Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 1990"

The Dark Side of Magical Realism: Science, Oppression, and Apocalypse in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Abstract: In criticism of the Latin American novel, \"magical realism\" has typically been described as an impulse to create a fictive world that can somehow compete with the \"insatiable fount of creation\" that is Latin America's actual history.1 This concept of magical realism received perhaps its most influential endorsement in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of Gabriel GarcÃ-a Márquez. The famous Colombian novelist began this speech, suggestively enough, with an account of the \"meticulous log\" kept by Magellan's navigator, Antonia Pigafetta. In the course of this fateful exploration of the \"Southern American continent,\" the imaginative Florentine recorded such oddities as \"a monstrosity of an animal with the head and ears of a mule, the body of a camel, the hooves of a deer, and the neigh of a horse\" (207). In the course of his Nobel speech, Garcia Márquez recorded many less imaginative but equally improbable facts— \"in the past eleven years twenty million Latin American children have died before their second birthday. Nearly one hundred and twenty thousand have disappeared as a consequence of repression. ... A country created from all these Latin Americans in exile or enforced emigration would have a larger population than Norway\" (\"Solitude of Latin America\" 208, 209)—on and on, as if he were trying to combat a plague of amnesia.

Miscegenation and "the Dicta of Race and Class": The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen's Passing

Abstract: The 1986 Rutgers University Press edition of Nella Larsen's two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), represents an important step in the resurrection of a neglected writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen was the first AfricanAmerican woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing (1930), and both of her novels were highly acclaimed before her literary career ended abruptly in the early 1930s for reasons that are still not wholly clear. There were well-publicized but unproven charges of plagiarism of a short story, yet, like most details of Larsen's life, the reasons for her disappearance from the literary scene remain a mystery.1 Larsen wrote no more than the two novels and the one story titled "Sanctuary," and in 1963 she died in obscurity after working some thirty years as a nurse in Brooklyn. The Rutgers edition has made Larsen's novels more accessible not only by publishing both in one volume with a substantial introduction but also by annotating references in the text to public figures, events, and parlance of the late 1920s. There is, however, a reference to "the Rhinelander case" in an important

A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon, and: Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis (review)

Abstract: defender of the New Criticism comes to exemplify \"postmodern theory.\" Nonetheless, Johnston does bring to the novel the analytical skills needed to convince readers that Gaddis' relation to current theory—whether intended or not— is more than superficial. And if it is doubtful that any single study will put the 950-page-plus Recognitions on course lists, Johnston's should at least encourage readings in academic quarters where both the novel's literary and cultural importance will be perceived. John Kuehl's more wide-ranging Study of Postmodern Antirealistic American Fiction is clearly intended for the larger and more traditional audience within the American university. A series of close readings organized thematically under chapter headings such as \"Reflexivity,\" \"Maximalism versus Minimalism,\" \"Conspiracy and Paranoia,\" and \"Entropy,\" it is a traditionalist's approach to a dense, formally innovative fiction. These are fine, clear explications that will be gratefully received by anyone who chooses to teach or write on neglected books such as McElroy's Hind's Kidnap, Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan's Stew, Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling, or Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat. Kuehl, however, like most English professors writing on the subject, is unwilling to make qualitative distinctions among the various works and authors he examines. Much the same might be said of Johnston's rather indiscriminate use of his theoretical sources (so that the work of Jean Baudrillard, for example, is allowed to carry as much authority as the more actively critical Deleuze and Bakhtin). Yet Johnston's theoretical bias is an indication of the cultural significance of Gaddis' writing. Whereas, in the absence of any theoretical context shaping Kuehl's taxonomy, or some argument for the more than literary importance of the categorized themes, effects, and antirealistic styles, the work of explication—admirable as it is—seems premature and likely to remain, regrettably, of little more than \"academic\" interest.

Atwood's Time: Hiding Art in Cat's Eye

Abstract: Like most of Atwood's novels Cat's Eye has more than one face and tells more than one story, offering a text which by its very structure is open to several possible constructions. It is also deceptive in the way of other Atwood texts in that it offers a coherent surface in the realistic mode which, with its critical reflection of contemporary manners and its engagement with timely issues, appears to be sufficient in itself as reflection and criticism. Yet it carries marks that disturb the sufficiency of this reading and demand a returning and reconstruction of the text. Elaine Risley, a successful, middle-aged painter, returning from Vancouver to Toronto for a retrospective exhibition of her work, tells two stories: one of her stay in Toronto and the other of her past. The second, told in the interstices of the first, forms the main body of the narrative. In both stories the obsessive presence of Elaine's "best friend," Cordelia, identifies Elaine's relationship with her as the unifying motive of the two braided narratives. When the narrative of the past is absorbed into the narrative of present time at the end, Elaine leaves for Vancouver, apparently with the past behind her but with a sadness which comes from facing the absence of friendship.

"It all depends on what story you hear": Historiographic Metafiction and Colin Johnson's Dr. Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World and Witi Ihimaera's The Matriarch

Abstract: In \"Parade,\" one of the stories collected in Waiariki and Other Stories, Patricia Grace maintains that Maoris will no longer allow themselves to be put on show, like \"Animals in cages to be stared at . . . [or] museum pieces, curios, antiques, shells under glass\" (86). The narrator, refusing to be a \"relic\" of a dying culture any longer, calls on the strength and determination of her people, which, when combined with the sea, land, and air, creates a formidable force:

James, "The Aspern Papers," and the Ethics of Literary Biography

Abstract: Although it has inspired a voluminous body of published scholarship, \"The Aspern Papers\" is a more intensely personal and topical story than hitherto recognized. To be sure, its central source is well-known: Henry James wrote the nouvelle shortly after learning in January 1887 that a Boston art critic and retired sea captain named Silsbee had schemed to pilfer the papers of Claire Clairmont, Byron's former mistress, who had settled in Italy with her niece. In the story, serialized in 1888 and revised for the New York Edition in 1908, an unnamed narrator also plots to filch papers from Jeffrey Aspern's quondam mistress Juliana Bordereau and her dowdy niece (or daughter) Tina. Most criticism of the tale focuses on one or two formal issues—the reliability of the narrator and the culpability or rapacity of the Bordereaus. I do not presume that such earlier approaches to the work are wrong. However, they neglect both James's own experience as a \"publishing scoundrel\" and the circumstances of a recent publishing scandal. \"The Aspern Papers\" offers, I believe, pointed commentary on the ethics of literary biography inspired in no small part by James's own research into the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne for his monograph in the English Men of Letters series in 1879 and by the controversy surrounding the publication oÃNathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife by Hawthorne's son Julian five years later. James clearly conceived Aspern as a type of the elder Hawthorne—not, as usually assumed, as a version of Byron or Shelley.1 Like Hawthorne, Aspern (the

"A Losing Game in the End": Aestheticism and Homosexuality in Cather's "Paul's Case"

Abstract: Willa Cather's homosexuality, for years a well-guarded but scarcely well-kept secret, is by now widely acknowledged. Sharon O'Brien's Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice sensitively traces Cather's personal and artistic development, her emergence from the male-identified male impersonator of her adolescence and youth into the mature woman writer who created the first strong female heroes in American literature. Central to this transformation were Cather's eventual liberation from her early internalized male aesthetic after a long and difficult struggle and her acceptance of her lesbianism, even as she recognized the need to conceal her sexual identity as \"the thing not named.\" As O'Brien remarks, \"Throughout her literary career, Cather was both the writer transforming the self in art and the lesbian writer at times forced to conceal 'unnatural' love by projecting herself into male disguises\" (215).1 What has not been sufficiently noted, however, is Cather's early contribution to gay male literature and to the debate about homosexuality sparked by the Wilde scandal. More particularly, \"Paul's Case,\" the acclaimed story that marks the beginning of Cather's artistic maturity after a prolonged period of apprenticeship, has not yet been placed in the context of its author's growing awareness of the limits of the masculine

The Road to Armageddon: The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870-1914, and: Mark of the Beast: Death and Degradation in the Literature of the Great War (review)

Abstract: During the past fifteen years, important studies of Great War writing have appeared, including Paul Fussell's Great War and Modern Memory (1977) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's No Man's Land, Volume 1: The War of the Words (1988). Jane Marcus continues to provoke debate with revisionist essays on overlooked women's war narratives, some of which have recently appeared, with afterwords by Marcus, in editions from The Feminist Press. In The Road to Armageddon, Cecil Eby returns to the forty-year period before the Great War to examine the roots of \"the martial spirit\" in English popular literature from 1870 to 1914. The authors Eby selects for discussion include the famous: H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie, G. A. Henty, Robert Baden-Powell, Thomas Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle, Henry Newbolt, and Rupert Brooke. Also treated are some lesser-known but influential writers of invasion stories and patriotic poetry, William Le Queux and G. E. Hornung. Eby's book documents the late Victorian and Edwardian hunger for invasion stories, public-school novels, and adventure and detective stories— narratives mat challenged long-held notions of British moral and military superiority and aroused British distrust of all nonislanders.

Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (review)

Abstract: Abrams, M. H. Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory. Ed. Michael Fischer. New York: Norton, 1989. 429 pp. $27.50. Biasin, Gian-Paolo. MÃ3ntale, Debussy, and Modernism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. 158 pp. $29.95 cloth; pb. $14.95. Giddings, Robert, Keith Shelby, and Chris Wensley. Screening tL· Novel: The TL·ory and Practice of Literary Dramatization. New York: St. Martin's, 1990. 174 pp. No price given. Herman, Luc, Kris Humbeeck, and Geert Lernout. (Dis)continuities: Essays on Paul de Man. Postmodern Studies 2. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989. 239 pp. No price given. Hollingham, Penny A. Care for the Elderly. Penguin Nursing Revision Notes. New York: Penguin, 1990. 71 pp. No price given. Jauss, Hans Robert. Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding. 1982. Ed. Michael Hays. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. 283 pp. No price given. Joshi, S. 7Ae Weird Tale. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990. 292 pp. $27.50 cloth; pb. $12.95. Lipsitz, George. 7¡'me Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. 306 pp. $35.00 cloth; pb. $14.95. Mailloux, Stephen. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. 190 pp. $24.95 cloth; pb. $8.95. Moran, Michael G. and Martin J. Jacobi, eds. Research in Basic Writing: A Bibliographic Sourcebook. Westport: Greenwood, 1990. 259 pp. $49.95. Murphy, Patrick D., and Vernon Hyles, eds. 7Ae Poetic Fantastic: Studies in an Evolving Genre. Westport: Greenwood, 1989. 226 pp. $39.95. Schwartz, Richard B., ed. Theory and Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois P, 1990. 193 pp. $22.95. Yaeger, Patricia, and Beth Kowaleski, eds. Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. 318 pp. No price given.

The Fiction of Correspondence: Letters and History

Abstract: Were he French, John Barth might have titled his 1979 novel LETTERS with a similarly self-reflexive pun to emphasize its preoccupation with textuality and the American past: \"histoire.\"1 English may demand that we choose between \"history\" and \"story,\" but the French term broadmindedly embraces both, extends the range of signification even to \"idle story, untruth, falsehood,\" and suspends questions of verifiability or referentiality. History, in LETTERS, plays across this entire range of textual possibility even as it spans three centuries of American revolution and social unrest, Indian conspiracy, diplomatic intrigue, and civil rights struggle, and crosses and recrosses borders from the Niagara Frontier and Chesapeake backwaters to Elba and St. Helena. \"While I don't conceive the work in hand to be a historical novel,\" writes the Author to one of the seven characters whose correspondence constitutes LETTERS, \"I evidently do have capital-// History on my mind\" (431)—a history at

A Code of Her Own: Attitudes Toward Women in Willa Cather's Short Fiction

Abstract: Efforts by feminist scholars to recover Willa Cather’s literary reputation and to ensure her place in a male-dominated canon have caused some feminist critics to dismiss aspects of her personality too complex to fit into established categories of feminist literary criticism In particular, feminist critics have not admitted the extent of Willa Cather’s misogyny, even though it informs the male code of behavior that is the controlling consciousness of all her fiction In her 1987 biography of Cather, Sharon O’Brien explores Cather’s difficulty in reconciling her gender with the male-dominated literary tradition she hoped to join But O’Brien does not acknowledge the depth or significance of Cather’s hostility toward women She admits that Cather had misogynistic views: “her early college journalism frequently expressed contempt for women in tones ranging from amused dismissal to bitter condemnation” (122) However, O’Brien argues that Cather’s misogyny disappeared as she matured and asserts that Cather experienced what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar term “the woman writer’s anxiety of authorship” (83), that even though she denounced women writers, “Somewhere in her consciousness she knew that women could be strong and vibrant and creative storytellers” (125) As Cather matured, she eventually abandoned the male values she once associated with art, thereby reconciling the opposing roles of woman and artist Thus, O’Brien insists, Cather was able to write novels that speak from a woman’s experience However, O’Brien’s effort to make Cather “fit” into a female literary tradition not only distorts the central themes of her fiction but also diminishes Cather’s complex and conflicted literary imagination For whatever reason, during her adolescence Willa Cather admired male behavior and even adopted male dress; her apparent identifica-

D. H. Lawrence's Mother as Sleeping Beauty: The "Still Queen" of His Poems and Fictions

Abstract: D. H. Lawrence's deep and painful love for his mother is one of the best known facts of literary biography. He was himself utterly candid about its nature and effects, writing to Rachel Annand Taylor as Mrs. Lawrence lay dying in 1910, "We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal. We knew each other by instinct. ... It has been rather terrible, and has made me, in some respects, abnormal" (Collected Letters I 69). Readers of Sons and Lovers and the powerful elegies and mother poems for Lydia Beardsall Lawrence may surmise how fervently her son hoped by writing them both to "shed

"Possession Granted by a Different Lease": Alexandra Bergson's Imaginative Conquest of Cather's Nebraska

Abstract: Ever since O Pioneers! was first reviewed in 1913 as \"a study of the struggles and privations of the foreign emigrants in the herculean task of subduing the untamed prairie land of the Far West,\"1 it has become enshrined in our literature as a national epic. And yet, ironically, the actual chronicle of the pioneer's taming of the wild frontier is precisely what Cather omits in a sixteen-year hiatus in the plot. Moreover, she never once depicts her heroine Alexandra Bergson physically working the land. Although Alexandra has typically been seen as a representative of the pioneers who settled the prairie, she can be better understood as a representative of Cather, herself a pioneer staking out a new territory in art. At its deepest level, 0 Pioneers! tells not the dramatic story of the pioneer's conquest of the prairie but rather the imaginative story of an artist's conquest of her true literary material—a material that, as we shall see, lay not, finally, in Nebraska but in consciousness. The real pioneers whose footsteps marked the way for Alexandra's imaginative conquest

Evelyn Scott's The Narrow House

Abstract: Narrow house, narrow minds, narrow vision, narrow, narrow, narrow. The Narrow House (1921) is Evelyn Scott's first novel, followed by Narcissus (1922) and The Golden Door (1925), a trilogy in which the books are related through the continuing lives of the characters, with the focus changing in each book. In The Narrow House, a subjective, psychological novel, Scott's approach makes each character equally important as the novel deals with the people living within and connected to the \"narrow house.\" There is no one central character, no protagonist; all the characters are antagonists. In The Narrow House, the reader is exposed to Scott's tough intellect, her insightful observations of human behavior, and her perceptive intuitions. The comparison made of Scott with Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford as psychological novelists is valid.

"The Nature of a Text": Ford and Conrad in Plato's Pharmacy

Abstract: If reading and writing are one," writes Jacques Derrida at the beginning of "Plato's Pharmacy," "if reading is writing, this oneness designates neither undifferentiated (con)fusion nor identity at perfect rest; the is that couples reading with writing must rip apart" (Dissemination 63-64). To read (and write) with/against Derrida is thus to commit a certain violence against conventional modes of literary practice. For Derrida reading and writing are transgressive acts that disrupt and destabilize the meaning of the symbolic order they posit; and the "violence of the letter" (Grammatology 101) activated by writing/reading is constitutive of the nature of textuality itself as a structure of traces inhabited by absence and negation, ruptured by the gaps of spacing that (de)compose signification, and rift by the radical otherness of difference which threatens the annihilation of any meaning predicated upon it. "Textuality being constituted by differences and by differences from differences, it is by nature absolutely heterogenous and

"Taking Hands and Dancing in (Dis)unity": Story to Storied in Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" and "A Room"

Abstract: To view Doris Lessing's short fiction in relation to \"the coercive network of seeing, power and surveillance\" (Seltzer 508) that characterizes the literature of the realist enterprise invites triply the hazardous. Of first concern is the author's well-known opposition to theoretics. On principle, Lessing dismisses critical terms like realism (and its contemporary companion, feminism) as prescriptive about rather than descriptive of her project. Her position (itself prescriptive, especially as polemicized in the 197

Shrike as the Modernist Anti-Hero in Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts

Abstract: In a discussion of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts in American Apocalypses, Douglas Robinson challenges the conventional alignment of Miss Lonelyhearts with Christ and Shrike with Satan, pointing out that such a thematic reduction overlooks the evidence that West more often aligns his antagonists the other way by presenting Lonelyhearts as a restless Satan wandering through chaos and Shrike as the Christ figure whose rhetoric becomes \"his image of order, his rock, which guarantees his invulnerability throughout the novel\" (126). Although Robinson does not elaborate on this concept, a close textual study of the novella will show that his reversal of traditional roles is viable, especially in the character of Shrike, who exposes the hypocrisy and irrationality of Lonelyhearts' religious mania with an unrelenting nihilism that identifies him as the modernist antihero. A general note on the nature of heroism in modern fiction seems appropriate here. In Radical Innocence Ihab Hassan asserts that, because part of the make-up of the hero in American fiction of the past was his ability to mediate between the Self and the World, the restlessness and rebellion in the heroic soul remained quiescent, and the hero's struggles affirmed the harmony of the inner life of man and the external world of God, nature, and society. Today, however, that harmony is rapidly disappearing:

Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba (review)

Abstract: also connects two forms of popular entertainment from modern culture—sports and circus—with the carnival spirit underlying Olesha's literary works, a spirit that culminates in Envy with that \"great carnivalistic event,\" the soccer match. The author concludes his study with a chapter on \"The Poetics of Dialogue,\" where the theories of Shklovsky and Bakhtin are once again invoked, this time to provide the framework for a discussion of the widespread ambivalence that informs Olesha's writings. Competing narrative voices and perspectival viewpoints (adult and child, artist and athlete, and so on), Peppard notes, combine to create a highly complex and dialogical literary structure. Peppard's monograph provides a number of illuminating observations about important (and, until now, largely unexplored) aspects of Olesha's poetics. One shortcoming, however, is the author's unfortunate tendency in his discussions to refrain from addressing broader implications raised by the notions of carnival, defamiliarization, and dialogicality. One wishes that Peppard, who is clearly knowledgeable about his topic, would have strayed more often from his narrow rhetorical plan, thrown off his exceedingly reverent (and thus sometimes restrictive) discipleship to Shklovsky, Bakhtin, and Morson, and speculated more freely and expansively about Olesha's poetics. Nonetheless, his book does represent a valuable addition to the scholarship now available on this remarkable Soviet writer.

A Note on Willa Cather's Use of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" in The Professor's House

Abstract: "How wonderful it would be," wrote Willa Cather in "The Novel DA©meublA©" (1922) of contemporary narrative practice, "if we could throw all the furniture out of the window" (Cather, Not Under Forty 51). Vandalism was not Cather's intent but rather a radical act of literary house-cleaning in which the narrative stage would be stripped as bare as possible—accordingly, those events and objects remaining were to be functional, resonant, allusive. St. Peter's throwaway remark about Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1843) in The Professor's House (1925), in reference to Crane's frequently coming under the surgeon's knife, typifies Cather's strategy of writing "by suggestion rather than by enumeration" (Not Under Forty 48). Cather had already paid tribute to Poe in her college graduation speech in 1897; the echoes of "The Pit and the Pendulum" in The Professor's House are in turn tribute to her enduring fascination with this master of the Gothic tale.1

The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion (review)

Abstract: The recent recognition that Ruth Jhabvala has gained from her novels, short stories, and film scripts justifies this sometimes compelling, sometimes irritatingly polemic book. Laurie Sucher is at her best when she analyzes individual works; I question the adamancy of her feminist stance as she ignores the context of the work. It is undeniable that Jhabvala's books mark the stages of her own journey through life—as the victim of political upheaval; as an outsider looking in on an alien culture; and as the wife of a man who himself belongs to a minority within a culture that makes agonizing demands on the individual. Sucher is comprehensive in her analyses of the quests towards \"the shedding of illusion\" that Jhabvala paints with wit and irony. This book is a concentrated study of four books written after 1972, two set in India, and two away from it. Their themes are more serious than the earlier ones, more direct in their treatment of love between women and between homosexual men, and more pessimistic in the portrayal of contemporary self-interest. Each examination is preceded by commentary on earlier stories that introduce the context and themes developed in the novels. A major section of the book deals with Heat and Dust, the work best known in the U.S. Although there is a valuable analysis of Jhabvala's indebtedness to E. M. Forster for significant names and even descriptions, Sucher's determined feminist approach limits her effectiveness. One cannot ignore the elements of the culture within which the novel is set despite her confession at the first of the book that her \"perspective is probably more politically feminist than her subject's.\" The struggle of adaptation to and survival in an alien culture compels us away from a single point of view. For example, \"Desecration,\" the story that leads into Heat and Dust, does not simply depict a woman who reaps the scorn of the village because she flees from boredom. Her very marriage is a violation of the social code: a Muslim married to a Hindu has already challenged tradition and belief. Olivia, too, in the novel, suffers the \"ambiguity of eros\" because she has stepped too far to the other side. Sucher is so well able to examine the Gothic tradition in Jhabvala, the eternal, \"human\" quest for wisdom and the writer's virtuosity as she layers story upon story, that the narrowness of her generalizations are bothersome. To claim that women engage in love \"at their extreme peril\" because \"God is thought

Ding-Bild-Schrift: Peter Handke's Slow Homecoming to a "Chinese" Austria

Abstract: Niemand, fast niemand, kann oder mag Handke noch weiter auf dem Wege folgen, den dieser nun schon seit mehreren BÃ1⁄4chern eingeschlagen hat." This remark by JÃ1⁄4rgen Manthey (383) reflects a general trend in the reception of Peter Handke's latest works. Starting with Langsame Heimkehr (1979), Handke's writing has acquired a new tone that, although adumbrated by his preceding works, either surprised or affronted many of his previous readers. Invariably, negative critical response has focused on the subjectivity and solemnity of Handke's new tone. Manfred Durzak, for example, accused Handke of narcissism, criticizing his seeming indifference to literature's social and political dimension. With Langsame Heimkehr, Durzak judges, Handke is "als KÃ1⁄4nstler abgestÃ1⁄4rzt" (159). Jörg Drews discovers an attitude of self-ordained priesthood in Handke's recent work and subsumes his writing under "Spielarten des Kulturkonservatismus, Einfaltsromantik und Intellektualromantik" (951, 954). Judgments of this kind are based on textual evidence. Handke's latest works contain archaic and sometimes solemn and absolutist vocabulary. Emphatic words like "Sehnsucht," "BedÃ1⁄4rfnis nach Heil," "selbstlose Daseinslust," and "stille Harmonie" seem to celebrate existence rather

Fear of the Open Heart: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Writing (review)

Abstract: substantial chapter on McCarthy's own works, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and How I Grew, although clever (especially when it dissects varieties of confession), suffers occasionally from repetitiousness and a moralistic bent. Of the three remaining autobiographers, Gertrude Stein receives the least fascinating treatment from Adams; the relatively high critical popularity of The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokios may help to account for that fact. Within this complex section, Adams emphasizes not only Stein's \"fictions\" but also her acute selfawareness and good humor. In dealing with Sherwood Anderson's A Story Teller's Story, Tar: A Midwest Childhood, and Memoirs, Adams highlights the autobiographer's role as mythic speaker for other Americans. He examines the Anderson legend (tales of boyhood poverty, primitive schooling, troublesome parenthood, and, above all, bohemian flight from bourgeois dreariness) and determines that the author of Winesburg, Ohio is \"ultimately fairly trustworthy; his autobiographies, especially self-revelatory.\" Adams likewise defends the mythic role of Richard Wright, saying that Black Boy is a \"truthful account of the black experience in America,\" in part because Wright's lying—demanded by \"his personality, his family, his race\"—is his \"major metaphor of self.\" Above all, Timothy Dow Adams's Telling Lies is a solid, original critical achievement. Its felicitous creativity deserves a wide readership.

Recent Books on Willa Cather: An Essay Review

Abstract: James Woodress. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. 583 pp. $35.00 cloth; pb. $14.95. Sharon O'Brien. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. 464 pp. $29.95 cloth; pb. $12.95. Jamie Ambrose. Willa Cather: Writing at the Frontier. Berg Women's Series. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. 173 pp. $24.95. Robert J. Nelson. Willa Cather and France: In Search of the Lost Language. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 173 pp. $22.50. Marilyn Berg Callander. Willa Cather and the Fairy Tale. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989. 95 pp. $39.95. Susan J. Rosowski, ed. Approaches to Teaching Cather's \"My Antonia.\" New York: MLA, 1989. 190 pp. $32.00 cloth; pb. $17.50. John J. Murphy. \"My Antonia:\" The Road Home. Boston: Twayne, 1989. 133 pp. $17.95 cloth; pb. $6.95. Susie Thomas. WiWa Cather. Women Writers Series. Savage: Barnes, 1990. 133 pp. Price not given. Hermione Lee. Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up. Virago, 1989. American release as Willa Cather: Double Lives. New York: Pantheon, 1990. 410 pp. $29.95.

Challenging the Arrogance of Power with the Arrogance of Impotence: Peter Handke's Somnambulistic Energy

Abstract: In 1967 Peter Handke built himself an ivory tower, and he has resided in it ever since. The theories about language and writing that he exposed in his essay \"Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms\" have continued to serve as his guiding principles throughout his more than twenty years of authorship. During the last decade, Handke has drifted further and further in the direction of mysticism, which has become the ultimate consequence of his rejection of current nonliterary discourse. Based on Herbert Gamper's long interview with Handke, Aber ich lebe nur von den Zwischenräumen, and Handke's two most recent works, Das Spiel vom Fragen: oder die Reise zum sonoren Land and Versuch Ã1⁄4ber die MÃ1⁄4digkeit, I will trace Handke's Nietzschean efforts to revalorize words and concepts and along with them the value scale of modern society. His attempts to reach out beyond the thoughtless superficiality of everyday language and the stale realism of the stories dominating modern fiction to a deeper or greater reality by means of a priestly, ecstatic, and often hermetic language have led to rather harsh criticism by those unwilling or unable to duplicate his efforts to rid himself of the shackles of rationalistic discourses. He has been reproached for conservatism and epigonism, and, indeed, the German literary tradition since classicism makes up much of the intertextuality in his works and guides his fundamental approach to writing. This orientation anchors him in modernism rather than in postmodernism.