Showing papers in "Style in 1998"

Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose

Abstract: Mick Short. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London: Longman, 1996. xvi + 399 pp. Stylistics has been a productive interdiscipline between linguistics and literary studies for around thirty years now. Controversial at first, attacked by the entrenched litcrit establishment, it became more theoretically sophisticated and diverse as it engaged with changes in the dominant models of linguistic theory: a brief liaison with transformational-generative grammar, a longer relationship with the functional grammar of M. A. K. Halliday and his associates, and a very fertile and developmental relationship with the increasingly powerful and insightful discipline of linguistic pragmatics. And as stylistics has responded to changes in linguistic theory, it has also been alert to the teachings of other intellectual movements: Russian Formalism, French Structuralism, Poststructuralism, etc. Original theorists such as Barthes, Bakhtin, Genette, and Foucault have become standard references in contemporary stylistics. An increasing range of topics and a growth of theoretical sophistication has been one aspect of the maturing of stylistics; another, the basic task of consolidating the practice of textual analysis. The original claim for of linguistic stylistics was that it provided a highly illuminating way of doing textual analysis. The original objections to this claim were (a) that a focus on linguistic mechanism paid no attention to literary considerations; and (b) that stylistics involved the use of technical jargon, which was supposedly disagreeable to students. Stylistics has effectively disposed of these criticisms. Most practitioners are happy for their investigations of texts to be framed by traditional literary categories such as point of view, metrical structure, and metaphor; and where the range of literary concepts has been extended by ideas from linguistics and related fields, e.g. foregrounding or the application of pragmatic analysis to dialogue, these extensions are now well established. As far as 'jargon' is concerned, it has long been realized that a little linguistic method goes a long way. Students do not need to learn an extensive technical terminology in order to say something meaningful about a poem or a prose extract. Certain very powerful linguistic-pragmatic concepts, once learned, provide critics and students with an analytic tool which gives rewarding results with simple application: I am thinking of concepts such as transitivity, modality, deixis, implicature, and register. And it is satisfying to record that such methodologies have now been comfortably absorbed into stylistic education for generations of students of literature. The book under review is an excellent instance of successful assimilation of linguistic method into literary studies via the stylistics interface. Its author, Mick Short, is an experienced teacher and writer in the pedagogics of stylistics; he and his colleague Geoffrey Leech at the University of Lancaster have produced a number of highly useful, very practical, books in literary stylistics, notably Leech's A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969) and the coauthored Style in Fiction (1981). All three books are addressed to student readers; all are theoretically and methodologically eclectic (though there is a constant interest in foregrounding); all are rich in textual analysis and exemplification. The three books contribute strongly to the basic original aim of stylistics, to deploy linguistics in textual analysis, and they do so not as mechanical exercises, but always with a keen sense of literary relevance. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose is an introduction, for newcomers to stylistics, to how "the language of literary texts acts as the basis for our understanding and responses when we read" (xi). It provides analytic tools which will allow the literature student to come to an understanding of literary processes in the activity of describing and discussing texts: describing texts is an exploration, not only of objective structures of language, but at the same time of our experiences in reading them. …

Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions

Abstract: Laurel J. Brinton. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Topics in English Linguistics 19. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996. xvi + 412 pp. $124.45 cloth. Laurel Brinton's ground-breaking new book is a meticulously researched study of Old English and Middle English (OE, ME) "mystery features"-items that have hitherto resisted grammatical and semantic categorization. Brinton proposes to analyze these quite diverse particles and phrases as pragmatic markers, thereby linking them with accounts of similar items in purely oral discourse which, since Deborah Schiffrin's seminal study Discourse Markers (1987), have been at the center of recent research in discourse analysis. Brinton, as a historical linguist, is one of the few scholars currently applying discourse-analytical methodology to OE and ME texts. This area of research has now acquired the name "historical pragmatics" and is being practised most prominently in Finland by Nils Erik Enkvist and the Helsinki School (Matti Rissanen, Irma Taavitsainen, Anneli Meurman-Solin, Terttu Nevalainen-the producers of the invaluable Helsinki Corpus of English historical texts) and by Brita Warvik at Turku (Abo). What makes this highly specialized linguistic study a suitable object for a review in Style? Brinton's results, I argue, should be popularized among narratologists concerned with medieval texts since they repeatedly recur to narratological parameters. Many of Brinton's insights suggest that the pragmatic markers on which she concentrates relate to the discourse structure of episodic narrative (such as I myself have characterized it in Towards a 'Natural' Narratology). Brinton's results are therefore apt to feed back into narratological research, just as her own discourse model (based on the episode structure of oral discourse and on grounding features) can be usefully supplemented with more particularly narratological factors. After an extensive review of recent research on mystery features in chapter 1, Brinton's second chapter is concerned with establishing the concept of "pragmatic markers," and provides a great number of definitions of the term as well as describing a variety of functions for pragmatic markers such as they have been proposed in the linguistic literature. Pragmatic markers, for instance, relate an utterance to preceding context or introduce "level shifts" and new "moves" (structural functions), serve as response signals, facilitate speaker interaction, and help to process oral messages and to provide for conversational continuity (30-31). They are characterized by their preponderant use in oral discourse, their high frequency of occurrence, their predominantly (though not exclusively) initial clause position and their optional use. Pragmatic markers operate multifunctionally both on the local and the global levels of discourse (31-35). In chapters 3 to 8 Brinton analyzes seven selected pragmatic markers and follows their diachronic development (if applicable) from OE to ME to PresentDay English. These selected markers are (1) the intensive construction gan ("And ryght anon the wympel gan she fynde"-Chaucer, Legend of Good Women 819, qtd. 68); (2) the discourse particle anon; (3) the OE episode-boundary marker gelamp (Hit a gelamp [ ... aet[ ... 1), a construction that, in ME, is replaced with (4) it befel; (5) the syntactic preposing of whan-clauses; (6) the OE mystery particle hwaet (familiar from the first line of Beowulf); and (7) the ME first-person epistemic parenthetical I gesse, which, as a narratorial intervention, has particular narratological relevance. This narratological relevance is confirmed further by Brinton's summary of grounding as an important textual feature (44-50). The term "grounding" has been coined in discourse analysis to refer to the foregrounding and backgrounding functions of linguistic or textual elements. Linguistic research on grounding has brought to light the consistent foregrounding of plot-line clauses in narrative texts, and it has also pointed to a graded scale of foregrounding features (thus allowing for a maximal foregrounding of episode beginnings and less prominent foregrounding for ordinary action clauses). …

A New History of Classical Rhetoric

Abstract: George A. Kennedy.A New History of Classical Rhetoric. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. xii + 301 pp. $54.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. For scholars of rhetoric today, George A. Kennedy might well take Aristotle's place in Dante asmaestro di color che sanno. He is the author of four seminal volumes on the history of classical rhetoric and its Christian tradition (not to mention other works on Quintilian, the New Testament, and ancient literary criticism), the first of which, The Art of Persuasion in Greece, came out over thirty years ago. Kennedy's influence on this growing field of study has been correspondingly formative, and in many respects he first laid the groundwork for the contemporary revival of interest in a field once largely the province of departments of speech and communication. The accessibility, clarity, and intelligence of these volumes have made them a standard in the bibliography of any scholar engaging with the history and theory of classical rhetoric. Kennedy has now come out with a new volume on rhetoric and rhetorical theory, an "extensive revision and abridgement" (iii) of the three earlier works on classical rhetoric: TheArt of Persuasion in Greece, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, and Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors. The title of the present volume, with its reference to anew history of classical rhetoric, suggests that it is revision rather than abridgement that is the engine behind the publication. However, readers familiar with the earlier volumes will find that the changes are comparatively limited. For the most part, Kennedy has summarized the contents of these volumes in chronological order, and while the original volume on Greek rhetoric has been rewritten and rearranged, it offers substantially the same treatment of the texts. Some notice has been taken of new work since the 1960s-the bibliography includes, for example, Peter Brown' s Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, Nicole Loraux's The Invention ofA thens, and The Recovery of Rhetoric, edited by R. H. Roberts and J. M. M. Good. Aside from updating the bibliography, Kennedy also evokes some new critical terminology in his preface, where he reformulates part of the book's project as the history of the development of "metarhetoric," theoryabout rhetoric, throughout the Greco-Roman period. (I discuss this further below.) For the most part, however,A New History of Classical Rhetoric is new because it offers three volumes in one, not because Kennedy has altered his original interpretations. This caveat aside, it would be ungenerous to take Kennedy's book to task for being exactly what it promises to be: a denser and more compact version of several volumes important to any student of rhetoric. And a student reader, as Kennedy himself points out, is precisely the projected audience for his book. To this end, Kennedy has removed most of the original scholarly notes and other material that would appeal to the specialist and often provides a brief description of social and political features of ancient society that a student reader might not be familiar with. The rapid pace of the discussion, and its broad coverage, renders the book almost encyclopedic: a reference work that will answer basic questions and offer sketches of crucial rhetorical texts, all without necessitating the purchase of three separate volumes. This single book comprises some thirteen chapters that span the range from "Persuasion in Greek Literature before 400 B.C." (chapter two) and "Greek Rhetorical Theory from Corax to Aristotle" (chapter three) through the Attic orators, Hellenistic rhetoric, early Roman rhetoric, Cicero, the Augustan and Silver ages, Greek rhetorical treatises under the Empire, and the Second Sophistic, to "Christianity and Classical Rhetoric" (chapter twelve) and "The Survival of Classical Rhetoric from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages" (chapter thirteen). Such a format necessarily has both advantages and disadvantages. …

Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds

Abstract: Lubomir Dolezel. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. xii + 339 pp. $ 45.00 hardcover. The timing of the publication of this book tells a deceptive story.Heterocosmica appeared in the wake of a number of other books on the application of possible worlds theory to literary semantics (Pavel, Ronen, Maitre, Semino, and myself), but none of these books (with the possible exception of Pavel's) would have been what it is, nor arguably written at all, without the inspiration provided by Dolezel's earlier work in this area. This is not to say that Heterocosmica is a mere gathering of older essays. The ground-breaking ideas proposed by Dolezel in the seventies and eighties form the core of the book, but they have been revamped, expanded, illustrated with new materials, adapted to a wider audience (one not as conversant in logical semantics and analytical philosophy as the readership of the original articles), and above all developed into a comprehensive theory. The main body of the book consists of two parts, Narrative Worlds and Intensional Functions. Each of them is introduced by a "starter terms" section devoted to the extended definition of basic concepts. The chapters that compose the two parts are labeled in the table of contents as either analytical (i.e. straight discussion of literary texts), theoretical, or theoretical with examples. Though the book is relatively restrained in its use of technical language, a glossary at the end of the book should help readers cope with the conceptual rigor of Dolezel's use of terminology. Dolezel's theoretical assumptions, stated in the prologue, "From Nonexistent Entities to Fictional Worlds," can be summarized as follows: 1. Fictional worlds are possible worlds constructed by language through a performative force granted to imaginative literature by cultural convention. 2. Fictional worlds are not representations (mimesis) of the actual world but autonomous realities called into being through the unrestricted creative power of fictional language. The limits of the fictionally possible are the limits of the expressible, or imaginable. 3. Fictional worlds differ ontologically from the real world through their incomplete nature. Because it is impossible for the human mind to think up an object (much less a world) in all of its properties, every fictional world presents areas of radical indeterminacy (i.e. ontological gaps). 4. Fictional language can be referential without entering into a mimetic relation to the real world. Through this position, Dolezel distanciates himself both from the neo-Saussurian, deconstructionist view that language can only refer to itself, because all realities are language-made, and from the position of "one-world" philosophers (Frege, Russell, Searle), who hold that language can only refer to actual, i.e. autonomously existing individuals. In Dolezel's model, reference to an entity does not presuppose its language-independent existence. The first part of the book provides an exploration, bordering on a typology, of the basic constituents of narrative worlds. Whereas narrative grammars (such as Prince's) formulate the minimal conditions of narrativity by means of a syntactic pattern of events, Dolezel describes these conditions in terms of what philosophers customarily call the "furniture" (i.e. inventory of existents) of a possible world. Not surprisingly, the minimal conditions for the development of narrative action is the introduction of one individual in a fictional world. The one-person world suffers from severe dramatic restrictions, since it excludes human competition, but Dolezel's discussion of three "one-person worlds" (chapter one) shows that interpersonal conflict can be fruitfully replaced with themes such as the attempt to establish civilization in the wilderness (Robinson Crusoe), the challenges of outdoor life, (Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River") or the struggle of the individual with the phantasms of his own mind (Huysmans,A Rebours). …

Ethical Criticism: What It Is and Why It Matters

Abstract: Introduction "Change the name and it's about you, that story." Thus in his Satires (I.1. 69-70) Horace elegantly and succinctly defines the imaginative transposing by which readers identify with fictions. Telling and consuming stories is a fundamental and universal human activity. From the time we are born the sound of story accompanies us like the collective heart beat of humanity, and none of us rejects the opportunity to enlarge ourselves by "trying on" the lives and feelings of fictional characters. We may not all consume a steady diet of what college catalogues sometimes call "great books," but our interactions with stories in one form or another - in commercials, TV programs, movies, song lyrics, sermons, legends, fairy tales, novels, dramas, and so on - is constant and ongoing. The famous command in the opening line of Moby Dick, "Call me Ishmael," is an invitation to the reader not only to identify a character, but to identify with a character: "Imagine your name to be Ishmael and it will be about you, this story. You will learn to see the world through my eyes, to feel the world through my nerve endings. During the time we spend together you will learn to live as if my heart beat in your chest, as if your ears answered to my name." Transpositions between readers and fictional characters carry obvious ethical significance. Despite current theories in philosophy and criticism about the inescapability of relativism, most of us cannot evade the deep intuition that identifying with characters in stories can exert a powerful influence on the quality and content of our own lives. It is this perspective - stories as an influence on ethos, or who we become - that makes ethical criticism necessary. To analyze how fictions exert this influence and to assess its effects is ethical criticism's job. What the humanities in general need is an ethical criticism that is intellectually defensible, not to replace or displace other critical approaches but to complement them. What literary criticism needs in particular is a theoretical basis for inquiries into and judgments about the potential ethical effects of literature and narrative art in general.(1) We need this theoretical grounding because practical ethical criticism goes on all the time, often conducted in a most helter-skelter, contradictory, and intellectually incoherent way. A firmer theoretical grounding could help us do practical ethical criticism more thoughtfully and responsibly. Both within the academy and within society as a whole, someone is always claiming that a given novel, movie, or TV program is either uplifting or degrading, inspiring or demeaning, should be read and seen by everyone or shouldn't disgrace either video airwaves or the shelves of the public library. Every time a feminist exposes Hemingway's complicity with the patriarchy, or every time an African-American critic recommends the retrieval of slave narratives because such narratives shame our past and help us shape the future, and every time a Judith Fetterley, a Terry Eagleton, or a Michel Foucault decries the dehumanizing effects of master narratives on subject-readers, such critics are deeply engaged in important versions of ethical criticism that are not at all diminished in robustness for being disguised as any kind of discourse but ethical criticism. The truth of my claim that ethical criticism goes on constantly in the academy is not obvious. What is obvious is that for the last 100 years - from the time of the "art for art's sake" movement to the present - most literary critics have strongly objected to "ethical" as an adjective for either "literature" or "criticism." Inside the academy, ethical criticism seems immediately to conjure images of Plato packing the poets out of his republic, or the memory of Matthew Arnold talking about "the best that has been thought and said," or the mental image of F. R. Leavis intoning on and on about "the great tradition. …

Sethe's Choice: 'Beloved' and the Ethics of Reading

Abstract: Morrison's Unusual Guidance Now, too late, [Stamp Paid] understood [Baby Suggs]. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn't count. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice. (180) "Sethe's rough choice," her decision to kill her daughter rather than have her become a slave at the plantation they called Sweet Home, is at once the most stunning and most important event in Morrison's novel. Stunning for obvious reasons: how can the love of a mother for her child lead her to murder the child? Important not only because the temporal, psychological, structural, and thematic logic of the novel flows from that event but also because Morrison's treatment of it presents her audience with a difficult and unusual ethical problem. In order to appreciate the events of the present time of the narrative - 1873 - we need to know what happened in the woodshed behind 124 Bluestone Rd. on an August afternoon in 1855. In order to understand the characters of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved in 1873, we need to know that on that afternoon Sethe reached for the handsaw before schoolteacher could reach for her or her children. In order to come to terms with the novel's progression, affective power, and thematic import, we need to come to ethical terms with Sethe's choice to pull the handsaw across the neck of her daughter.(1) The problem arises because Morrison stops short of taking any clear ethical stand on Sethe's rough choice, but instead presents it as something that she, like Baby Suggs, can neither approve nor condemn. This essay will seek to explore the ethics of reading Sethe's choice by (1) contextualizing Morrison's treatment of it in relation to the typical relation between implied author and audience in ethically complex texts; (2) analyzing the narrative strategies Morrison uses to offer some limited guidance to our ethical judgment without clearly signaling her own assessment; and (3) examining the consequences of that treatment for our relation to Sethe and, ultimately, to Morrison herself; and (4) considering the implications of Morrison's treatment for any larger conclusions we might draw about the ethical ,dimension of reading narrative. Let me begin by sketching my approach to the ethics of reading. I regard the ethical dimension of reading as an inextricable part of approaching narrative as rhetoric. To approach narrative as rhetoric is to understand narrative as a rhetorical act: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose that something happened. This rhetorical act involves a multi-leveled communication from author to audience, one that involves the audience's intellect, emotions, psyche, and values. Furthermore, these levels interact with each other. Our values and those set forth by the implied author affect our judgments of characters, our judgments affect our emotions, and the trajectory of our feelings is linked to the psychological and thematic effects of the narrative. Furthermore, the communicative situation of narrative - somebody telling somebody else that something happened - is itself an ethical situation. The teller's treatment of the events will inevitably convey certain attitudes toward the audience, attitudes that indicate his or her sense of responsibility to and regard for the audience. Similarly, the audience's response to the narrative will indicate their commitments to the teller, the narrative situation, and to the values expressed in the narrative.(2) Among the many approaches to ethics now being developed, this one is most closely related to those of Wayne C. Booth and of Adam Zachary Newton.(3) Each of them, like me, wants to root narrative ethics in narrative itself rather than in some abstract ethical system. Indeed, Booth emphasizes the pervasiveness of ethics in critical responses to literature, and Newton says that he wants to conceive of "narrative as ethics." Each of them moves, in his own way, from narrative to theoretical treatments of narrative and then back to narrative. …

Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple

Abstract: Auden's assertion that poetry doesn't make things happen is a tidy conceit for a melancholy afternoon's tea break, but as the prayers smoke from the mosque and the young thousands chant rap, my era will re-examine what is happening. Nor in that circum-audient air can one deny - terrifying, some of it - the power of prose. - Hortense Calisher This essay is one of many recent efforts, by myself and others, to challenge two critical schools popular through much of this century: those who think ethical judgments have nothing to do with genuine "literary" or "aesthetic" criticism, and those who think that ethical judgments about stories can never be anything more than subjective opinion. My thesis is thus double: ethical criticism is relevant to all literature, no matter how broadly or narrowly we define that controversial term; and such criticism, when done responsibly, can be a genuine form of rational inquiry. It is true that it will never produce results nearly as uncontroversial as deciding whether it rained in New York yesterday, or even whether President Clinton lied. What's more, many of its judgments, such as Plato's exaggerated attacks on Homer, will be rejected by most serious ethical critics. Yet when responsible readers of powerful stories engage in genuine inquiry about their ethical value, they can produce results that deserve the tricky label "knowledge."(1) The very phrase "ethical inquiry" is for some thinkers an oxymoron. Ethical indictment of a story? Of course you can have that, as a personal expression. Ethical celebration? All right, if it will please a collection of fellow believers. But inquiry? The word implies the chance of arriving at established, decisive conclusions: knowledge. About ethics, many still claim, there can be no such conclusions - and thus no genuine inquiry about them. For some these days, the claim has been strengthened by a flood of aggressive and often carelessly performed denigrations of first-class works on grounds of sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, or "classism." Though seldom travelling under moral or ethical terminology, these intrusions of "ideological" interests have seemed to some a total corruption of the formal or structural standards that dominated criticism in mid-century.(2) Meanwhile, over-confident ethical or moral indictments and calls for censorship seem increasingly fashionable, many of them pursued so irrationally as to provide evidence that genuine inquiry may flee whenever questions about ethics enter the room. The responses to those would-be censors are often equally subjective and opinionated, too often divorced from any serious digging into the potential dangers for readers who really listen to what the story-teller tells. (From here on I use the term "listen" to cover all serious engagement with stories, whether by readers or viewers or listeners). Many of the defenders against censorship, resting strictly on first amendment grounds, talk as if to engage in ethical or moral criticism is itself an act of censorship: once we step onto the slippery slope - "this story is ethically faulty" - the censors will buy our words and hurtle us on to the bottom. More challenging efforts to rule out ethical criticism come from those who fear that it will destroy our most precious narrative possession: the "aesthetic" domain, the world of true an, a world that is not just different from the quotidian world of moral conflict but in effect far superior to it. As Wendy Steiner says in the conclusion to The Scandal of Pleasure, genuine art "occupies a different moral space" from the world of practical affairs. For her, since an is obviously "virtual," not primarily concerned about "reality" it should not be subject to the kind of moral criticism we offer when everyday behavior in the so-called real world offends us (211). What is striking, however, is that whether or not critics defend or attack ethical criticism, and whether or not "ideological" critics use ethical terms, nearly everyone concedes that no matter what we do or say about the ethical powers of an, those powers are real. …

Drawing Fictional Lines: Dialect and Narrative in the Victorian Novel

Abstract: The presentation of dialect in novels often appears to be startlingly inconsistent. Even when the narrator calls attention to the dialect speech of a character, the actual presentation of that speech in the dialogue may differ from what the reader is led to expect. In Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, for instance, the narrator carefully explains that "Mrs. Durbeyfield habitually spoke the dialect; her daughter, who had passed the Sixth Standard in the National School under a London-trained mistress, spoke two languages; the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad and to persons of quality" (15). But, despite this explanation, Tess's speech resembles her mother's only in a brief passage following this parenthetical comment and a few other instances; otherwise, Tess's speech follows no clear pattern. When she is speaking to "persons of quality," her language is often tinged with dialect, but, as the following scene demonstrates, when she is at home it is often more like the narrator's than her mother's: Her mother expostulated. "You will never set out to see your folks without dressing up more the dand than that?" "But I am going to work!" said Tess. "Well, yes," said Mrs. Durbeyfield; and in a private tone, "at first there mid be a little pretence o't. . . But I think it will be wiser of 'ee to put your best side outward," she added. "Very well; I suppose you know best," replied Tess with calm abandonment. And to please her parent the girl put herself quite in Joan's hands, saying serenely - "Do what you like with me, mother." (43; ellipsis in original) Tess's standard English speech in this passage bears no resemblance to her mother's dialect, though nothing has happened in the novel to account for this clear deviation from the narrator's insistence that Tess speaks the dialect when at home. Inconsistency in use of dialect appears in many other novels as well. To cite just a few examples, the adult Pip in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations represents his own speech as a child in almost entirely standard English, but he quotes that of his closest childhood companions in dialect, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Walter Scott's Jeanie Deans, and Hardy's Elizabeth Henchard, though identified as dialect speakers, all speak nearly standard English in their major scenes. During the Victorian era, the representation of the speech of lower class characters as standard English in novels using dialect bothered many critics. An 1837 review of Oliver Twist in National Magazine and Monthly Critic, for instance, tells readers that "we should notice the incongruity (the more remarkable in one so true to nature) of which [Dickens] has been guilty in the character of Oliver Twist. To say nothing of the language which this uneducated workhouse-boy ordinarily uses, there are many phrases which amount to positive absurdities in one of his standing" (qtd. in Collins 68). Over fifty years later, in his 1898 book on Dickens, George Gissing continued to criticize Dickens's use of dialect, labeling such inconsistency a product of idealism "leading [Dickens] into misrepresentation of social facts" (qtd. in Chapman, Forms 234). Such comments demonstrate the widespread expectation among Victorian critics and readers that dialect in novels should follow clear rules based on a certain idea of real speech: a child should speak simply, a working class character should speak dialect. In the discussion of any novel using dialect, a Victorian reviewer was likely to comment on whether the style of each character's speech matched the style associated with a real person of that condition. While critical discussion of consistency regarding class location predominates, Victorian critics and more recent studies of dialect have also examined for consistency a second aspect of dialect, the actual representation of the speech. Critics and scholars approaching dialect in this way ask not whether the characters ought to be dialect speakers at all, but whether the dialect itself has internal consistency (does the character either always or never drops 'h's, for instance)? …

Making, Taking, and Faking Lives: The Ethics of Collaborative Life Writing

Abstract: Whose book is this? - Malcolm X Although issues of literary ethics may arise in any genre, ethical dilemmas seem to be built into collaborative life writing in ways peculiar to it.(1) With fiction, ethical criticism is usually concerned with issues of meaning and of reception: in the simplest terms, does the text have beneficial or harmful effects on its audience? But nonfiction generally and life writing specifically raise other concerns. Indeed, although Wayne Booth limits his scope to fiction in The Company We Keep, he asks key questions that are perhaps even more compelling for life writing than for fiction: e.g., "What Are the Author's Responsibilities to Those Whose Lives Are Used as 'Material'" (130), "What Are the Author's Responsibilities to Others Whose Labor Is Exploited to Make the Work of Art Possible?" (131), and "What Are Responsibilities of the Author to Truth?" (132). With collaborative life writing, especially, ethical concerns begin with the production of the narrative and extend to the relation of the text to the historical record of which it forms a part. Ethical issues may be particularly acute in collaborative autobiography because it occupies an awkward niche between more established, more prestigious forms of life writing. On one side is solo autobiography, in which the writer, the narrator, and the subject (or protagonist) of the narrative are all the same person; at least, they share the same name.(2) On the other side is biography, in which the writer and narrator are one person, while the subject is someone else.(3) In the middle, combining features of the adjacent forms-and thus challenging the common-sense distinction between them - is as-told-to autobiography, in which the writer is one person, but the narrator and subject are someone else.(4) The ethical difficulties of collaborative autobiography are rooted in its nearly oxymoronic status; the single narrative voice - a simulation by one person of the voice of another - is always in danger of breaking, exposing conflicts of interest that are not present in solo autobiography. Although the process by which the text is produced is dialogical, the product is monological; the two voices are permitted to engage in dialogue only in supplementary texts - forewords and afterwords - and even there, the dialogue is managed and presented by one party, the nominal author. Insofar as the process is admitted into the narrative, then, it is exclusively in supplementary texts, and generally as a chapter of the writer's life. Though critics are not in a position to mandate disclosure of the process, fuller disclosure is likely to reflect a more ethical collaboration; such disclosure is certainly rhetorically effective, insofar as it suggests that the nominal author has nothing to hide. Autobiographical collaborations are rather like marriages and other domestic partnerships(5): partners enter into a relationship of some duration, they "make life" together, and they produce an offspring that will derive traits from each of them. Each partner has a strong interest in the fate of that offspring, which will reflect on each in a different way. Much of this is true of any collaborative authorship, of course; with autobiography, however, the fact that the joint product is a life story raises the stakes - at least. for the subject. It is easy enough to articulate ethical principles that should govern the production of collaborative autobiography. The fundamental one might be a variant of the Golden Rule: do unto your partner as you would have your partner do unto you. Thus, autobiographical collaborations should be egalitarian; neither partner should abuse or exploit the other. Given the subject's stake in the textual product, a corollary principle would be that the subject should always have the right to audit and edit the manuscript before publication. As we shall see, however, in some circumstances, this is easier said than done. …

Lyrical Ethics and Literary Experience

Abstract: What sense can it make to attach the adjective "lyrical" to the term "ethics"? It is all too clear why writers and critics might want the attachment to ethics, for it seems as if literary criticism has to be able to idealize ethics now that it has manifestly failed to affect politics. Claims about ethics enable us to continue to feel good about ourselves by staking our work on values less easy to check up on: who can tell if the moral fiber of a literary audience or the audience comprised by our classes undergoes some kind of modification? But why complicate that position by introducing the now largely neglected concern for anything distinctively lyrical within literary experience? In my case the answer is simply that I am angry and frustrated with the criticism and theory now arrogating to itself the aura that invoking "ethics" still seems to promise. Here then I will attempt to provide reasons for these reactions, then use my criticisms in order to develop contrasts which I think offer readers an opportunity to speculate on how stressing qualities of ethos established by the lyrical can modify the relations we project between literary texts and moral philosophy. Tony Cascardi once remarked to me that the only people to whom we should listen on the topic of ethics are those who are evidently embarrassed by their talk. Let me begin by establishing the appropriate credentials. For literary critics at least, this embarrassment can, or should, stem from taking ourselves as spokespersons for self-congratulatory values in reading that are extremely difficult to state in any public language. And with this embarrassment there probably ought be some self-disgust, since our claims to understand and use ethics seek a self-promoting and perhaps unwarranted dignity for what we do while they also displace the domain of pleasures and thrills and fascinations and quirky sensualities that may in fact be what we produce for our clients.(1) At the least then we need a theoretical stance that can acknowledge our self-interest without succumbing to the temptation to defend ourselves by assuming the mantle of ironic distance. This is where the lyrical becomes important. Emphasizing its centrality for literary experience allows us to stress the various ways that this experience is concerned with exploring modes of ethos involving psychological states and inviting affective responses capable of challenging the models of agency that dominate moral discourses. This challenge addresses both the specific values philosophers bring to bear in that discourse and philosophy's tendency to make itself the arbiter of what differences make substantial differences in how criticism discusses values. More important, even to begin taking up the challenge, criticism itself must treat the specific intricacies and pleasures that literary experience provides in terms that lead beyond the aesthetic: criticism must show how what matters for the aesthetic also has consequences for the questions posed by moral philosophy. I am tempted to claim that having to face the challenge will help critics resist what now often seems a grand ethical dog show where we all get one turn around the arena before a table of discerning judges, judges who have probably forgotten what it feels like to be able to prance. But it is probably more accurate to claim only that this shift in critical perspective will at least lead us to do less harm than we do now because we need not promise moral worth but can stress simply those states that attentive pleasure makes available. I Let me begin by attempting to clarify what I mean when I refer to ethical criticism in relation to literary studies. Ethical criticism occurs in at least three activities - in individuals evaluating motives and actions in texts, in readers imagining or actually entering moral conversations about their assessments, and in critics using texts to enter the discourses about morality carried out by professional philosophers. …

Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings

Abstract: Frederick Wegener, ed. Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xvii + 331 pp. $29.95 cloth. This thoroughly researched, annotated, and illuminating collection brings together for the first time the miscellaneous, little-known, uncollected, and heretofore dispersed critical writings of Edith Wharton. As editor Frederick Wegener observes, Wharton studies have been characterized by psychologically- and biographically-oriented scholarship, from the landmark biography of R. W. B. Lewis in 1975 to Shari Benstock's No Gifts From Chance in 1994; from Cynthia Griffin Wolff's A Feast of Words:The Triumph of Edith Wharton in 1977 to Susan Goodman's Edith Wharton's Inner Circle in 1994; from Alan Price's The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War in 1996 to Sarah Bird Wright's Edith Wharton's Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur in 1997. Seemingly every nook and cranny of Wharton's mansion of letters has been approached, entered, and more or less occupied. Yet the attention of critics and scholars to that wing of Wharton's work closest to their own and very important to Wharton, her criticism, has been meagre. Frederick Wegener's impressive collection conducts us into this neglected and psychologically revealing outpost. The collection opens with a fifty-two page essay by Wegener's hand, "`Enthusiasm Guided by Acumen': Edith Wharton as a Critical Writer." The essay is so intelligent and insightful that Wharton scholars may find themselves as appreciative of Wegener's analysis of the criticism and its context as of his work as collector and editor of the Wharton materials themselves. The essay abounds with information about Wharton's critical activities and assessments of their revelations. Wegener draws the figure of a woman yearning to write critical articles but lacking the confidence to do so; a woman startlingly different from the seemingly self-assured novelist; a woman unable to take women, and hence herself, seriously as writers of criticism; a woman who gendered the critic and scholar as male. Yet he shows us, as well, the female critic who wrote one of the most sizable bodies of criticism in the history of American letters; addressed a variety of subjects in her criticism; and undertook to reform and renovate common critical practice in her own culture. To establish this figure, Wegener examines material from Wharton's critical writings, of course, but also from her letters and from her fiction. He provides us with one of the most telling bodies of material on the subject of Edith Wharton's complexity, of her conflicts and insecurities as an intellectual woman, and of what he perceives to be the difficulties of locating a genuinely feminist sensibility in her work. The collection that follows is divided into five sections: reviews, essays, and other writings, 1896-1914; reviews and essays, 1920-1934; tributes and eulogies; prefaces, introductions, forewords; and self-considerations. The collection includes an unreprinted parody, an unpublished essay, a collaborative essay by W. Morton Fullerton and Wharton on the art of Henry James, and a bibliography. The collection offers, as well, deeply researched and wonderfully useful endnotes that supply cross-references, relevant quotations from works and writers to whom Wharton refers, family and social connections, and historical and cultural context, all serving to plant Wharton's criticism deeply in the milieu from which it emerged. …

Film Form: An Argument for a Functional Theory of Style in the Individual Film

Abstract: Part I: The Different Domains of Style As with other artforms, the initial problem of talking about style or form in film is complicated by the fact that the concept of style can be applied to so many different kinds of things and at so many different levels of generality.(1) One might use "style" to refer to whole periods of filmmaking, speaking, for example, of the German Expressionist style, or Hollywood studio style in the thirties. Or one might apply the concept of style to the work of a particular filmmaker's oeuvre, referring, for instance, to the style of Stanley Donnen or Yvonne Rainer or Theo Angelopoulos. In these cases, the domain of the concept of style fluctuates. That is, what it refers to shifts in terms of the range of things to which it is applied. When investigating a period style, we look at a domain comprising all the relevant films made in a stipulated spatio-temporal region. When considering a directorial style, we look only to the films of the director in question, including, where relevant, films of different stylistic periods. Moreover, the concept of style can be mobilized for different purposes and, therefore, can take different directions of analysis. When interrogating a period style, our purpose is to say how all or most of the relevant films are similar, and, therefore, we look for what all the filmmakers under examination have in common. But when analyzing a directorial style, we look to features that differentiate a given filmmaker from other filmmakers - we look for what makes the director appear distinctive. And these different projects, of course, can pull in different directions. In discussing the work of Fritz Lang as a German Expressionist director, we may point to certain features of his work he shares with other directors of the pertinent movement and period, but when speaking of Lang's directorial style, we may omit some of these features, since they do not differentiate Lang from other directors. Because the domains, purposes and directions of stylistic or formal research often diverge, the possibility of confusion - of talking past each other - an easily arise when speaking of "film style." Thus, in order to avoid such confusion, it is useful to separate out some of the different usages of the concept of film style in order to be clear about that to which we intend to apply it. Though other, more fine-grained, distinctions can be made with respect to the concept of style, a provisional cartography of common usages includes what we can call general style, personal style, and the style or form of the individual film.(2) Both general style and personal style refer to groups of film; their domain is a body of work. The style or form of the individual film refers to a specific film, such as Kundun. General style refers to a group of films by more than one filmmaker as in the notion of the Classical Hollywood Cinema. Personal style refers to the films of a single filmmaker, such as Edward Yang. The category of general style can be further divided into at least four subclasses: universal style, period style, genre style, and school or movement style.(3) If we call the balanced shot outside the planetarium in Nichols Ray's Rebel Without A Cause (Bordwell 244) "classical," we are using the concept of style in a universal sense, since we will call any such symmetrically poised composition, from any period in film history (and, perhaps in any visual artform), "classical" in this sense. The domain of the concept of style when used universally is at least all film. When we refer, however, to the tableau style or to the "clothes-line" style of composition of primitive film, though we are talking about a general style (and not the style of a specific filmmaker), our reference is restricted, with the exception of explicit references to atavisms, to films of the first two decades of this century. The universal concept of style applies to all films, whereas the concept of a period style applies only to some subset thereof governed by temporal/historical criteria and often by regional (sometimes national) considerations. …

Who Has the Right to Feel?: The Ethics of Literary Empathy

Abstract: Like most golden rules, empathy is seen as more than a virtue; for many, it is a litmus test of one's humanity. In the political realm it is lobbied for in the form of social legislation and demanded of elected officials who must "relate" to their constituents. As privacy has become a public commodity and the talk show host the prototype of a leader, politically motivated empathy has on occasion escalated to the point of being maudlin. Though Bill Clinton is hardly ubiquitous, surprisingly few challenged him when he declared to a heterogeneous electorate, "I feel your pain." But while a show of empathy may enhance a person's profile in real-life encounters, it has of late raised suspicion when directed toward fictional subjects. Writers or readers who appear to empathize with another's life experiences are often accused of arrogating a cultural authority to which they have no natural claim. Discourse of all kinds - poetic, fictional, critical - is taken at this time to be an artifact of social identity; the language of a particular text is thus treated as the secret code of those who share a designated mark of social identification. Moreover, since everyone is marked by society in a number of ways (through, for instance, ethnicity, class, sex, religion, age, physical mobility, and nationality), if we were to insist on shared identity in all areas, writers would only be fit to represent themselves, and readers, to understand representations of themselves. By this logic, autobiography would emerge as the sole legitimate creative genre and it would be suitable only for a readership of one: its author. Though no one proposes surrendering to such an extreme position, questions linger about the degree to which social identity insinuates itself into literary art. David Palumbo-Liu's musing on his experience as an assistant professor is worth noting since his account, which is hardly unique, reminds us that assumptions about literary empathy have real consequences: what do we do when called on (over and over again) to guest-teach The Woman Warrior? or The Color Purple or Ceremony and so on? Do we insist that skin color has no bearing on the ability or right of anyone to teach a particular work and enter once again into the debates that inevitably follow regarding the politics of hiring faculty members of color? Is the request that I teach Maxine Hong Kingston a sign of the dreaded ethnic ghettoization or a sign of respect? (1078) The question persists: to what extent is our literary engagement biologically or culturally determined? Narrowing the authority of writers, readers, or teachers obviously reduces the scope of their literary activities, but it poses an even greater threat to culture: it debunks a fundamental assumption about cultural expression - namely, that representation presupposes a capacity for empathy. That particular assumption is so rooted in human consciousness that it has endured in the face of the shrewdest of arguments about the nature of representation. Notwithstanding postmodern pronouncements that all systems of representation are mechanisms of distortion (a claim that tacitly argues there is a truth to be distorted), the collective faith that representation is possible has not diminished. We might have expected in the wake of deconstruction to witness the long, withdrawing roar of verbal activity, but, of course, we have not. Though postmodern critique has not preempted representational acts, it has left many in a duplicitous relationship with culture, one in which they exercise their faith in language by speaking and writing, but remain skeptical of others' verbal expression, always keeping an eye out for the ways they are being had. In 1828, Felicia Hemans published a poem that, were it not for the problems it raises about literary empathy, might be dismissed as unmemorable. "Indian Woman's Death-Song" was inspired by an account of a woman who, distraught by the abandonment of her husband, drowned herself and her two young children in the Mississippi River. …

Forget the Alamo: Reading the Ethics of Style in John Sayles's Lone Star

Abstract: Blood only means what you let it - John Sayles, Lone Star In an editorial of 26 March 1997, Linda Chavez, the President of the Center for Equal Opportunity and a nationally syndicated columnist, laments Hollywood's subtle "chipping away at the incest taboo," arguing that John Sayles's 1996 film,Lone Star, advocates incest as "just another alternative life style choice" While Chavez derides the film as a "boring, politically correct saga about prejudice and murder in a small Texas town," her critique of Sayles's narrative neglects the tremendous import of incest as a metaphor for the history of ethnic struggle in Frontera, Texas,Lone Star's fictive cultural battleground ("Kiss" 25)(1) Similarly, Laura Miller of Salon Magazine ridicules Lone Star as "a sort of Frankenstein's monster cobbled together from dozens of garden-variety movie cliches and ordered by its creator to deliver a moral of bland multiculturalism" (3)(2) As with Chavez, Miller seems loathe to recognize Sayles's deliberate narrative design and his express interest in commenting upon the fractious cultural dilemmas of our past and their often silent impact upon the present In Lone Star, Sayles skillfully exploits the incest taboo as the vehicle for his analysis of the interconnected ethnic threads that constitute contemporary American life and the often uneasy relationships that continue to exist between the races Sayles's incest metaphor also provides the writer and filmmaker with a prescient means for exploring the ways in which our shared history impinges upon the ethical choices that confront us in the present Sayles constructs his ethical examination of Frontera's historical and present-day cultural dilemmas by virtue of an arresting and carefully plotted visual style As Martha C Nussbaum notes, an artist's sense of style - whether visual, literary, or otherwise - often functions as a means for rendering ethical judgments In Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990), Nussbaum argues that"form and style are not incidental features A view of life is told The telling itself - the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader's sense of life - all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life's relations and connections," she writes; "life is never simply presented by a text; it is always represented as something" (5) In Lone Star, Sayles employs the film's cinematography as a dramatic means for commenting upon the nature of Frontera's shared sense of culture and community By using a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, Sayles highlights the sociological disjunctions between Frontera's segregated past and its relationship to the ethnic tensions that plague the border town's historical present Sayles produces Lone Star's striking visual style through his careful manipulation of the audience's sense of time and place By altering our traditional understandings of temporality and setting, Sayles succeeds in demonstrating the ethical interconnections between the past and the present In Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1981), the French rhetorician Gerard Genette offers a useful mechanism for exploring the particular narratological elements that establish style and tempo within a literary work, in Genette's case, Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu These narrative movements - specifically, summary, ellipsis, descriptive pause, and scene - reveal the stylistic foundations that produce the overall impression that a given narrative evokes Such movements establish a tempo within a text, and their efficacy can be measured by the effects they create within that narrative With Lone Star, the application of Genette's narrative principles usefully demonstrates the moral impact of Sayles's visual style, as well as of his strategic, ethically motivated tampering with traditional conceptions of time and place …

Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative

Abstract: Brian Richardson. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modem Narrative. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.219 pp. $30.00 cloth. In the field of narrative theory, new publications are a common occurrence, but not so for new approaches. This is not to say that recent narrative theorists do not have their own insights or observations regarding narration, or that their critical work is not valuable, but much of what has been published in the last twenty years, from Todorov's Introduction to Poetics through the seemingly endless "introductions" to narrative that have followed in Todorov's wake, has consisted primarily of (usually uncredited) rewordings of Gerard Genette's Figures (especially the section published in English as Narrative Discourse) that often do little more than offer more illustrations of Genette's theory, or argue over terminology or small 'errors' Genette made in expressing certain concepts. Yet while it may be argued that at this stage of narrative theory's development it is unlikely that a theoretical work as significant as Narrative Discourse or Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination will be forthcoming, there is still a great deal of work to be done in this field. In Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative, Brian Richardson succeeds in arguing that causality, "the single most undertheorized aspect of narrative transaction," is an important feature of narration and should be examined further by narrative theorists and critics (182). His book provides an excellent starting place for such examinations. Richardson states that the subject of his book is "the connection between multiple story lines, the interpretation of the text, the sequencing of episodes, and the casual system governing the world of fiction" (13). The text is divided into two sections, the first of which is concerned with Richardson's theoretical approach to literary narrative. In these chapters Richardson attempts to clarify and reconceptualize varied strands of causality in literature; discusses causal settings and four types of probability that govern fictional world; and moves his discussion into narrative segments, which in turn leads to the longer critical chapters. In the second section, Richardson applies his theories to a large number of literary works. He notes that "an all too common failure of literary history is a sweeping theory based ona paucity of examples" (63). This charge can certainly not be made against Richardson himself, who makes no sweeping claims, and yet gives us an impressive number of examples. In his first chapter, Richardson defines cause as the condition that occasions change in events. He adds that just as modernist and postmodernist narratives interrogate the boundary of fact and fiction, readers must use their own acumen to determine the existence and direction of causal connections (43-44). Of particular interest is his discussion of the "monistic fallacy": characters' behavior that rests on metaphysical assumptions that support a specific ideology (52). In fact, he says, free will is distinct from ontological issues. As Richardson is obviously interested in determinism and in narratology, it is perhaps curious that he does not cite Bakhtin (here or elsewhere), but despite this omission, his argument for cause and the free will of characters, and his arguments against dogma in criticism, are convincing and useful (60). In the important second chapter, we find Richardson's four types of probability settings that govern fiction: 1. the supernatural; 2. the Naturalistic, which includes recognizable and repeatable actions with plausible consequences; 3. chance worlds, in which the more unlikely the events, the more evident the author is; 4. authorial excursions into fictional worlds (metafictions) in which the characters can take control from the author (a section that would profit from a discussion of Bakhtin's dialogism). …

To Blot It All Out: The Politics of Realism in Richard Wright's 'Native Son.'

Abstract: The strategies of the classic realist text divert the reader from what is contradictory within it to the renewed recognition (misrecognition) of what he or she already "knows," knows because the myths and signifying systems of the classic realist text re-present experience in the ways in which it is conventionally articulated in our society Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice But what enabled me to overcome my chronic distrust was that these books - written by men like Dreiser, Masters, Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis - seemed defensively critical of the straitened American environment These writers seemed to feel that America could be shaped nearer to the hearts of those who lived in it And it was out of these novels and stories and articles that I felt touching my face a tinge of warmth from an unseen light Richard Wright, Black Boy I Although now almost twenty years old, Belsey's forceful dismissal of a realism that, to her mind, "performs the work of ideology" (67) remains, to this day, a virtual axiom of Anglo-American literary criticism Despite Rita Felski's more recent claim that "the 'conservative' status of realism as a closed form which reflects ruling ideologies has been challenged by its reappropriation by oppositional movements such as feminism" (161), recent scholarship, implicitly or explicitly deploying what Belsey dubs "[p]ost-Saussurean work on language" (3),(1) has tended to take the diagnosis of realism as reactionary as its starting point in discussions of the realist novel Indeed, even such a recent reclamation of American realism as William Solomon's 1996 essay, "Politics and Rhetoric in the Novel in the 1930s," begins by conceding realism's effectively conservative character as a mode of ideological "closure" (799) If the ostensibly realist fiction of the 1930s is to be rescued from critical scorn here, this is to be done by demonstrating that it is not in fact realist at all, but rather an attempt to go "beyond" realism and toward a rhetorical form exhibiting a healthy and "at times extreme skepticism towards the referential reliability of realist modes of narration" (800) Nor has the Wright who, in our second epigraph, praises realism as a kind of personal and political epiphany escaped scholarly censure for just this allegiance To be sure, Wright's work, and Native Son in particular, was initially praised by reviewers for nothing other than the power of its realism Thus critics who praised Uncle Tom's Children for its "brutal reality" and "authenticity" would likewise applaud in Wright's first novel an "authentic, powerful writing" and a "factual quality as hard and real as a paving stone" (Reilly, Critical Reception 2, 28, 50, 61) More importantly, as regards recent formulations of the politics of literary realism, these first critics and reviewers would see this realism itself as at the very heart of a potent and oppositional political act, as "a considerable factor in awakening a social sense and conscience willing at last, after much evasion and self-deception, to face the basic issues realistically and constructively" (Locke 20) By 1963, such readings of Wright's achievement in Native Son were so current that Irving Howe could claim of the novel that it was not only a disclosure of the facts of racist oppression, but further, a form of literary liberation from the "protest" novel for those black American writers who came after it ("Black Boys" 137) Yet it is instructive that such an argument should come some two years after Howe's own fearful eulogy for Wright, which lamented that his works were now largely unread, his name unknown (Reilly, Critical Reception 350) For indeed, by the 1960s, Wright's literary fortunes had waned - so much so, in fact, that his 1954 novel, Savage Holiday, would receive not a single American review (Reilly, Critical Reception 239) - and had done so in step with the declining esteem in which the realist novel was held in American literary circles …

Timely Interruptions: Unsettling Gender through Temporality in the 'The Story of an African Farm.'

Abstract: With its odd syntax, desultory structure, and peculiar characterizations, The Story of an African Farm (1883) is an iconoclast among the tightly constructed linear narratives that tended to dominate nineteenth-century fiction. Yet Olive Schreiner's novel is an important text primarily because of its anomalous response to narrative conventions. Through its many irregularities, it both questions and unsettles the social construction of gender that governed behavior at the end of the century. As one of the spate of controversial New Woman novels that emerged in an era of widespread nervousness over the volatile issue of gender roles, Schreiner's colonial text queries and rejects the culturally perceived conjunction between biology and behavior. Setting African Farm apart from its generic feminist contemporaries, however, is its strategy for disrupting gender paradigms. The novel problematizes gender construction on both a broadly structural and an intimately textual level through its unusual manipulation of temporality. Appropriating the prevailing essentialist distinction between temporal forms, the novel situates masculine linear temporality as a controlling force and simultaneously disrupts its hegemony through the inexorable intervention of feminine time. In the narrative chaos that ensues, African Farm creates a textual space within which alternate constructions of gender can be imagined and enacted. To realize this goal, the novel both responds to and complicates Victorian discourses on a subject - time - that was an obsessive concern during the period. The century was marked by a dizzying array of scientific, technological, and philosophical developments that initiated a veritable revolution in the way time was theorized. Lyell's unnerving geological findings, advances in a host of time-based sciences, a widespread faith in history as progress, and, of course, Darwin's explosive theories are but a few of the startling advances that shaped Victorians' temporal perceptions. Yet these conceptions, I maintain, carried an implicit but insistent gender component. In effect, they presupposed and reified a "natural order of time," one formed by and perpetuated through gender-laden values that precluded substantive change in women's prospects. Prominent among such temporally based values were those associated with history, progress, Christianity, and evolution, all of which were weighted in favor of the men who determined both their direction and their interpretation. In Victorian culture, for example, it was the male who shaped the course of history and whose accomplishments furthered the cause of progress. In Christianity it was the male who served as prophet, priest, and typological precursor of Christ. In Darwinian theory it was the male who was the most advanced specimen in the human developmental chain. In seeking to identify its complicity, question its reliability, and negate its authority in prescribing a restrictive female role, Schreiner and other New Woman novelists, however, foregrounded the constructedness of this "natural order of time." Schreiner pursues this project by problematizing the temporal associations that reinforced Victorian notions of masculinity and femininity.(1) The presumption of masculine and feminine time may seem hopelessly essentialistic to modern critics accustomed to distinguishing between biological sex and gender, but it is necessary to consider temporality as Victorians themselves constructed it. Thus, my project is to explore, not endorse, the temporal ideology at work in Schreiner's text, for it responded to the essentialist designations of time that helped naturalize cultural definitions of gender. Although African Farm is not the only late-century novel to adopt a sophisticated temporal perspective to explore gender paradigms - Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, H. Rider Haggard's She, Sarah Grand's The Beth Book, and Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus, for example, also manipulate time in interesting yet diverse ways - none does so more insistently, consistently, and pervasively than African Farm. …

Mark Twain Speaks for Himself

Abstract: Paul Fatout, ed. Mark Twain Speaks for Himself. Rpt. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1997. xxi + 244 pp. paper. $14.95. Orig. pub. 1978. This informative collection of diverse newspaper articles, sketches, and memoirs reminds us of Samuel Clemens's productive career, his uncanny insight into human nature, and the complex, multifaceted persona of his greatest creation, Mark Twain. In assembling various so-called "fugitive pieces" (xiv) from Twain's journalistic work, the late Paul Fatout provides valuable insight into Clemens's fervent efforts to create and maintain the iconoclastic persona of Mark Twain. Culling articles, sketches, editorials, and other materials from Twain's work on such publications as the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the San Francisco Golden Era, the New York Daily Graphic, the Hartford Courant, and the New York Times, Fatout presents an intriguing survey of Twain's career-long work in print journalism. In these pieces, published together here for the first time, Fatout offers us the opportunity to survey Twain's development as a journalist, satirist, and humorist over many decades. Rather than employ the pieces to support a theory about the Clemens-Twain dichotomy-the topic of "split personality" that, as Fatout notes, has intrigued critics and biographers for years-Fatout lets the entries speak for themselves. Fatout's collection, first published in 1978 and available for the first time in a paperback edition, is a valuable addition to any collection of critical and biographical works on Twain. The book's illustration of Twain's roles as writer, journalist, and observer of human foibles-as well as his more amorphous role as American icon-complements such earlier landmark works as Albert Bigelow Paine's three-volume Mark Twain: A Biography, the Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1912), Justin Kaplan's Mr Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (1966), Edgar Lee Masters's Mark Twain: A Portrait (1966), Edward Wagenknecht's Mark Twain: The Man and His Work (1967), and Van Wyck Brooks's crucial text, The Ordeal Of Mark Twain (1970). Fatout's book effectively demonstrates Twain's textualization of the Clemens-Twain dichotomy, which has generated much critical and biographical discourse since Twain's death in 1910. In presenting these "little-known efforts, oral and written, out of which the reader, if so minded, may construct any hypothesis he chooses" (xiv), Fatout places the pieces in chronological order. Spanning the vast amount of time between Twain's first days as an enthusiastic and imaginative reporter for the Territorial Enterprise and the last few years of the author's life, the entries reflect Twain's remarkable literary output and, in Fatout's terms, provide a "sporadic glimpse of almost his entire career as writer and talker" (xiv). The seventy-six entries-ranging in length from two or three paragraphs to four or five pages (the longest piece being a twelve-page memoir of Marjorie Fleming, one of Twain's beloved Angel Fish)--are preceded by Fatout's detailed and insightful notes throughout the book. In these notes, Fatout offers concise, useful explanations of biographical and sociohistorical contexts, illuminating many relevant and significant facets of Twain's artistic methodology in the process. In addition to this background information and the publication data pertaining to each entry, the editor occasionally offers a thoughtful, brief evaluation of the tone or style of the pieces, which adds a certain charm to the text. For example, Fatout notes that the aforementioned Fleming memoir is "informative, gentle, and affectionate" (225), and he states that the entry, "Mark Twain in a Railroad Car," published in the Jackson, California Amador Dispatch on December 30, 1871, reveals "a tongue-in-cheek spirit of misdirection that no doubt made the editors hospitable to the tall tale impulses of Mark Twain" (65). Beginning with "The Indian Troubles on the Overland Route," one of the author's earliest contributions to the Territorial Enterprise (published on October 1, 1862, before the creation of the Mark Twain nom de plume) and closing with "Marjorie Fleming, the Wonder Child" (published in Harper's Bazaar in December, 1909), the collection attests to the longevity and substance of Twain's journalistic output. …

Introduction: Reading Literature and the Ethics of Criticism

Abstract: The very fact that Style has published such an issue as the one that now rests in the reader's hands will be disturbing to some in the field of literary study. Despite (or more likely because of) the fact that numerous journals in the field have supported, through publication, the efforts of scholars grappling with the role of ethics in the act of reading literature-PMLA and Salmagundi, like Style, have devoted entire issues to the discussion of art and ethics-the cry from many in the academy is that of blasphemy. I As a discipline that grew in large part out of a feigned innocence of aesthetics, many literary scholarseven those who accept or practice reading strategies that involve overtly ethical bases-seem to resist the idea that the literary artifact and its reader have ethical and moral lives that intersect at times, a relationship that does not result in mechanical responses, but rather, as with those living creatures we come to know in the texts of our lives, causes us to think in ways we would not have had we not encountered them. In The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1998), Wayne C. Booth suggests that ethical criticism, because of its misuse in the past to censor and repress all kinds of literature deemed immoral by some, fell on hard times and was replaced by various formalist theories that ignored the very real ethical or political effects of literature. In recent decades, however, ethical criticism has enjoyed a revival of sorts, motivated in part, Booth argues, by the work of "feminist critics asking embarrassing questions about a male-dominated literary canon and what it has done to the 'consciousness' of both men and women; by black critics pursuing [ ... I question[s] about racism in American classics; by neo-Marxists exploring class biases in European literary traditions; by religious critics attacking modern literature for its 'nihilism' or 'atheism"' (5). Although much of the modern era denied the political or ethical nature of literature, claiming that in some mystical fashion art transcended the boundaries of politics or ethics, postmodern philosophy has demonstrated the folly in such a claim and argued that art is indeed political, a product of societal mores and power relations. The mispractice of ethical criticism has usually involved acts of judgment that in essence imply that a given literary work is somehow inferior because of its system of morality; such criticism, reductive in nature, often leads to censorship and produces no fruitful scholarship. What Booth, among others, wishes to establish is a form of criticism that examines a work of art in order to discover and make explicit the moral sensibility informing that work. In On Moral Fiction (1978), John Gardner argues that moral criticism is absolutely necessary for the health of English studies, and, despite his often sweeping generalizations about the value of certain artists, On Moral Fiction must be acknowledged as an important precursor to the revival of contemporary interest in ethical criticism. Gardner's rage against the English academy was fueled by his belief that the study of literature had become morally bankrupt and uninterested in what is most human about literature. Before his untimely death in 1982, Gardner used his influence as a noted writer of fiction and as a professor of English in an effort to move the tide of intellectual thought toward an affirmation of the mystery and beauty of life.2 If we are to accept the proposition that literature reflects human experience while at the same time it affects it, that literature is both a product of the social order and helps establish and maintain it, ethical criticism, in its desire to examine the moral and ethical nature of a work of art, clearly establishes an important bond between the life of the text and the life of the reader. This bond, however, should never be viewed facilely or reductively. Patricia Meyer Spacks contends that while fictional narratives offer opportunities for ethical reflection, they are not imperatives for behavior; rather, according to Spacks, "paradigms of fiction provide an opportunity for moral playfulness: cost-free experimentation" (203). …

'This Thing I like My Sister May Not Do': Shakespearean Erotics and a Clash of Wills in 'Middlemarch.'

Abstract: At my local card shop a little book of romantic pictures is on display for Valentine's Day.(1) The only text is Shakespeare's Sonnet 116. The pictures are all of heterosexual couples. Apparently it remains difficult for many people to think of the first hundred and twenty-six sonnets as homoerotic, yet it seems equally difficult for readers, other than some scholars in Renaissance studies, to see them as anything other than romantic. And when we read the sonnets addressed directly to the beloved, we may not be able to avoid a sense of voyeuristic eavesdropping. The ordinary response of voyeurs is to imagine themselves within the scene by identifying with one of its participants. Reading Sonnet 22's, "My glass shall not persuade me I am old, / So long as youth and thou are of one date" in the context provided by Sonnet 18's famous assertion, "thy eternal summer shall not fade," the reader may feel most seductively called to identification not with the other reader whom the apostrophe evokes, but with the writer whose love both confers and is immortality. Although George Eliot's Middlemarch usually has quite a different effect on readers, because Eliot brings Shakespeare's sonnets into her novel, if only briefly, eavesdropping on their interchange can draw us into other scenes of literary relation, suggesting different, because differently gendered, pleasures, frustrations, and pains in the erotics of authorship. Like Shakespeare, Eliot changes with the times, for new readings emerge with every new group of readers. In an overview of the reception of Middlemarch, Gillian Beer notes that while Eliot's contemporaries recognized the centrality of "feminist issues" to the novel, these issues received almost no attention from "critics of the next 100 years" (148). Then by 1976 Eliot was so regularly castigated by feminist critics that Zelda Austen entitled an article "Why Feminist Critics Are So Angry with George Eliot." Laying out a pattern for much later feminist criticism, Austen and Kathleen Blake, in "Middlemarch and the Woman Question," published the same year, defend Eliot both against the charge that her novels inadequately address the feminist questions they raise and, further, that Eliot denies her heroines the same sort of success at transcending gender roles she had enjoyed. Working against the idea that women's fiction should provide liberatory role models, both Austen and Blake praise Eliot for realistically depicting the possibilities open to most nineteenth-century women and for refusing to set up as a model the extraordinary person (herself) at the expense of more compromised and less successful women. While feminist objections to Eliot do continue, defenses on the grounds of realism also continue to appear. According to these defenses, Eliot's tendency to resolve her heroines' life crises with marriage becomes fidelity to the truth of ordinary women's lives. Thus some critics find a model not in the fiction, but through it, and Eliot is remade as an exemplary feminist author. In the last twenty years, Eliot's novels, her cultural authority, and her egalitarian relationship with George Henry Lewes all figure prominently in the narratives feminist critics have made of the rise of women writers in the nineteenth century. Because of her balanced and deliberately sensible discussions of "love problems" and the common understanding that her own life was defined by both companionate love and respectfully received work, Eliot is perhaps not the first writer who comes to mind when one thinks about the impact on prose style of wildly romantic longings. Nor is focus on the depiction of romantic longing a topic that initially seems compatible with a feminist approach to Eliot. But now that Eliot's place in literature is secured without doubt, perhaps we can acknowledge another Eliot, the one who, at what would seem to have been her last possible moment for romantic abandon, married John Cross, a good-looking admirer twenty years her junior. …

Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy

Abstract: Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. xxv + 221pp. $37.50 cloth; $18.50 paper. In this short book, Barbara Herrnstein Smith undertakes to tackle some of the most vexed issues of modern and contemporary philosophy. She takes on, for instance, the concepts of truth, reason, objectivity, meaning, and belief in order to explore the "dynamics of contemporary intellectual controversy." As Smith argues, the controversy arises between traditionalists who propose and defend objectivist views of these concepts, and relativists or postmodernists who challenge and undermine those views. Siding firmly with postmodernists, Smith draws upon contemporary research in theoretical biology, computer sciences, and history and philosophy of science. The list of postmodernists includes Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Bruno Latour, among others. In chapter 1, Smith seeks to establish the argument that, contrary to Marxists and others who have questioned the politically quietist nature of postmodernism, non objectivists do not fail to judge or act effectively. Giving up objectivity, Smith insists, means only giving up chimerical ideals; good judgments will always turn out to be contingent in their origin and operation, and their identification as "good" or "bad" will always turn out to be contingent and contestable. The notion of contingency has a certain foundational authority in Smith's treatment of virtually every theoretical problem. Thus in the second chapter, "Making (Up) the Truth," she gives a defense of constructivism that is based on the assertion that truth is contingent. The defense is built on certain contemporary critiques of traditional epistemology, critiques that propose that there can be no touchstones of truth, no ready-made exposures of deception, no compelling refutations of error. Constructivism denies all assumption of epistemic privilege. It views science as truth-making rather than truth-discovering, and this truth-making occurs through the processes of rhetorical, pragmatic, social, technical, and intellectual activities. In chapter 3, Smith discusses belief and resistance, proposing a symmetrical account. The general mechanisms underlying our practices play a role in modifying and maintaining our beliefs. We are always changing and "we are inextricably interlocked with our always changing worlds" (48). Moreover, our relation to the world is always both dynamic and universal. This relation accounts for the fact that while there is plasticity to our beliefs, there are also mechanisms that make the beliefs stable and persistent. Chapter 4 takes on the concept of meaning. Although our behavior as verbal agents seems to be rule-governed, there are no inherent properties to words, exercising some sort of autonomous power over us. We tend to reify the relatively regular patterns of our verbal practices and treat them as rules. These so-called rules, however, are simply our own descriptions of our practices; they are projections of our responses onto the words themselves, and it is these projections we call meanings. The relation between our utterances and our world, Smith suggests, is "not only historically and causally complex but also cognitively reciprocal" (60). Doing without the concept of determinate meaning does not amount to endorsing linguistic anarchy. All verbal or social expression has a shaping history and a set of shaping conditions that make it possible, and such expression can include verbal or social lawlessness too. The rest of the book is devoted to refuting one or another major charge against skepticism or relativism. In the fifth chapter, Smith examines the selfrefutation charge often raised against relativists, epistemological skeptics, and postmodernists. …

Almanac of Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic Stories after Freud and Lacan

Abstract: Almanac of Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic Stories after Freud and Lacan. Ed. Ruth Golan, Gabriel Dahan, Shlomo Lieber, and Rivka Warshawsky. Tel Aviv: Groupe Israelienne de l'Ecole Europeene, 1998.227 pp. $25.00. Initially, because of how it is situated within what Elisabeth Roudinesco calls "Lacanian legitimism" (428), the Almanac of Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic Stories after Freud and Lacan may seem as interesting for the politics it exhibits as for the essays and other pieces included in it. The volume is a collection of eighteen texts produced by the Israeli Group of the European School of Psychoanalysis. The group intends to produce, each year if possible, a new volume such as this one. It includes a brief introduction by the editors, but more important is the volume's thematic introduction. It is by Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent. Laurent is the titular president of the European School of Psychoanalysis of the Freudian Field. Miller is the son-in-law of Jacques Lacan. He and his wife Judith in effect inherited the family business. Together, they created the Cause Freudien and l'Ecole de la cause freudienne (the School of the Freudian Cause). Because they head the parent organization of that "Lacanian legitimism," Miller, as the clinician, becomes the head at least symbolically of all such organizations, of which there are several dozen around the world. Thus it is with considerable warmth that the editors of the Almanac express their gratitude to both Miller and Laurent for allowing the group to use their jointly delivered talk as the thematic point of departure for this volume. With Laurent and, especially, Miller at the head of the table of contents, the editors mean to suggest that all the essays in some fashion belong within the legitimized school of Lacanian theory and practice.'That claim, if indeed it is that, is perhaps more important to the members of the Group than to literary critics interested in Lacanian theory. The keynote piece by Miller and Laurent is called "The Other Who Does Not Exist and His Ethical Committees." Published originally in La Cause Freudienne 35 (February 1997) and translated into English by Michele Julien, Richard Klein, Kevin Polley, Mischa Twitchin, and Veronique Voruz, it came from the seminar of 1997 conducted in Paris at the School of the Freudian Cause. The main theme of the seminar was the crisis of ethics in a time when all seemingly agree that there is no primally grounded Other, no god or first cause or foundational law. The editors of the Almanac claim this crisis lies at the center of their collection, for they insist that "psychoanalytic practice must address this Real crisis while at the same time upholding the inexistence of the Other"(13). In the essays in the collection, the authors attempt-not always very directly-to connect this thesis to issues ranging from sexual identity to child psychosis to anorexia, modem art, and logic and mathematics. To manage these topics, the editors divide the collection into sections under the headings "Today's Civilization and the Discontents about the Real," "The Answer of Psychosis," "Concerning the Object," and "Interpretation and Truth." Some of the more interesting essays in the collection are Gabriel Dahan's "The Clinics of Management," Colette Soler's "Plus-Un of Melancholy," Laurent's "From Saying to Doing in the Clinic of Drug Addiction and Alcoholism," Bracha Lichtenberg-- Ettinger's "Supplementary Jouissance," and Riva Warshawsky's "The House, the Car, the Camera, the 'Sudden Attacks': A Clinical Case." But however much any of these hews to the thesis of the introduction, none of them does as much as Miller and Laurent to make this volume worth purchasing or to clarify the politics within which the volume is situated. Because it outlines the latest version of the history of Lacanian theory, Miller's section of that introduction alone explains the politics and makes the Almanac worth buying. …

Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance

Abstract: Julian Wolfreys and William Baker, eds. Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance. New York: New York University Press. xi + 259pp. If this ain't the berries! as an uncle of mine (memorable only for that botched idiom) used to say. Here's a book explaining and performing literary theory for undergraduates that is not only dutiful (which we would expect) and lucid (which it had better be) but brilliant (yes) and great fun (I swear). Wolfreys and Baker have devised an ingenious and challenging way to stage this anything-but-sure-fire-hit, and they have assembled a seven-person ensemble of scholars (the editor Wolfreys also appearing in the role of the butler) to provide an experience in lit-theory-for-beginners that is, by far, the best available. No other guide, survey, anthology, study manual, or crib comes close to the poise, wit, slyness, and effectiveness of Literary Theories. No other work makes so fully available to students and the rest of us the idea of a theoretical position as an awareness of what the hell it is you are doing and, even better, what you might be doing instead. It is a generous and assured book that honors both its readers and its subject with affability as well as respect. Literary Theories is the only book of its kind to get its audience right. It has an uncanny sense of how it is being read, and a wonderful flexibility in adapting to its most interesting readers. It is a challenging and entirely uncondescending book, figuring that anybody prepared to tackle good theory deserves good words and shows about theory. It knows who these people are, these undergraduates taking "Intro to Theory 201 " or "The English Major: A Gateway." Any theory book for such an audience should assume as its rhetorical challenge something like this: providing a detailed explanation of S/M theory and practice to the Christian Coalition. Your audience wants to hear but doesn't; it is secretly eager but openly, dramatically hostile. The audience, that is, should be regarded as profoundly ignorant but with an appetite it is not necessary to arouse (no need to peddle the product). In addition-and here the parallel to Ralph Reed breaks down-the student audience can be projected as bright but easily bored. Each of the contributors to Literary Theories seems not only to accept these conditions but to revel in them. This book gets its foot in the door irresistibly by telling us, right off the bat, that it has no idea what "theory" is and will make no attempt to consolidate the various presentations made in it. In fact, the editors see theories as a set of intriguing possibilities, not mutually exclusive but certainly not capable of simply being pluralized or homogenized. Theories, in other words, give us different ways to perform, different ways to act in reference to literary experience. To demonstrate this, Wolfreys and Baker offer a short story as a kind of rough set of notes toward a choreography and then fling seven dancers at us: structuralist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, new historicist, and deconstructive. The short story is also given, published for the first time ever. Richard Jeffries's "Snowed Up" seems to have been written in 1876; at least it was rejected then in the only extant reference to the story. That is surprising, as "Snowed Up" is a layered and immediately absorbing tale about a London blizzard that isolates the city, cuts off food supplies, and provides material for a young woman's diary, concerned equally with suitors, battles with papa (over the suitors), money, food, the looting lower orders, rats, and snow. The story is strange and open, chosen not simply to tease young readers into theoretical activity but to show how much fun that activity is. "Snowed Up" offers a playing field for seven different games, each of them persuasive and none of them exclusive. One of the unusual aspects of this collection is its resolutely undogmatic and good-natured air, its refusal to make truth claims and score mean-spirited points. …

"Nothing but Face"-"To Hell with Philosophy"?: Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and the Scandal of Human Countenance

Abstract: Scene One: A Railway in Argentina Sitting in an Argentine train compartment, seething at the press of others, the twentieth-century Polish emigre writer Witold Gombrowicz begins his Diary entry for the year 1962 this way: That mug ten centimeters away. The teary, reddish pupils? Little hairs on this ear? I don't want this! Away! I will not go on about his chapped skin! By what right did this find itself so close that I practically have to breathe him in, yet at the same time feel his hot trickles on my ear and neck? We rest our unseeing gazes on each other from a very near distance [. . . E]ach person is curling up, rolling up, shutting, shrinking, limiting to a minimum his eyes, ears, lips, trying to be a little as possible. (3: 17) While the entry makes it clear that its ressentiment is centered chiefly on the numbers of people compressed into the same car as Gombrowicz himself, "that mug ten centimeters away" does not exactly fade from readers' sight. It stays vivid (Gombrowicz has ensured as much), but partly because of the uncanny little scene that embeds it. Literature, with criticism's help, has accustomed us by now to a whole scenic pallet, diminutive theaters of figural enactment: Mirror Scenes, Scenes of Writing, Scenes of Reading, Scenes of Instruction, Scenes of Eating, even Scenes of Fasting (in Kafka's case). Gombrowicz offers, in their place, a Scene of Facing. Indeed, it is fair to assume that Gombrowicz expects readers of his Diary who are already familiar with his work - the 1937 novel Ferdydurke, in particular - to recognize such a scene as a lately-added snapshot to a much larger portfolio of signature studies in the face-to-face.(1) Thus, against the background of the author's abiding concern with the space between two persons(2), that mug ten centimeters away denotes not so much a countenance positioned opposite as an incitement to Opposition itself. The gauntlet-slap delivered to Gombrowicz's face is the fact that another faces him. The slap that answers it is his counter-face grimacing in return. Przyprawienie geby ("fitting someone with a mug") describes the norm of human interaction in Gombrowicz, a relentless duel of face-making, face-wearing, face-imposing. One face creates the other; a grimace responds. Both faces remain in dependent relation, face and grimace, mug and countenance, tracing a double helix of mutual deformation on into the negative infinity.(3) There is no sublation or sublimation. Higher, theoretical operations merely repeat rather than resolve an almost chthonic drama. Nothing but face, says a character in Ferdydurke who is looking for authentic countenance: the face that looks at me and the face it imposes on mine and the face I adopt in return and all the faces, mugs, grimaces, and permutations of phiz that pass between us. Just as that definitive paradox of Gombrowiczian space - "from a very near distance" - overrides any proprietary ideas about autonomous identity, so face is synecdochic shorthand for the face-to-face relation, for the scandal of one's own face forced into self-consciousness and counter-move by the face of another.(4) One wears a face; one doesn't own it. The sufficiency of my own private physiognomy is always being interrupted or compromised by the intervening faces of others. Even more, that desire is ridiculed by the unruliness of the face to begin with, by its enslavement not only to the faces of others, but also to one's own body. Thus, sometimes in Ferdydurke face just signifies personhood; other times, it means "the agony of outward form." As above, in extended form, "Nothing but face, nothing sincere or natural, everything false, imitated, and artificial" (3: 199). Physiognomy - as counterintuitive but also deeply intuitive as it sounds - is anything but private property. That is the obvious point about the train compartment. Even if I seem finished to myself, a facing other will make me seem unfinished, de-shaped. …

The Ethics of Reading Elie Wiesel's Night

Abstract: A Dead Child Speaks My mother held me by my hand. Then someone raised the knife of parting: So that it should not strike me, My mother loosed her hand from mine. But she lightly touched my thighs once more And her hand was bleeding - After that the knife of parting Cut in two each bite I swallowed - It rose before me with the sun at dawn And began to sharpen itself in my eyes - Wind and water ground in my ear And every voice of comfort pierced my heart - As I was led to death I still felt in the last moment The unsheathing of the great knife of parting. - Nelly Sachs The survivor [. . .] is a disturber of the peace. He is a runner of the blockade men erect against knowledge of "unspeakable" things. About these he aims to speak, and in so doing he undermines, without intending to, the validity of existing norms. He is a genuine transgressor, and here he is made to feel real guilt. The world to which he appeals does not admit him, and since he has looked to this world as the source of moral order, he begins to doubt himself. And that is not the end, for now his guilt is doubled by betrayal - of himself, of his task, of his vow to the dead. The final guilt is not to bear witness. The survivor's worst torment is not to be able to speak - Terence Des Pres In considering ethical reading, we should differentiate between an ethics of reading and an ethics while reading. For me, an ethics of reading includes acknowledging who we are and what are our biases and interests. An ethics of reading speaks of our reading as if, no matter how brilliant, it were proposing some possibilities rather than vatically providing the solution to Daniel's prophetic reading of handwriting on the wall; it means reading from multiple perspectives, or at least empathetically entering into the readings of those who are situated differently. For me, an ethics while reading would try to understand what the author was saying to her original imagined audience and both why and how the actual polyauditory audience might have responded and for what reasons. An ethics while reading is different from but, in its attention to a value-oriented epistemology, related to an ethics of reading. An ethics while reading implies attention to moral issues; generated by events described within an imagined world. It asks what ethical questions are involved in the act of transforming life into art, and notices such issues as Pound's or Eliot's anti-Semitism and the patronizing racism of some American-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers. What we choose to read and especially what to include on syllabi have an ethical dimension. Thus, I will choose to select other Conrad works for my undergraduate lecture course than the unfortunately titled The Nigger of the Narcissus. Let me tentatively propose five stages of the hermeneutical activities involved in ethical reading and interpretation. Even while acknowledging that my model is suggestive rather than rigorous, I believe that we do perceive in stages that move from a naive response or surface interpretation to critical or in-depth interpretation and, finally, to understanding our readings conceptually and ethically in terms of other knowledge. Awareness of such stages enables us to read ethically. My stages are: 1. Immersion in the process of reading and the discovery of imagined worlds. Reading is a place where text and reader meet in a transaction. As we open a text, we and the author meet as if together we were going to draw a map on an uncharted space. We partially suspend our sense of our world as we enter into the imagined world; we respond in experimental terms to the episodes, the story, the physical setting, the individualized characters as humans and, the telling voice. While it has become fashionable to speak dismissively of such reading as "naive," or the result of the "mimetic illusion," in fact how many of us do not read in that way with pleasure and delight - and with ethical judgments? …

The Traffic in Men: Female Kinship in Three Novels by George Eliot

Abstract: In an inquiry into gender inequality written in 1975, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex," the anthropologist Gayle Rubin explores the relationship between Claude Levi-Strauss's analysis of kinship structures in primitive cultures and Sigmund Freud's modern analysis of sexual development. Close to the surface of her argument is a perception that women's status in primitive cultures (that is, objects of exchange between men) and women's socialization as described by the Oedipus theory both forbid them relationships with each other. In the novels of George Eliot it is not surprising to find female status and socialization serving similar roles; Eliot is an author with as keen an insight into her culture's structures as Freud's into his or Levi-Strauss's into the Arapesh's. But I would like to suggest that in Eliot there is also an alternative pattern, a pattern of relationships between women that works to subvert the conventional structural imperatives. To briefly recapitulate Rubin's essay: using Levi-Strauss's perception that marriages are a special form of gift exchange, in which kinship between men is established, Rubin shows how a politics of gender asymmetry is created from gender difference. She then discusses Freud's explanation of how children learn the rules of gender, and strikingly describes the precise fit between Freud's theories and those of Levi-Strauss. They show us, Rubin says, how the construction of a system that devalues women into exchange objects creates an "Oedipal crisis of culture" (198). The congruence between primitive kinship structures and the theories of a founding father of modernism seems to reveal a deep structure in the oppression of women, and one that seems to transcend time and place with extraordinary power. She notes particularly that the exchange system guarantees not only a woman's powerlessness to refuse the man to whom she has been promised, but most certainly that she cannot choose for herself another woman. Following Lacan's designation of the phallus as symbolic cultural information about what having a penis means, Rubin notes that fights to women go with possession of it. Such possession or its lack marks the difference between exchanger and exchanged, the giver and the gift. Lacking such "embodiment of the male status . . . in which certain rights inhere - among them the right to a woman" (192), women are thus excluded from a system in which they might affirm a culturally important bond with each other. By 1985, Rubin's description of this system had become one of the bases for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's exploration of male homosocial desire and English literature, In Between Men Sedgwick offers the erotic love triangle as an expression of a kinship structure that both delineates and negotiates power relationships among men. If, as Rubin says, a traffic in women makes a woman "the conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it" (174), not only is the real partnership between the men, but it also expresses certain rights that men have to their female kin that women do not have to themselves. Discussing Eliot's Adam Bede, Sedgwick points out that even the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris, whose independence from this triangular partnership is marked by her freedom to refuse an excellent marriage offer from Seth Bede, must by the end of the novel enter the exchange system of the bourgeois nuclear family - as the bride, in fact, of Seth's brother Adam. Sedgwick traces this plot trajectory as part of a much larger economic shift from a preindustrial world in which women's work, located at the very site of production (the farmhouse), can offer the kind of authority represented by Dinah's aunt Mrs. Poyser to one in which it merely supports the needs of the man who brings his earnings home from elsewhere. Indeed, Adam Bede demonstrates this shift. But I would like to add to Sedgwick's observation that Adam Bede also puts Dinah into another triangle in which her kinship with Adam's lost first love, Hetty Sorrel, is essential to her later relationship with Adam. …

Fiction, Pretense, and Narration

Abstract: 1 It is never too late to do something good: take for example the availability, in French translation, nearly thirty years after its first publication (1957), of one of the great works of contemporary poetics. In choosing to translate the original title, Die Logik der Dichtung, as Logique des genres litteraires, the author of this excellent translation has remained faithful to the book's global orientation: the project of a general poetics that would be a poetics of genres. Yet, contrary to the German title, the French title no longer indicates that it is Dichtung in the etymological sense - that is, fiction as poiesis - which stands at the center of this theory of genres. Indeed, Hamburger's generic theory rests upon an analysis of what she thinks constitutes the irreducible specificity of literature: its fictional character. Her efforts are directed at "a theory of language, which investigates whether that language which produces the forms of literature [formen der Dichtung] . . . differs functionally from the language of thought and communication, and, if so, to what extent" (3). Now, these differences are clearer in the case of fiction. Tending thus to identify literature with fiction, she aims to replace the traditional definitions of literature - that is, aesthetic conceptions - with a logico-linguistic definition based upon traits internal to the literary utterance. At the same time she challenges the pragmatic and contextual criteria for fiction advanced most notably by Anglo-American philosophy and implicitly accepted by narratology. To the extent that Hamburger defines literature by its specific place in the general system of language, her poetics is largely dependent upon a general linguistic theory. This theory is neither syntactic, nor semantic, nor pragmatic, but gnoseologic. In effect it postulates that, in its deep structure, language is an utterance-system [systeme d'enonciation] definable as a relation between an utterance-subject - which, "being fixed in language, is therefore the . . . analogue to the cognitive subject or subject of consciousness" (39) - and an utterance-object, which is that upon which the utterance bears. This subject/object relation is not a fact of communication, but is inscribed in the very interior of the structure of language: the utterance-subject is thus distinct from the I-Producer of communication, which is purely discursive or pragmatic. Hence every utterance, whatever its mode of utterance, is the utterance of an utterance-subject, apropos an utterance-object: for Hamburger, a question, a command, a wish are all equally as much utterances apropos some object as an assertoric proposition is. The central thesis of this conception of language resides in the affirmation that "all statement is reality statement" (33). Since the utterance is defined not by its object but by its subject, this thesis does not mean that every utterance bears upon some actually existing object, but that it is produced by a real person, an utterer: "statement is constituted only through a genuine, real statement-subject" (45), that is, by a real I-Origo about which we can raise the question of its place in time (even if in certain cases the response is that this place is not important - as when we are faced with a theoretical utterance-subject such as is embodied for instance by a mathematical theorem). It is obviously this thesis that makes possible the construction of a polar opposition between fiction (which does not provide for an actual utterance-subject), and the set of actual utterances [enonces de realite, "reality statements"],(1) which is to say in fact the utterance-system as such. So it is to language as a system of actual utterances ["reality statements"] that Hamburger comes to oppose the system of literary genres. On this basis she will take account solely of discursive practices diverging in an observable way from the linguistic utterance-system: all genres, such as autobiography, history, the essay, etc. …

Revitalizing the Reader: Literary Technique and the Language of Sacred Experience in D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover

Abstract: The famous sex scenes in Lady Chatterley's Lover have been celebrated for their beauty, verity, and liberating power. They have also been attacked as tedious, naive, sexist, and obscene. While it has been observed that the scenes represent the erotic initiation of Constance Chatterley, what has not been realized is that they are part of a narrative structure designed to initiate the reader.(1) The aim of this initiation is to transform the reader's consciousness. Through an analysis of the literary devices and sacred discourses deployed in the erotic episodes, I demonstrate that the initial attempt to revitalize readers eventually gives way to a deconstructive impulse that prevents readers from forming new erotic dogmas and encourages first-hand exploration. It is sometimes forgotten that Lawrence was fundamentally a religious artist: that is, his sensibilities and artistic aims were profoundly shaped by his ongoing experience of the divine. In February 1913, a month before he began composing his greatest novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, he wrote to the artist Ernest Collings that "I always feel as if I stood for the fire of Almightly God to go through me - and it's a rather awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious, to be an artist" (Letter 550 in Letters 519). Throughout the rest of his career he continued to identify artistic inspiration and religious sensibility. A year before his death, he reasserts that the imagination is an essentially sacred faculty energized by bodily feeling.(2) As a novelist, Lawrence turned to world religions not only for symbols, myths, and rites to use in his works, but also for ritual forms to structure his narratives and guide his technical innovations. Because his ultimate aim was to produce a spiritual transformation in his readers by evoking "new, really new feeling," especially the numinous "feeling of being beyond life or death," he became particularly intrigued with the structure and function of religious initiation rites (Phoenix 520, 527-28). In theosophy and cultural anthropology, he learned that an initiation rite is a transformational process typically comprised of two phases: a destructive phase in which the novitiate's ordinary modes of consciousness and action are disintegrated and purged, and a creative phase in which new, sacred modes are established that enable the awareness of or union with divinity.(3) The "double rhythm of creating and destroying" in Lawrence's major novels is precisely the dual rhythm of initiation (Studies in Classic American Literature 70).(4) The narrator of Lady Chatterley also implies that novels should have a two-phased initiatory structure: in the first phase, the "properly handled" novel should "lead" the reader's "sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead"; in the second phase, it should "reveal the most secret places of life" by "cleansing and freshening" the "tide of sensitive awareness" (106). My investigation shows that these two phases determine the choice and arrangement of techniques and diction in Lady Chatterley. In the destruction phase, Lawrence tries to dissolve and expunge the reader's deadening sexual ideas and inclinations. In the sacralization phase, which focuses on the erotic encounters between Connie and Mellors, Lawrence attempts to vitalize, expand, and unify the reader's consciousness and thereby engender a sacred experience. The disintegration stage dominates the first half of the novel, while the vitalization stage governs the second half. As one stage wanes, the other waxes, and each is characterized by an array of structures, techniques, and discourses. The two distinctive arrays of language suggest two different narratorial consciousnesses: a narrator who seeks to break down the reader's mindset, and a new or renewed narrator who seeks to build up a fresh awareness. In this essay, using the sex scenes as exemplars, I examine how the sacralization phase operates. My investigation does not focus on the actual, historical impact of the novel on readers, but rather on potential reader responses implied by the novel's textual effects. …

Borges and the Classical Hollywood Cinema

Abstract: Although there are already a few articles written about the influence that Borges's interest in cinema had on his fictional work, this still remains a largely understudied area of his aesthetics, especially in comparison to the attention given by critics to Borges's use of other products of mass culture. It is widely accepted, for example, that many of his tales borrow the structure of the detective short story, but his appropriation of cinematic techniques is less known and often misunderstood. One of the problems with the existing studies on Borges and film is that the influence of the latter has always been analyzed in isolation from the emerging culture industry in Argentina. It is necessary to see film in his work as related to his interest in other elements of popular culture, such as the adventure tale and the detective fiction. It was not by chance that when Borges wrote his first collection of stories, A Universal History of Infamy, cinema was mentioned in the preface as a source of inspiration, alongside the names of Chesterton and Stevenson. Departing from previous studies on Borges's use of film, which traditionally focus on the influence of a specific technique (montage) or a film director (Von Sternberg), I will study the function of cinema within a general Borgesean strategy to erase the boundaries between high and low culture by appropriating modes of narrative organization from popular culture. To a certain extent, Borges's interest in cinema was a reaction to the early attention that the introduction of new means of communications and the emergence of a culture industry received in Argentina. In the Argentina of the first decades of the century, large groups of people became immediately fascinated with the possibilities that new inventions such as radio and television offered. In La imaginacion tecnica, Beatriz Sarlo has shown how the introduction of the radio in the 1920s created a legion of followers who were initially attracted to the technical aspects of the medium (building, repairing, inventing), and it was only later in that decade that a different group emerged, one composed of people only interested in being listeners and for whom the radio represented simply a new form of entertainment. The creation of a radio audience was the result of the sudden availability of radios at a lower cost and of the establishment of new broadcasting stations. The story of the reception of film in Argentina was somewhat different. Unlike what happened with the radio, the higher prices of movie making and the small amount of technical information available turned the great majority of those interested in films into mere spectators from the very beginning (Sarlo 109-28). The possibility or at least the illusion of intervening in the development of the technical means of film creation was never there; only a few inventors in Argentina tried to contribute to its development. From spectators, many movie goers quickly moved to the category of fans. The great number of publications dedicated to cinema that appeared during the 1920s gives us an idea of the kind of attention the film industry was receiving from the general public. In 1919, Imparcial Film, the first magazine completely devoted to the film industry in Buenos Aires, appeared, and in the following years others soon began publication: Cinema Chat and Hogar y cine (both in 1920), Argos Film (1922), Los heroes del cine (1923), Film Revista (1924) (Sarlo 29). It was then under the impact of the early culture industry that Borges, as so many other modern subjects in the Argentina of the 1920s, became a movie fan. Two aspects of Borges' aesthetics should be emphasized here because they will allow us to understand better the attraction that Borges felt for the products of the culture industry, especially film. The first one has to do with a way of structuring fiction that I will give the name of "geometrization" of narrative. The use of an excessive order or symmetry to shape the plot has always been recognized as one of the most distinctive characteristics of Borges's fiction. …

Henry James's Paradoxical Bowl: The Reinstatement of Doubt in Fin-De Siecle America

Abstract: The philosophic obsession with questions of knowledge and truth tainted much of the American fin de siecle. The opposing and endless epistemological claims of religion and science cast an almost permanent shroud over knowledge and truth, resulting in a paralyzing sense of frustration that lasted through much of the period.(1) Part of that frustration derived from the positivistic approach science adopted towards questions of knowledge and from the opposing claims of religion, which argued that intuition, a higher faculty than brute reality, yields more reliable insights into the nature of the univocal and stable reality positivists claimed as the ultimate given. Vexed about the fruitlessness of such an abortive search for truth, many philosophers buried their heads into the despair and desolation of a world unable to provide final answers. Others reveled in a sort of Nietzschean "open sea" of doubt. Yet others bypassed what they considered a static dualistic habit of thought and created a style of thinking and questioning that would have radical implications for the humanities in general and philosophy in particular. The literature of the period - the American novel primarily - underwent a similar compartmentalization. Divided into the two opposing modes of the realistic and the romantic, the novel was either considered to represent a brute, univocal, knowable external reality or to concern itself with the transcendental, the ideal, and the unknown. The former mode was roughly associated with science; the latter, with religion. Whereas in philosophy the two modes were often placed side by side as alternative modes of knowledge, the literary panorama was slightly more complicated. For basing their arguments only on the kind of reality the novel supposedly represented, a group of conservative critics determined that the realistic novel was a debased mode of writing and, in relationship to the idealism and spiritual liberation of the romance, always placed on the margins of the American canon.(2) But it would be unfair to blame what I understand as an unfortunate hierarchical construction only on the work of literary critics. For much of the dislike of realism came from the fin-de-siecle atmosphere itself, a dislike that the period called "modern fiction." When in 1895 Yale University introduced - for the first time in its history - a course in modern fiction, the Daily Telegraph announced its opening in a sarcastic tone more appropriate for a fashion product than for an academic course. "One of the latest of the new academic studies instituted in the U.S.," the Telegraph writes, "is a course in modern fiction." Similarly and more pointedly, the magazine Punch devoted a whole section to satirizing the opening of such a course. The attack on and general disapproval of the course centered on how it implied disrespect of more traditional, classical authors. The inclusion in the course of some authors labeled "realists," moreover, was a matter of serious concern, since literature was supposed to transcend the vulgarity of everyday matters that realism apparently represented. Thus Punch portrays a stern professor in a British university interviewing some of the students who had done poor work in the previous term. After talking to one of these students, the instructor concludes: "Ah, I see how it is. You've been wasting your time over light literature - Homer and Virgil, and trash of that sort" (255). In a more revealing interview, the same instructor sends for Mr. Smith "because . . . [his] acquaintance with modern realism is quite insufficient. [He] will attend the course of anatomy lectures at the hospital" (255). Not only does the language of the magazine ridicule fiction in general, but also the genre of realism in particular when it equates it with the knowledge one can achieve in an anatomy class. Realism was considered particularly deceitful because it disguised that it was fiction when it passed off the events it portrayed as facts. …