Sixties led many American writers to direct their creative energies into chronicling actual, rather than fictitious, events (new journalism, as Peter Hamill named it2), many writers in the early Twenties responded to the destructive horrors of their time by simultaneously transforming actual events into literature and exploring this creative process through metaliterature. E. E. Cummings' The Enormous Room (1922), for example, opens with an introduction comprised of a series of nonfictional letters and summaries of the responses they received. Written during World War One by Cummings' father asking U.S. government officials to arrange for his son's release from a French concentration camp, the letters establish a nonfictional premise for the book, which in turn uses allusions to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, illustrations, and typographical innovations to flaunt its status as invention. Thus, as Patricia Waugh claims all metafiction does, this autobiographical novel \"self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality\" (2). The elaborate system of literary allusions and notes explaining these allusions in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and William Carlos Williams' explicit incorporation of the idea of the great American novel into his 1923 work, The Great American Novel, function similarly. Although Ernest Hemingway is usually labeled as a realist, his first full-length work, In Our Time, also exhibits many metafictional qualities. Ezra Pound suggested as much when he called the series in which Hemingway's first in our time was published an \"Inquest into the state of contemporary English prose\" (in our time, inside back cover). Yet although a few critics have noticed metafictional aspects in In Our Time, none to my knowledge has explored the metafictional ramifications of its announced inquisitional purposes. This essay approaches In Our Time

Anticipatory Fiction: Bread and Wine and Liberation Theology

Abstract: The grounds of my hope are very complex because I'm a Christian and a whole lot of other things. Or at least I subscribe to that discourse in which God is a significant signifying term. I also subscribe to Gramsci's optimism of the will. Yet as long as you are part of the struggle, pure hope becomes abstract because the actual historical process produces tremendous setbacks and certain small gains. —Cornell West1

Requiems for Revolutions: Race-Sex Archetypes in Two African Novels

Abstract: Nuruddin Farah's A Naked Needle (1976), and Ayi Kwei Armah's Why Are We So Blest? (1972), are both novels set in failing revolutions in postcolonial states, one a decade after independence and the other immediately in its wake. They are also novels that in their treatment of racially mixed marriages and relationships make considerable play, either of a serious or satiric kind, with race-sex archetypes inherited from colonialism. This article will attempt to determine the value die authors attach to the latter paradigms and what connection they have, if any, with the process of revolutionary decline. Koschin, die mercurial narrator of Farah's novel, is at once raconteur and reporter, romantic revolutionary and astute political commentator, idealist and realist. At the visit to Mogadiscio of his English fiancA©e Nancy, diree years after General Syad Barre's Soviet-backed military coup of 1969, Koschin is still determinedly celebrating the "revolutionary" event that ended the chaos of colonial parliamentary models: "Before this blessed Revolution, Nancy, there were over sixty political parties in this Country of Curiosity. . . . Each major tribe had a party to its name, each major party had a major tribe to support her" (99). ' His euphoria, however,

The Transformation of the English Novel: 1890-1930, and: The Hero's Tale: Narrators in the Early Modern Novel, and: The Empathetic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self (review)

Abstract: certainties expressed now and again throughout the present collection of essays. Although there is a variety of compelling pieces in the collection, from Godzich's essay on emergent literatures and Aldo Scaglione's treatment of education and social background in the Renaissance to Pauline Yu's contribution on Chinese poetry and Robert Magliola's discussion of sexuality and mystic desire, the volume comes together in terms of the unity of perspective or of discipline only when that unity is forced upon it. If this ongoing tension gives the lie to any notion of \"the comparative perspective,\" it also demonstrates the very real vitality that comparatist studies, at times almost despite themselves, continue both to embody and to generate; and in this sense, The Comparative Perspective on Literature is a genuinely stimulating volume.

Hardy's Laodicean Narrative

Abstract: In A Laodicean, stealthy observation leads to knowing. Characters prefer to be out of sight; they move uneasily among each other, enter and exit awkwardly, whisper within earshot of their enemies, and stand around waiting their turns to perform. Critics, who in the same breath call the work a spectator's novel and a failure, dislike its sensationalism and undeveloped characters (see Peter Larkin). One of its chief faults, writes Larkin, is an inconsistent vision. Paula Power, for example, \"remains largely dependent for her existence on the impression she creates in other characters,\" but because we \"rarely see, independently and in separation from the viewpoint of other characters, what they claim to see in Paula, we come to regard [her] presence as dangerously close to vacuity, and to see them as staring rather blankly\" (84). In identifying the novel's problem, Larkin has exposed a phenomenological assumption about reading: by expecting to see \"independently,\" but the way the characters

The Compositional Self in William Gaddis' JR

Abstract: William Gaddis has long been counted among the most reticent of authors. Although not nearly as inaccessible as Pynchon, and still less actively pursued, he too is a writer of clear stature whose absence from public and institutional life has itself created publicity. Thomas LeClair perceived this in 1981, when he grouped Gaddis, in company with Pynchon, Salinger, and DeLiIIo, in a Horizon roundup of \"Missing Writers,\" and Cynthia Ozick, reviewing Carpenter's Gothic on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, identified Gaddis briefly as the writer who is famous for not being famous enough. These are descriptions that come close to the many paradoxes, disappointments, and unfortunate ironies

Telling Lies and Stories: Peter Carey's Bliss

Abstract: There are many stories in Peter Carey's Buss, and not a few lies, but there is one story that enjoys a special, privileged status. This is the story of Little Titch that Harry Joy invents under duress and tells to Constable Box and Sergeant Hastings, \"the only original story he would ever tell\" (76). I want to examine the story of Little Titch, and the sequence of other stories in which it is embedded, as a point of entry into Carey's larger \"story\" in Bliss, the bildungsroman of Harry Joy's mid-life crisis, his fall into hell, and his eventual attaining of \"bliss.\" A story about telling stories, Bliss is postmodern in its awareness of the problematic nature of trying \"to grasp reality through a fictitious construct\" (Wright 150), and yet it uses such problematic stories to make narrative sense of extrafictional experience.1