Showing papers in "Style in 1995"

Jean Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity

Abstract: From ATT it has now entered into common speech on and off the Internet as a shorthand for this conception of computer networks as a cybernetic space. From a Baudrillardian perspective, this figuration of Internet as a kind of cybernetic terrain works to undermine the symbolic distance between the metaphoric and the real. It abandons "the real" for the hyperreal by presenting an increasingly real simulation of a comprehensive and comprehendible world. This heading points the way toward Baudrillard's "hypertelia," that fated catastrophe when the sophistication of a model outdoes the reality it attempts to comprehend. If Baudrillard's critique of modernity applies to the current acceleration in information and communication technology as well as the media euphoria surrounding these occurrences, then Internet likewise provides a context for understanding Baudrillard's image of fatal technology. This image in Baudrillard and, conversely, the shadow of Baudrillard cast upon information technology foregrounds the contemporary challenges to "the real" in postmodern culture. This reading also suggests, however, how Baudrillard can be used to dissuade Internet beyond its modern closures. Replacing the one world with possible worlds, Internet ultimately offers both the seductions and subductions of a postmodern "world." For Baudrillard, the shift from the real to the hyperreal occurs when representation gives way to simulation. One could argue that we are standing at the brink of such a moment, marked primarily by the emerging presence of a virtual world. Just as the highways once transformed our country, the "information superhighway" offers an image of dramatic change in American lives through a change in virtual landscape. Although this expression originated in the White House as a catchy term for the proposed National Information Infrastructure (NII), the expression quickly entered into popular parlance as a pseudonym for the already existing worldwide network of Internet. The overused expression does little to represent the actual network architecture that connects these machines, yet the metaphor of the highway persists as a media image, functioning as a conceptual model for the world created by this technology. …

The Problem of Impossible Fictions

Abstract: "In fiction, anything is possible." This statement appears to be such a truism about literature that its utterance seems hardly necessary. And yet the implicit assumption in this platitude is that those events and circumstances whose realization in the actual world is practically impossible are nevertheless possible in the realm of fiction. The notion of an "impossible fiction" is an ostensible oxymoron. Traditionally, according to theorists of possible-world semantics, impossible worlds are those worlds that violate the foundational principles of classical logic: the laws of noncontradiction and bivalence or the excluded middle. Such worlds, considered so radically different from the actual world we inhabit, are thought to be inaccessible. However, as Marie-Laure Ryan has noted, logical impossibility is but one conceivable form of an impossible world. Other forms include physical, causal, taxonomic, temporal, and geographic inaccessibility.(1) She writes that "genres will be defined on the basis of the number of accessibility relations linking FW (the fictional world) to the culturally predominant representation of AW (the actual world). The greater the number of accessibility relations, the shorter the distance from AW to FW" (Ryan, "Possible Worlds" 536).(2) A number of fictional works, though, are constructed taxonomically and/or physically in radically different ways from the actual world particularly in science fiction and fantasy. Though such worlds would naturally be considered as impossible, they are more often construed as highly improbable. Their eventuality is significantly minuscule but nevertheless not impossible, according to Ryan ("Possible Worlds" 538). Not only is the transgression of taxonomic and physical norms possible in fiction, but in the development of so-called "postmodernist fiction," the once sacred laws of logic have been opened to violation as well. The logically impossible is a salient feature in the fictional universe of many works in recent literature. A TYPOLOGY OF IMPOSSIBLE FICTIONS In all, there are roughly five principle types of impossible fictions. One form explicitly violates the logical law of noncontradiction and might also be described as a sous-rature world, a world under "erasure." Another type is the so-called "forking-path" fiction, where more than one narrative path or possible world becomes actual at the same time. A third example is the "squaring-the-circle" fiction, where otherwise logically consistent fictions have a capacity to lead to logical paradoxes. A fourth division is the mixing or traversing of ontological levels in a fictional work, what might be called "diegetic violations." The final type of impossible fictions is that of characters inhabiting more than one fictional world: in other words, the problem of the compossibility of characters. 1. CONTRADICTIONS AND SOUS-RATURE WORLDS An event might be described by a narrator as having taken place in a fictional work, only to be asserted subsequently as not having occurred. It cannot be the case, at the same temporal moment and in the same geographic location, that an event has occurred and not occurred. This is a transgression of the first fundamental principle of informal logic. An example might be found in Alain Robbe-Grillet's La maison de rendez-vous, where Edouard Manneret's death occurs in more than one temporal moment. Johnson hears of his murder from the police yet still manages to call on him later that evening. Kim, his murderer, finds his corpse after having killed him, only to reencounter a living Manneret waiting for her in a room. Manneret manages to be alive after having been found dead, clearly a contradiction. In Brian McHale's useful inventory of characteristic impossibilities, he discusses what he calls sous-rature worlds, worlds under erasure, which are usually withdrawn immediately after their construction only to be reinvoked. "First one state of affairs is projected. …

Fictional Worlds: Density, Gaps, and Inference

Abstract: 1. Gaps and facts. Possible-worlds semantics claims that fictions are possible worlds, but, disturbingly, in some essential features they differ from, or are even in contrast to, the formalized systems that are known by that name in logical semantics. One of the most troubling contrasts is that possible worlds of logical semantics are complete, but fictional worlds of literature are not. The theorem of incompleteness has been accepted almost unanimously by the philosophers and literary theorists who formulated the possible-worlds semantics of fictionality from David Lewis to Ruth Ronen (Lewis 42-43; Heintz 90-92; Howell 134-35; Eco, Role 217-22; Parsons 182-85; Wolterstorff 131-34; Dolezel, "Literary" 194-95; Pavel 105-13; Ronen 108-43; and others). The Carnapian test of incompleteness is simple: only some conceivable statements can be said to be true or false with respect to a given fictional world while others are undecidable. It is false to state that Emma Bovary died a natural death; it is true that she committed suicide; but we cannot decide the question whether she did or did not have a birthmark on her left shoulder (Heintz 94). Referring to a cause celebre of literary criticism, Nicholas Wolterstorff explains what kind of lack we are faced with: "We will never know how many children had Lady Macbeth in the worlds of Macbeth. That is not because to know this would require knowledge beyond the capacity of human beings. It is because there is nothing of the sort to know" (133). Nicholas Rescher and Robert Brandom are even more definite when pointing out the source of the undecidability: "The situation is not just that we don't know whether P or its contradictory [similar to] P, but that the world itself is indeterminate in this regard in its make-up - it is ontologically indecisive in point of P vs. [similar to] P" (Rescher and Brandom 5). Barry Smith, having distinguished between ontological and epistemological incompleteness (a distinction derived from Husserl's and Ingarden's suggestions), comes to the same conclusion: fictional objects are ontologically incomplete since "from the very start we can exclude the possibility of supplementary information, information which would be additional to that which is to be found in (or, within certain limits, read into) the texts themselves" (381). The incompleteness of fictional worlds results from the very act of their creation. Fictional worlds are brought into existence by means of fictional texts, and it would take a text of infinite length to construct a complete fictional world. Finite texts, the only texts that humans are capable of producing, necessarily create incomplete worlds. Since the shape of the fictional world is determined by the constructing fictional text, the incompleteness is controlled and modulated by the author's choices implemented in his/her writing. To construct a fictional fact, the author has to create an authenticating texture; if he/she writes nothing that is, produces zero texture - no fictional fact comes into existence, and thus a gap appears in the fictional world. This situation means that the number, distribution, and function of gaps is a variable, depending on the author's aesthetic principles, on his individual style, and on the historical and genre norms implemented. Some telling instances of this diversity have been pointed out in recent literary semantics. So, for instance, I have indicated how the radically incomplete physique of the hero of a Romantic narrative serves a specific stylistic aim: a physical detail surrounded by emptiness is brought into sharp focus and thus offered for symbolic interpretation (Dolezel, "Note"). Thomas G. Pavel has observed that "authors and cultures have the choice to minimize or maximize" the "unavoidable incompleteness" of fictional worlds; he has suggested that cultures and periods of a "stable world view" tend to minimize incompleteness whereas periods of "transition and conflict" tend to maximize it (108-09). …

Allegories in immersion : virtual narration in postmodern fiction

Abstract: Through its insistence on the concept of virtuality, the possible-world approach has brought a new dimension to the study of narrative. The first stage in the study of the interplay between the actual and the virtual in narrative communication has focused on the level of the narrated. In Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, for instance, I proposed a concept of "virtual narrative" that referred to the as yet unrealized projections and unverified retrospective interpretations motivating the behavior of characters. But the opposition real-virtual also finds useful applications in the exploration of the discourse component of narrative. Some of the concepts recently introduced on the narratological scene have a strong flavor of virtuality: I am thinking of Gerald Prince's notion of the "disnarrated" and of David Herman's "hypothetical localization." In what follows I propose to add another element to this growing repertory: the concept of virtual narration. I regard this concept as the discourse counterpart of my earlier, story-oriented notion of virtual narrative. REAL NARRATION Under the term of "virtual narration" I understand a way of evoking events that resists the "expectation of reality" inherent in language in general and in narrative discourse in particular. Philosophy may periodically relativize, destabilize, and even reject the notion of reality, but narrative and expository language knows little of these doubts: even in an atmosphere of radical antirealism - such as the contemporary zeitgeist - it remains firmly rooted in truth and reality. The unmarked case of modality is the indicative, and to narrate in the indicative is to present events as true fact. The repertory of semantic categories at the disposal of narrators (or essayists, for that matter) often forces the writer to a firmer commitment to facts than caution would call for.(1) It is through tacked-on modal markers that language defactualizes, relativizes, or switches the reference world from the speaker's reality toward a nonactual possible world. In the type of narration I call "real," the narrator presents propositions as true of the world in which he is located, and the audience imagines the facts (states or events) represented by these propositions. If the reader has other means of access to the reference world she may, after considering the described states of affairs, evaluate the narrator's statements as true or false. She may also do so on the basis of the internal coherence of the narrative discourse. If the statements are valued as true, the expressed facts are stored as knowledge; if not, they are excluded from the reader's representation of the reference world. As long as the narrator (or implied "I") uses the indicative mode, the reference world is identified as the world in which the narrator is located. This "real" mode of narration is found in both fiction and nonfiction and is independent of the truth value of the discourse: even the false can be told as true fact; otherwise lies would never deceive and errors never mislead. But "real" narration is not the only way to evoke events to the imagination. With appropriate markers of irreality, narrated events may be ascribed to a foreign world. Counterfactuals and hypotheticals refer to another world in the realm of the possible; reports of dreams or narration in the mode of free indirect discourse conjure private mental worlds standing in opposition to the physical reality of the textual actual world. Events may even be called to the imagination as nonexistent. The processing of a negative sentence - for instance, "Mary did not kill her husband" - involves imagining the world in which Mary kills her husband. The narratological study of the modes of expression that sever the expectation of reality is only beginning. One of these modes is what I call "virtual narration." VIRTUAL NARRATION As a preliminary to the definition of virtual narration, let me review two senses of the term "virtual. …

Virtual termites : a hypotextual technomutant explo(it)ration of William Gibson and the electronic beyond(s)

Abstract: Etude de l'esthetique developpee par William Gibson, influencee, selon l'A., des travaux de Manny Farber

Perverse Pleasure and Fetishized Text: The Deathly Erotics of Carter's "The Bloody Chamber." (Angela Carter)

Abstract: It takes an iron nerve to perceive the connection between the promise of life implicit in eroticism and the sensuous aspect of death. Mankind conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of things. Blind-folded, we refuse to see that only death guarantees the fresh upsurging without which life would be blind. Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality Angela Carter shows through her collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber, that she has just such a nerve of iron as Georges Bataille suggests is needed for perceiving the connection between life and death. Even the illustration on the front cover of this slim volume suggests the eroticism of life and the sensuality of death: a dewy, white lily with a phallic stamen jutting from its hidden center emerges through a rupture in dry, flat ground. Around the base of the lily, thick black cords of stem wrap themselves in vertiginous, maze-like coils Like the book itself, the lily is a kind of bloody chamber, for it has droplets of blood on its interior and exterior walls where the stem's sharp thorns have pricked it.(1) What makes this illustration interesting is its kaleidoscopic quality. One moment the lily represents life and the next moment, death. Because of the lily's lush, white petals, it seems bloated with fecund vegetable vitality, and yet lilies are known as burial flowers, funeral decor, the stuff of a dead man's nosegay. Even the blood that trickles down the sides of the lily and splashes onto its leaves has an ambiguous quality, for it suggests both the vitality of the circulatory system and the mortality of flesh. One moment the lily looks female and the next moment, male. At first glance, for example, the lily appears to be a female receptacle, its stamen a clitoris, and the serpentine stem a phallus. On second glance, however, the penile shape of the lily begins to suggest the contours of the phallus and the coiled stem an all-encompassing vaginal "maw." This vaginal "maw" doubles as the mysterious place from which life emerges and that dark abyss into which man fears falling and from which he fears never to return: eros and thanatos, the life force and the death drive. In a discussion of the partial drive and its circuit, Jacques Lacan makes reference to a fragment of Heraclitus: "to the bow is given the name of life... and its work is death " (177). The dialectic of the bow, says Lacan, is integrated in the drive. This low or the curve of sexual fulfillment in the living being is represented by Lacan in the form of an inverted lily: (Diagram omitted). It is appropriate that the cover of Carter's collection evokes life and death, sexuality and aggression, female and male, the jouissance of the real and the dry cracked ground of the symbolic. For all of these elements are present in Carter's stories, overlapping and intertwining with one another just as they do in the best of fantasies. I do not, however, intend to discuss these intersections in each story. Instead, I intend to economize or, more accurately, to metonymize by allowing one story, "The Bloody Chamber," to stand in for the entire collection. Obviously, this casts me into the position of fetishist or pervert, as I realize but at the same time disavow Carter's symbolic castration, her inability to say it all. I take this perverted position because I am not entirely sure that it is possible to read Carter's story from any other. In fact, as I will argue in this paper, Carter herself writes from the position of pervert and thus forces her reader into perverse collaboration. But, then, perhaps this is as it should be, for in fantastic literature, says Rosemary Jackson, " m ovement and stillness, life and death, subject and object, mind and matter, become as one"(80). The impossible structures around which fantastic narratives are woven, she says, are "related to this drive towards a realization of contradictory elements merging together in the desire for undifferentiation"(80), a desire for that which is beyond the pleasure principle. …

Foucault's Response to Freud: Sado-Masochism and the Aestheticization of Power

Abstract: Among the numerous modern theorists who have attempted to bring the insights of psychoanalysis to bear on political and social theory, Michel Foucault is one of the names that certainly comes readily to mind. But while few would see one critic as doing more than stating the obvious when he wrote that Foucault, like other leading French theorists of his generation, was "deeply affected by Marx and . . . Freud" (Said 2), most of Foucault's interpreters have had little to say about his relation to psychoanalysis and have focused almost exclusively on his contributions to historiography and social theory. The relative lack of interest in the psychoanalytic dimension and implications of Foucault's work can be explained and even justified in various ways. First, there is the fact that Foucault wrote very little that explicitly concerned Freud. Second, the little he did write on psychoanalysis was principally focused on its status as an institution and its contributions to the creation of what Foucault called "disciplinary society." In addition, Foucault's critique of the central psychoanalytic concept of repression in volume one of The History of Sexuality could be evoked to justify the view that Foucault was only peripherally or even negatively involved in a discussion of psychoanalysis.(1) Factors such as these, however, even if they help explain the relative neglect of the psychoanalytic dimension of Foucault's work, are perhaps ultimately less important than the nature of the psychoanalytic concept that represented for Foucault the central contribution of psychoanalysis to the theory of power and of the socio-political: sado-masochism. It is true that the term sado-masochism was rarely, if ever, used by Foucault in his discussion of political power. But even if it remains implicit in his work, a concept of sado-masochism is nonetheless central to both the social and psychological dimension of Foucault's theory. In neglecting the psychoanalytic dimension of Foucault's works, his interpreters may unwittingly have confirmed the truth of what Foucault in his histories and genealogies often claimed: that the "dirty secret" of power has long been hidden from us by a form of repression or censorship as strong as or stronger than the one that relates to sexuality per se and that the deepest critical implications of his own work lie in a transgression of this other, deeper form of censorship.(2) One aim of this essay is to bring to light and analyze critically Foucault's implicit "dialogue" with Freud, in particular that part of the dialogue that has to do with the concept of sado-masochism. In the process I shall explore the critical implications for psychoanalysis of an approach to sado-masochism that does not limit its significance by treating it as characteristic only of a particular stage of development or form of neurosis, as Freud most frequently did. What I shall try to show is the force and implications of Foucault's critique of one of the central components of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, but I do not seek to test the rigor of Foucault's critique of Freud through an extended discussion and analysis of Freud's work as a whole. It may be worth noting at the start, however, that a fuller discussion of Foucault's dialogue with Freud would reveal the problematical dimension of a number of Foucault's assertions when they are confronted with the entirety of the Freudian corpus. A second aim of this analysis relates more narrowly to Foucault's work and the psycho-social model it proposes. As I have already suggested, my approach to Foucault stems from a sense that both his critics and defenders have failed to recognize the critical impact of Foucault's concept of sado-masochism and in the process missed one of the most significant elements of his work in relation both to psychoanalytical and social theory. But I will argue as well that these same defenders and critics may have also missed what is one of the most serious limitations of his work, a limitation that becomes fully evident in Foucault's History of Sexuality. …

Introduction : from possible worlds to virtual reality

Abstract: In: virtual reality. Out: reality. So claimed on December 31, 1994 one of those countless lists of predictions that invariably herald the coming of a new year.(1) What is out is the concept of a reality where the mind and the body encounter the resistance of matter, where the laws of gravity hold, where some events happen that you cannot take back, where you live only one life. What is in is a realm where all your wishes can be fulfilled, where you live multiple lives, where you can inhabit multiple personalities, and where nothing "counts" because it is only a game, an endlessly repeatable and endlessly variable simulation. With this pronouncement, a major theme of postmodernism has gone mainstream. As Benjamin Woolley describes the contemporary mind set: "Reality has left the physical world and moved into the virtual one" (235). For the past twenty years, what has been "in" for cultural theory was any kind of concept that opposes and challenges nature, essence, and reality: copies, fake, fiction, conventions, the artificial, make-believe and role playing. The news of "the death of reality" and of its replacement by hyperrealities did not await electronic mail td spread throughout the cultural, critical, and literary scene. In an intellectual climate that regards concepts as toys to play with and that favors consensus over correspondence theories of truth (if truth remains an issue at all), professions of radical antirealism are often more an intellectual game than a metaphysical commitment, for such a commitment would reinstate "the absence of reality" as surrogate reality: this is to say, as transcendental object of knowledge. (Hard-core postmodernists would of course reply that playing games is the only metaphysical commitment left after the death of reality.) Games may be played in a spirit of nonseriousness, but they are part of a culture, and as such they must be taken seriously. Thus, regardless of our personal position concerning the nature, existence, or epistemic accessibility of reality, we must address the theme of its crisis and the emergence of alternative concepts if we want to understand the contemporary zeitgeist. The focus of this issue of Style is a conceptual space encompassing two manifestations of what may be called "the parareal": one--possible worlds, or PW--a philosophical notion currently developing into a tool of literary criticism; the other--virtual reality, or VR--a technological phenomenon that has recently captured the public's imagination, attracting along the way theoretical attention from the academic community. The relation between postmodernism and PW theory can be described as a love-hate affair. The love part stems from the endorsement by PW theory of an ontological model consisting of a plurality of worlds. In this model, contemporary thought finds a philosophical basis for its endorsement of diversity in all its forms, from multiculturalism within society to a pluralism of coexisting individuals within the subject. According to Brian McHale, the transition from modernism to postmodernism is defined by a shift from an epistemological to an ontological dominant: "Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability" (11). McHale's assimilation of plurality with instability--a fairly typical move in postmodern thought--points, however, to the hate part of the relationship. The rallying cry of postmodern theory is the negative prefix: as Linda Hutcheon observes, the term "postmodernism" is "usually accompanied by a grand flourish of negativized rhetoric: we hear of discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentering, indeterminacy, and antitotalization" (3). Encompassing all of these notions, of course, is the almighty concept of deconstruction. This approach to diversity runs contrary to the structure assigned by PW theory to its ontological model; hence the hate component. By designating one world of the system as actual and by opposing it to the surrounding nonactual possible worlds (as Saul Kripke defines the so-called "M-model"), PW theory postulates an ontological center that dispels any chance of equality among the members of the system. …

Reader-Response under Review: Art, Game, or Science?

Abstract: One of the problems of the label "Reader-Response Criticism" is that it covers a multitude of different approaches. Jane Tompkins's anthology, Reader-Response Criticism, originally published in 1980 but reprinted many times since then and still used as a course textbook, includes essays that could equally well be labelled New Critical, Phenomenological, Structuralist, Psychoanalytic, or Deconstructive. Her introduction claims that Reader-Response Criticism "could be. said to have started with I. A. Richards's discussions of emotional response in the 1920s or with the work of D. W. Harding and Louise Rosenblatt in the 1930s" (x). Rosenblatt's later book, The Reader, the Text, the Poem, first published in 1978 and now reissued with a new preface and epilogue, is one of the books under review here. But also under review are a number of books that might not normally be considered Reader-Response at all, including work by Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur, as well as new books by writers whose earlier work appeared in Tompkins's anthology - Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, and Wolfgang Iser. What all these books have in common is a concern with The Act of Reading, to use Iser's title to name the process of responding to the black marks on a page. Whether this act is an art or a science, to be treated, as subjective and personal manner or regarded as a rigorous, objective discipline, has long been a matter of debate. Even the word "response" is a complex and controversial one. Fish happily describes himself on the back of his new book as "a founder of Reader Response Theory" but he is well-known for arguing that the text is the product of the reader rather than the other way round, so the term "response" seems problematic even in the case of its best-known exponent. Holland, as we shall see, adopts a position similar to that of Fish, rejecting out of hand the notion that reading is "a mere response to a stimulus" (226). Even Iser, against whom Holland is here arguing, appends a footnote to the preface of The Act of Reading, explaining that he reluctantly accepted the English word "response" for the German term Wirkung, "which comprises both effect and response, without the psychological connotations of the English word" (ix). Reader-Response, then, serves as an umbrella term for a variety of positions held together only by their concern with what goes on in the mind of the reader when he or she picks up and peruses a book. Most of the present batch of books concerned with this process seem to consider it as an art, even a game, rather than a science. There is a widespread reaction against structuralism and the impersonal discourses it spawned, a return to the recognition that readers are people with all the properties that go with being human: gender, history, politics, and beliefs. They have hang-ups (and some let them all hang out); they are haunted by a range of ghosts (especially if they are Marx); they respond in personal and creative ways, and they are fed up with repressing these ways in their professional criticism (especially if they are women). It is not that there is a general clamor to return to the days of "Q" - Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, first professor of English Literature in the University of Cambridge - though it is worth noting that even "Q" began his 1916 lectures "On the Art of Reading" with an acceptance that his responsibility was "to instruct young men how to read" (9). The study of English Literature has moved on since then, although not always, according to some of these recent books, in ways that have enlarged our understanding of the art of reading, or of literature, or of ourselves. Perhaps the most outspoken critic of the contemporary literary critical scene is Norman Holland, who describes his book The Critical I as "a critical I-ing of current criticism, its practice and theory," with special attention to "what some of the practitioners assume about the I, the person engaged in the literary transaction" (xi). …

The Heroine Is Being Beaten: Freud, Sadomasochism, and Reading the Romance

Abstract: In 1972, though Avon Books reluctantly published Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower, its overwhelming popularity ushered in the current reading market in which popular romances comprise nearly fifty percent of all paperback sales.(1) Woodiwiss's novel follows the tempestuous love affair between a beautiful but hapless orphan who, while escaping the clutches of ruthless guardians and a repellent arranged husband-to-be (whom she kills in self defense), encounters a handsome and dangerous sea captain. He mistakes her for a prostitute - a common device in these early romances - and forces himself upon her. The following passage from The Flame and the Flower illuminates the dynamic of what came to be known in the industry as the "rape saga": He pointed to her shift. "Get that off." Heather swallowed hard. Her eyes flew down his body and widened even more. She was fast losing her innocence. "Please - " she gasped. "I'm not a patient man, Heather," he said and his voice was very menacing. Her fingers shook as she untied the ribbons and unfastened the tiny buttons between her breasts. She caught the hem and raised it over her head. Her eyes lifted to his as she felt his fiery gaze upon her body. "Now lie down," he ordered. . . . "Please," she whimpered. "Aren't you satisfied that you've taken the one thing that was only mine to give? Must you keep torturing me again and again?" (41-42) Naturally, such feminist critics as Ann Barr Snitow, Tania Modleski, and Janice Radway were quick to point out the obvious dangers of such violent fantasies. In an article in the New Republic titled "Soft-Porn Culture," Ann Douglas reads the rape saga as culture's insidious retribution for women's liberation, punishing women by offering them seemingly woman-centered stories that continually reinforce women's passivity and thralldom to exciting but domineering men. Douglas succinctly expresses the peril of such a fantasy: The Harlequin heroine guarantees the continuance of her initial youthful ignorance of life by her avid willingness to let the first chance at sexual bondage do the work experience is usually asked to accomplish. The idea of "growing up," of maturation, is the one most taboo in porn, and this taboo constitutes one of its greatest attractions. (28) Worse, [T]he women who wouldn't thrill to male nudity in Playgirl are enjoying the titillation of seeing themselves, not necessarily as they are, but as some men would like to see them: illogical, innocent, magnetized by male sexuality and brutality. (26) Such fears and disapproval are well-founded, and pressure from both critics and avid readers has led to a great diminution in such brutal portrayals in more recent novels. Yet while this depiction has largely fallen out of favor with writers and readers recently, the dynamic still appears in some novels whose very reason for being is to provide a female-centered sexual and romantic fantasy. In a typical scenario, a strong-willed woman meets an equally strong-willed older man and both feel incredible antipathy - and attraction - toward each other. After a series of misunderstandings, he eventually loses control of his passions and physically assaults her, but the narrative operates in such a way that this assault appears as evidence of the hero's uncontrollable love of and attraction to the heroine. Once she recognizes this in him (and he recognizes it in himself) they call a truce and declare their true - loving - feelings for one another. These dynamics are evident in the titles of many novels, such as Sandra Bishop's Beloved Savage, Adrienne Day's A Gentle Taming, Rosemary Rogers's Sweet Savage Love, Katherine Kincaid's Beloved Bondage, and Linda Lael Miller's Taming Charlotte. The oxymorons in titles like Day's and Rogers's also underscore the tension that drives these depictions of love as simultaneously painful and beautiful, heroes as lovable yet savage, and sex as gentle yet fierce. …

Book Reviews -- Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Helene Cixous and Translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers

Abstract: Cixous, Helene. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory, 1990. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 162 pp. $19.95 cloth; $12.00 paper. In 1975, in "The Laugh of the Medusa," published in L'Arc, Helene Cixous argued for a revolutionary reconception of writing that would explode traditionalism and allow for what she then called ecriture feminine. Her intentions in this volume, a series of lectures given at the Wellek Library in May 1990, are not so forthrightly ideological, nor does she offer much pragmatic assistance for the teacher of composition or the would-be-famous novelist. Instead, Cixous explores three distinct "schools" that produce what she envisions as great writing--the Schools of the Dead, of Dreams, and of Roots. Cixous invests much weight in the purposefully ambiguous nature of the word "school"; she seems to refer to a motivation, conscious or unconscious, that directs, influences, and shapes writing; at other times she seems to want to speak of actual places from whence we get instruction (again, consciously or unconsciously). Cixous' first journey, to the School of the Dead, is divided into eight numbered sections. The association of death with writing and creation has been discussed before (for example, in Bruce Robbins's "Death and Vocation"), but Cixous discusses both how death is influential and how writing, reading, and creation all enact and (re)present different kinds of deaths. Discussing the need for this school, she writes, "When do we reach the hour when we say we have deceived everyone in our lives in order to keep what we call life going? I don't know. We go to the School of the Dead to hear a little of what we are unable to say" (53). This unlocking, or bringing forth, of the unutterable is what writing from the School of the Dead enables, and has certain effects on the reader that Cixous describes variously as wounding, stabbing, and hurting. It becomes obvious, even at this early point, that the types of texts Cixous wants to discuss here are the ones that take us to extremes, that push the envelope, as it were. Cixous draws from a large array of writers (Poe, Kafka, Lispector, and Tsveteava are mentioned often) to illustrate different facets of her ideas here, ultimately arguing that "writing is learning to die" (10), not to mention that reading reflects similar urges and allows us to "annihilate the world with a book" (19). The writer can, through association with the School of the Dead, "proceed to the burning point, reach that last hour, when we'll be able to write or say everything we have never dared say out of love and cowardice" (48). This opening up of the writer proceeds not from definite inclinations; Cixous gives the impression that this process happens without our knowing, takes shape in our writing as we write. She claims that she herself has never been fortunate enough to study in this school, but that she is able to go to a place where she has something in common with the dead--the School of Dreams. Interestingly, the thirteen subsections of this chapter are the only ones in the book that are not numbered--suggesting, perhaps, that dreams abandon numbers and logical progression and that a similar mindset can creep in when the writer is immersed in the act of creation. Again, the School of Dreams provides access to the unsayable. Cixous reads Jacob's dream of the ladder as a metaphor for what the School of Dreams can enable by allowing us to leave home and to move "toward the foreigner in ourselves, that inner foreign country" (69-70). It is in this foreign country that we can face our-'selves' directly: We can hope to move closer to everything we can't say without dying of fright through the School of Dreams. What makes us flee, . . . what no man, no prophet could ever do, is look right at God, look him in the eye. This is a metaphor. It's looking at what must not be looked at, at what would prevent us from existing, from continuing our ordinary, domestic lives, and what I call, for better or worse: "the truth. …

A Postmodern Challenge to Reference-World Construction: Gilbert Sorrentino's 'Mulligan Stew.'

Abstract: The subversions of postmodern fiction have constituted a challenge to narrative reading that theorists in diverse fields have been unable to ignore. Even within fictional-world semantics, where remarkable tolerance exists for the often disturbing impossibilities of fiction, postmodern fiction has strained the capabilities of theory and has stubbornly resisted analysis through the possible-worlds apparatus. This article exposes the subversions of postmodern fiction against the background of a theoretical extension for fictional-world semantics that provides, a more tolerant view of the aspects of fiction most threatening to the possible-worlds approach. Even within this expanded appreciation of the reading procedures for accessing fictional truth, postmodern fiction presents serious problems that threaten to defy theory. This article explores these problems through the example of Mulligan Stew, exposing interrelated aspects of metafictional narrative technique and the roles played by such procedures in creating impossible fictional-world structures. As a result, theory-subversive narrative characteristics are accepted within the expanded fictional-world semantic model. My analysis begins with the concept of "textual reference world," conceived as a reader construct, created through shared, interpersonal, and recognizable reading operations and mediated by the codified conventional context on which the operations depend. With traditional narrative fiction, the reference world is postulated by the reader to preexist textual stipulation as if the narrative signifying discourse refers to (rather than merely signifies) that world. The criteria for truth applying to the reference world are modeled on the correspondence theory by which truth is assessed in the real world, the reference world temporarily replacing the actual world as referent and context for truth. That no such "world" actually exists we take for granted. But as an independent mental construct the reference world acts as an insulator between reality and the fictional world and preserves the autonomy of that world by setting its "isolation" in a new truth context. Philosophical reference problems are solved within this context, which reestablishes the metaphysical relationship between words and imagined reality, the reference world providing the context required for successful reference. Names and descriptions refer in the reference world, which is separate from the actual world in that it contains entirely new entities yet is not entirely isolated from the actual world because of the reader' s inescapable applicable knowledge. The reference world accommodates the crucial intersection of extra- and intertextuality with fictional worlds, the reader implementing the text-external knowledge bases of world models, text models, and intertextual repertoire (see Charles, "Matrix"). Such knowledge constitutes a special "access relation" among worlds that makes reference both possible and meaningful and that results in the construction of more complete fictional truth beyond the typical epistemological indeterminacy of fiction. By postulating such a world as a mental construct, the reader can inscribe herself there, as Marie-Laure Ryan's exploration of fictional recentering shows (13-30). Fictional characters can consequently take on a more comprehensive existence that matches intuitions about their participation in reality and the reader's emotional responses to their situations. Once characters "exist" in the reference world to which the reader imaginatively relocates, it becomes possible to "interact" with them on a perceived-as-equal ontological footing. The reference world is what we have in mind when we speak of traditional fictional characters as if they were ontoIogically complete persons with selfhood and destiny. In this world we routinely fill in gaps in description and consider psychological motivation for characters' actions. Here we attribute to fictional characters an existence that only membership in such an imagined "ontologically actual world" can provide. …

A Recipe for Mourning: Isak Dinesen's "Babette's Feast"

Abstract: When director Gabriel Axel's film version of "Babette's Feast" hit American movie screens in 1988, restaurants in major cities around the country offered the chance to enjoy the sumptuous feast served up in the movie.(1) For a hefty price, film-goers could complete the cinema experience by heading off to a restaurant and savoring the delights of turtle soup, Blinis Demidoff, and Cailles en Sarcophage, accompanied by Veuve Clicquot champagne and Clos de Vougeot Burgundy. These well-attended dinners became rich fodder for some social observers, who critiqued them as an example of 1980s yuppie self-indulgence. While film reviewers debated the problems of translating Dinesen's narrative for the screen and discussed the aesthetic issues of the plight of the artist and the transformative power of art, these pundits considered the diners' response symptomatic of the me-decade's materialist culture of conspicuous consumption (see Schickel; Kauffmann). Once again, they lamented, excessive disposable income was serving the insatiable and emptily narcissistic desires of a thin slice of society. While there is no concrete evidence to suggest that readers of Dinesen's short story have indulged in similar acts of consumption over the years, the possibility should not be dismissed out of hand. After all, the story was first published in the Ladies' Home Journal in June 1950 when Dinesen, in need of money and eager to break into the lucrative American magazine market, took up the advice of a friend who urged, "Write about food. Americans are obsessed with food."(2) If the story is indeed "about food," we may ask precisely what it says about food, and whether what it says invites a different reading of the collective "eater-response" of a segment of the movie-going public. Dinesen scholars, while certainly not ignoring the culinary aspects of the tale, have tended to concentrate their analyses on the question of artistic creation, on the conflict between the aesthetic and the ascetic, and, more recently, on the specificity of the woman as artist and creator. Food has tended to be viewed allegorically in the story as representing, for example, the schism between the ethical, Norwegian, puritanical sect of Protestantism, nurtured on split cod and ale-and-bread soup, and the aesthetic, sensuous inclinations of French Catholicism, nourished by haute cuisine and epitomized by the master chef Babette. The miraculous dinner Babette prepares at the story's end serves, in this reading, to reconcile the ascetic with the aesthetic, the spiritual with the carnal (Langbaum 248-55). Another view holds that Babette is an "artist-priest" and benevolent "witch" who heals the dissension in the aging congregation with the "communion feast" or "Last Supper" she prepares, revealing through this Dionysian repast that spiritual fulfillment is obtainable only through acceptance of fleshly values (Stambaugh 79-81). In still another, feminist, approach, Susan Hardy Aiken argues that the Quail in Sarcophagus Babette cooks represents "woman's own body that is offered up, in displaced form, through her Eucharistic culinary corpus" (254). In this reading, Babette is exhausted at the dinner's end because she is "emptied out, . . . in effect consumed by her own artistic production" (254). Moreover, Aiken sees female artistic creation as inseparable from feminine sacrifice, and she views the text as showing that the production of narrative implies the author's "simultaneous self-annihilation and self-creation" (254). There is no denying that Babette's sumptuous feast and its aftermath offer a reflection on religion and on the opposition between the spiritual and the carnal, while also raising the questions of artistic creation and identity. But these issues do not fully represent the text's concerns. The reading that follows aims to show that the dinner has above all a psychoanalytic function. It allows for a communion in loss by enabling loss to be talked about and the process of its mourning to begin. …

Philosophical Realism and Postmodern Antirealism

Abstract: Realism has preoccupied philosophers, literary theorists, and art theorists for generations. Yet in neither of these disciplines have discussions concerning realism reached a conclusive state or a clear definition. Typically, the conception of realism is subject to considerable disagreement regarding its very meaning, its implications (on any level of theory or practice, of semantics or ontology), and even regarding its place in the overall structure of the disciplines in question. Exemplary cases in this context are the debate over the mimetic value(1) of perspective in Renaissance art, the debate over the realism of the novelistic genre in literary studies, and the debate over the kind of truth conception realism entails in philosophy or over how tenable realism can be in view of the possibility that future science will refute the existence of its current theoretical position. All these discussions continue to stir the verbal energies of both philosophers and art and literary theorists with an intensity that varies at different times. Facing the profound multivalence surrounding the concept of realism, this paper will suggest that realism stands to gain in clarity and productivity if discussed within an interdisciplinary framework. Specifically this paper aims to suggest ways in which the philosophical debate between realists and antirealists can illuminate the position of critics towards questions of representation in literature. This aim will be attained, however, without positing philosophical tools as privileged or prior but rather as analogous to the conceptual tools offered by literary theorists. Rethinking realism in interdisciplinary terms evidently offers vast possibilities; these will be delimited to the question of what constitutes a realist position in philosophy and how such a position can be identified in the context of literary theory. Once spelled out, the complex of assumptions of the philosophical realist will lead to a consideration of some of the assumptions guiding the work of literary theorists of postmodernism. I shall examine whether the practice of formulating a poetics of postmodernism as implemented in literary studies by necessity contradicts a realist perspective, one that privileges notions such as "reality" and "representation." Examining the case of postmodernist poetics against the assumptions of philosophical realism will reveal that a gap exists between the perspective that allegedly dominates postmodernist theories, one that is a professed antirealist perspective, and the practice of postmodernist criticism. Thus, while postmodernist discourse often includes formulations that signal cultural relativism or even a radical antirealism, critical approaches to literary postmodernism are in fact much less extreme in their practices. THE PROBLEMATICS OF AN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF REALISM Although realism is a concept already present in various disciplines, the idea of creating an interdisciplinary domain for discussing the problem of realism takes this interdisciplinary reality a step further. The idea is not to move back and forth between philosophy and literary theory to find places where realism in the philosophical sense is discussed by literary theorists and vice versa. Rather, the purpose of this kind of project is to show that realism, although operative within particular disciplines, can also become operative across disciplines. Despite the fact that philosophy has contributed mostly to the formulation of the problem of realism on a metatheoretic level while literary and art theory contributed mostly to defining the problem of realism as a problem in and of representation, this paper attempts to construct a level of interaction between the disciplines. The attempt to discuss realism across disciplines conflicts with a certain diffuseness that characterizes current discussions of realism in each of the disciplines concerned. This diffuseness can be attributed to the following factors: (1) The question of realism, both in philosophy and in literary theory, has opened vistas of problems; realism has turned out to touch on the very foundations of each of the disciplines involved. …

Bilingual Style in Nabokov's Autobiography

Abstract: Vladimir Nabokov once remarked that "the best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style" (Strong Opinions 154-55). In Nabokov's own case that story has two versions, Russian and English, and anybody wishing to tell it must therefore be prepared to offer an account of both, describing not only their separate features but, insofar as possible, their underlying relation. Of course, given the variety of Nabokov's bilingual oeuvre -- the numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as the many translations of himself and others he produced from about 1923 until his death in 1977 -- any investigation of his style will have to deal with linguistic, textual, and aesthetic matters of unusual complexity.(1) A solution, perhaps the only one in a discussion of limited space, is that of summary reduction, here the substitution of a representative cross-lingual text for the oeuvre and then the analysis of a significant component of that text in regard to its different instantiations. The text I have chosen is the autobiographical diptych Speak, Memory/Drugie berega, and the component I shall look at is its acoustic patterning. The autobiography recommends itself as representative, indeed, as paradigmatic, for several reasons. One is the fact that it is an autobiography, a nonfiction narrative purporting, however intricate the mediation, to be a depiction of the author's own experience and identity. This means that any conclusions about its style will pertain not only to the individuality shaped within the text as aesthetic object but also to the personality located behind it as maker, since the two, object and maker, are in some fundamental way the same. Likewise, the cognitive stance of the narrative, its stated views and opinions, will also be those not merely of a narrator or character but of the author himself, although, to be sure, they will be no less mediated by the imperatives of form than the image of the author is altered by its status as a model or projection.(2) It follows from this that if the analysis of the autobiography's verbal texture is to reflect its generic situation, its continual balancing of the demands of formal integration and referential truth, then that analysis will want to differentiate between those details that serve as rhetorical fulcra, as means of underpinning the organization of the text itself, and those that more directly assist the process of authorial self-expression, that inscribe in the text a characteristic voice that is perceived as responsible for it, even though the distinction between aesthetic calculation and personal revelation, like that between object and maker, may not always be clear-cut in practice. Another reason for viewing the autobiography as paradigmatic is its compositional history, its cumulative movement back and forth across several linguistic and temporal boundaries in relentless search, so it would seem, of ways to satisfy the competing claims of internal coherence and external veracity. For readers unacquainted with that history, it may be helpful to note that the canonical English edition is actually the culmination of a painstaking thirty-year process of multiple translingual revision. Except for chapter 5 ("Mademoiselle O"(3)), which deals with Nabokov's Swiss governess and the topic of his exposure to French (and which was initially written in French and published in 1936 in the Parisian Journal Mesures and then translated into English and published in 1943 in The Atlantic Monthly), the book's fifteen chapters, or at least what were to become those chapters, were composed in English from 1946 to 1950 and published separately in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Harper's Magazine. They were then collected, revised for style and factual accuracy, arranged in order of their biographical chronology, and published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence, the first redaction of the autobiography proper. …

Nonfictional Narrative in Freud's 'Dora': History, Scripted History, Conscripted History

Abstract: Drawn to the battlefield of dream and desire, readers regularly reprowl the text of Freud's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, attracted both by its history and by its continuing drama. Tracing paths of force and counterforce, forays and retreats, we reflect on how it must have been and how it all still is. Was it on this very site that Freud's army of interpretation conquered Dora's self-wounded ignorance, here that her powers of evasion produced her crafty escape? Was it here that transference and countertransference waged guerilla war, here that mirror moves dazzled and defied? Dora is at once history, scripted history, conscripted history. This "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" is, after all, Freud's first case study and still a canonical text for psychoanalytic training (Marcus 56). While for some readers it remains an instruction manual, for others it offers compelling, though perhaps unwitting, representation of the power struggle its methodology encodes and seeks to contain. This paper is indebted to the analyses of recent feminist critics--particularly many published in the collection In Dora's Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism, edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane--who unmask the power agenda inherent in Freud's treatment of Dora. Maria Ramos's discussion of Freud's dominance of Dora during the analysis is insightful. Kahane concentrates on how Freud's voice as narrator organizes dialogue and events to his advantage; Jane Gallop, Suzanne Gearhart, and Jacqueline Rose write suggestive analyses of the transference and countertransference in the case. And Toril Moi, in particular, demonstrates persuasively how Freud's compulsion to fill the gaps of Dora's history ultimately reveals that the analyst "clings to his dream of complete elucidation" (187) of the Dora case. Freud's methodology, according to Moi, assumes that Dora's fragmentary case can be completed by the work of the author (187). and that " p ossession of knowledge means possession of power" (194). While this paper can add little to the wealth of post-Freudian psychoanalytical reconsideration already produced on the subject of Freud and Dora, it means to explore specifically how Freud implicated himself as a nonfiction writer through his development and adjustment of the case-study style. For it is in that nonfiction contract and its accompanying style that Freud seeks to exert textual power over both Dora and his readers. I am proposing a model for reading nonfiction that would examine the narrator of a nonfiction text against the grain of what we know of the human limitations of an author or reporter and that would probe those intertwined and differing presences. I call such a task reading for the "implicated author," in the sense that the adjective means "deeply involved, even incriminated," and to play against Wayne Booth's famous notion of the "implied author" outlined in The Rhetoric of Fiction. For Booth, an implied author is suggested by the book's total form "regardless of what party his creator belongs to in real life" (73-74). My reading for an implicated author, however, refuses to ignore the limitations and/or strengths of a "real-life creator," most particularly in the manner by which the author's "real-life" affiliations are revealed by his methodology. Instead, it answers communications scholar John J. Pauly's invitation to examine nonfiction narrative for "the way the reporting process implicates writer, subjects, and readers in relationships beyond the text" (112). Reading Dora as a text that implicates its author both as a narrative presence in the text and as an author who intends his case history to be consumed as fact reveals a type of truth claim particular to the Freudian case study. In Dora, Freud presents what he claims is actuality within a highly constructed text (not unlike the strategy of a docudrama or nonfiction novel), while at the same moment he exerts all the rights and privileges of a factual contract in which the scientist-psychoanalyst attempts to hold the powers of interpretation and to exclude both his subject and his readers from meaning formation. …

Words of One's Own: Some Evidence against Men's Use of Language as a Tool of Domination

Abstract: A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative. Adrienne Rich's characterization of the domination of women by men throughout history contains two assumptions that the present paper will debate: at language has been a primary source of men's continued supremacy and that written language contains the record of that supremacy. Having taken Rich's claim as an invitation to study gender differences in language use, we have conducted an inquiry into men's and women's use of written language during the eighteenth century, a period of history much focused upon by feminist scholarship. Our findings have led us to contend that there are perceivable (and describable) gender-relevant differences in the language written by men and women during that century. We will trace the way the element of gender informs the dichotomy of the sexes in language, information that has been assumed by other scholars interested in this question to be the product of patriarchal culture and to have been under the control of men in that culture. Most important in view of such a prior perspective, we will bring to light the well-documented and significant extent of women's written contribution to the shaping of their own gender identity according to patriarchal values, a phenomenon anticipated by some contemporary feminist language and historical theorists. The eighteenth century was a time that feminist historians contend was formative in the development of the patriarchal definitions of modern womanhood, and the evidence of this linguistic contribution by eighteenth-century women to the construction of the patriarchal ideal argues for a review of some feminist historicists' contention that the domestic subculture, as a vital support structure of modern industrialized culture, was solely a patriarchal product. The development of the feminist critique of language and literature that Rich called for 23 years ago has been fruitful and has multiplied in a variety of academic disciplines. Research into the details of the history of male domination of the female, theories about its role in the development of modem sociopolitical organization, and questions about the patriarchal stamp of language and literature all have been pursued. Joan Scott, in Gender and the Politics of History, has provided a feminist interpretation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical processes that links the identification of gender to the evolution of power relationships in modem industrialized society (42). She argues that gender identities are determined by the total conglomerate of cultural forces rather than by individuals or groups within cultures whose power and identity are derived from some category -- such as race or class -- other than gender. Scott's contention about the significance of gender in social history is that "differences between the sexes constitute and are constituted by hierarchical social structures" (25). Beside Scott, other feminist theorists of social, political, and literary history such as Nancy Armstrong, Rita Felski, Vivien Jones, and Jane Spencer have argued for the identification of gender as an essential part of the construction of social hierarchies by a cultural process that features language. Although Armstrong concludes her political history of the novel with the observation that women's writing has contributed much to the definition of the political hierarchy that emerged in the eighteenth century, she, too, acknowledges that "the modem political state ... was accomplished largely through cultural hegemony" (9). All of the writers mentioned use fiction and nonfiction texts as cultural products demonstrating the "feminization" of culture. …

Representing Other Voices: Rhetorical Perspective in Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract: Mikhail Bakhtin, in his discussion of "Types of Prose Discourse," denies that his theory of voice has much to say about poetry. "Poetic speech in the narrow sense," he writes, "requires a uniformity of all discourses, their reduction to a common denominator." Prose, in contrast, retains as a fundamental feature "the possibility of employing on the plane of a single work discourses of various types, with all their expressive capacities intact, without reducing them to a common denominator." Bakhtin then does concede that "even in poetry a whole series of fundamental problems cannot be solved without some attention to the [types] for investigating discourse"; but only in the sense that "different types of discourse in poetry require different stylistic treatments" (200).(1) Despite his own disclaimer, however, Bakhtin's theories certainly have application to poetry.(2) Elizabeth Bishop, for example, deploys in her work a genuine multiplicity of voice beyond mere differences in stylistic treatment and does so in ways that fully engage the social discourses that interested Bakhtin. Even when her texts seem to unfold within a single stylistic "denominator," Bishop's controlled lyric forms often bring into play the multiplicity of social voices [in the] wide variety of their links and interrelationships" as well as the "struggle among sociolinguistic points of view" that Bakhtin calls heteroglossia ("Discourse" 263, 273). Some aspects of this multiplicity have attracted critical attention in welcome contrast to accounts of her work that claim she is usually speaking in her own voice" (Parker 32); "usually writ[ing] in her own voice" with "few personae" (Schwartz, "One Art" 139); or that she fails to establish "a voice sufficiently distinctive so as to serve as a vehicle for an assumed dialogue" (Gordon 16).(3) However, critical discussion has almost exclusively focused on Bishop's skill in projecting variations in visual perspective.(4) I shall emphasize how multiplicity extends beyond visual effects into a "perspective" that is instead rhetorical, which Bishop accomplishes by interweaving subtly distinguishable patterns of rhetoric associated with variations of stance and viewpoint. This representation of distinct rhetorical patterns establishes "voices" such as Bakhtin proposes, each of which retains its integrity as a separate and often socially situated mode of representation, but always in a relationship directed toward and addressing the text's other rhetorical "voices." In Bishop, the scenes of multivoicedness vary, as does the balance among its components. Many of Bishop's most familiar poetic strategies contribute to it; her manipulations of perspective, which often shift radically within a text, and her pervasive figures of travel and maps. These travel scenes, besides their biographical reference, also take place as specific social-historical encounters and feature a surprising variety of human figures within varying cultural contexts. Bishop's varied generic registers take part in her orchestrations of voice as well: her blues and children, s songs, her use of troubadour forms, and her translations all reflect her project of voice exchange. Some poems are overtly spoken by another's voice. The "Songs for a Colored Singer" are each sung by a separate, black female voice but also together form a group of poems sung by multiple voices. "Jeronimo's House" is spoken by one of Bishop's many squatters. "The Riverman" is the interior monologue of a witch doctor on the Amazon. "Manuelzhino" is introduced with the instruction that "a friend of the writer is speaking." Even "Crusoe in England" is cast as Crusoe's own utterance. In each case, Bishop's own voice comes into play, too, to a greater or lesser degree. "Jeronimo's House" inscribes Bishop's view of Jeronimo's viewpoint. The friend speaking "Manuelzhino" is Lota de Soares, with whom Bishop lived for eighteen years. And Crusoe's persona is nearly a transparent mask for Bishop herself. …

Watch and Ward: James's Fantasy of Omnipotence

Abstract: In James's first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), the protagonist Roger Lawrence, whose recent marriage proposal to Miss Morton has just been rejected, meets and adopts an orphan, Nora Lambert, and raises her with the hopes of making her his ideal wife. James seems unaware of the sexual displacement he sets up in his plot. While Leon Edel, in his introduction to the 1959 Grove Press edition, notes James's apparent obliviousness to the text's eroticism, he views both the obliviousness and the eroticism as "harmless": "Watch and Ward contains a peculiar sexuality of its own. I refer to the book's persistent erotic imagery and innocent erotic statement which seems to have been set down with bland unconsciousness on the author's part" (6). Because Roger Lawrence never physically acts on his desire for Nora Lambert as she is growing up under his care, Edel concludes that Roger's desire for the girl as revealed in the text's imagery is unconscious and "innocent" because it is "Freudian" - natural, in other words. Of course fathers desire their daughters - if only unconsciously - just as daughters, in turn, cannot help but desire their fathers. Thus, Roger's desire is "understandable" - certainly not harmful to the child, at any rate. In fact, Edel does not even refer to the child's experience. Edel sees Roger's, and by implication the narrator's and James's, obliviousness to the relationship's inherent sexuality as endearing: "Watch and Ward is naive from beginning to end. . . . It is the utter innocence of this story which, in a way, endears it to us" (7). It is reassuring to note that most recent critics find this story to be anything but "utterly innocent," for if the plot of Watch and Ward is a narcissist's dream-come-true, it is also replete with all the destructiveness that such a dream entails.(1) But what is more, the novel shows that patriarchy is an especially fertile ground for pathological narcissism. Current theory describes healthy narcissism as the playful indulgence of illusions (about life, ourselves, and others), combined with the understanding that they are illusions and that one might have to let go of them.(2) The healthy subject indulges illusions, recognizing their potential and that without them the subject cannot create, grow, or change, that as one illusion dies, another is born in its place. The pathological narcissist does not understand the tentative, precarious nature of illusions, and maintains illusions at the expense of reality, often addictively. Denial or despair becomes more and more a part of psychic life. Whether or not a person will be a healthy or a pathological narcissist depends largely on one's early relationship with one's parents. The ideal parent can enjoy and play with the child's illusions - the child's overvaluations of self and others and feelings of merger with the parent - and with her or his own illusions. She or he can play with and let go of any or all of those illusions when circumstances call for a more realistic vision (Mitchell, Relational Concepts 196). A parent who must delude him or herself, whose own sense of security or specialness is shaky or grandiose, forces the child to maintain similar delusions. Because physical and emotional survival at this stage of development depends upon relatedness with the parent, the child will comply with the parent and the parent's delusions. It is too painful for the child to hold onto its own wishes and needs in this kind of environment with this kind of parent. The child will abandon its authentic true self - hide or repress it - and construct in its place a false self to meet the caretaker's needs and agenda. "Here illusions are no longer the spontaneously generated, transitory, playful creation of an active mind. Illusions are insisted upon with utmost seriousness by significant others, and they become the necessary price for contact and relation" (Mitchell, Relational Concepts 197). The child learns how it must be if it is going. …

Supplement to a Bibliography of Russian Formalism in English

Abstract: This is a supplement to my "Bibliography of Russian Formalism in English," published in a previous bibliographic number of Style (26.4, Winter 1992: 554-76). The original listing was divided into three sections: the first for English translations of writings by the Formalist critics, the second for English-language writings on the Formalist school, and the third for such miscellaneous but possibly relevant items as (translated) writings by members of the movement dating from later than its dissolution in 1929. This supplement is divided into two major sections: the first listing revisions to entries in the original bibliography, the second listing additions to it (whether of new items or - much the larger group - items that I missed in my first survey). The entries in both of these sections are keyed to the entries and divisions of the 1992 listing, of course, in a way which is (hopefully) sufficiently clear. As in the original bibliography, the spellings of proper names in Russian, which vary depending on the system of English transliteration used, have been regularized, with some inconsistency as the unavoidable result. (An asterisk indicates an item that I have not seen.) Thanks to Kenneth Morefield for assistance. REVISE: 1B. Individual Formalists Boris Eikhenbaum: The Young Tolstoy. 1922; revised ed. 1928. Trans. (of 1922 ed.) David Boucher et al. Ed. Gary Kern. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1972. Extract rpt. Tolstoy's Short Fiction. Ed. Michael R. Katz. New York: Norton, 1991. Norton Critical Edition. 370-78. Roman Jakobson: "On Tolstoy's Crises." 1924. Trans. Ralph E. Matlaw. Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Matlaw. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967. 52-55. Trans. Carol A. Palmer. Erlich 97-101. "The Theory of the 'Formal Method.'" 1926 [Ukranian]; 1927. Trans. Lemon and Reis 102-39. Rpt. Critical Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. 828[9]-46. Revised ed., 1992. 800[01]-16. Trans. I. R. Titunik: "The Theory of the Formal Method." Matejka and Pomorska 3-37. With Yury Tynyanov. "Problems in the Study of Literature and Language." 1928. Trans. Herbert Eagle. Matejka and Pomorska 79-81; SW 3: 3-6; VA 25-27; LL 47-49. Trans. Richard T. De George: "Problems in the Study of Language and Literature." The Structuralists: From Marx to Levi-Strauss. Ed. De George and Fernande M. De George. New York: Anchor, 1972. 81-83. Trans. L. M. O'Toole: "Problems of Research in Literature and Language." RPT 4 (1977): 49-51. Trans. anon. (from French trans.?): "Problems of Literary and Linguistic Studies." New Left Review 37 (May-June 1966): 59-61. "On a Generation that Squandered Its Poets." 1931. Trans. E. J. Brown. Brown 7-32; Erlich 138-66; VA 111-32; LL 273-300. Extracts trans. Dale E. Peterson (from French trans.?): "The Generation that Squandered Its Poets." Yale French Studies 39 (1967): 119-25. Viktor Shklovsky: "Art as Technique." 1917. Lemon and Reis 5-24. Frequently rpt. Revised as ch. 1 of Theory of Prose: "Art as Device." Yury Tynianov: "The Interval." 1924 (publ. 1929). Trans. John Glad and Sylvia Maizell. Russian Literature Triquarterly 5 (Winter 1973): 420-43. Trans. Christopher Pike and Joe Andrew: "Interval - To Boris Pasternak." Pike 106-39. Section 9 trans. Donald Davie: "Pasternak's 'Mission.'" Pasternak: Modern Judgments. Ed. Donald Davie and Angela Livingstone. London: Macmillan, 1969. 126-34. Portion trans. Victor Erlich: "Words and Things in Pasternak." Pasternak: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Erlich. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978. 32-38. 2. Writings in English on Russian Formalism Any, Carol. "Introduction: Russian Formalism, 1915-1930." Soviet Studies in Literature 21 (1984-1985): 5-28. Special issue: The Russian Formalist Tradition: Retrospective Views, ed. Any. Rpt. Boris Eikhenbaum (portions). -----. …

Narrative after Deconstruction: Structure and the Negative Poetics of William Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night

Abstract: William Burroughs's recent writing poses problems for critics. Traditionally Burroughs is known for a negative poetics that assaults the word and all continuity for the sake of breaking down social controls.(1) His recent writing attempts to balance this negative poetics with a narrative continuity previously foreign to his writing. Burroughs remarked in a recent interview, for example, "I don't think there's any substitute for [narrative structure]. I mean -- people want some sort of story in there. Otherwise they don't read it. What are they going to read? That's the point" (Skerl 11). This shift towards increased narrative cohesion is one that we can observe in most postmodern authors. Thomas Pynchon shifts from the radical discontinuity of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) to the more cohesive style of Vineland (1990); Ishmael Reed moves from absurd parody in Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-down (1969) to somewhat more realistic social satire in The Terrible Twos (1986); Kathy Acker quiets some of the radical discontinuity of works like The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (1973) in her recent In Memoriam to Identity (1990). Burroughs and these other writers can be seen as working through the deconstructive impulse that dominated writing of the 1970s and searching for some way of reintroducing narrative structure without rejecting that deconstruction wholesale. Because Burroughs's writing was, perhaps, more radically deconstructive than any of these other writers, his movement towards a narrative continuity is more pronounced and promises to be particularly revealing. Our challenge is to explain how Burroughs can adopt a narrative structure without renouncing his confrontational, negative poetics. Burroughs's recent writing is primarily "scenic": that is, it moves away from the linguistic basis of his experimental "cut ups" of the 1960s to concern itself with the dynamics of individual episodes. The Place of Dead Roads (1983), for example, begins and ends with the same scene recast with a different ending and significance. These scenes differ from the often individual comic and stylized pieces of Naked Lunch (1959) in that Burroughs's recent scenes recast the same characters and situations in a variety of combinations, drawing attention to how characters and their goals are structured by their situation and its narrative presentation. Situation also appears as a plot issue in this recent fiction. Characters search for a way of transcending the traditional conceptualization of the human situation. Burroughs speaks, for example, throughout The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands (1987) of the need for humans to "evolve" out of their bodies in order to move beyond the earth into space. Thus, in reading this recent fiction, we need to bring together an understanding of the dynamics of scenes and a consideration of how this scenic structuring reflects the more abstract construction of the human universe. We must account for both the concrete scenes and the abstract values that stand behind them. This scenic and abstract narrative seems to push us back towards an older structuralist model, in which a narrative balances abstract deep structural values with their manifestation into concrete situations and narrative. At the same time, however, one of Burroughs's principle themes is the danger of universalizing systems that reduce the world to an abstract machine, exactly the complaint raised against narrative structuralism. In other words, Burroughs demands a narrative model that emphasizes the play between surface and depth but rejects the notion that narrative can remain under the control of some deep. "core." Burroughs can be seen as returning to a notion of narrative structure that he has rejected in the past just as current theorists reject structuralists' accounts of narrative in the hopes of reworking this model as the basis of a new narrative form. Thus, in describing Burroughs's narrative we will need both to employ and to critique the structural narrative model that these scenic and abstract repetitions play out. …

Toward a reading of forms

Abstract: 1 Does this book need an extended justification? Nothing would seem more natural than its purpose: to grasp meanings by way of forms; to discriminate patterns and significant features; to reveal those unedited knots, fissures, and textures in literary discourse that signal the simultaneous occurrence of an authentic experience and of a realized work. It is a long time since anyone has doubted this: art consists in this interdependence of a mental universe and a perceptible construction, of a vision and a form.(1) Perhaps things are not all that simple: concerning the nature of the literary fact and the means of understanding works, concerning the interrelations of creation and reality, of the artist and history, of sensation and language, concerning the role in art of that primary function, the imagination, uncertainties and disagreements abound. But if there is one concept that provokes contradiction and disagreement, it can only be that nevertheless central one of form. It must be said that difficulties accumulate here, and I can scarcely attempt to resolve them. In these pages, preceding not a speculative work, but a series of applied readings, I will confine myself to specifying a few points, to anticipating certain misunderstandings, and to speaking first of all about the experience upon which I am relying. 2 To enter into a work is to change universes, to open an horizon. An authentic work presents itself simultaneously as the revelation of an uncrossable threshold and as a bridge thrown across this forbidden threshold. A self-enclosed world constructs itself before me, but a gate is opened, forming part of the construction. The work as a whole is a closing and an opening, a secret and the key to its secret. But the initial experience remains that of the "New World" and of the gulf; whether it is modern or classical, the work marks the advent of an order discontinuous with existing affairs and the affirmation of a state that obeys its own laws and its own logic.(2) As reader, listener, observer, I feel myself accepted, but also refused; in the work's presence, I cease to feel and to live as one habitually feels or lives. Caught up in a metamorphosis, I witness a destruction preliminary to a creation. Of course, reality -- the experience of reality and action upon reality -- is not in general foreign to art. But art only turns toward the real in order to abolish it and to substitute a new reality for it. Contact with art is, in the first instance, the recognition of this advent. Like the crossing of a threshold, an immersion in poetry, a release into a specific activity, contemplation of a work entails putting our mode of existence in question and-displacing all of our perspectives: "it is a passage from a disorder to an order" (to recall, while modifying it slightly, the expression of Paul Valery) which is true even if this order is a will to disorder, a passage from meaninglessness to the coherence of meanings, from the unformed to form, from the empty to the full, from absence to presence, the presence of an organized language, the presence of a spirit in a form. 3 To the experience of the spectator corresponds that of the creator. Numerous and similar are the statements of artists who emphasize, from their own viewpoint, the same rupture, the same autonomy; the poet at work sees himself as distinct and separate: poetic sensibility differs from practical sensibility, and so forth. This notion is already the thesis of Diderot in Le Paradoxe sur le comedien; Balzac recalls it in his Massimilia Doni and derives from the disjunction between experience and expression a law governing all creation: when the tenor Genovese, a brilliant singer, is made to "bell like a stag" the moment his role as the lover places him on stage in the presence of the diva with whom he is smitten, Balzac comments, "When an artist has the misfortune to be filled with passion that he wants to express, he does not know how to depict it, since it is the thing itself instead of an image of it. …

Dickens with Kant and Sade

Abstract: As the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius. Thomas De Quincey, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" In effect, the father's death opens the reign of violence. In choosing violence - and that is what it's all about from the beginning - and violence against the father, the son - or patricidal writing - cannot fail to expose himself, too. All this is done in order to ensure that the dead father, first victim and ultimate resource, not be there. Being-there is always a property of paternal speech. And the site of a fatherland. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination Thus the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire. The first symbol in which we recognize humanity in its vestigial traces is the sepulture, and the intermediary of death can be recognized in every relation in which man comes to the life of his history. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection That Dickens enjoyed comparing his position as a novelist to the position of the criminal, and especially the murderer, has become a commonplace in Dickens criticism. And what's more, such identifications of writers with the criminal figures they represent are at least as old as Plato, who indicted poets for forgery and banished them from his Republic. Certainly it is easy to read in such a self-comparison a high degree of bravado, but can we not perhaps also read in Dickens's comparison an intimation of a point of connection between representer and represented - between experienced violence and the violence of representation? In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida explains this point of connection as follows: Representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where one speaks as one writes, one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the representer. A dangerous promiscuity and a nefarious complicity between the reflection and the reflected which lets itself be seduced narcissistically. In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. . . . There is no longer a simple origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one. (36) Because he is both author and victim of such scenes of splitting and doubling, Dickens's identification with the murderous characters within his novels can therefore be read as an attempt to re-embody the origin within the field of its reflection. Thus these Dickensian scenes re-present the violence of this splitting of and at the origin of representation. That is, they function as mises en abyme, as disguised reflections of the violent pre-condition of textuality that appears within the text itself. This is a violence that exceeds every text, that is anterior to them, a cracking of the foundation that is their foundation. And by way of the murder scene, Dickens's novels therefore attempt to deploy their "criminal plots" in such a manner as to recover this moment of violence, re-cover this moment of cracking in the foundation, through the resolution of these plots. In uncovering and localizing the agent of diegetic violence - even as they come to suggest the identification of this agency with its author - Dickens's novels attempt to charge the figure of the murderer with the violence of representation, even as they work insistently towards arresting and recontaining this more primal violence at the level of their plots. This attempt at recovery and recontainment of the violent origin of representation thus follows the logic of anamorphosis that Jacques Lacan outlines, for example, in his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.(1) Anamorphosis, according to Lacan, appears at the moment in art history when the vanishing point of perspective painting (the device by way of which one could contain the phenomenon of space within a portrait) gave way to another kind of vanishing point - the point at which representation runs up against its foundational violence, the violence of a gap or spacing at and in its origin (Ethics 139-41). …

Criminal Pleasures, Pleasurable Crime

Abstract: I. "I LIKED SOMEBODY BEING DEAD" What is it in the hard-boiled novel that hooks me, binds me to it, arrests me in the tracks of an otherwise intractable desire? Where, to be precise, am I to locate the pleasure I take in that novel - a pleasure that is at least compulsive in that I am driven to repeat it, and that entails an interruptive thickening of a reading that might otherwise proceed too quickly, of a text we habitually characterize as thin? Taking seriously some of the commonplaces about the genre, we could open with a methodical elimination of the suspects that would please, at .any rate, the classical detective. Pleasure, then - my pleasure - can hardly inhere in the hard-boiled plot, since plot is here, in contrast to the classical tradition, subordinated to such elements as scene, dialogue, setting, and even to some extent to character. Where the classical detective story unfolds toward a moment of epiphanic illumination, the hard-boiled novel is said to be strangely indifferent to the economy of such a movement.(1) It sacrifices the drive toward a plenitude of meaning to less teleological representational exigencies. It plays down the joys of Holmesian closure by insisting that, as Raymond Chandler famously put it, it is a novel we would want to keep reading even if the last chapter had been torn out. And it performs this thwarting of narrative pleasure with plots of a delinquent character that Chandler is perhaps most expert at composing: plots that, through an irresolvable complexity or a resolute poverty of suture, forever expose their very plottedness and thereby cast suspicion on their capacity to produce the end-pleasure of a positive apocalypse. The temporal ontology of the hard-boiled novel is decidedly that which Kermode calls "waiting time": a time that kills time, that wastes it by refusing to redeem it, that "shall be no more" because it exhausts itself in its unfolding and so forgoes the climactic fulfillments of a time Kermode calls "season" - of a time, that is, "charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end" (47). This may seem already a perverse characterization. After all, what is at issue is a detective novel,(2) and detective novels require crimes, which in their turn require solutions - resolutions - that shed light on all that has come before. We might then start to wonder how a genre so clearly geared toward closure can also be less than primarily concerned with the pleasures such closure entails. Here is at least a provisional hypothesis: in - for example - Hammett and Chandler, where crimes continue narratively to be solved and a certain resolution is no doubt achieved, such resolution is phenomenologically secondary because mystery and its apocalyptic temporality are in fact no more than "manifest" expressions of a more traumatized structure, a more dilatory temporality, a more perverse pleasure than those of the novels' official discourse. "The initial deception," writes Jameson of Chandler, "takes place on the level of the book as a whole, in that it passes itself off as a murder mystery" (143; my emphasis). And Gertrude Stein, in more elliptical fashion: I never was interested in cross word puzzles or any kind of puzzles but I do like detective stories. I never try to guess who has done the crime and if I did I would be sure to guess wrong but I liked somebody being dead and how it moves along and Dashiell Hammett was all that and more. (4) "How it moves along," not "how it ends." For Stein as for Jameson, the penetration of the mystery is inessential to hard-boiled fiction, and this means again that the ending in such fiction is no longer the site of a primary delectation. "I liked somebody being dead," Stein says. Such a preference may help us already to flesh out our initial claim. It offers the disturbing but provocative suggestion that the hard-boiled corpse - the thing that provides the mystery and seems therefore most intimately bound to a temporality of narrative recuperation - is also and at the same time that which erodes that temporality, dysfunctionalizes pleasure, fixates us fascinatedly on a moment of brute and irrecoverable loss. …

A Comment on Alison Finch's Article

Abstract: Alison Finch's article ("Computer-Assisted Research on Literature: The Imagery of a Myth") is touching in its reliance on old-fashioned scrutiny of metaphors and similes and her attempt to build out of these a structure of what she calls a myth. Unfortunately, the points she makes are in large part either irrelevant or wrong. She cites the claim that "almost all literary critics of repute" ignore the results of computer-assisted research of literature, that this research is presented in a "rebarbative" way, and - this is the main point of her article - something that she claims has not been noticed by any critics but herself, that figures of speech used by practitioners in presenting their research "tend to mythologize their own enterprises." In order to support this latter claim she has put together a farrago of citations from many different sources, without concern for context, meaning, or anything else. There is no doubt that some (especially Francophone) researchers have gone far afield in presenting their data and their conclusions, but Finch's claim is not only foolish, but also misguided. She does not seem to realize what computer assisted research is and what it does. To begin with, research in literature (computer-assisted or otherwise) is essentially about language. Literature is a sub-field of the mass of language of all kinds that is constantly being produced by its speakers. Hence the study of literature, as well as the study of newspapers, law books, and children's books, is the province of linguistics, specifically corpus linguistics, which has a broad constituency, of which Finch has apparently never heard. This is what computer-assisted research really is. Computer study of language is essentially a quantitative discipline and as such is subject to the methods and principles of statistics. Computer corpora originated in this country, with the publication in 1961 of the so-called Brown Corpus, which has been extensively analyzed by researchers. British and Scandinavian scholars have been developing their own corpora (The Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen, London-Lund, Helsinki Corpus, British National Corpus [in progress]), analyzing them, and publishing their results in, first, the I.C.A.M.E. Journal and, later, in other outlets (see volumes by Stig Johansson and Anna-Brita Stenstrom, Jan Svartvik, Gerhard Leitner, and Merja Kyto, Matti Rissanen, and Susan Wright, inter alia), and have established computer-linguistic analysis on a solid basis, constantly exfoliating (to use an arboreal metaphor). The major difference between these activities and those of critics applying a package of software to a poem, some short stories, or the like, is that proper computer study requires a substantial mass of text and suitable comparative norms. …

The Imagery of a Myth: Computer-Assisted Research on Literature

Abstract: Doubts have often been expressed about computer-assisted research on literature, but until about seven years ago these doubts were voiced mainly by those who did not themselves practice it.(1) Since 1988, however, real worries have increasingly been expressed by specialists in books and periodicals devoted to computer-assisted research on literature (henceforth CARL). They ask questions not only about methods, but, more seriously, about the assumptions behind the methods. These questions are starting to be put with a harshness unprecedented in CARL. Thus Willie van Peer, in a 1989 article in Computers and the Humanities, goes so far as to say that the view of language underlying quantitative studies is "utterly naive" (303), while in 1991, in Literary and Linguistic Computing, Thomas Corns talks of certain hopes for CARL as resembling a "fanatic's dream" (128). These doubts have culminated in a recent special issue of Computers and the Humanities (1993-94) in which contributors call still more urgently for internal revaluation and ask more pressingly than before whether CARL should not be moving in new directions. During these last seven years, CARL researchers have voiced a special unease about the fact that almost all literary critics of repute ignore the results of CARL investigations. This unease was first highlighted in a colorful and provocative article by Rosanne Potter ("Literary Criticism"), and the recent special issue of Computers and the Humanities once more points out that in its present form CARL is marginalized by most literary critics.(2) The CARL experts who have asked why this should be so have usually provided what is no doubt the correct answer: that the conclusions of most individual CARL projects have simply been too trivial or too obvious to attract attention.(3) A second reason put forward for the marginalization of CARL is the rebarbative presentation of its research; this is a particular concern of Potter's ("Literary Criticism" 91, 94, 97), but others have echoed her. There may be a third contributory factor, one that has not yet been singled out by any practitioner nor, I believe, by external critics. Some surprising figures of speech infiltrate the critical diction of many CARL analysts - figures of speech that tend to mythologize their own enterprises. This self-mythologization is, perhaps, both a symptom and a cause of the problem. It may have stopped CARL experts evaluating properly the results of their own research, and it cannot but be off-putting to the non-CARL critics they are trying to win over. It is perhaps natural that some CARL experts should see themselves as pioneers or navigators, going downstream to check information at the confluence of the valleys and fortunately not looking upstream at all the vertiginous tasks ahead: We therefore had to go back downstream from the Dictionary of Frequencies, and extract information very close to the source, at the foot of the texts, at the confluence of 15 valleys where the raw forms of the 15 chronological sections converged [...] upstream, how many tasks were waiting - tasks which might have made us dizzy if we had looked far enough ahead. Luckily fog swathed our departure. Or: [T]he present study constitutes an entree en matiere, a first voyage into the quantitatively uncharted waters of contemporary narratological pragmatics. (Frautschi 280) But it is rather more surprising to find them as mountaineers: Will imitators be braver than precursors were - will they follow up the steep slope Gunnel Engwall has embarked on? Or as horse-riders: As an experienced rider controls his horse with ever more subtle commands, so the critic may control the exact routines of the computer with more latitude. (Smith 39) Or as big-game hunters: [Computer-knowledge is] unrestrained curiosity, drawing people to safaris in the jungles of the unknown. (Busa 71) They may even share this outdoor life with their chosen authors: certain stylo-statistical tests show that Marlowe is like a "young Olympic quality athlete" who "may dominate the track in all events" (Baker 37). …

Romantic, Radical, and Ridiculous: Faulkner's Hero as Oxymoron

Abstract: INTRODUCTION "Until quite recently," argues John V Knapp, "the construct in various theories and literary criticism known as character has been neglected in literary studies" (349) It seems, however, that since the publication of the Poetics Today issue on the theory of character and the Style issue on literary character, from which the above statement is quoted,[1] there is no need to apologize for trying to deal with character and characterization It is impossible to disagree with Margolin, who claims, in the same issue of Style, that "literary character is not an independently existing entity with essential properties to be described, but rather a theory-dependent conceptual construct or theoretical object, of which several alternative versions exist in contemporary poetics" (453) Nevertheless, most readers, professionals as well as laymen, would intuitively agree with Knapp that "after all, readers of literature have always had to base their understandings of fictional characters on that preexisting world those readers inhabit or could inhabit or could create" (350): that is, our understanding of character is based upon our knowledge of people in the "world" This paper is an attempt to describe character and characterization in Faulkner's works The terms employed in this description' are, of course, theory-dependent constructs, even though the understandings they are based upon are probably similar to our understandings of that "preexisting world" we inhabit The main term I would employ in the attempt to illuminate Faulkner's characters is the oxymoron Traditionally defined as "a figure of speech which combines two seemingly contradictory elements" (Preminger 595), I use the term oxymoron in a broader sense (Shiffman, "William Faulkner's Poetic World") as indicating the coexistence of the absence and presence of the same element, whether linguistic or not: the coexistence of movement and its absence, noise and its absence, intimacy and its absence, and so on Thus, an oxymoron need not be a merely linguistic phenomenon It is often based upon a metaphorical or metonymical transition, which, once it is identified as such, gives way to the recognition that the oxymoron depicts two unrelated phenomena in the work's world (as it does, for instance, in the expression "living death," which is based upon a metaphorical transition from the physical features of death to its possible psychological ones) It can, however, attempt to describe a unique or illusive fictional entity, which cannot be adequately described by preexisting categories (Thus, in Light in August "each turn of dark saw him [Christmas] faced again with the necessity to despoil again that which he had already despoiled--or never had and never would" [Faulkner 176]) The oxymorons in Faulkner's works show a marked tendency to belong to the nonlinguistic type: they point to the existence of a novel phenomenon in the fictional world, a phenomenon undefinable by any of the preexisting linguistic or cognitive categories, since it simultaneously includes two mutually exclusive linguistic or cognitive categories Thus, one must constantly hesitate between two contradictory categories in order to define them Faulknerian choices (or plots) and heroes are characterized by a situation in which one and the same act is the violation of one positive norm and the acquiescence in another; one and the same quality is the hero's most important virtue and his main vice In short, Faulkner's leading characters, his heroes and (less frequently) heroines, can be described as oxymoronic They are constructed around a core characteristic that must be simultaneously conceived as both their greatest asset and major liability ROMANTICISM: AN OXYMORON Romanticism seems as relevant to the description of some of Faulkner's heroes as fanaticism is to most of them The concepts of romanticism and fanaticism are essential to the description of Faulkner's use of the oxymoron as the core around which his characters are constructed …

Edna St. Vincent Millay's Gendered Language and Form: "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree"

Abstract: Although part of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Harp-Weaver (1924),(1) Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" was regarded by many critics as inferior and still tends to receive less attention than Millay's other sonnet sequences. However, I believe it is the one that is thematically most imaginative and most inventive within the genre. As they narrate a woman's inner struggle, these sonnets merge women's speech in its various forms, from gossip to story telling to diary, and as such represent an important development. To achieve her dramatic purpose, Millay uses a range of sonnet structures, but she also experiments with form. Millay's sonnets have been identified as "reflective in theme" (Sterner 112). I will argue that here she develops sonnets that are reflective in form in order to reveal the process of a woman's emerging self-knowledge. Because the sequence combines a language and perspective that is female, critics of the time dismissed it.(2) Louis Untermeyer pronounced it "dull" (158). The female voice that Millay gives us, especially in this sequence, rankled critics such as John Crowe Ransom, who blatantly describes her language as deficient in "masculinity" (98) and therefore lacking in interest for he "intellectual adult male" (99). Accounting for Millay's critical treatment, Clark explains, "the alienation of affection and the personal which was modernism was bound to reject Millay, as it rejected in a larger sense the claims of women and sentimentalism to power and value" (72).(3) Some critics faulted Millay for her choice of conventional forms. Yet in "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" Millay does not always follow conventions. Avoiding a formal framework, a classical or philosophical opening, she begins in medias res (or in medias mess). Ear from the expression of ideal love more characteristic of sonnet sequences (including others by Millay herself), this one presents the chores of an estranged wife who returns to care for a dying husband, finally to attend to his burial. The seventeen sonnets explore--for those who decode the graphically detailed language--themes of separation and identity. Millay describes the woman's earlier sense of suffocation within the marriage, and she goes further by showing the woman as alienated also from the community of neighbors and service people. Feminist critics in the 1970s rediscovered Millay's female voice, her domestic images and themes.(4) While this sequence has been recognized as "one of the most striking portraits of a wife's situation in twentieth-century American poetry" (Dobbs 97), it remains underestimated in assessments of the genre. For instance, Jean Gould regards Millay's narrative as lacking "the appeal or the pure artistry of her intimate yet objective personal sonnets, or those written out of deep philosophical conviction, as the other two sequences were" (129). Most critical attention still goes to "Fatal Interview" and "Epitaph for the Race of Man," but I find Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" the sequence that is truly groundbreaking. As I hope to show, its meaning as well as its structure have not been adequately explored or evaluated. Critics have tended to see the wife as victim, but attention to the reflective sonnets that expose the woman's thoughts and revelations provides a rather different reading. GENDERED LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL CODES Sonnet 1 opens with "So," the frequently used conversational starter and goes on to introduce a narrative focused on relationships and feelings, especially fears. Details of domestic life, of women's nonverbal world, unfold. Kitchen is the center of this world. Readers need to follow the significance of the seemingly inconsequential details, such as a recovered apron, a pantry out of order, a neglected kitchen, the whistle of a tea kettle. This is no aerial view. Millay places us at ground level, reading the sawdust for clues, later the carpet. (Much the way women interpret domestic clues, seemingly extrathematic details, to discover a wife's story as in Millay' s friend Susan Glaspell's drama, Trifles. …

Book Reviews -- the Fictions of Language and the Langauges of Function: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness by Monika Fludernik

Abstract: Monika Fludernik. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. xvi + 536 pp. L50.00, $74.50 cloth. In the long history of reflection on the nature of narrative, narratology can best be distinguished by the privileged relation it has established between the features of narrative content and linguistically inspired theories of the mediation of such narrative content. Perhaps no one has stated this more boldly than the inventor of the term "narratology," Tzvetan Todorov, for whom character is a noun and action a verb and who suggests that noun and verb might be better understood in considering the role they play in narrative. While Todorov's analogy is guilty of the exaggeration and approximation typical of nascent disciplines, there does remain a grain of truth in his formulation, which, even with the multitude and diversity of developments in literary theory over the past thirty years, stands as a watershed in modern approaches to narrative.. This is not to say, however, that "pre-"narratological studies are to be dispensed with in the wake of scientific or critical progress, for it has become clear in recent years that narratology, which now possesses a history of its own, has entered a phase where further refinements are likely to come--at least in part--from the reconsideration of issues that were earlier seen either to lie outside the scope of narratology (e.g., fictionality) or to be incompatible with the aims and methods of narratology (e.g., style). The "crisis of narratology" that has gathered force over the past ten years or more as the Saussurean-inspired paradigms have weakened has at the same time produced new theoretical frameworks for the study of narrative, for it is now clear that today's inheritors of the earlier narratology tend either towards a narrative semantics derived from possible-worlds logic (the most comprehensive work to date being Marie-Laure Ryan's Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory 1991 ) or, with greater attention devoted to textual surface structures, towards the various modes of the inscription of subjectivity in language as a key feature of narrative fiction. With a variety of sources running back to (among others) Charles Bally's stylistics and Kate Hamburger's phenomenologically inspired Logik der Dichtung (1957; second edition 1968)--a work having provided an important theoretical basis for Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978)--this latter tendency in narratology has found in Monika Fludernik's The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction an achievement of cardinal importance. Fludernik's accomplishment is to have produced an exhaustive study of the representation of speech and consciousness in fiction through a sustained analysis of free indirect discourse and related devices, addressing numerous issues that have not been adequately resolved previously, be it due either to limitations inherent in the paradigms commonly accepted or to the failure of critical and theoretical insight. All of this, and more, is brought to bear on extracts drawn from no fewer than two-hundred and fifty English language, French, and German texts (both literary and journalistic as well as oral), backed up by extensive readings in the relevant bibliography on recent narratological and linguistic research, together with penetrating discussions of earlier studies that serve to enrich and to put into historical perspective work currently being done in the field. From the time it was first observed, free indirect discourse has remained a privileged area of linguistically informed approaches to narrative. The dominant approach over the decades--even among narratologists--has been to locate the device midway between direct speech (assumed to be the most "mimetic" form of speech representation) with its syntactic and expressive elements and indirect speech with its tense and referential shifts. …