Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Modernism, Narrative and Humanism: Conclusion: Humanness unbound

/pdf/narrativa-digital-uma-abordagem-multimodal-na-aprendizagem-25w8z8wg30.pdf

Narrativa digital: uma abordagem multimodal na aprendizagem de inglês

Reading the Uninteresting: Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August: An Indian Story

In Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Peter Brooks argues that in novels of nineteenth-century Britain and France, the prostitute "exemplifies the modem narrateable" [Brooks 162]. Faced with a spectacle of social conformity that seemed to reflect a fully administered life, novelists turned their gaze to the deviant social "depths" in order to tap a world still storied, one that seemed to elude and resist the pervasive pressures of the law. Reading Balzac and Eugene Sue, Brooks isolates the prostitute as figure for and point of access to what he calls "that eminently storied subworld, realm of power, magic, and danger" [162]. Yet if nineteenth-century writers were seduced by the lure of an eroticized deviance, it is also true, according to Brooks, that they feared absorption into those very depths that engaged their fancy. The persistent tendency to cast the prostitute as ineffaceably marked by her association with urban degradation is a symptomatic displacement: it reveals the writer's need to stand apart, to define himself against a susceptible other [150]. Brooks's argument thus accounts for the doubled quality of the response, the fascination and the fear, that the figure of the prostitute elicits. This doubled response emerges out of a tension between an aesthetic desideratum, the need for a narrateable, "literary" character, and a more strictly social anxiety, the fear of a fall. I begin with Brooks because his interpretation introduces an illuminating disjunction between the prostitute's "literariness" and her status as a social threat. Despite the fact that social conditions produce the prostitute's allure, as "the narrateable" this figure serves a distinctly aesthetic function. While the disjunction might be said to occur at the level of Brooks's own account (where the principle of the narrateable transcends any particular social configuration), constructions of prostitutes and fallen women in nineteenthcentury realist fiction do typically exhibit a complex interplay of social and "literary" concerns, although of course the "literary" concerns are always

Prostitution's artful guise

This article investigates Henry James's The Princess Casamassima to stress how realism emerges as a powerful personal and collective reparatory fantasy. By analyzing the "unnatural alliances" that mark Hyacinth's options throughout the novel, this article emphasizes how the personal narrative (Hyacinth's family history) is entangled in the collective narrative (the Revolution), and how the realist plot of personal drama echoes the revolutionary plot written out on the grand social scale. In fact, it is argued, both evolve as responses to a highly conflicted drama of filiation (akin to a Freudian family romance), in which deficient origins demand reenactment and supplementation.

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

Modernism, Narrative and Humanism: Conclusion: Humanness unbound

Narrativa digital: uma abordagem multimodal na aprendizagem de inglês

Reading the Uninteresting: Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August: An Indian Story

Prostitution's artful guise

An "unnatural alliance": Realism and Revolution in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima