Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 1991"
18 citations
16 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors take a closer look at the way historical material is adopted and adapted by the war novelists, and the degree of artistic concern exhibited in the re-creation of prewar, wartime, and postwar history in these novels.
Abstract: As I have argued elsewhere,1 the historical novelist combines the techniques of the historian (documentation) and that of the novelist (imaginative re-creation of events) in the fictional evocation of the past. The presence of this tendency in Nigerian war fiction is the basis of my position that the Nigerian war novel is historical fiction. This paper takes a closer look at the way historical material is adopted and adapted by the war novelists, and the degree of artistic concern exhibited in the re-creation of prewar, wartime, and postwar history in these novels.2 The concern (or lack of concern) for the formal requirements of fictional art will be used to assess these novels as artifacts. The focus here, in other words, is on the aesthetics of the war fiction as opposed to pure sociological analysis.
15 citations
TL;DR: The Counterlife (1986) as discussed by the authors is a novel about structure that can be read as fiction about structure, and it is the first novel to explore the theoretical implications that exist for the structure of fiction or the self in uneasy equations between art and life.
Abstract: When Philip Roth opens his autobiography, The Facts, with a letter addressed to his novelistic alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, he observes that the most recent novel to give Nathan voice, The Counterlife (1986), \"can be read as fiction about structure\" (6). Fiction about fiction is, of course, not new among Roth's novels; My Life as a Man (1974), for example, charts the sources of fiction in trauma and repression and raises the specter of fiction's enslavement to autobiography. Each of the three earlier novels about Zuckerman, published together as Zuckerman Bound (1985)—The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983)—as well as the volume's \"Epilogue,\" the novella The Prague Orgy, meditates in one way or another on the relations between invented worlds of fiction and the life of their inventor. But not until The Counterlife does Roth fully explore the theoretical implications that exist for the structure of fiction or the self in the uneasy equations between art and life. Roth thematizes structure in the novel, shattering narrative conventions, deconstructing the unitary self by multiplying stories about the self, and opening the fiction out to contemplate its own making.
15 citations
TL;DR: A speaker who deliberately seeks to mislead his addressees aptly might be said to employ a rhetoric of deception as mentioned in this paper, which is the speech of someone deluded and yet also deliberately deceiving, who both knows and does not know what he is about.
Abstract: A speaker who deliberately seeks το mislead his addressees aptly might be said to employ a rhetoric of deception. The language of one who does not intend to mislead but who has allowed his understanding to be occluded, by contrast, might be described as a rhetoric of self-deception. Although not ironclad, the distinction does seem to imply considerable logical and moral polarization. Consider the contrast between lago and Othello, for example. Both perform criminal acts, but the treacherous lago knows what he is about while the blundering Othello in important ways does not. lago's self-knowledge makes him a villain while Othello's impercipience marks him as a tragic dupe. My point is simply that common sense would find it difficult to split the difference between these positions. If one knows something, then one cannot also simultaneously not know it. Nonetheless, given a theory of a divided self such as that afforded historically by psychoanalysis, a third position combining elements of the first two is conceivable. A rhetoric of (self-) deception would be informed by half-knowledge; it is the speech of someone deluded and yet also deliberately deceiving, who both knows and does not know what he
13 citations
TL;DR: While Kaplan's and Rose's hyperbole easily testifies to the power one Southern African writer has had on a whole generation of scholars, it inadvertently colludes in the muting of yet another of many extraordinary contemporary voices, one of which is gradually being discovered and rediscovered in the process of a remarkable Bessie Head renaissance as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: While Kaplan's and Rose's hyperbole easily testifies to the power one Southern African writer has had on a whole generation of scholars, it inadvertently colludes in the muting of yet another of many extraordinary contemporary voices, one of which is gradually being discovered and rediscovered in the process of a remarkable Bessie Head renaissance. Several recent publication projects signal this revived interest in Head. Alice Walker named Bessie Head one of her, \"favorite uncelebrated foreign writers\" . . . \"whose work deserves more attention in this country\" in Mother Jones in January, 1986 (\"Let us now praise unsung writers\" 27).
13 citations
TL;DR: In addition to feminist perspectives both commentators apply the categories of either Freud (Weintraub) or Jung (Kirkby) in their discussion of the novel as mentioned in this paper, which may indeed be a reconciliation with the archetypal female principle of regeneration through decay.
Abstract: Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping has been drawing the kind of acclaim that may establish it as an American classic.' Most of the praise for the novel focuses on the masterly display of language, but some of it falls particularly on its reputation as a woman's novel, a rare book that touches some central female experience. Aviva Weintraub calls Housekeeping an \"essentially female novel\" and the lake that dominates the landscape \"an essentially female image\" (69). Joan Kirkby sees the novel as a rejection of \"the patriarchal values that have dominated American culture and a return to values and modes of being that have been associated in myth and imagery with the province of the female\" (92). In addition to feminist perspectives both commentators apply the categories of either Freud (Weintraub) or Jung (Kirkby) in their discussion of the novel. The novel is certainly dominated by female characters, and it may indeed, as Kirkby suggests, reject patriarchal values such as \"the house as a symbol of the female self and the female body\" (107). However, her claim that the novel \"is a reconciliation with the archetypal female principle of regeneration through decay\" (107) describes a work
11 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine both Achebe's storytelling and his view of the act of storytelling as manifested in his most recent novel to determine the ways in which power and knowledge impinge upon stories and their tellers.
Abstract: Many critical discussions of Chinua Achebe as storyteller center on the ways in which he deliberately draws upon an African oral tradition to enhance his efforts to depict different tensions—such as that between precolonial Ibo ways of thinking and Christian missionary notions, or between men and women, or between generations. Such critics point to Achebe's use of proverbs, different speech rhythms, and repetition,1 but they do not explicitly address in any detail the role of storytelling itself as a political or social act—as a demonstration of knowledge and an exercise of power—within the novels. Although each of Achebe's five novels demonstrates his own power as a storyteller and reveals his view of the complex and often problematic relation between knowledge, power, and storytelling, nowhere does Achebe more minutely examine the nature of that relation than in his latest novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987). My endeavor in this paper is to examine both Achebe's storytelling and his view of the act of storytelling as manifested in his most recent novel to determine the ways in which power and knowledge impinge upon stories and their tellers.
9 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that a work of art establishes a distance from lived experience, transfixing it so that we can see its apparatus at work, and that life has a peculiar meaning for the inhabitants of the geographical location and political entity we call Nigeria.
Abstract: Chinua Achebe's contribution to the emergence and survival of the Nigerian novel has been crucial and formidable. By the Nigerian novel we simply mean any novel written by Nigerians, and whose matter and manner reveal an understanding that life has a peculiar meaning for the inhabitants of the geographical location and political entity we call Nigeria. Formulated within the framework of the referential function of literary production, this study is animated by the conviction that a work of art establishes a distance from lived experience, transfixing it so that we can see its apparatus at work. This study, therefore, has endeavored to il-
9 citations
TL;DR: The authors discuss the relationship between the manifest conscious intention of an author (often totalized as her "ideology"), which is read off from a literary text in the explicit social and political positions taken up by the author and her narrator(s), and the objective ideological junction of the text, which is the product of the determinate effects of its distinctly "literary" nature as discourse.
Abstract: I would like I„I? situate this brief discussion of Lessing's The Grass is Singing within the critical debate as to the relationship between the manifest conscious intention of an author (often totalized as her "ideology"), which is read off from a literary text in the explicit social and political positions taken up by the author and her narrator(s), and the objective ideological junction of the text, which is the product of the determinate effects of its distinctly "literary" nature as discourse. An important insight is that these two moments in the text constitute a significant relationship, and, even when produced by the same author, must be seen as materially distinct and not reducible to one another. Within such a view Lessing's literary productions are not the expression of her ideological positions, nor can the latter be glibly read off from the former. An attempt to ascertain the full cultural effect of The Grass is Singing would take into account the important operation within it of literature itself—the ways in which literary tradition and its forms impose upon the writer, defining in advance the range of her creative freedom, and often seriously contradicting or undermining an explicit social or political project. The final "effect" of a text would then be seen as a complex interaction between deliberate intent or conscious project and the displacement or mediation of such a project, the transformation of political or social ideas into art, through the material processes of language we term "literary tradition" and "literary form." Thinking in this way,
7 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a letter written to his superiors by Jennings, a missionary of the London Missionary Society during the reign of Khama the Great (1875-1923) in what was then called the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana).
Abstract: ■This motto is extracted from a letter written to his superiors by Jennings, a missionary of the London Missionary Society during the reign of Khama the Great (1875-1923) in what was then called the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana). 2This statement by Tântrist poet Ramprasâd refers to the actuality of the Tântrist assertion that the goddess Mahâmâyâ (see Head, A Question of Power 98) exists within each and every individual.
TL;DR: Carver's stories make their way toward single voices: the "I" in retreat from domestic babel, the "he" or "she" recoiling from a noisy world.
Abstract: With a powerful blend of fatalism and desire, Raymond Carver's stories make their way toward single voices: the \"I\" in retreat from domestic babel, the \"he\" or \"she\" recoiling from a noisy world. Much has already been said about the nature of such voices, the characters that inhabit them, and the silences just beyond them. Still largely unexamined, however, are the processes by which the chaos of life is evaded, the failed conversation curtailed, the din of alien discourse suppressed. Nor has the relation of Carver's singular discourse to other kinds of contemporary literary discourse been explored. To put it another way: Carver's stories are not, like the novelistic discourse M. M. Bakhtin describes, many-voiced or multi-languaged. Carver reduces polyphony, backgrounds the many voices and the carnival spirit, which are the essence of \"modern literature\" and novelistic discourse as Bakhtin understands them. He suppresses the folk energies that are the founding forces of heteroglossia and that rule in many contemporary writers (Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme are two who come to mind here), including some who appear with him under the unsatisfactory label of \"minimalism.\" Furthermore, his stories are often stories about askesis—curtailment to the point of solipsism, to borrow Harold Bloom's definition (115-123)—and about varying degrees of xenophobia. The authorial suppression of polyphony, although it is necessarily incomplete, is far reaching and has several important manifestations in Carver's fiction. One is the almost-total absence in the stories of irony, parody, word play, and other ludic elements—again, those folk energies— which are the early and enduring expressions of heteroglossia. Carver's fiction is rarely playful; nor is it often marked by allusions, double meanings, reflexive or metafictional gambits. Moreover, in most of his stories Carver aligns rather than interanimates authorial and narrative voices. In their introduction to a 1987 interview with Carver, Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory observe that \"there is little authorial presence\" in the stories (66). This is an oversimplification—Carver is capable of subtle intervention—but it does suggest one important way in which the number of voices and the forces of dialogism in the stories are reduced.
TL;DR: Aig-Imoukhuede's Pidgin poem points to the predicament faced by an African man who, in spite of his approval of Western tenets and norms, is reluctant to accept monogamy as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Frank Aig-Imoukhuede's Pidgin poem points to the predicament faced by an African man who, in spite of his approval of Western tenets and norms, is reluctant to accept monogamy, one feature of the European metropolitan civilization. It emphasizes the chaos in the life of the modern African male desirous of a second wife, especially when the reason has little to do with the quest for a male child or the fact of the ascertained barrenness of the first wife—repugnant as these conditions are to the
TL;DR: The authors examined Traveler in light of Barthes's theory and found that Calvino really sacrificed himself that the reader might live, in the sense that the death of the author makes possible the birth of the reader.
Abstract: \"To give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth,\" proclaimed Roland Barthes in 1968, a year of overthrows, \"the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author (\"Death of the Author\" 148). Two years later, Ã-talo Calvino seemed to agree with Barthes's rather Oedipal prophecy when he wrote that \"after the process of literary composition has been taken to pieces and reassembled, the decisive moment in literary life is bound to be reading\" (\"Notes toward a Definition\" 96). And in 1979 Calvino published a novel all about reading with a protagonist called \"Reader\"—If on a winter's night a traveler. Critical response to Traveler has concentrated on this apparent alliance between Barthes and Calvino, reading Traveler, in Patricia Waugh's phrasing, as \"the fictional completion of Barthes's statement: that the death of the author makes possible the birth of the reader\" (134). But has Calvino really sacrificed himself that the reader might live? How complete is the correspondence between the theory of reader supremacy and the experience of reading this novel? Can an author apply to his writing a theory that requires his own subordination? Can writing free reading? Are Barthes's ideas about the power and autonomy available to readers realistic? Examination of Traveler in light of Barthes's theory reveals tensions between the means Calvino employs and the result presumed by critics who have read Traveler as a realization of the future of writing according to Barthes's
TL;DR: It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom as discussed by the authors, whether love and hate can be different things at bottom, each of which supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another.
Abstract: It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object. —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Abstract: In a paper published not long ago in Ufahamu, Kofi Anyidoho tries to explain \"some of the sensations [Ayi Kwei] Armah's Two Thousand Seasons generates by reinterpreting and recreating historical and contemporary Africa through a system of ideas, images, and symbols carefully structured into a visionary ideal\" (109). To Anyidoho, although history is Armah's point of departure, he transforms historical experience and subverts and recreates history. And this subversion and recreation calls for certain adjustments in the way we apprehend historical reality. Because the world Armah recreates is a \"visionary world,\" it may fall short of the expectations of people who are used to conventional historical realism. If we accept Anyidoho's thesis that \"[t]here is no such thing as a complete history, a history which represents the past as it truly was\" (109), we are then compelled by Armah's approach to African history in this novel to believe that his vision in Two Thousand Seasons is a vision of the ideal, especially when we consider the central position he accords the ethos of \"the way\" as a guiding principle in precolonial Africa, and which could
TL;DR: For instance, the authors argues that the predominant form from which American writers have attempted to liberate their characters has always been that of society, which, as Richard Poirier pointed out in discussing Huck Finn, has been previously conceived of.
Abstract: Frederick R. Karl in his exhaustive survey of postwar American fiction has little to say about novel sequences because, he claims, in comparison to Britain, there is a "paucity of sequential novels" in America.1 Our "social expectations" and "our need for movement and escape" militate against novel sequences, which, of necessity, imply "limited options." The relative scarcity of this form, he argues, is "tied to our optimism, [and] our desire to break from predetermined forms, to free ourselves from the historical past, emerging into that purer atmosphere of pastoral, which promises liberation" (252). The predominant "predetermined form" from which American writers have attempted to liberate their characters has always been that of society, which, as Richard Poirier pointed out in discussing Huck Finn, has been previously conceived of
TL;DR: The Spirit of Biography and Novelists in Their Youth as mentioned in this paper is a balanced combination of traditional scholarship and contemporary theory, however, would have lent these books a richer critical context within which to read and write (auto)biographical texts.
Abstract: préfigurations of his personal tragedies, as a kind of preconscious working out of his soon-to-be-real problems. Thus, the readings offered in The Spirit of Biography and Novelists in Their Youth are unquestionably illuminating and informed. A balanced combination of traditional scholarship and contemporary theory, however, would have lent these books a richer critical context within which to read and write (auto)biographical texts.
TL;DR: The Devil's Own Mirror: The Irishman and the African in Modern Literature as discussed by the authors is a seminal work in the field of African literature, focusing on the African short story and its relationship with the novel.
Abstract: Adeola James, ed. In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk. Studies in African Literature. London: James Currey; Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1990. 160 pp. $17.50. Robert M. Wren. Those Magical Years: The Making of Nigerian Literature at Ibadan: 1948-1966. Time / Space Artists and Scholars 1. Washington: Three Continents, 1991. 147 pp. $22.00. C. L. Innes. The Devil's Own Mirror: The Irishman and the African in Modern Literature. Washington: Three Continents, 1990. 113 pp. $25.00. Craig W. McLuckie. Nigerian Civil War Literature: Seeking an \"Imagined Community.\" Studies in African Literature 3. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter, Dyfed: Edwin Mellen, 1990. 172 pp. $49.95. F. Odun Balogun. Tradition and Modernity in the African Short Story: An Introduction to a Literature in Search of Critics. Contributions in Afro-American Studies 141. Westport: Greenwood, 1991. 208 pp. $39.95. Kenneth W. Harrow. Faces of Islam in African Literature. Studies in African Literature. London: James Currey; Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1991. 134 pp. $17.50. Mildred Mortimer. Journeys Through the French African Novel. Studies in African Literature. London: James Currey; Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1991. 240 pp. $17.50. Kandioura Dramé. The Novel as Transformation Myth: A Study of the Novels of Mongo Beti and Ngug\\ wa Thiong'o. Foreign and Comparative Studies / African Series 43. Syracuse: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1990. 138 pp. $14.00.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss censorship and the Irish writer, including Jo O'Donoghue and Frank O'Connor, and present a critical study of censorship in Irish literature.
Abstract: Julia Carlson, ed. Banned in Ireland: Censorship and the Irish Writer. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. $25.00 cloth; pb. $11.95. RÃ1⁄4diger Imhof, ed. Contemporary Irish Novelists. Studies in English and Comparative Literature 4. TÃ1⁄4bingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990. No price given. Jo O'Donoghue. Brian Moore: A Critical Study. Montreal and Kingston: McGiIlQueen's UP, 1991. $39.95 (Canadian). Michael Steinman. Frank O'Connor at Work. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1990. $32.50 cloth; pb. $14.95.
TL;DR: The Biafra civil war as discussed by the authors was a civil war in which hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them children, perished in the thirty months of its duration, a war that neighboring African nations, with their own newly-won independence, were saddened to witness.
Abstract: During the latter part of the 1960's as America was preoccupied with Vietnam abroad and its own social revolution at home, the West African Republic of Nigeria was engaged in a bloody civil war in which the federal government fought the secession of the Eastern Region, an area declaring itself at the moment of its revolt, the Republic of Biafra. Some of us may remember Biafra in the context of the sunken eyes and bloated bellies of the starving children whose faces haunted us from the cover of Time magazine—others from the illogical admonitions of over-zealous parents who warned us to eat everything on our plates because children were starving in Biafra. The Nigerian Civil War was one in which hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them children, perished in the thirty months of its duration. It was a war that neighboring African nations, with their own newly-won independence, were saddened to witness. It was a war in which non-African nations, protective of their own economic interests, plied the Nigerian federal government with weaponry to exact a quick, albeit brutal and genocidal end to what they perceived as simple tribal rivalries. Surely, we know from our own nation's history
TL;DR: Fragments as discussed by the authors is a novel that depicts materialism, ostentation, corruption, greed, selfishness, and irresponsibility in Ghanaian literature, and it is one of the few novels in English from Africa that deals in any compelling way with the maladies that have come with the colonial encounter.
Abstract: Although in Fragments, Armah's second novel, we find not only that Ghanaian writer's most vivid picture of the materialism, ostentation, corruption, greed, selfishness, and irresponsibility choking Africa but also his most poignant vision of the alternative values that could tame the tide of disorder on the continent; critics have seldom accorded recognition to the significance of the book in Armah's oeuvre.1 Nor has the novel's pre-eminent position within the whole corpus of postcolonial African fiction in English been reckoned. And yet Fragments is a feat of the imagination, one of the few novels in English from Africa that deals in any compelling way with the maladies that have come with the colonial encounter. Fragments represents a major literary accomplishment in the sense that, like the work of the other great artists of the world—Yeats, Joyce, Soyinka,
TL;DR: For instance, despite Updike's numerous portrayals of middle-class American life and his extraordinary combination of popular and critical success, the reception of his works has been predictably apolitical.
Abstract: Despite John Updike's numerous portrayals of middle-class American life and his extraordinary combination of popular and critical success, the reception of his works has been predictably apolitical. Perhaps because Updike has written extensively about the influence of the theologian Karl Barth on his thinking, critics have concentrated largely on Updike's preoccupation with faith in a secular world. With Couples, The Centaur and more so with his "Rabbit" tetralogy—Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit At Rest—Updike has been established as the humanist priest of contemporary America.1 It is little wonder, then, that even The Coup, Updike's most overtly political novel about revolution, independence, and dictatorship in Africa has been similarly depoliticized. But to read The
TL;DR: Soyinka's plays, his fictional characters have not been discussed in detail as mentioned in this paper, leaving a gap in the existing criticism of Soyinka's work, particularly since The Interpreters was specially cited for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Abstract: Soyinka's plays, his fictional characters have not been discussed in detail. This leaves a gap in the existing criticism of Soyinka's work, particularly since The Interpreters was specially cited for the Nobel Prize for Literature. This paper examines, in depth, the nature of characterization in two Soyinka novels: The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973), and hopes to fill this lacuna to a great extent. Any critique of characterization in the African novel not taking into account the traditional African conception of \"personality\" and \"individuality\" is, even at its best, limited. Most western analyses of African characters fail for this reason. The majority of western critics underestimate the degree to which African writers are entrenched in the traditional world view and the depth of their conditioning by the traditional perception of man. They do not look up to western models for inspiration but to African oral literatures that, in various ways—realistic as well as stylized— reaffirm traditional images of man. Originating in a view of personality more communal than individual, traditional standards of characterization are at odds with the western ideal of individualized, growing characters. For instance, the \"type\" is more of a norm than an aberration in traditional characterization. The modern
TL;DR: For instance, the English critic Tony Tanner pointed out that the fictional imagination of postwar America was as much troubled by the postmodernist novel's dissolution of form as by the constrictive, overdefinitive forms of conventional realism as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Twenty years ago the English critic Tony Tanner maintained, as the central thesis of his book City of Words (1971), that the fictional imagination of postwar America was as much troubled by the postmodernist novel's dissolution of form as by the constrictive, overdefinitive forms of conventional realism. Tanner linked the erosion of formal distinctions with fears of an entropie universe in which energy was always running down: the abiding anxiety of 1960s writers who discussed entropy (Pynchon, Burroughs) was its homogenizing effect on the universe where all things dwindled to nothing, all things became alike. The waste-making process resulted in a confusion and merging of identities and an eventual dissolving of all things into a blank, formless waste, a perfect homogeneity of nothingness. John Updike was never of this experimental school of writers but, as Tanner observed, the characters of his early novels discussed these same processes, and the landscapes they inhabited were afflicted by the same cosmic entropy or universal wasting. Conner, in The Poorhouse Fair (1959), theorizes about \"entropÃ-a,\" and George Caldwell, in The Centaur (1963), sees Nature as \"garbage and confusion.\" Harry Angstrom, a tidy man who dislikes waste in his domestic affairs if not in his sexual ones, moves
TL;DR: The notion of fiction as biographies was introduced by Ira Shabert as discussed by the authors, who pointed out that there is a tendency to choose as subjects figures who oppose the totalizing and anti-individualistic forces that surround them, a common authorial intent to "inscribe the person as a dynamic principle, running a gamut of moods, feelings, sense experiences, intellectual positions, managing a plurality of roles".
Abstract: A hybridization of biography and fiction is nothing new—consider the fictionalized criminal biographies of the English eighteenth century or the novelizations of the eminent by Bulwer Lytton in the nineteenth. Still, those early examples seem marginal to the purposes either of biography or fiction, facile, sensational perhaps, popular in the worst sense, specious and ignorable. Nowadays, on the other hand, "fiction as biography" seems central and ubiquitous, self-conscious, and serious about its art. As for its ubiquity, Ira Shabert's bibliography contains, along with such obvious examples as Claudius and Hadrian, Nat Turner and Huey Long, citations to fictionalized versions of Nostradamus, Chatterton, Saint-Simon, Shelley, and Marx's daughter. As for the artistic seriousness of the form, Shabert's intelligent commentary stands as testimony. What is at issue is implicit in her title. Books that recreate a life that was once lived, about which historical and archival material exists, raise a set of problems whose solutions are not self-evident. The first is the question of why such re-creation should exist at all, what things such books can do which conventional biographies cannot. But more importantly, the idea of fiction as biography suggests the whole range of vexed questions involving self and other, "intersubjectivity," as the phenomenologists put it, the ability to enter into the self of the subject. One way of examining such questions is to draw upon the commentary of the writers of those fictional biographies. Generally self-conscious about what they do, the writers of such fictions tend to be incisive and witty, profoundly interesting. Another way is to lay out the contours of personality theory, drawing on literary criticism, philosophy from Sartre to the present time, and psychoanalysis. Schabert does both with grace and ease. Mainly, of course, questions of the nature of the form can best be answered by an ingenious attention to some exemplary works. Her choices remind a reader of how extraordinarily various the form is: they range among Robert Graves' Wife to Mr. Milton, Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian's Memoirs, George Garrett's Death of the Fox, and Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. Paying tribute to the virtuoso uniqueness of each of her examples, Shabert also pulls together certain common strains, a tendency to choose as subjects figures who oppose the totalizing and anti-individualistic forces that surround them, a common authorial intent, to "inscribe the person as a dynamic principle, running a gamut of moods, feelings, sense experiences, intellectual positions, managing a plurality of roles.
TL;DR: The authors argue that women writers have not been able to afford the decentering and dispersal of the subject that characterize male postmodernism, because in patriarchy women have never attained a stable, self-consistent subjectivity to decenter or disperse.
Abstract: For Patricia Waugh and Rita Felski, feminine or feminist fiction is most interestingly framed as the positively valorized half of a positive-negative dyad. Waugh's negative term is postmodernism; Felski's is a prescriptive experimental feminist aesthetic. Both critics carefully complicate the picture by giving the enemy its due, but hostility toward the negative term is nonetheless pervasive in both texts, a consistent backdrop for the analysis of the virtues of feminine (Waugh) or feminist (Felski) fiction. Feminine and feminist fiction are complex and diverse; \"the postmodern\" and \"feminist aesthetics\" are static and monolithic. For Patricia Waugh, the dyad is also gendered: her negative term, \"the postmodern,\" is defined as predominantly masculine. Derek Longhurst's anthology, despite the evenhandedness implied by its title, is predominantly masculine, both in the genres of popular culture it pays the most attention to, and in the concerns of most of its contributors, with a few notable exceptions. Patricia Waugh argues that women writers have not been able to afford the decentering and dispersal of the subject that characterize male postmodernism, because in patriarchy women have never attained a stable, self-consistent subjectivity to decenter or disperse: \"During the 1960s, as Vonnegut waves a fond goodbye to character in fiction, women writers are beginning, for the first time in history, to construct ... a sense of unified selfhood, a rational, coherent, effective identity.\" At the same time, Waugh argues, because women writers have never been guilty of the excesses of centered, dominant (white bourgeois male Enlightenment) egotism to which the postmodern decentering is a reaction and corrective, they have an inherent affinity with postmodernism and post structuralism in constructing identity \"through impersonal and social relations of power (rather than as sense of identity as the reflection of an inner 'essence').\" Despite this affinity, it is the split between postmodern male self-destruction and feminist self-construction that most concerns Waugh: \"it is the central argument of this book, therefore, that despite common concerns the postmodern deconstruction of subjectivity is as problematic for women as the liberal construction of self.\" After this clear, cogent, if somewhat familiar introductory theoretical positioning, Waugh's opening chapter, \"Postmodernism and Feminism,\" degenerates into simplistic literary stereotype: both modernism and postmodernism are together reduced to \"an aesthetics of impersonality\" that women writers \"have not felt comfortable with.\" The straw-man villain of modernist and postmodernist \"separation\" (ego-formation by means of differentiation from the mother/other) is then knocked down by the feminist object-relations heroine of \"self in relationship.\" Waugh argues that twentieth-century women writers have always worked outside the male-defined traditions of modernism and postmodernism, and not only should be spared censure by their standards but also should be praised for eluding them. The rest of the book argues for object relations theory as the appropriate theoretical framework for a proper understanding of twentieth-century women's