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Showing papers in "Style in 2001"


Journal Article
22 Dec 2001-Style
TL;DR: A cognitive perspective on literary characters from the point of view of readers has been proposed in this paper, where the authors focus on the effect of the reader's experience of encountering characters in fiction.
Abstract: Miss Bronte was struck by the force or peculiarity of the character of some one she knew; she studied it, and analyzed it with subtle power; and having traced it to its germ, she took that germ as the nucleus of an imaginary character, and worked outwards;--thus reversing the process of analyzation, and unconsciously reproducing the same external development. Elizabeth Gaskell on Bronte's Shirley in The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) 1. A Cognitive Perspective on Literary Character Mrs. Gaskell's statement about Charlotte Bronte's method of creating characters hints at the double nature of literary characters: on the one hand, they are based on real-life experiences with living persons; on the other, they are the result of processes of literary construction. (1) Whereas Gaskell looks to the author's contribution to construction, my aim is to look at literary character from the point of view of readers and to elucidate what effects this doubleness has on their experience of encountering characters in fiction. (2) It may be a truism to say that the reading of literary texts is a process in which textual information interacts with the reader's knowledge structures and cognitive procedures. (3) But in literary text-analysis the constraints on literary understanding that arise from the interactive nature of the reading process are rarely acknowledged. Whereas a number of theorists from Iser through to Perry and Phelan have paid attention to the dynamic aspects of narrative, such attention is by no means the rule, and categories for text analysis still tend to highlight the nondynamic, structural side. For the analysis of literary character, there exist some categories that at least show an awareness of the dynamics of reception. In a famous distinction between flat and round characters, implying such awareness, E. M. Forster defines flat characters as those who "are easily recognized," whereas round characters are "capable of surprising" (Aspects of the Novel 74, 81); for the experience of recognition and surprise, the reader must previously have established mental representations and expectations. Other categories, such as the well-known differentiation between static and dynamic characters, fail to account for these dynamics: to decide whether a character is static or dynamic, the reader would have to wait until he or she has read the whole book, since changes in the character's traits may occur late in the story. Of course, readers start forming impressions of characters from the very beginni ng of the reading process on, and from a reader-oriented point of view, the question is not whether a character is static or dynamic, but, rather, when and under which conditions he or she appears static or dynamic to the reader. Even the categories aware of the temporal dimension of understanding seldom offer any detailed description of how the dynamic processing strategies of the reader interact with the successive presentation of information in the text. Drawing on results from cognitive psychology and cognitive social psychology, as well as from research in discourse processing, I attempt to capture the quality of this interaction more precisely than the more text-oriented, structuralist approaches have been able to do. My theory-building is similar to that of Richard Gerrig in his Experiencing Narrative Worlds (1993), in that my method attempts to align psychological models of the workings of cognition and emotion in text understanding with the description of textual properties. (4) In such an alignment, the interaction between reader and text appears, above all, as a dynamic process, for the framework of cognitive psychology affords a view not only on such general constraints on information processing and text-understanding as l imitations on working memory, but also on the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processing in using inference and forming hypotheses, activating schemas, and constructing categories. …

75 citations


Journal Article
22 Mar 2001-Style
TL;DR: The notion of unreliable narration has been studied extensively in the literature, e.g., by as discussed by the authors, who argued that the existence of an implied author is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for unreliable narration, and that unreliable narration can be explained as an interpretive strategy or cognitive process.
Abstract: I. Introduction It seems hardly necessary to emphasize how important the concept of the unreliable narrator has been in literary studies since it was introduced by Wayne C. Booth in 1961. Booth's classic definition of the unreliable narrator has survived in nearly all narratological textbooks: "I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author's norms), unreliable when he does not" (158-59). Recently, however, in the wake of an increasingly critical attitude toward this traditional understanding of unreliable narration, e.g., in the works of Tamar Yacobi ("Fictional Reliability"), Kathleen Wall, or James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin, the German scholar Ansgar Nunning has shown in a whole series of articles on the subject (1) that the existence of an implied author is neither a necessary nor a sufficient requirement of unreliable narration. (2) Instead, he has offered a reader-centered approach to unreliable narration. According to Nunn ing ("Unreliable"), unreliable narration can be explained "in the context of frame theory as a projection by the reader who tries to resolve ambiguities and textual inconsistencies by attributing them to the narrator's unreliability." In consequence, unreliable narration can be understood "as an interpretive strategy or cognitive process of the sort that has come to be known as 'naturalization"' (54). (3) Within the theory of unreliable narration such a cognitive turn represents a first paradigm shift. It allows a radical rethinking of the whole notion of narrative unreliability. Instead of relying on the device of the implied author and a text-centered analysis of unreliable narration, narrative unreliability can be reconceptualized in the context of frame theory and of readers' cognitive strategies. In the following, however, I will argue that we need a second fundamental paradigm shift, one toward a greater historicity and cultural awareness. Such a second paradigm shift--a historical and cultural turn--goes beyond Nunning's cognitive approach and leads to a cultural-narratological theory of unreliable narration. (4) The central thesis of my approach rests upon the realization that, because unreliability is the effect of interpretive strategies, it is culturally and historically variable. It reflects a number of prominent synchronic and diachronic developments within philosophical, scientific, psychological, social, or aesthetic discourses of the last two centuries. Unreliable narration can therefore be considered as a phenomenon on the borderline between ethics and aesthetics, between literary and other cultural discourses. Furthermore, if we include historical and cultural aspects in the theory of unreliable narration, the concept of narrative unreliability can ultimately serve as an important categor y in the wider field of cultural studies. After a brief sketch of the cognitive turn and its implications for our understanding of what exactly constitutes unreliable narration, I will formulate a set of four theses. These theses highlight the central features that I believe to be the minimal conditions of unreliable narration and suggest the necessity of a historical and cultural turn in the study of narrative unreliability. They will be followed by four diachronic theses concerning the history of unreliable narration. Within this historical framework, I will focus on the different cultural discourses that have been reflected in narrative literature by the use of unreliable narration since the phenomenon came into being with the realist novel of the eighteenth century. II. The Cognitive Turn in the Theory of Unreliable Narration: Unreliable Narration as a Result of Interpretive Strategies Until quite recently, Booth's definition of the unreliable narrator had hardly been questioned. On the contrary, it served as the basis for almost all works on unreliable narration. …

67 citations


Journal Article
22 Sep 2001-Style
TL;DR: The Harry Potter series as mentioned in this paper is a classic example of a coming-of-age novel with a strong connection to children's literature, where the characters learn to recognize their autonomy from their parents, but death becomes more threatening, more of a menace than it is in the first Harry Potter book.
Abstract: When I first read J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997), I did not understand its mass appeal. It is clever and charming, but it is also episodically plotted, relatively predictable, derivative of Baum, Lewis, and Dahl, and it is altogether more sexist than it needs to be. But as I read the final chapter, I discovered Rowling's secret ingredients: the book portrays parents' love as omnipotent, and it provides a reassuring message about death. These represent two of the most essential ingredients of children's literature. (1) As a whole, the series also participates in the traditions of adolescent literature. As the characters in the series grow older, the books shift solidly onto the terrain of adolescent literature. The characters learn to recognize their autonomy from their parents, but death becomes more threatening, more of a menace, than it is in the first Harry Potter book. Moreover, the Potter books demonstrate another defining characteristic of adolescent literature: the charac ters begin to explore their sexuality. Throughout the series, the books also rely on social institutions to proscribe adolescents' place in society. Thus, as a series, the Harry Potter books provide us with the opportunity to interrogate what constitutes adolescent literature. Although the task of defining adolescent literature has engaged numerous scholars, many do so by comparing the genre to adult rather than children's literature. Certainly, both children's and adolescent literature were greatly influenced by Romanticism. Indeed, the first novels to focus on the transition between childhood and adolescence were written during the Romantic era; Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-96) is often cited as the first such novel. Labeled "Bildungsromane" by such literary critics as Susanne Howe, G. B. Tennyson, and Jerome Buckley, the coming-of-age novel focuses on the development of the adolescent into an adult. Buckley, for example, defines an adult as one who has achieved the capacity to work and love, but his model is relatively androcentric (22-23). Feminist critics including Annis Pratt; Eve Kornfield and Susan Jackson; Barbara White; and Elizabeth Abel, Elizabeth Langland, and Marianne Hirsch point out that the pattern of development differs for the male and female p rotagonist. Female protagonists are more likely to define maturity in terms of inner growth and familial relations than they are in terms of achieving independence from their parents (Abel, et al., 8-11). Regardless of the protagonist's gender, however, critics of the Bildungsroman seek to understand narrative structure in terms of character development. But scholars of literature written specifically for adolescents--to which I refer as "young adult literature"--are more likely to focus on issues of audience and need than on paradigmatic stages of character development. Such critics as Ben F. Nelms, Sheila Schwartz, Kenneth Donelson and Alleen Pace Nilsen, Geraldine DeLuca, Robert C. Small, Marilynn Olson, Michael Steig, Marc Aronson, and Michael Cart tend to ask the implied questions "for whom is the novel written and what is its purpose?" Peter Hollindale, for instance, singles out the epiphany as the defining characteristic that provides adolescent novels with a cathartic function; he firmly believes adolescents need the emotional outlet that books provide (116-32). Maria Nikolajeva and Caroline Hunt also employ poststructural methodologies to investigate how material culture infiltrates the genre to help define it. Most of these critics still assume that depicting characters who grow is still an essential component of the genre. From my vantage point, however, the crux of defining adolescent literature as distinct from children's literature resides in the issue of power. While in children's literature, growth is depicted as a function of what the character has learned about self, growth in adolescent literature is inevitably depicted as a function of what the adolescent has learned about how society curtails the individual's power. …

33 citations


Journal Article
01 Apr 2001-Style
TL;DR: Nelles as mentioned in this paper provides a good overview of earlier and current theories, and the disagreements around those theories, all of which provide a broad context in which readers may locate his instructive approach to this intriguing structural device that is "so widely found in the literature of all cultures and periods as to approach universality" (1).
Abstract: William Nelles. Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. 208 pp. /$42.95 cloth. In mapping out the geography of embedded narrative theory, William Nelles has provided us with a scholarly and yet readable roadmap to follow in Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative. And, like any good map, this book takes into account old roads and new, providing a satisfying overview of earlier and current theories, and the disagreements around those theories, all of which provide a broad context in which readers may locate his instructive approach to this intriguing structural device that is "so widely found in the literature of all cultures and periods as to approach universality" (1). Perhaps the hallmark of this writer's own style is that he is considerate of contemporary readers' sensibilities: he does not ignore competing or dissenting voices in his discussion but, instead, he welcomes the interaction of ideas. The effect of such inclusivity builds confidence in readers used to encountering either polemical invective or dogmatic narrowness in books of a theoretical bent. He greets other theorists like a modern Zeno, "with an open hand instead of a closed fist" (Hatch 4). This "persuasive sweetness" (using that phrase in the same way that the ancient Greeks did-as a chief characteristic of successful teaching), combined with well-worked logic, goes a long way: Nelles has provided us with a convincing inductive argument about this aspect of narrative theory, and, by doing so, he has underscored the interdependence of theory and interpretation in a way that will be useful for years to come. In taking what he himself describes as a structuralist and narratological approach to his subject (159), Nelles directly confronts and lays to rest two criticisms of structuralist theories of narrative from humanists and from those "theorists committed to the cutting edge of the various poststructuralisms" (161). As for the humanists and their fears that the general field of narratology works to simplify the multiple nuances of narrative discourse into scientific formulas and diagrams, Nelles provides the comforting reassurance that his theoretical approach to embedded narratives "does not at all eliminate the need for interpretive 'readings' but rather presupposes and in fact underscores it" (160). As a case in point, a clear understanding of the definitions of both the unreliable narrator and the ironic narrator will not help us decide what is at work in Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." Only an interpretation can do that for us (160). On the other hand, deconstructionists looking for contradictions and gaps in Nelles's work will find that he acknowledges the possibility of inconsistencies in his narratological theory. As a matter of fact, they will find that he has hung a lantern on them already, thus taking the sting out of the usual poststructural critique. As Nelles succinctly puts it, "the premises upon which the model rests are no more than strategic moves that are not grounded in either concrete realities or transcendent truth. Narrators do not literally speak and no one will ever know how the implied reader will interpret a given text" (161). Subsequently, he deftly parries in both directions without closing off a productive dialogue with either theoretical camp. Nelles's openhanded and inviting stance is maintained throughout the book. In chapter 1, "Historical and Implied Authors and Readers," he sorts out for readers these two concepts, which have been, he correctly notes, "a recurring source of confusion for theories of narratives and their applications" (9). To begin with, he offers his own understanding in his characteristically easy-to-understand way: "the historical author writes, the historical reader reads; the implied author means, the implied reader interprets; the narrator speaks, the narratee hears." He usefully complicates these definitions by providing examples from well-known literary works. …

23 citations


Journal Article
22 Dec 2001-Style
TL;DR: The concept of fabula has always been a staple of narrative theory, yet it is vulnerable to many theoretical objections as mentioned in this paper, some of which relate back quite directly to its Russian Formalist roots, but others arise through Structuralist mediations of the concept (in the guise of such pairs as "story" and "discourse").
Abstract: The concept of fabula, or its many near equivalents, has always been a staple of narrative theory, yet it is vulnerable to many theoretical objections. It is possible to justify a rhetorical view of the concept's pragmatic value, and so its particular relevance to fiction, but only once various flawed notions of fabula have been eliminated. Some of these relate back quite directly to its Russian Formalist roots, but others have arisen through Structuralist mediations of the concept (in the guise of such pairs as "story" and "discourse"). The inadequacies of these models are manifest in fabula's relationship to event, chronology, temporality, causality, perspective, medium, and the genesis of narrative. The concept remains valuable, however, in respect of its role in interpretation, especially in the case of fictional narrative. The rhetorical basis of this view of fabula and its relation to sujet effectively overturns the logical hierarchy of previous representational models.

16 citations


Journal Article
22 Mar 2001-Style
TL;DR: In this paper, Leavis adds the following footnote: "He can't have failed to note with interest that Emma fulfills, by anticipation, a prescription of his own: everything is presented through Emma's dramatized consciousness and the essential effects depend on that" (10n).
Abstract: To his observation that Henry James was, like George Eliot, "a great admirer of Jane Austen," F. R. Leavis adds the following footnote: "He can't have failed to note with interest that Emma fulfills, by anticipation, a prescription of his own: everything is presented through Emma's dramatized consciousness, and the essential effects depend on that" (10n). Perhaps he has in mind passages in Emma such as the following: "Have you any idea of Mr. Knightley's returning your affection?" "Yes," replied Harriet modestly, but not fearfully--"I must say that I have." Emma's eyes were instantly withdrawn; and she sat silently meditating, in a fixed attitude, for a few minutes. A few minutes were sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart. A mind like her's, once opening to suspicion, made rapid progress. She touched--she admitted--she acknowledged the whole truth. Why was it so much worse that Harriet should be in love with Mr. Knightley, than with Frank Churchill? Why was the evil so dreadfully increased by Harriet's having some hope of a return? It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself! (335) (1) Here Harriet's supposedly reciprocated feelings for Knightley force Emma to acknowledge the truth of her own heart. "A few minutes" of reflection are enough for revelation to be reached. Notice that the trajectory by which Emma arrives at the truth, from touching, to admitting, to acknowledging, is first described indirectly, from the vantage-point of an external narrator, and then presented more directly, as the narrative enters into her mind. It is Emma who asks herself "Why was it so much worse that Harriet should be in love with Mr. Knightley, than with Frank Churchill?" and "Why was the evil so dreadfully increased by Harriet's having some hope of a return?" Her consciousness could be said to be "dramatized" here if by this is understood the narrative's attempt to re-enact, rather than describe externally, the character's actual thought-processes. From "Why was it so much worse" onwards the reader is granted intimate access to Emma's thoughts and anxieties, leading up to her final moment of anagnorisis. Notice, though, that the narrator's perspective is partly retained through the use of the past tense and the third person; Emma's thoughts would have been "Why is it so much worse [...] ?" and "Mr. Knightley must marry no one but me!" Though it is going too far to claim that "everything" in the novel is presented in this way, there are certainly many other instances of the narrative slipping into Emma's consciousness. Take her first encounter with Mr. Martin as she and Harriet bump into him on the Donwell road: Emma was not sorry to have such an opportunity of survey; and walking a few yards forward, while they talked together, soon her made her quick eye sufficiently acquainted with Mr. Robert Martin. His appearance was very neat, and he looked like a sensible young man, but his person had no other advantage; and when he came to be contrasted with gentlemen, she thought he must lose all the ground he had gained in Harriet's inclination. Harriet was not insensible of manner; she had voluntarily noticed her father's gentleness with admiration as well as wonder. Mr. Martin looked as if he did not know what manner was. (28) Emma's first impression of Mr. Martin is heavily influenced by her prejudices against his social background and her plans for Harriet. In her mind he is simply an obstacle to Harriet's elevated future, and she is already rehearsing the grounds on which he will be supplanted. The final two sentences must, from the context, come from Emma's perspective rather than the narrator's. "She thought" is a strong hint that representation of her consciousness will follow, and "her father," referring to Mr. Woodhouse, a clue that her perspective predominates. With "Mr. Martin looked as if he did not know what manner was," the narrative must be inside Emma's mind, even though no linguistic signals have explicitly marked the point of entry, and again the past tense remains as an indirect feature. …

13 citations


Journal Article
22 Sep 2001-Style
TL;DR: Carver's work has been characterized by an astonishing absence of consensus as discussed by the authors, as a "failure to understand the social matrix of a social realist with no political agenda and no understanding of his social matrix whatsoever".
Abstract: Criticism on Raymond Carver is marked by an astonishing absence of consensus Indeed, like no other author of the so-called minimalist movement, Carver has been coopted by the various critical schools as a conveniently elastic foil to demonstrate their respective aesthetic ends Thus critics interested in literature's heteronomous aspects have interpreted Carver as (1) a genuine social realist who excels in sympathetic accounts of America's underprivileged (eg, Morris Dickstein), (2) a dangerous social realist with a conservative political agenda (eg, Frank Lentricchia), or (3) a failed social realist with no political agenda and no understanding of his social matrix whatsoever (eg, John Aldridge) Critics focused on literature's epistemological commentary have described him as (1) a naive naturalist behind a minimalist mask, betraying the achievements of the 1960s ironists (eg, William H Gass), (2) an epistemological nihilist behind a realist mask, sharing the postmodernist refusal to engage with re ality (eg, Tom Wolfe, "Stalking"), or (3) a genuine postmodernist skepticist who synthesizes the one-sided epistemologies of conventional realists and traditional fabulists into a higher level (eg, Phillip Simmons) Critics looking for literature's aesthetic function and formal innovation, finally, have read Carver as (1) a founder of a new, highly original, representationalist version of the minimalist style (eg, John Barth, "A Few Words"), (2) a copier of an insipid, Hemingwayesque tone more suitable to popular fiction (eg, Joshua Gilder), or (3) a stylistically blank chronicler of urban despair with virtually no literary signature at all (eg, James Atlas) To an extent, this unusual heterogeneity of critical assessments may result from a lack of historical distance; yet at some level, I believe, it was encouraged by the structural specifics of Carver's work: Carver's typical text offers hardly any obvious hints as to its aesthetics, epistemology, or politics In terms of the sort of questions critics have begun to ask in the wake of the debates on realism and postmodernism since the 1960s, Carver's stories can be said to be "open" texts This does not mean, of course, that they transcend aesthetic questions or leave them entirely up to the reader; it does mean, however, that they eschew the clear aesthetic markers with which hurried readers can easily determine what kind of text they are dealing with (ie, pre-, post-, post-post-modernist, and the like) and thus what kind of reading posture they should adopt (ie, suited for ironic play or serious social commentary) Carver, it seems, jumbles the rules of the traditional aesthetic games by juxtaposing represe ntation with silence and disconnecting experiment from metafiction, but he does not complement his texts with convenient meta-commentaries, either implicit or explicit, that guide the reader towards a clear-cut textual intention What further complicates assessment of Carver's work, moreover, is that the notion of the Carver-text really applies only to his blue-collar subject matter and the general feel of his narrative surfaces That is to say, although one can speak of a characteristic "tone" and "theme" of Carver's fiction, there is, behind the exterior of his type of minimalist, New Yorker story, a rhetorical versatility and a constant shifting of rhetorical register that eludes simplistic categorization Most of the stylistic catalogues conceived as an attempt at defining minimalist technique" (by, for instance, Bell or Herzinger) fail to do justice to a diversity in Carver's prose that often goes unnoticed because its stylistic stoppings and subversions do not always come with the histrionic sashay typi cal of experimentalist fiction Carver's verbal subtlety and outward technical reticence seem to have encouraged his interpreters to beat his work into whatever aesthetic or political intention suits their purpose In what follows, I will focus on a specific aspect of Carver's rhetoric that is often used to stereotype the aesthetic signature of his work, namely his employment of epiphanic rhetoric …

11 citations


Journal Article
01 Oct 2001-Style
TL;DR: The Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture as discussed by the authors is a collection of essays from the seventeenth century to the present focusing on English epistolary literature.
Abstract: Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven, eds. Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. ix + 231 pp. $57.50 cloth; $18.50 paper. Novel criticism went postal in the 1980s and 1990s. Between 1979 and 1982, William Warner, Terry Eagleton, and Terry Castle all published book-length readings of Clarissa. Janet Gurkin Altman's seminal formalist study of the epistolary genre, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, appeared in 1982, and Linda S. Kauffman followed with her generic studies of the letter in Discourses of Desire (1986) and Special Delivery (1992). The early 1990s delivered cultural-historical readings of the genre, most notably Elizabeth MacArthur's Extravagant Narratives (1990) that explores closure techniques in fictional and actual letters, Mary Favret's Romantic Correspondence (1993) that examines the cultural and political reasons behind the English epistolary novel's demise, and Nicola Watson's complementary study Revolution and the Form of the British Novel (1994) that emphasizes the use of letters after the epistolary novel's apparent death. And the late 1990s saw the publication of April Alliston's Virtue's Faults (1996), an analysis of the intertextual correspondences between eighteenth-century female epistolary novelists in Britain and France, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook's Epistolary Bodies (1996), an exploration of the eighteenth-century letternarrative's negotiations between public and private spheres, and Barbara Maria Zaczek's Censored Sentiments (1997), an analysis of the effects of conduct materials on eighteenth-century epistolary writings. Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven's essay-collection Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, while acknowledging its debt to this work, underscores a recent trend in epistolary criticism: the move away from fictional and toward actual correspondence. In fact, though specific to the recovery project described in his contribution to this collection, Gerald MacLean's call for "a more fully historicized account of epistolarity than we are likely to get from critical approaches developed from and for the elucidation of epistolary novels" (190) captures the main thrust of Epistolary Histories. Gilroy and Verhoeven's introduction, which offers a concise overview of epistolary theory, provides a strong opening for this collection whose contributors include epistolary theorists Linda S. Kauffman, Anne Bower, and Clare Brant, besides such well-known critics as Nancy Armstrong, Donna Landry, and MacLean. Mirroring the dialogism of their epistolary subjects, these writers provide not only their contributions but also responses to fellow contributors' chapters. Further adding to this cohesive structure, Gilroy and Verhoeven arrange the contributions in three thematic groupings: "Epistolarity and Femininity," "Cultures of Letters," and "New Epistolary Directions." Though these groupings remain broad and the essays explore some atypical epistolary works, the emphasis remains on Anglo-American texts from the seventeenth century to the present. "Epistolarity and Femininity" opens with Armstrong's revisitation of the relationship between class politics and the novel's popularity. Her "Writing Women and the Making of the Modern Middle Class" reveals how themes and structures inherent in American colonial captivity narratives are translated into the power of Richardson's epistolary heroines to establish standards of social and moral purity. Ultimately, she suggests, such ideals correspond to the emergent English middle class's vision of itself. Shifting to actual letters, Landry explores the epistolary travel accounts of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Elizabeth, Lady Craven, firstly to uncover the letters' personal and political statements and then to examine generic connections between epistolary and travel writings, while Brant shows how eighteenth-century historians' readings of Mary Queen of Scots's letters created visions of Mary that still influence the study of her. …

10 citations


Journal Article
22 Sep 2001-Style
TL;DR: Frye's theory of character in children's literature has been explored in this article, where the authors argue that children read fiction because they are interested in human nature and human relationships as revealed through fictive characters.
Abstract: Character and characterization are such an obvious part of fiction that they are very seldom discussed in critical works. Despite the postmodern and poststructural denigration of characters, however, they are still central in fiction; basically, we read fiction because we are interested in human nature and human relationships as revealed through fictive characters. In this essay, I will deal with two aspects of the vast field that may be called a theory of character: (1) the changes in characters themselves as they are presented in children's literature of the past two centuries and (2) the changes in the devices of characterization, that is, the artistic means authors employ to reveal characters to readers. 1 In his treatment of literature as the displacement of myth, Northrop Frye discerns five consecutive stages: myth, which presents characters as gods, superior to both humans and the laws of nature; romance which presents characters as idealized humans who are superior to other humans, but inferior to gods; high mimetic narrative, which presents humans who are superior to other humans, but not the laws of nature; low mimetic narrative, which presents humans who are neither superior nor inferior to other humans; and, finally, ironic narrative, which presents characters who are inferior to other characters, such as children, the mentally handicapped, animals, and so on (Frye 33-34). By this definition, all characters in children's fiction would appear at the ironic stage, since they naturally lack experience and knowledge and are therefore inferior to adults. But even a brief glance at a number of classical and contemporary children's novels demonstrates that this is not the case. Characters in children's novels are empowered in a variety of ways and operate on all the displacement levels. According to Frye, contemporary Western literature has reached the ironic stage, at which most of the characters we meet in novels are weak, disillusioned men and women. But this is true only of quality literature, since formulaic fiction operates within the romantic mode (romance, adventure, fantasy). Further, at least some contemporary adult fiction still uses mimetic modes. Children's literature is historically a recent form of fiction. Its emergence coincides with the establishment of realism (mimetic modes) in the mainstream; therefore, Frye's five stages seem to coexist more frequently in children's literature than in the mainstream of any given period. In contemporary Western children's fiction, we meet characters from all Frye's modes. The mythic hero is, however, not a common figure in children's fiction, for myth as such is absent in the history of Western children's literature. Since children's literature emerged long after Western civilization had lost its traditional mythical belief, this stage is not represented in children's fiction. The most important mythic figure is the cultural hero, whose story teaches his people to use fire, to hunt, and to cultivate land. Such stories were not relevant--as living narratives, essential for survival--for young readers at the time children's literature became a separate artistic form. Of course, if we treat Judeo-Christian belief as myth, we can naturally say that Bible stories retold for children are mythical children's narratives. This view would have them correspond to the mythical stories of archaic people, told indiscriminately to children and adults alike. In certain cultures, mythical stories are still prominent as instructional narratives for young people. Classic myths, such as the Gree k, Celtic, native American, or African, however, are in the Western world retold for children who have no direct belief in them--myth has been displaced and instead functions as romance. In his study The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell presents an analysis of the monomyth, the universal mythical pattern we find in the vast majority of narratives. …

9 citations


Journal Article
22 Sep 2001-Style
TL;DR: For instance, the authors argues that children's literature should be studied as if it were any other type of literature, or does it have certain distinct features that require a specific method, or are there persistent, overarching aesthetic, ideological, or linguistic patterns that unite children's poetry, nonfiction, prose, and picture books?
Abstract: As odd as it may seem, one of the most persistent questions posed by scholars of children's and young adult literature is what constitutes our field of inquiry. What exactly defines children's literature? What marks a work as specifically for children? What makes a book for children count as literature, as a poem, not merely as doggerel or verse? In tandem with these questions are questions of method. How ought one to study children's books? What critical methods and theories are appropriate? Should literature for the young be theorized as if it were any other type of literature, or does it have certain distinct features that require a specific method? Does the heterogeneity of the offerings require an equally heterogeneous methodology, or are there persistent, overarching aesthetic, ideological, or linguistic patterns that unite children's poetry, nonfiction, prose, and picture books? Part of the puzzlement comes from the fact that the critic of children's literature must pass through a series of challenges before she can even begin to specify the literary character of her object of study. The first potential challenge has to do with the fact that children's literature falls into categories other than the literary, namely, the popular and the pedagogical. Indeed, even as the advent of cultural studies and the exploding of the Western canon have created a space for all sorts of literature previously marginalized in English departments, most literary critics are content to leave the study of children's texts to the social sciences of education and librarianship, figuring that the literary value of such simplistic fare is substandard and unworthy of serious theoretical attention. The cross-marketing of products based on children's books contributes to this impression; after all, one doesn't find action figures from Heart of Darkness, say, or Langston Hughes lunchboxes. But the fact is that La ngston Hughes was as much a writer for children as he was for adults. The questions of style and aesthetics worth answering with regard to his and other writers' adult literature are as important to children's texts, if not more so, since, as Graeme Harper points out in his essay for this volume, children are in the process of developing their sense of style and their notions of aesthetic value, of crafting meaning out of and assigning value to sensory experience. Such a process, so closely mediated by adult interaction, demands as well theoretical mediation, or at least meditation. A second challenge that children's literature scholars must face concerns the ubiquitous concern whether a work is "appropriate for children." No other literature is quite as implicated in the ethics of readership as books written for and marketed to children. The question of appropriateness functions almost as a gatekeeper for the criticism of children's literature, so much so that scholars often find their efforts to detect stylistic patterns or perform aesthetic critique sidetracked by the necessity for undertaking a sort of apologetics for the capacity of children to be adept readers. Can children be expected to grasp the subtle mechanisms of parody and irony? Can children really see and perhaps even resist the offensive implications of rigid gender-role identification? How much can children understand of the horrors of history such as the Holocaust or American slavery? To how much should they be exposed? Do children catch the racist ideologies of their texts like a virus, or are they capable of reading c ritically and hence perhaps building up their immunities? How does one present history without reinscribing potentially damaging ideologies? These questions seem, once again, to demand answers from the disciplines of the social sciences, and yet they are equally implicated in the stylistics and aesthetics of texts, in how authors manage the terms of narrative address and how they position the reader. As Harper points out, children's literature in some important respects necessarily colonizes its reader, but, as Marah Gubar counters, an author's style of address can create the kind of questioning, interactive reader that resists complete subsumption into prespecified norms. …

9 citations


Journal Article
01 Apr 2001-Style
TL;DR: Bidney as mentioned in this paper presents a method for studying literary epiphany and applies this method to epiphanies rendered by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, Tennyson, Pater, Carlyle, Tolstoy and Barrett Browning, using an approach quite different from the one powerfully employed in his previous book, Blake and Goethe, which works purely with phenomenology.
Abstract: Martin Bidney. Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to ToLstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. 235 pp. / $34.95 cloth Martin Bidney is ambitious in choosing to write a book about epiphanies in literature- "puzzling but privileged moments, sudden gifts of vision, when one's feeling of aliveness intensifies and the senses quicken" (1). For those of us drawn to literature early in our reading lives by the moment in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when Stephen Dedalus experiences "the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair"(184), Patterns of Epiphany raises our hopes. After all, when a scholar chooses to write about the images and patterns that represent a soul-expanding moment, his readers necessarily hope that the scholarship itself will rise to the occasion and itself be remarkable. Sometimes, Bidney's scholarship does rise to the occasion, but sometimes it seems confined by the very approach he embraces. Bidney chooses to study epiphanies through the lens of phenomenology, following the work of Gaston Bachelard. Bidney presents a method for studying literary epiphanies and applies this method to epiphanies rendered by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, Tennyson, Pater, Carlyle, Tolstoy and Barrett Browning. Using an approach quite different from the one powerfully employed in his previous book, Blake and Goethe, he works purely with phenomenology. "To ensure an empirical method," he writes, " I want to define 'epiphany' in a way that assumes no ontological commitments" (2) Thus, he keeps his attention strictly, sometimes narrowly, focused on structural components of literary epiphanies following the approach that Bachelard used to investigate reveries. According to Bachelard, "It is the very function of a phenomenology of reverie to redouble the benefit of reverie through a consciousness of reverie" (Poetics of Reverie 128). Early in Patterns of Epiphany, Bidney raises a profound question: "[H]ow can something epiphanic-that is, mysterious in its expansive intensity-be spoken of as 'made'?"(4). He goes on to present his hypothesis: "I want to show, first, that epiphanies tend to be composed primarily of elements, motions, and/or shapes[ ...] Second, I want to show that any given epiphany maker is likely to present a distinctive, recognizable recurrent combination of one or more elements, motions, and/or shapes"(5). He turns his attention to poetry. First he takes on Wordsworth's "The Pilgrim's Dream, or, The Star and the Glow-worm." The glow worm becomes a "fiery center whose power expands to traverse and transform the visible world" (30). He shows how Wordsworth repeats the image: "A Shepherd scene in a peaceful valley and a Druid vision at Stonehenge, two of the epiphanic high points of The Prelude, provide a pair of mutually corroborating variants of this same basic pattern of communication or motion from a lower center to a higher center or circumference through a path of light[ ...]" (34). I find value in seeing this pattern repeated in Wordsworth's poetry; however, I grow impatient with an approach that points out a pattern again and again. Therefore, I am relieved when Bidney turns his attention away from Wordsworth, towards writers whose epiphanies do not fit so nearly into one pattern. In Coleridge, for instance, he finds contradiction between his literary criticism and poetry: "[H]owever strong the emphasis in Coleridge's critical writings, on the organic unity of parts[. …

Journal Article
22 Sep 2001-Style
TL;DR: Nesbit's The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) as discussed by the authors is a classic example of a children's book with a burglar protagonist who is a copycat.
Abstract: Catching a burglar in the act of creeping into her family's nursery, the youngest heroine of E. Nesbit's The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) "kn[ows] better" than to succumb to fear (192). For Jane, despite her youth, "had read a great many nice stories about burglars, as well as some affecting pieces of poetry, and she knew that no burglar will ever hurt a little girl if he meets her when burgling" (192). Elaborating on the conventions of this Victorian mini-genre, Nesbit explains that in all the cases Jane had read of, [the thief's] burglarishness was almost at once forgotten in the interest he felt in the little girl's artless prattle. [... But Jane] could not at once think of any remark sufficiently prattling and artless to make a beginning with. In the stories and the affecting poetry the child could never speak plainly, though it always looked old enough to in the picture. And Jane could not make up her mind to lisp and "talk baby," even to a burglar. And while she hesitated he softly opened the nursery door and went in. (192-93) Even as Nesbit parodies the tendency of other authors to domesticate the figure of the burglar, she enthusiastically purloins and reproduces this scenario, both here and in her other works. Just as the burglar Jane discovers gets converted into a family friend (later referred to as "that nice chap--our own burglar"), the thief caught by the child protagonists in The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) is quickly adopted and transformed into "our own dear robber" (Phoenix 210, Story 201). (1) Such encounters, I will argue, testify to Nesbit's self-conscious sense of herself as an author who plunders or colonizes the realm of childhood, as well as the work of other authors of children's literature. Yet Nesbit optimistically insists that children too can fruitfully practice the art of thieving, as indicated by the fact that these burglars are themselves seized and exploited by the very youngsters whom they hope to rob. Far from being artless prattlers, Nesbit's child heroes are artful dodgers, adept at appropriating and recycling the work of adult authors. But as Julia Briggs, Erika Rothwell, and Mavis Reimer all point out, Nesbit's young protagonists frequently misinterpret or misapply the material they steal, experiencing a great deal of trouble as a result of their naivete. These difficulties, however, do not indicate that Nesbit believes children should cease such stealthy operations entirely. Rather, they convey her conviction that young people must learn to pull off more savvy and sophisticated heists, ones that more closely resemble Nesbit's own appropriations. By simultaneously lampooning and propagating literary conventions--such as the burglar motif in the passage quoted above--Nesbit models for her readers the kind of balancing act she wants them to master; even as she encourages children to take pleasure from and make use of texts, she coaxes them to become more critical readers. Keenly aware of the power that adults and their narratives wield over children, Nesbit incites young people to commandeer more completely the scripts they are given, to revise rather than simply reenact them. Tracing how she repeatedly employs the trope of reciprocal robbery to encourage such piracy both confirms and complicates recent efforts to conceptualize children's literature as a form of colonization. (2) A number of critics have noted the extraordinary extent to which Nesbit's child characters are saturated in and fascinated by all kinds of literature. (3) In book after book, Nesbit portrays young people as irrepressible mimics who shape their games, ideals, behavior, and even speech around texts created by adults. In The Story of the Treasure Seekers, for example, the Bastable children swipe scenarios for their activities from Kipling, Conan Doyle, Marryat, Edgeworth, de la Motte Forque, Pope, and the Arabian Nights, as well as assorted picture books, newspaper stories, and advertisements. …

Journal Article
22 Sep 2001-Style
TL;DR: In the context of children's picture books, the authors argued that "to force pictures into the same mould as words seems to be potentially unproductive, except in terms of establishing conventions, when, of course, it is, by definition, necessary" (181).
Abstract: Imagine a discourse between the arts in which the conventions of what we might call "ordinary" cognition do not apply, on a site of intense lobbying neither tethered by history or cultural integrity, nor, frequently, concerned with social cohesion or communicative norms. It will be a discourse in which the categories of an imperial culture are abrogated (however temporarily) by an "indigenous" one, yet it will undoubtedly also be a site of intense "colonization." On it, likewise, there will be an appropriation of language on an unprecedented scale. Past experience will play little part. Memory is short and episodic, rather than semantic. It is a primal discourse. Primal in that it is the site of first contact. Primal also in that it is most often considered to be the meeting of a primitive culture and an advanced. Primal, likewise, in a behavioral sense: in it, the satisfaction of physiological needs is tantamount. Indeed, body and mind here are in a state of kinetic unrest. This is a scene of prolonged immat urity, yet ontological and epistemological questions held in a private language are encouraged to be made public. Here the verbal arts have no canon. Literature has no prevailing cultural standard of merit. Questions of the popular and the high cultural are not naturalized and the fictional and nonfictional carry the same degree of verisimilitude as works of propaganda, rhetoric, and didacticism. In modem times, the West has become the site of this tenacious yet frequently unacknowledged imperial discourse, the discourse between multifarious forms of artistic representation to win the attention of children. It is in such a discourse that the picture book is located. 1 Arguing the need for a critical language for the discussion of children's picture books, Peter Hunt suggests that "to force pictures into the same mould as words seems to be potentially unproductive, except in terms of establishing conventions, when, of course, it is, by definition, necessary" (181). It is impossible, however, to conventionalize pictorial representation to the same degree as linguistic representation. Linguistic systems are mastered painstakingly, piece by piece, referent by referent, word by word. Pictorial systems, by contrast, are mastered all at once; they involve what Flint Schier has called "natural generativity" and are therefore much less conventional than linguistic systems. Each system, nevertheless, relies on general agreement and on a willingness to engage in communicative activity: the pictorial system on deep recognitional capacities that link object and its picture, the linguistic system on lexical and syntactical regularities and rules. In the media-saturated culture of the contemporary West, the commonalities and differences of our separate but shared experiences are frequently offered up in a televisual or hypertextual format in which what Hunt describes as "force" is a set of discursive practices that address and interpellate both adults and children as potential viewers or listeners. The linguistic and the pictorial are frequently experienced as synergistic or polylogic systems bound up in this mass media, a media whose intention, according to Jean Baudrillard, is to transcribe the complexity of contemporary life into an ongoing procession of meaningless simulacra, a hyperreal, "a real without origin or reality" (2). Baudrillard's disenchanted vision of postmodernity, articulated most profoundly in the late 1970s and 1980s, produced an interesting ontological metaphor. "Disneyland," he claimed, "is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' country, all of 'real' America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social, in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation" (25). …

Journal Article
22 Mar 2001-Style
TL;DR: For instance, the authors argues that deconstruction may come to be viewed with hindsight as a transitional phase of structuralism rather than as its inherent scientism, and with a variably tacit or implicit reliance on the repertoire of historically sanctioned rhetorical tropes and figures.
Abstract: When William Nelles begins his 1992 article "Stories Within Stories" with a string of synonyms customary for his title's infamous effect, ones including "Chinese box" and "Russian doll," he imaginatively champions the effect of narrative framing or embedding. "[S]o widespread among the narrative literature of all cultures and periods as to approach universality," the effect may be, he writes, the greatest "undeveloped resource in literary theory" ("Stories" 79). Although the culmination of Nelles's research on the subject, his 1997 book Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative, has not retreated from this position of promise or elation, it more nervously proceeds by acknowledging embedding's identity in formal terms; indeed, "no two students of the genre appear to define it in quite the same way" (Frameworks 1). The championed or promising feature I further celebrate, however, is not just embedding in and of itself. I start with excessive embedding, abused embedding, vertiginous embedding for my p articular approach to this variously defined effect in need, as Nelles puts it, of a "comprehensive history." Tzvetan Todorov bestows the multiple-embedding prize conjointly to the Arabian Nights and to The Saragossa Manuscript (71). According to Todorov, however, both of these award-winners suffer diminishment, for he concludes that in each narrative "all the degrees, except for the first, are closely linked and incomprehensible if isolated from one another." In contrast to Todorov, I want to look into those shifts among layered degrees that are quite comprehensible and are predicated precisely on the abusic of embedding. A medievalist by trade, I in fact have to agree with Nelles (Frameworks 2) that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales wears the crown, at least for American literary scholars, as monarch among the most flamboyant and complex multi-degreed embedded narratives. In this essay, I will ultimately turn to another excessively embedded text, Johannes Kepler's Somnium not because I want to shift the grounds of record-making in narrative embedding while remaining devoted to medieval documents or documents in medievalism. Rather, by looking at a text that stands on the cusp of medieval fantasy and modern science, I may better explain narratology's attention to this effect (favored particularly since the labors of Todorov and Gerard Genette) through an expanded methodological and rhetorical picture. Narrative embedding holds a special allure for theorists and critics, and this allure seems bound up with the legacy of narratology's structuralism--or with structuralism's inherent scientism--and with its variably tacit or implicit reliance on the repertoire of historically sanctioned rhetorical tropes and figures. Embedding evokes mystery, the mystery of hermeneusis (as Nelles would come to conclude; see Frameworks 140-41), while it conjures images of geometrical containment an d even Pythagorean mysticism. While it indeed invokes such aesthetic or psychic arcana, however, it also calls upon the durable elements of eloquence and persuasion, the fundamental bases or units of rhetoric. First, I locate the neo-structural project of narratology's fascination with embedding more fully in deconstructive critical understanding. This move will be in response to some of Nelles's conclusions about method in Frameworks. While the still-productive structuralism of modern narratology should not be thought of as having been supplanted by deconstruction's corrosive, self-consuming logic or its own anti-scientism, "deconstruction" itself militated against successivist models in philosophical or analytical method. Thus, I generally agree with Nelles's sentiment that deconstruction may "come to be viewed with hindsight as a transitional phase of structuralism rather than as its successor" (Frameworks 162). In taking up the deconstructive legacy of structural narratology and embedding, however, I respond equally to Jeffrey Williams's conclusions in Theory and the Novel, a study that seeks to put paid to narrative embedding, particularly concerning the effect's ultimate deconstructive heritage (i. …

Journal Article
22 Jun 2001-Style
TL;DR: Campion's film The Piano (1993) generated intense and dramatically polarized debate among women as discussed by the authors, especially among women, who found the film a mesmerizing and masterful depiction of a decidedly female sensibility and sexuality, while others found it rendered abuse and rape in the worst possible way as Ada, the victim, ends up loving and running off with Baines, one of the men who abuses her.
Abstract: I Dangerous Voices Jane Campion's film The Piano (1993) generated intense and dramatically polarized debate, especially among women (1) While some found the film a mesmerizing and masterful depiction of a decidedly female sensibility and sexuality, others asserted that it rendered abuse and rape in the worst possible way as Ada, the victim, ends up loving and running off with Baines, one of the men who abuses her (2) Though none of Campion' s other films have garnered as much acclaim or as much controversy, they all share with The Piano a focus on women together with complex structures of narration, characterization, and plot development that thwart easy or unambiguous interpretation In this, Campion's films enact a new kind of feminist perspective that some critics and theorists have called for but that Campion has had the courage and creative vision to implement and explore Though writing on feminist politics rather than aesthetics, Wendy Brown articulates the nature of the challenge posed by Campion's films: The question is whether feminist politics can prosper without a moral apparatus, whether feminist theorists and activists will give up substituting Truth and Morality for politics Are we willing to engage in struggle rather than recrimination, to develop our faculties rather than avenge our subordination with moral and epistemological gestures, to fight for a world rather than conduct process on the existing one? (48) In her call for feminists to "give up substituting Truth and Morality for politics," Brown refers to the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment that she feels informs both the epistemology and "political structure" of "much North Atlantic feminism" (45) Ressentiment characterizes the "morality that emerges from the powerless to avenge their incapacity for action; it enacts their resentment of strengths that they cannot match or overthrow" (44) Ressentiment invokes the "good" and the "true" as judgment and weapon against such strengths and thereby ascends to power over it on the basis of morality rather than deeds Brown, quoting Foucault, argues that feminist politics could avoid ressentiment by forgoing specifically moral claims against domination [] and moving instead into the domain of the sheerly political: 'wars of position' and amoral contests about the just and the good in which truth is always grasped as coterminous with power, as always already power, as the voice of power" (45) Brown's call speaks to the dynamics of the tales Campion tells, tales in which neither her heroines nor the films themselves resort to frameworks of truth or morality to make sense of the struggles with domination the heroines experience and the films recount Though Campion deals with abuse, oppression, and mistreatment in all her narratives--of women, children, the poor, the Maoris--she resolutely forgoes the moral judgments of melodrama and refuses to portray her protagonists as victims Though her films reference certain genealogies and pasts--whether familial, colonial or generic--they noticeably refuse the conventional relations usually articulated between past and present in these milieux (4) Instead, chronicling her characters' struggles with and attitudes toward adversity, she mixes an almost documentary curiosity with surrealist wit and tragic irony Significantly this approach in Campion's films coincides with some form of female voiceover narration that exists in tension with their other narratio nal structures The perspective that emerges is consequently plural, ambiguous, and difficult to assume in an unproblematic way In this respect, her films formally challenge conventional feminist understandings of narration and the female voice in narrative cinema as well as explore a feminist position devoid of ressentiment Before considering Campion's films specifically, I will briefly cover issues of narration and voiceover in cinema II …

Journal Article
22 Jun 2001-Style
TL;DR: In this article, Measurin g a film's fidelity to the narrative voice of its source text, uncovering a filmmaker's biases in regard to her or his source text as well as the social contexts of both works.
Abstract: For decades, the study of film adaptation has been troubled by questions of fidelity. Too often, adaptation studies have merely compared films to their literary sources, a "tiresome" endeavor, as Dudley Andrew points Out, that inevitably privileges the literary work over what comes to be seen as its inferior film derivation (266). In reacting to a long history of uninsightful comparisons of film and literature, scholars have tended to regard the study of adaptation as a naive approach to the examination of film and to favor, instead, methods that (as the popular adage in cinema studies proclaims) treat film as film. At the same time, however, the realization that literary adaptations make up almost half of all commercial film releases has precipitated a search for ways to reconceptualize issues of adaptation. (1) One recent approach that has reinvigorated adaptation studies considers a filmmaker's relationship to his or her source within the context of film production. This new focus represents a much needed reorientation of the study of adaptations, for even if film scholars have not been eager to consider the question of fidelity, filmmakers have persistently regarded it as a major aspect of filmmaking and promotion. Indeed, promotional materials often advertise film adaptations by lauding the degree to which they capture the essence, or voice, of their source narratives. Yet as many film scholars have demonstrated, a literary work never simply reappears on the screen, and a critical distinction must be made between "those narrative features that can be transferred from one medium to another and those that can't" (MacFarlane 9). Of the stock formal devices of narrative frequently called upon to present a text faithfully on film, perhaps a novel's most elemental, yet elusive feature is authorial voice. In an adaptation, a filmmaker necessarily mixes the verbal with the visual, perhaps hoping to capture the novel's crucial essence, the authorial timbre of the original. But because an author's voice is often understood only as a hovering presence throughout a text, it is the formal quality that challenges translation into the film medium most fully. Perhaps this problem of capturing a disembodied authorial voice may shed light on the related issue of locating authorial identity at all. For embedded in the concept of capturing a novel's essence is the bugbear of delineating an authoritative textual meaning, a concept that seems to equate a novel's narrative voice with the author's intention. As post-structuralist theory demonstrates, however, defining authorial intention often reveals more about the interpretive predispositions of a reader than about the author's narrative designs. In film, the challenge of capturing an authorial voice is even further complicated because a filmmaker often adapts a source from an historically distant era, and the problem becomes one of transposing a presence removed by time and place. In light of these exegetical complexities, the concept of fidelity--naively understood as a one-to-one mapping on of a novel to film--must be reconceived to account for (what Bakhtin might term) a film's historical heteroglossia. (2) Measurin g a film's fidelity to the narrative voice of its source thus becomes a way to uncover a filmmaker's biases in regard to her or his source text, as well as the social contexts of both works. Identifying the recent proliferation of film adaptations from historically distant novels as a "return of the classics" movement, Timothy Corrigan argues that fidelity to their sources is not the reason such adaptations are so popular. He suggests, instead, that this "return of the classics" reflects a conservative reaction against trends of postmodernist filmmaking that diminish traditional plot and character. This movement embodies, he claims, "a therapeutic turn from cultural complexity" and "an increasing concern with manner over matter" (72). Although the idyllic past envisioned in these films may never have existed, even when the source texts were written, its filmic embodiments present a fantasy of a time when life was simpler, offering escape and solace to world-weary contemporary viewers. …

Journal Article
22 Sep 2001-Style
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on two novels for children that were published much earlier than those discussed by Stephens and McCallum, whose example texts yield more readily to postmodern readings.
Abstract: In the past two decades, the work of Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin has become increasingly important to the criticism of children's literature. Caryl Emerson, one of his translators and editors, argues that Westerners most admire Bakhtin's views on "the novel as subversive genre, carnival as permanent revolution, and culture as a battleground where marginal figures endlessly undermine all centers" (qtd. in Vice 154). Recent works of scholarship such as those by John Stephens and Robyn McCallum have recognized Bakhtin's theories as powerful constructs for understanding novels written for children and young adults. (1) Stephens devotes part of his study to "carnivalesque" texts that "interrogate the normal subject positions created for children within socially dominant ideological frames" (120). (2) McCallum examines "the representation of dialogic conceptions of subjectivity in adolescent and children's fiction using a Bakhtinian approach to subjectivity, language and narrative" (3). Both Stephens and McCallu m are concerned with the interaction of human characters, especially with the ways in which children or adolescents act to form identities and to appropriate ideologies that may be at odds with empowered adults. (3) I have chosen here to address two novels for children that were published much earlier than those discussed by Stephens and McCallum, whose example texts yield more readily to postmodern readings. In The Magician's Nephew (1955), by C. S. Lewis, and Mary Poppins (1934), by P. L. Travers, heteroglottic language and carnivalized action create polyphonic exchanges in which power relations between characters are negotiated; in the episodes on which I will focus, however, it is not only adult and child characters engaged in this transaction but also humans and animals. It is true that neither of these novels for children is dialogic to the degree that Bakhtin claims for Dostoevsky's work; that is, all voices within the text do not bear equivalent ideological or narratological weight. It is also true that the carnival pageantry of these novels at times seems orchestrated by the central figures of Aslan and Mary Poppins. Nonetheless, at certain moments in each book, the nature of the power struggle between humans and animals helps to move these texts in the direction of a more explicit polyphony and a more carnivalesque style of action. Bakhtin's notion of carnival appears germane to the novels of Lewis and Travers in general and to the episodes I have selected in particular. For one thing, throughout their children's novels, Lewis and Travers bring together heterogeneous collections of characters from all orders of being--humanity, mythology (Greek, Norse, Christian), the animal world (both talking and nontalking beasts), and other fictional sources (for example, nursery rhyme and fairytale figures) (4)--and have them mingle in festival-like gatherings reminiscent of medieval carnival celebrations. (5) For another, the interaction among these disparate characters often results in the suspension of hierarchical barriers and in what Bakhtin calls "carnivalistic mesalliances" that mingle "the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid" (Problems 123). As Bakhtin argues, All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people. This is a very important aspect of a carnival sense of the world. People who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free familiar contact on the carnival square. (123) Because carnival laughter is directed at exalted beings, power shifts occur in accordance with "the peculiar logic of the 'inside out' (a l'envers), of the 'turnabout,' of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear" (Rabelais 11). In a chapter from Mary Poppins entitled "Full Moon," which depicts the zoo animals turning the tables for one evening and caging human visitors, this power shift is temporary and therefore more directly analogous to the mock crowning and decrowning of the carnival king important to Bakhtin's notion of carnival. …

Journal Article
22 Sep 2001-Style
TL;DR: The authors examined the narrative implications of extending the simile, mainly from a reader's point of view, and examined some of the narrative variations possible in extended simile by means of a brief survey of the Homeric tradition.
Abstract: One of the distinctive features of simile is that it can be extended beyond the dimensions of trope into the relatively autonomous mini-genre of its Homeric form. Thus, a study of the extended simile may offer some insights into the relationship between trope and genre. Homeric similes often interrupt a story quite significantly, representing a type of narrative embedding that has not so far been examined as such. Following on an earlier study, which examined the simile in relation to the literal-figurative dichotomy, this essay is an attempt to investigate the narrative implications of extending the simile, mainly from a reader's point of view. It also examines some of the narrative variations possible in extended simile by means of a brief survey of the Homeric tradition. In the earlier essay on simile, I pointed out that, whereas metaphor depends on a distinction between the literal and figurative in order to exist, simile transcends this antithesis by including not only figurative examples, which may be converted or abbreviated into metaphors, but also literal examples, which do not relate to metaphors at all. In fact, a sliding scale of "literalness" and "figurativeness" can be used to classify different simile types on a continuum. Simile is so versatile because, as Christine Brooke-Rose notes in A Grammar of Metaphor (14, 64-65), it is mainly defined by grammar. Brooke-Rose shows that its grammatical nature is what makes simile, and not metaphor, extensible. Unlike metaphors, which may be represented by any part of speech and which often, to adopt I. A. Richards's terminology (96), state only the vehicle, leaving the tenor a matter of implication, similes appear in a limited number of fixed grammatical forms and always state both of their terms; they also label their ter ms clearly by means of comparative tags. These comparative tags have the effect of marking a boundary between the vehicle's material and the main discourse. When we are told that "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold" (Byron 82), the word "like" disconnects the wolf-sheep image (or mini-story) from the Assyrian-Israelite scene and story unfolding as the main topic of the poem. The tenor, "The Assyrian," is, in contrast, an important element of this topic. In longer similes, the single vehicular tags, "like" or "as," usually give way to the double markers, "just as" and "so" (and their cognates), to label and connect tenor with vehicle over significant textual distance. Occurring in many languages and often matching each other as in the Italian "quale ... tale," these tags are powerful framing devices, strong enough to hold in abeyance the main discourse even at moments of great tension or gravity. Within their framework, the vehicle is able to flesh out a world that is not the world of the main discourse, or tell a story that is not connected to the main narrative, more-or-less for its own sake. In an article on narrative framing, Marie-Laure Ryan distinguishes between "actually" and "virtually" crossed boundaries: "The narrative can cross a boundary, by selecting the "here" and "now" of the other side as points of reference, or can simply look through boundaries, by revealing what is beyond the line from the perspective of this side of the line. In this second case, the crossing of the boundary is only virtual" (874). This distinction is helpful in indicating what happens to the reader's central focus as similes are extended. Whereas many short similes invite only a "virtual" crossing of their boundaries, longer, especially Homeric-type, similes attempt to seduce the reader into a "real" crossing, one that reorientates her into a different universe from that of the main story or discourse. Just as "literalness and "figurativeness" are variable qualities, so some crossings may be "more real" or "more virtual" in comparison with others. In all the following similes, brevity is an important factor in the reader's experience: "Oh, my luve is like a red, red rose," "The holy time is quiet as a Nun," "As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend," "these who die as cattle," "Like a patient etherised upon a table" (Burns 562, Wordsworth 205, Hopkins 30, Owen 80, Eliot 13). …

Journal Article
01 Jul 2001-Style
TL;DR: In this article, the authors of three women's self-representational narratives, Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey, and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, were studied.
Abstract: I In Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation, Leigh Gilmore argues that there is a "crisis in critical approaches to the discourses of women's self-representation," and suggests that such a crisis "can be characterized as a kind of contractual dispute around gender and genre, in which the 'terms' [of traditional autobiography studies] seek to define legitimacy within autobiography's discursive nexus of identity, representation, and politics" (2).1 As Gilmore points out, "exploration of the possibilities of women's selfrepresentational writing is linked to the politics of self-representation," and, I would add, to the politics of representation more generally (3). What Adrienne Rich describes as a "politics of location" reacts to a history of exclusionary politics, a vortex that has created cultural, literary, and historical vacuums that warrant the current eruption of autobiography and autobiographies. Contemporary women's autobiographical fiction articulates the painful position of having no "place" to call one's own. Furthermore, women's self-representation illustrates that having to make a "place" for themselves means having to construct a space within alienating narrative and cultural forms, even while fracturing those forms so that they might accommodate "the subject" (in all senses of that word) of the marginalized self. Thus, traditional critical frameworks addressing autobiography studies are also fractured when female autobiography enters the scene. The politics of location that arises in contemporary women's selfrepresentational narratives articulates a paradoxical position; it is not merely one of location or dislocation, but, rather, the co-existence of the two as the marginalized subject shuttles back and forth between them to weave a sense of self within a perceived position of absence. Out of this weaving comes a reconstruction of a past perceived by the hegemonics of centricity as having no history at all. It is from this position, a third place of paradoxical being, one that I describe as ex-centric, that some female subjects seek to express themselves. Such subjects are in the process of mapping new cultural spaces. In the autobiographies of three women's self-representational narratives I study for this project, there is no final "place" of arrival, but rather a continual narrative enactment of the journey of self-discovery, a fluid, ongoing process that, even in the narratives' conclusions, opens out into yet another story of the shifting terrain of subjectivity. Dorothy Allison's memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, concludes with a poignant scene in which the narrator finds herself"standing by [herself] in the rubble of [her] life, at the bottom of every story [she] had ever needed to know." Allison concludes her memoir with a dramatic scene of the narrator pulling herself out of the rubble rib by rib "like a climber holding on to rock" (94). This upward and outward movement is a brilliant enactment of how one's life stories can bury one or can provide a medium through which one may climb toward liberation from social, literary, and familial burial. Minnie Bruce Pratt moves through the landscape of her childhood to reconstruct and then deconstruct the perspective given her by her family's social position in the segregated southern town where she grew up. In her collection of essays, titled Rebellion, and her short stories, titled S/HE, Pratt probes the dynamics of social and economic privilege. It is a privilege that is implicitly gendered female and racialized as white; it is a privilege that, because it is given can be taken away. Writing from memory's groundlessness, Kim Chernin drops into the gaps and crevices behind memory's reconstructions and discovers what resides within the forgotten places. In her autobiographical novel reconstructing her years as a young Jewish woman living on a kibbutz in Israel, Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey, Chernin writes three versions of the same story and in each story delves into a deeper layer of truth hidden by the social and literary conventions of the romantic love story. …

Journal Article
22 Jun 2001-Style
TL;DR: The Age of Innocence as discussed by the authors is a famous portrait of a young woman in the early 19th century, which depicts the idealization of childhood purity and the lack of knowledge either of juvenile guile or of the brutality of British class society.
Abstract: Prelude: Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), the son of a clergyman schoolteacher, was raised in a large family of modest income. Through talent, ambition, and agreeableness, Reynolds became a grandly successful portrait painter, knighted by the King, elected President of the Royal Academy. Late in his life, as a childless bachelor, he found himself increasingly drawn to children, and he produced several portraits of young people marked by an idealized, almost reverential air. Among these was "The Age of Innocence" (1788), a fetching portrait of a young girl (fig. 1); Derek Hudson, an art historian, believes she may have been the daughter of his favorite niece (201-02). This painting is both touching and cloying. As Hudson notes: To modern taste Reynolds's children may seem too consistently sweet. Even his London street urchins, so tired that they fell asleep while they posed for him, were idealized by that radiant vision, their rags and poverty refined away. The President of the Royal Academy banished his Whig principles from the painting-room. (150-51) (1) Thus, enjoyment of "The Age of Innocence" requires that viewers be complicitous with Reynolds in his idealization of childish purity and banish from their mind any knowledge either of juvenile guile or of the brutalities of British class society. I. The Novel Edith Wharton began writing The Age of Innocence in 1919, shortly after the close of WWI, whose horrors she had observed closely because she had been living in exile from America in Paris since 1910. She set the novel in the New York of the 1870s, the time of her own youth, when her aristocratic family had returned to New York City after an absence of some years traveling in Europe. Her story centers on Newland Archer, a gentleman lawyer from one of the best families in Old New York society, who is engaged to marry May Welland, a gracious, beautiful, seemingly naive young woman of his set. May's cousin, Ellen Olenska, returns to New York, fleeing her marriage to a dissolute Polish count, and while she is supported by her family, she is initially rejected by society. In solidarity with his future in-laws, Newland is instrumental in getting the Countess accepted into the appropriate circles, and he becomes her confidante and protector and her lawyer. Under pressure from her family, he advises her not to divorce the Count because of the scandal that may ensue, and although she intends never to return to her husband, she reluctantly agrees. But Ellen is everything that May is not--worldly, passionate, out-spoken, intellectual, artistic--and Newland falls in love with her. Learning of the efforts that Newland has made on her behalf, and seeing in him all the nobility and integrity so lacking in her European marriage, Ellen is equally entranced, but insists that her love is contingent upon their behaving honorably. So Newland goes through with his marriage to May and settles into it with a mixture of complacency and frustration until circumstances bring him back together with Ellen. The two plan an illicit rendezvous, but Ellen breaks it off and abruptly announces her intention to return to Europe. On Ellen's last night in the States, May gives a lavish farewell banquet for her cousin. After the guests have departed, Archer discovers that he has vastly underestimated his wife: May has been cognizant of his passion for Ellen, and she has deftly engineered her rival's departure by confiding in Ellen--prematurely, though her intuition proves true--that she is pregnant. Thereafter, Archer and May raise three children in a placid household, and Newland engages in philanthropy and social service. After May's death, when he is 57, Archer has the opportunity to see Ellen and rekindle their romance, but al though he knows he has missed "the flower of life," he prefers to leave Ellen as a memory or fantasy and hold fast to the precepts of his "old-fashioned" life. Wharton's handling of this material is rich with allusion and ambiguity. …

Journal Article
22 Mar 2001-Style
TL;DR: Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" as discussed by the authors is a case study of the use of rhetorical arguments in self-defense by a protagonist who is about to confess to the murder of an old man.
Abstract: I have no idea what Ezra Pound meant when he complained that Poe is "A dam'd bad rhetorician half the time" (qtd. in Hubbell 20). Perhaps he was referring to Poe's literary criticism, but what concerns me here is the rhetoric of one of Poe's murderous narrators, for John P. Hussey is certainly correct when he notes that "Poe created a series of rhetorical characters who try to persuade and guide their readers to particular ends" (37). Let us consider the protagonist of "The Tell-Tale Heart." It has been customary to see that tale as a confession, but it becomes clear that the narrator has already confessed to the murder of the old man who was his former living companion. The tale, then, is not so much a confession as a defense: "The Tell-Tale Heart" is actually a specimen of courtroom rhetoric--judicial, or forensic, oratory. This is not to say that he is necessarily arguing in a court of law; he may be speaking to his auditor(s) in a prison cell--but that he is telling his side of the story to someone (rath er than writing to himself in a journal) is clear by his use of the word "you"; and that he is speaking rather than writing is clear by his exhortation to "hearken" (listen) to what he has to say. The important point is that his spoken account is forensic insofar as that means a legal argument in self-defense. To this end, the narrator has a considerable grasp of the techniques of argument but, like a damned bad rhetorician, he fails in his rhetorical performance even while striving desperately to convince. That does not mean that Poe himself is a damned bad rhetorician, for what John McElroy says of "The Black Cat" is equally true of "The Tell-Tale Heart": the story has "two simultaneous perspectives: the narrative and the authorial" (103). The author, Poe, puts various rhetorical figures of speech and thought, as well as argumentative appeals, into his narrator's explanations of the horrible events he has initiated, and then Poe sits back with his perceptive readers to watch the narrator fall short in his a ttempts at persuasion. The result is an irony that alert readers detect and a conviction--on my part, anyway--that Poe is a better literary craftsman than even some of his critical champions have realized. Poe and the Tradition of Rhetoric and Oratory: His Time and Place We cannot say for sure with which rhetorical handbooks Poe was familiar, but that he was familiar with some is shown by a remark he makes in "The Rationale of Verse": "In our ordinary grammars and in our works on rhetoric or prosody in general, may be found occasional chapters, it is true, which have the heading, 'Versification,' but these are, in all instances, exceedingly meagre" (14: 211). To be more particular, scholars attempting to demonstrate a nineteenth-century writer's familiarity with the rhetorical tradition often begin with the eighteenth-century Scottish divine and professor of rhetoric, Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres "went. through 130 British and American editions between 1783 and 1911" (Short 177n). Hussey shows no diffidence at all in insisting that Poe's art is grounded "in the specific injunctions of the [rhetorical] handbooks," Blair's in particular. For Eureka, specifically, Poe needed appropriate personae for his narrator and a rigidly structured pattern or m old, for which he turned to the "classical address, again as Blair describes it, with six major sections: the Introduction (Exordium), Proposition and Division, Narration, Reasoning or Arguments, the Pathetic, and the Conclusion (Peroration)" (41). Although these divisions are centuries old and as such did not originate in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Hussey makes a case for Poe's indebtedness to Blair by showing how the poet-cosmologist follows certain dicta expounded in the Lectures. Although he makes no attempt to prove his case, Donald B. Stauffer takes for granted that Poe took some of his ideas about style from Blair (454). …

Journal Article
22 Dec 2001-Style
TL;DR: The use of chiasmus in Shakespeare's plays has been studied extensively as discussed by the authors, with a focus on the relationship between the two types of words, i.e., "change" and "exchange".
Abstract: 1. Chiasmus, Antimetabole, Commutatio, Permutatio, Counterchange Ye haue a figure which takes a couple of words to play with in a verse, and by making them to chaunge and shift one into others place they do very pretily exchange and shift the sence. (Puttenham 208) 'tis true 'tis pity, And pity 'tis, 'tis true-a foolish figure. (Hamlet 2.2.98-99) Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern. Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz. (2.2.33-34) I "pretty" and my saying "apt"? Or I "apt" and my saying "pretty"? (LLL 1.2.18-19) The use serueth properlie to praise, dispraise, to distinguish, but most commonly to confute by the inuersion of the sentence. (Peacham) The goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness. (MM 3.1.182-83) That we were all as some would seem to be--Free from our faults, or faults from seeming free. (3.1.293-94) And let the subject see, to make them know That outward courtesies would fain proclaim Favours that keep within. (5.1.14-16) Ignominy in ransom and free pardon Are of two houses; lawful mercy Is nothing kin to foul redemption. (2.4.112-14) There is an enormous difference in mental travail between passing through the facile reversible chiasmus of pleonasm, virtual identity, or opposition and parsing the complex, conflicted, multiple relationships that chiasmus may demand. In 1589, Renaissance rhetorician George Puttenham (above) captures the figure's easy showiness in his claim that chiasmus can "very pretily exchange and shift the sence." In those three memorably familiar examples of chiasmus from Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare exemplifies its facile wittiness. Then, however, Henry Peacham complicates Puttenham's assessment when he includes among the uses of chiasmus "to distinguish, but most commonly to confute by the inuersion of the sentence." Peacham indicates the work that can be involved in processing chiasmus: its facile "exchange" and "shift" may require us to stop short for being "confuted" and then have to redefine the terms and rethink the relationships between them in inversion." It is Measure for Measure that, above, provides examples of chiasmus compelling us to stop, to puzzle over definitions and relationships, to focus on difficulties--not merely on the definitions, the omissions, the substitutions, but especially on the complex relationships suggested far beyond simple identity, opposition, and substitution involved in chiastic exchanges. Given these complications, we must ask, In what ways can this figure be used? In what ways did Shakespeare use the scheme? And what are the consequences? What can chiasmus do for fun, for memorable aphorism, for such complex thought as analyzing the relationship of justice to mercy? The kind of linguistic-rhetorical study practiced by Sister Miriam Joseph in creating an anatomy and catalog (Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language) and by M. M. Mahood in examining the dramatic effects of punning (Shakespeare's Wordplay) is undergoing revival and revision both in Keir Elam's elaborated analyses of staged rhetoric in Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse. Language-Games in the Comedies and in Patricia Parker's dizzying interpretive intensifications and expansions of punning into cultural criticism in Shakespeare from the Margins. Language, Culture, Context. In contrast to Elam and Parker, I shall apply techniques such as theirs to a relatively overlooked but intriguing scheme in order to ask that critics, in their analyses and interpretations, pay heed to schemes in the ways we already consider tropes. (1) To this end, I first consider some of the ways chiasmus has been employed. Moving from simple to complex uses, from traditional to recent analyses with familiar illustrations, I shall foc us on analyses of examples in Shakespeare. …

Journal Article
22 Mar 2001-Style
TL;DR: In a recent reappraisal of Edward Said's Orientalism, Timothy Brennan deems this immeasurably influential study "a profoundly American book" that "could not have been written anywhere else" as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In a recent reappraisal of Edward Said's Orientalism, Timothy Brennan deems this immeasurably influential study "a profoundly American book" that "could not have been written anywhere else" (560). "Its legacy," Brennan continues, "is fused, or confused, with an American national culture that is particularly impervious to what the book is saying," producing "special resistance in the United States to Orientalism's moods and styles" and a "wedge that has been driven between the text and the public image." Such a description of Said's critique echoes one of the many memorable phrases in The Great Gatsby, by Said's fellow Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald; it recalls the passage in which the narrator, Nick Carraway, characterizes Jay Gatsby as "peculiarly American" (68). Embraced for his Jazz Age glamour and his mystique as a doomed artist maudit, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his work have suffered a similar fate, so that, in the words of various writers, his "public image" has occluded much of Fitzgerald's contributi on as an unheeded prophet and a cultural diagnostician of "attenuated ideals" and the "failure" of cultural possibility "betrayed," of "our capacity [...] for unqualified corruption and despair," and of "the seductive touch of the sinister" (Marx 361, 365; Minter 112; Updike; "Life Styles"). As cultural critics, neither Said nor Fitzgerald objects to appalling conditions. Rather, each evokes and examines the narratives by which civilizations, especially "Western" ones, imagine and legitimate themselves by drawing factitious boundaries and then collectively persuading themselves of their naturalness and inevitability. On the American studies front, Walter Benn Michaels, in his 1995 book, Our America (170-71), recently introduced Said's counter-orientalist critique into the academic conversation about Fitzgerald and his legendary literary generation. One of the most memorable set-pieces in Fitzgerald's 1934 novel, Tender is the Night, reflects the need for such an intervention. This passage not only enacts a co unter-orientalist critique, but it also anticipates and vividly illustrates Said's and Michaels's preoccupation with construing civilizations and demarcating their boundaries. In this passage, on a provincial French "station platform," Fitzgerald stages a face-off between the Occident and what used to be called the Orient, between two "princely households, one of the East and one of the West" (259). One "princely" household is that of the novel's protagonist, Dick Diver, and Nicole Warren, the Chicago heiress to robber-baron millions whom he married. The other household is that of a manganese-enriched Gulf emir. Despite his having the European title "count" bestowed upon him by the pope, the Divers have nicknamed him "Buddha" (258). It is in the attentiveness of the Divers and of Fitzgerald's narrator to naming, also reflected in the backward-looking designation of Buddha's wife, the Divers' erstwhile friend, as "lately Mary North" (258), that we find the conflict. This later designation, for instance, locks in Mary's identity as the widow of Dick's drinking buddy, a composer with the mock-allegorical name (intimating legendary presidential "honesty" and steadfastness and compasse d-measured positional certainty) of "Abe North." Thus seeming to fix Mary's status, the narrator counters with the offsetting information that, as a result of her new marriage, Mary came to "fly proud and high" in the course of "a journey that had begun in a room over the shop of a paperhanger in Newark" (258). "Grimacing" at Mary's mobility and quipping that "if Europe ever turns Bolshevik she'll turn up as the bride of Stalin"(259), the Divers describe a trait that, unlike the Divers themselves, Fitzgerald's narrator seems to value. Over the course of the narrative, Nicole Diver, however, will come to embrace this trait, leaving Dick locked in the constraints of an untenable faith in his own "Western civilization." The narrator's repudiation of Dick's understanding of civilization crystallizes during an after-dinner interlude showing Dick and Nicole in their guest room. …

Journal Article
22 Dec 2001-Style
TL;DR: For instance, the authors argues that the distinction between watching a film and reading a novel is the difference between what he calls "perceptual knowledge" and "conceptual knowledge".
Abstract: The growing cachet of film studies has been accompanied, as in all emerging disciplines, by a certain amount of institutional anxiety. As Noel Carroll points out in his book Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (1988), among the discipline's earliest efforts to allay this anxiety was the attempt to legitimize film's status as an art form. "Moreover," Carroll writes, "such a mission brought film theory in contact with philosophy almost immediately, since proving that film is an art requires making philosophical assumptions about such things as the nature of art and the conditions a medium must meet in order to be regarded as an autonomous art form" (4). These forays into philosophy led film theory directly into the philosophical problems Carroll astutely diagnoses in his book, most notably essentialist arguments for the specificity of the film medium. But quite often, as a corollary of these medium-specificity arguments, film theorists have been concerned to establish the autonomy of film in relation to other narrative art forms, including literature, and the attempt to distinguish film from the latter has often led theorists to insist on a philosophical distinction between the medium of film and the medium of language. For George Bluestone, whose 1957 book Novels Into Film takes its inspiration from the work of classical theorist Rudolph Arnheim, the difference between watching a film and reading a novel is the difference between what he calls "perceptual knowledge" and "conceptual knowledge." The philosopher Stanley Cavell, whose views are derived from those of Andre Bazin, maintains that because films are direct "re-presentations" of reality, unlike literature they offer up "a world of immediate conviction;[. . .] a world of immediate intelligibility" (150). For all his anti-essentialism, Carroll himself has recently taken up a similar position, claimin g that films differ from language in that they can be understood at some level "just by looking--sans any process of decoding, inference, or reading" (Philosophical 132). Along with David Bordwell and others, Carroll has dubbed the stance on which this view is based "cognitivism," and the lucid, philosophically aware works in which this stance is increasingly finding a home make a much better case for the distinction between film and literature than earlier theorists had made. Furthermore, Carroll and Bordwell have provided generally convincing critiques of the currently dominant modes of film theory, modes adapted from literary theory, and these critiques make cognitivism a genuine rival to existing approaches. As powerful as their criticisms of contemporary theory are, however, and as subtle and nuanced as their own theories can be, the cognitivists' philosophical distinction between watching a film and reading a literary text remains problematic. The difficulties with this position can best be seen by contrasting it with those of a philosophical tradition extending from the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein to the works of the contemporary philosophers Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty. In particular, I will argue that Davidson's conception of "radical interpretation" provides a better model for understanding the interpretation of both film and literature than the models the cognitivists provide. Not only does radical interpretation call into question the distinctions between film and language the cognitivists want to draw, but it also recommends a different direction for the future of film studies than the cognitivists propose. But before we can see the value of radical interpretation for film theory, we must fir st examine the sources of its philosophical differences with cognitivism, and for that we must turn to the philosophical context from which it emerged. 1. Film Interpretation as Radical Interpretation What exactly are perceptions, beliefs, desires, and other "intentional states"? This is a question philosophers began to confront in new ways after the publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953). …

Journal Article
22 Mar 2001-Style
TL;DR: In this paper, a short introduction to the Renaissance pastoral and theories thereof is given, where the authors largely ignore the presence of power and the court and indulge instead the fundamental means of pastoral allegory--critique.
Abstract: It seems that all we can do is compose introductions to the pastoral, although recently these introductions have begun to grow longer and longer and their vocabulary larger and more disparate. We now require words like power to aid our compulsive need to prove that shepherds were poets and poets were courtiers-- and, indeed, many commentators have done an exquisite job of discovering what it meant to write in the fickle courts of the English royalty. (1) But in this short reintroduction to the Renaissance pastoral and theories thereof, I will largely ignore the presence of power and the court and indulge instead the fundamental means of pastoral allegory--critique. Because the pastoral has taught us to value the very idea of critique, it is important to remember that the critiques contemporary readers place into the context of prior critical apparatuses often tell us as much about the process of critique as about the subject itself. "Any collective critical project," Louis Montrose writes, "must be mindful t hat it, too, is a social practice that participates in the very interplay of interests and perspectives that it seeks to analyze" ("New" 415). In elucidating the place of critique in this genre, (2) I will first briefly outline "some versions of pastoral," to borrow William Empson's language, and trace how Raleigh's response to Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" (3) and Sidney's Old Arcadia exemplify two rather confusing but quintessential processes of pastoralism and pastoral critique. Second, I will survey how notable contemporary theories of pastoralism often only imitate their subject. Thus, in the context of Montrose's still-vital desire to "draw attention to what seems [...] a vital though largely unremarked conjunction of form and function" ("Gentlemen" 432-33), I wish only to discuss the "function" of the pastoral "form": what it means to criticize, how pastoral writers and critics have gone about it, and how we continue to go about it today as we teach and write about the Renaissance pas toral. Writing of the "intense preoccupation and experience" (3) revolving around critical employments of the country and city, Raymond Williams suggests that the "initial problem" we face "is one of perspective" (9). A few pages later in The Country and the City, he assigns the same problem--that of perspective--to the history shrouding the pastoral. What is the pastoral, Williams asks, how should we view it, and how did pastoral poets themselves see it? Do we look to the stated subject of the pastoral fiction or to the other fictions to which it alludes and upon which it feeds? Finally, even before attempting to determine perspective, Williams wonders, how do we discern the properties and boundaries of the pastoral itself; when, for example, does a pastoral become antipastoral, and when is it "simply" nature poetry or fiction? In the same vein, in What is Pastoral?, Paul Alpers laments that "it sometimes seems as if there are as many versions of pastoral as there are critics and scholars who write about it" (8). Yet even apart from this problem of a contemporary critical perspective--one fascinatingly implicated in the politics of post-structuralism--the genre of the pastoral poses numerous problems of definition and effect, and did so even to Renaissance writers themselves. (4) One of the cruxes of these problems, both in form and perspective, lies in the idea of critique. The pastoral, antipastoral, and critical theory thereof denote a process of critical reflection and awareness that exploded in the Renaissance--the pre-modern-and has continued to develop to the present day--the post-modern. Moreover, recent critical theory of pastoral and antipastoral productively mimics the trenchant business of the antipastoral cited above. In this business of critique, the pastoral exists as the given text, the antipastoral as critique, and literary criticism as meta-critique. But this paradigm oversimplifies the relationships, for what initially sounds plain is unavoidably heterogeneous: the entire process surrounding pastoralism is critically charged. …

Journal Article
22 Jun 2001-Style
TL;DR: The confessional quiz show was a popular format for women to share their personal stories for the chance to win prizes during the 1950s and 1960s as discussed by the authors, where women traded the public recitation of their life stories for winning prizes.
Abstract: During the 1950s, television's daytime airwaves were filled with women's stories. Well before soap opera's plotlines pervaded daytime schedules, a variant of the popular "audience participation" genre offered viewers a steady stream of women's personal narratives, but these stories were intermixed with elements of the quiz show. (1) Within this hybrid format--called here "the confessional quiz show"--women traded the public recitation of their life stories for the chance to win prizes. At one extreme, the "misery show" stressed the pathos of women's lives, recounting the struggles of the female subject. Chief among these popular "sob shows" were Strike It Rich (1951-58), Turn to a Friend (1953), Glamour Girl (1953-54), Welcome Travelers (1955-56), and the ratings blockbuster Queen for a Day (1956-64). Other versions of the confessional quiz show retained sentimental storytelling without devolving into bathos. Programs like The Big Payoff(1951-59), Stand Up and Be Counted(1956-57), and It Could Be You (1956-61 ) centered upon humor, social indecision, touching reunions, and stories of spousal gratitude. The salient feature of each of these daytime programs--and the focus of this essay--is the confessing female subject, the woman-as-confessor-narrator. My purpose here is to detail how four of the most popular 1950s confessional quiz shows--Strike It Rich, Queen for a Day, It Could Be You, and The Big Payoff--cast the voice of the woman storyteller as variously outspoken and silent, inextricably caught within paradoxical frames. In each program, these frames are evident in the interplay between sound and visual tracks. Multidimensional soundtracks reveal that women are endlessly prompted, interrupted, edited, summarized, and silenced; visual tracks, which further compromise women's vocality, prove that women revert to somatic expression when their voices fail. Indeed, it can be argued that this alternation between storytelling and emotive display serves to disclose the latent opposition between free expression and enforced muteness at the core of these programs. In this regard, a woman's quandary on the confessional quiz show is not unlike her dilemma in historical melodrama. In her book Overhearing Film Dialogue, Sarah Kozloff reminds us that the women's film, driven by emotional confession and talk, evokes melodrama's paradox. Building upon the earlier work of Peter Brooks and Tania Modleski, Kozloff finds in the dialogue of women's films an enduring enigma. While film melodramas are verbally overexplicit, they nonetheless "hinge around the not said, the words that cannot be spoken" (242). Like stage melodrama from earlier centuries, the women's film relies upon the "melodramatic gesture" and scenarios of "tears and fainting" (240). On the one hand, melodrama unleashes "the desire to express all" and to "utter the unspeakable" (Brooks 4); on the other, it dramatizes "the repression of speech" and its consequence in hysterical signs (Kozloff 244). The 1950s confessional quiz program exposes exactly this "pressure between speech and silence" (Kozloff 247). Women are encouraged, indeed required, to tell their personal stories, yet their narratives are continually interrupted and reworked so as to accent the hysterical gesture and woman-as-spectacle. The melodramatic impulse toward full disclosure, however truncated in its utterance, complies with television's "confessional mode," a form Mimi White traces across multiple television genres of the 1980s and 1990s. Significantly for White, confession mediated through television is "repeatedly linked with consumer culture and social subjectivity" (10). The programs under discussion here, while predating White's examples by many decades, affirm this confessional pattern. On each show, a succession of female subjects in social distress is required to narrate a personal confession in the presence of interlocutors (White 67), and winning confessions merit therapeutic rehabilitation by means of money or consumer goods. …

Journal Article
22 Mar 2001-Style
TL;DR: In this article, Fuss analyses the strategies through which colonialism pathologizes the colonized subject by excluding that subject from the fruitful self/other dynamics that creates subjectivity, in so doing, it also determines which individuals attain full cultural signification and which do not.
Abstract: In her stimulating reading of Frantz Fanon's anti-colonialist book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Diana Fuss analyses the strategies through which colonialism pathologizes the colonized subject. By excluding that subject from the fruitful self/other dynamics that creates subjectivity, colonialism polices "the boundaries of cultural intelligibility"; in so doing, it also determines which individuals attain "full cultural signification" and which do not. Through its dissemination of an imperialist power-knowledge, it arbitrates who shall (or shall not) have "unfettered access" to a rich self-identity. If, as psychoanalysis claims, the "I is an Other," then "otherness constitutes the very entry into subjectivity" (Identification 141-43). But what happens when, as in the colonized context, this entry is blocked or severely curtailed? In effect, two striking pathological symptoms emerge, the first involving identification, the second desire. In the first, identification loses its radical force and its impetus--its power to remodel the self. (1) By depriving the colonized subject of the detour through the other that generates a complex fictive awareness of the self s polymorphous potential, colonialism impoverishes his sense of identity. (2) Because the colonizer alone propagates those idealized figures--national, cultural, religious--that function as models upon which he can mould his identity, his is the sole prerogative of identifying with them. The colonized subject, by contrast, either disavows identification with these (for him) ambiguous figures--they belong to the cultural domain of the oppressor-or he identifies solely at the level of mimicry, obeying the colonizer's injunction to be like, and unlike him at the same time. (3) Such disavowal, however, is also a mark of his subjugation, since it merely reinforces existing power-inequ alities. In the second, colonialism impairs the transformation of the desire to be like (identification) into the desire to have (possession) the idealized object. (4) While the colonizer's desire flows without major impediment from one state to another (he is free to act out his desires), the colonized subject experiences only a block: an obscure shadow falls between one and the other. Because identification brings desire into being (Borch-Jacobsen 47) and precipitates incipient action, the colonizer has the monopoly of desire, since he alone can follow its path to its predestined fulfillment: he alone can indulge the voracious desire to assimilate the other in the near-certainty of its satisfaction. (5) For the colonized subject, by contrast, desiring is itself ambiguous, because it is sundered from any immediate prospect of possessing its object: the birth of desire, as it were, coincides with its traumatization. The present essay has a narrow critical aim and, after this introduction, rarely lifts its eye from the Joycean text. My first task will be to read "A Painful Case" in the light of those pathologizations of identification and desire I outlined above. In dramatizing the vicissitudes of both these processes, the story highlights a crucial distinction between them. If James Duffy symptomatizes the impairment of identification (basically he disavows it), Emily Sinico symptomatizes the fate of desire, whose prospects of fulfillment are blocked. In effect, the story genders these processes, attributing failed identifications to the male and frustrated desires to the female. My main task, however, will be to link these two processes to the basic metaphorics that structures the plot. While Duffy insistently attracts metaphors of elevation, Sinico attracts those of falling: ascent is his mode of organizing his world, while descent is hers. Duffy's failed attempts to occupy the higher ground match her repeated sinkings down to the ground. Their separate dispositions confirm the colonial pathology I have sketched Out: his aspirations to rise meet an impassable block, while the burden of her thwarted desires makes a fall seem inevitable. …

Journal Article
22 Mar 2001-Style
TL;DR: The lack of critical attention to Melville's style may be a matter of timing with regard to when he began writing his tales as discussed by the authors, which is the period just prior to 1853 that has been the focus of most scholarly attention.
Abstract: That Herman Melville found a locus of generative power in language's multiple possibilities--uses, meanings, and expressions--is unquestioned. Curiously absent, however, among the major studies of Melville's short fiction is discussion of just that: how Melville's style relates to his larger rhetorical choices during the writing of his serialized fiction, 1853-56. (1) Only R. Bruce Bickley, in The Method of Melville's Short Fiction, declares to connect Melville's "fictional methods" with his overall artistic vision (x). Bickley's aim is not sentence style, however, but an examination of "structure, narration, and characterization" as those elements contribute to the "essential meanings of his tales" (xi). Though described differently, Bickley's discussion of Melville's "technique" is actually another analysis of the topical patterns in the tales exposing the ironic stance of Melville's first person narrators (126). The lack of critical attention to Melville's style may be a matter of timing with regard to when he began writing his tales. Critically, it is the period just prior to 1853 that has been the focus of most scholarly attention to Melville's stylistic thrusts. In Brian Foley's words, "during the years 1848-51, while Melville's imagination was teeming with new ideas gleaned from his reading, he sought a new mode of expression, one that could encompass a multiplicity of modes" (267). With that backdrop, it's not surprising that Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre have become central works in the Melville canon for examining Melville's stylistic concerns. As appropriate as that may be, it still does not fully explain why such inquiry would not be directed into what is Melville's most mature period as a publishing author. One obvious explanation is that Melville's ideas invite attention. That is, as John Bryant says in the introduction to Melville's Evermoving Dawn (1997), as "traveler, ethnographer, allegorist, humorist, tragedian, philosopher, closet dramatist, psychologist, biographer, novelist, talespinner, and poet," Melville "could speak volumes" (5). Two other reasons are implicitly manifest in Michael Kearns's analysis of Melville's style: "the critics who argue most persuasively recognize that Melville's style has a rhetorical effect that can be connected in some way to his interest in what's inexplicable, ineffable about human experience" (54). One, this suggests that because Melville scholars have historically connected his style to larger metaphysical concerns, we have come to accept benignly this relation without close analysis of the syntactical component in his sentences; and, two, because Melville's metaphysical "ideas" are seen as his most defining characteristic as an author, less emphasis is placed on his stylistic innovations. To these explanations I would like to add one more: the lack of analysis of Melville's style in his serialized fiction between 1853 and 1856 is due to the implicit yet prominently hel d belief that the hermeneutical key to understanding Melville's narrative artistry is best seen in analysis of his longer prose narratives. (2) If style as a rhetorical choice is central to Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre, then it is worth examining during Melville's tenure as a serial writer between 1853 and 1856. Indeed, from the linguistic minimalism of Bartleby in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," the epitaph inscribed on Oberlus's gravestone in the "Encantadas," to the court documents in "Benito Cereno," it is clear that Melville's concern with language uses, meanings, and expressions continues into his short fiction. For these reasons, Melville's short fiction is worth closer examination in the way his syntactical sentence structures inform an understanding of his larger rhetorical choices during the period 1853 through 1856. (3) As arguably the most stylistically embellished tale in the Melville ouevre, "The Piazza Tale" is exemplary for analysis. What makes "The Piazza Tale" unique in the context of the other stories in the Piazza Tales collection (1856) is that it was written exclusively to introduce the collection, and as an introduction it anticipates in rhetorical purpose many moves Melville makes in the other tales. …

Journal Article
22 Jun 2001-Style
TL;DR: Anorexia nervosa is an identity crisis and can only be understood through the tragic splitting of body from mind as discussed by the authors, which can be traced back to the beginning of the daughter's struggle to separate from the mother and argues that anorexia s cause is to be found in an inadequate rite of passage from girlhood to motherhood.
Abstract: Extreme thinness, cessation of the menses, growth of facial and body hair, sexual indifference, strenuous regimens of exercise, repetitious behavior patterns, lack of speech, insomnia, cognitive, temporal and visual distortions, disturbed attitudes toward eating, fondness for solitude, and suicidal ideation are all signs of the anorexic condition. For individuals with eating disorders, food becomes the abject. As soon as food is something to be taken into the body, to cross its boundary and transform the corporeal space, it becomes terrifying for them. They measure it meticulously and devote intense energy to counting calories. Invariably they feel repelled by and frightened of their own bodies. Perceived as somehow extraneous to the self-structure, bodies must be controlled, but ultimately anorexics feel powerless to control them. "Anorexia is, above all," Kim Chernin explains, "an illness of self-division and can only be understood through this tragic splitting of body from mind" (The Obsession 47). But wh y do so many women starve themselves so? Why do they shun the good things in life and insist on clinging to a self-destructive disease? Why do they seek literally to make their bodies "not-matter"? For anorexia, the repertoire of originating factors delineated by experts is complex and lengthy. It includes psychic or attitudinal conditions, familial and cultural factors, and somatic variables. From a Freudian position, Chernin journeys back to the beginnings of the daughter's struggle to separate from the mother and argues that anorexia s cause is to be found in an inadequate rite of passage from girlhood to motherhood. "For a woman," Chernin writes, "to develop into her full womanhood she must surmount the guilt that arises from her fantasy of having damaged the mother through the force of her oral aggression and rage" (The Hungry Self 120). From the Jungian concept of the animus, Noelle Caskey suggests psychic incest as anorexia's cause. Michele Montrelay describes anorexia as a substitute for masculine access to castration that offers a way for women to bypass the problem of lacking the means to represent lack (qtd. in Vice 198). According to Hilde Bruch, a foremost authority on eating disorders, an orexia is a reaction to the confusion of role demands women confront and the ambivalence about one's gender. For Peter Dally and Joan Gomez, it is a response to intellectual effort, professional achievement and the social context in which they take place. In this respect Deborah Perlick and Brett Silverstein argue that the syndrome "is particularly likely to affect women who strive to achieve in areas traditionally dominated by men and who come to feel limited by being female, particularly if their mothers were unable to achieve in these areas" (80). Salvador Minuchin has studied correlations between anorexia and disturbed family functioning. Susan C. Wooley has found in sexual abuse an etiological factor. Paul Garfinkel and David Garner argue that hypothalamic dysfunction might be a primary cause of the disease. For Naomi Wolf, anorexia is a culturally-engendered disorder directed against our culture's skeletal standard of bodily attractiveness for women. Likewise, Marcia Germaine Hutchinson attributes the c urrent epidemic to the influence of the media. Although researchers are divided as to the primary cause of the disease and the most appropriate therapy, they agree on its target: to seize selfhood, gain a sense of self or, in Kim Hewitt's words, "to initiate oneself into a new state" (42). (2) Sheila MacLeod, an anorexic herself, notes that "in becoming anorexic I did the only thing I could. [...]I adopted the only strategy open to me in order to preserve any sort of identity, however precarious, and in order to believe in myself as an individual being, separate from both the family and the school. Anorexia nervosa is fundamentally about an identity crisis" (54). Similarly, in The Obsession, Chernin writes: "'I don't want to be an imitation,' says the anorexic girl. …

Journal Article
22 Jun 2001-Style
TL;DR: For example, Inside Daisy Clover (1965) as discussed by the authors is a classic example of post-recording scenes where women come to recognize the industrial practices that have alienated them from themselves as women and as performers.
Abstract: When Daisy Clover begins screaming, hurling her body against the glass of the recording booth, it is as if her voice has disappeared. Displaced in the cavernous darkness of the sound-stage, her voice ricochets from the antiseptic, elevated control room off the giant screen where a black and white image of a happy Daisy tips her hat and mimes a song, smiling for all she's worth. As Raymond Swan, the head of the studio, rushes out of the control room toward the booth, the opening and closing doors provide us aural fragments of the sound a woman makes when her voice has lost all connection to her self. This scene has been the film's dramatic climax. For the next nine minutes of screen-time, Daisy refuses to speak. As I have argued elsewhere, in classical Hollywood cinema "woman's natural ability to speak is interrupted, made difficult, or conditioned to a suffocating degree by sound technology itself [...] It is the very recording process that fractures a woman's body and voice into irreconcilable pieces" (5). In films such as Inside Daisy Clover (1965), scenes of post-recording (also known as dubbing, looping, re-recording, or additional dialogue replacement [ADR]) become a site where women come to recognize the industrial practices that have alienated them from themselves as women and as performers. Such scenes also necessarily expose the very processes by which film creates an impossible female image--and in so doing supplants, undermines, or domesticates the female performer. In films of the post-studio era, sound technology becomes a stand-in for "Hollywood" as an industry, and it is through the attitude expressed toward technology in the scenes of re-recording that a film's attitude toward Hollywood is expressed. The model for the conjunction of re-recording and its effect on the female performer can be found in one of the canonical texts of the studio era, Singin' in the Rain (1952). In this classic fifties musical, aspiring young singer Kathy Selden's career is almost sacrificed when the unpleasant silent film star Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) needs a voice-double. There are two scenes of dubbing. The first shows how at every point sound technology initiates a circuit of exchange in which parts of one woman substitute for another. The scene begins with a huge close-up of a microphone. The camera pulls back to show Kathy, watched by the man she loves, singing a love song in front of an orchestra. As she sings, we dissolve to a close-up of a phonograph record. The camera again pulls back to show Lina Lamont trying to sing along while standing at the end of a huge megaphone with "Monument Pictures" printed on it. Dissolve to a shot of technicians sitting under a battery of cameras and flashing red lights as the actors perf orm the song on a film set. The "live" performance fades from color to black and white and we have the final product--Lina's performance and Kathy's voice. In the second scene, Kathy is dubbing Lina's speaking voice. Kathy and Don (Gene Kelly) are in a dark recording studio, hemmed in on all sides by technology: a mixing board in the foreground, a screen within the screen dominating the background, a microphone between Don and Kathy, and perched in a corner a megaphone casting an ominous shadow over them. The dialogue Kathy recites and the romantic song "Would You?" she sang earlier express what we know to be her true romantic feelings, while we watch the process whereby her words are misattributed to a fiction (the movie character) and a rival (Lina Lamont). Any harshness in the film's satire of studio/star-practice is offset by the film's happy ending (the star's shortcomings exposed, the young singer instantly acclaimed) and by that refuge of the essentially comfortable--an in-joke. In both scenes, it is Debbie Reynolds' Kathy who is dubbed: the "speaking" voice by Jean Hagen (the actress with the "bad" voice) and the singing voice by Betty Royce (Wagner). …