Jacobson: Neodomestic American Fiction

Neodomestic American Fiction

Kristin J. Jacobson

In American literature, domestic fictions—that is, novels focused on the home and homemaking—are linked with white, middle-class women’s fiction and culture. Employing a spatial lens, Neodomestic American Fiction joins and extends other studies in redefining domestic fiction’s literary history and definition. Unlike previous redefinitions and reevaluations, Neodomestic American Fiction reads domestic novels alongside feminist geography and architectural history to map the links and disjunctions among a range of authors writing during the same period as well as across centuries and cultures. Kristin Jacobson’s attention to domestic geographies reveals that a new space and subgenre emerge in the 1980s: neodomestic fiction.

In this innovative study, Kristin Jacobson identifies over thirty novels that renovate traditional forms, therefore challenging model domesticity’s conservative gender, racial, and sexual politics. Rather than produce stable single-family homes, neodomestic fictions advance a politics of instability characterized by mobility, renovation and redesign, and relational space. These “alternative” domesticities—when read in the context of neodomestic fiction—are not marginal but rather central to domesticity’s configurations. Such resistance, as Iris Marion Young argues, “is integral to modern political theory and is not an alternative to it.”

Thus, this spatial analysis of post-1980 domestic novels does not indicate a post-feminist or post-gender world. Rather, neodomestic fiction’s heterogeneous, unstable spaces offer opportunities to examine contemporary hierarchies and experiment with more egalitarian homemaking. These fictions include Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes, and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life.

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Lawrence: Techniques for Living

Techniques for Living

Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose

Karen R. Lawrence

Christine Brooke-Rose is a writer, critic, and narrative theorist whose extraordinarily varied body of work tests the relationship between twentieth-century theory and fiction in unparalleled ways. As they rupture “the relics of nineteenth-century ideologies,” Brooke-Rose’s fictional experiments offer new ways to theorize life and formulate conduct in the new world orders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specifically addressing the loss of our ability to differentiate reality from what she calls “the unreal,” her novels mime the various “deaths” and absences described in contemporary literary theory, registering these absences technically, ontologically, and emotionally in linguistic and grammatical “constraints.” Rather than melancholy or self-enclosed exercises, however, her writing draws creative vitality out of the loss and limitation it examines. Deploying twentieth-century discourses drawn from technology, literary theory, astronomy, evolutionary biology, and popular culture, her vital, often humorous, fictions offer survival strategies for the genre of the novel. They offer new forms for telling the human story within the unreality of contemporary life.

In Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose, Karen R. Lawrence explains how Brooke-Rose’s career invites revision of contemporary literary histories and theories of postmodernism. With her highly original narrative forms, Brooke-Rose significantly contributes to the radical evolution of narrative in modernism’s wake. In its singular focus on the lively and prolific experiments of this writer/critic/theorist, Techniques for Living lays the groundwork for further challenges to our generalized versions of postmodernism, as it also provides a fascinating reading of a highly original writer.

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Punday: Five Strands of Fictionality

Five Strands of Fictionality

The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction

Daniel Punday

Fictions, we are so often told, are everywhere in America today. The extravagant claims of advertising are everywhere, much of the day’s news concerns “pseudo-events” like rallies or ceremonies staged so that they can be reported on, and philosophers doubt even the possibility of any knowledge being objective. Thus we seem less and less able to distinguish between the real and the invented.

In Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction, Daniel Punday examines the “postmodern” expansion of fictionality—the feeling today that the line between the real and the invented is harder to draw—and argues that this feeling reflects a struggle by different cultural groups to define how we tell and use “literary” stories. He discusses the literary texts of John Barth, Alice Walker, and Ishmael Reed; paraliterary forms like science fiction and electronic writing; and resolutely nonliterary texts, especially role-playing games, in terms of how each responds to the institution of literature through its definition of fictionality.

For too long, postmodernism has been described by easy generalizations—relativist, indeterminate, commercialized—that have rendered the term nearly worthless. Punday applies a more nuanced understanding of fictionality to a variety of contemporary narrative forms that occupy different locations within postmodern literary culture. Approaching postmodernism as a configuration of institutions that legitimize fictionality, he illuminates the nature of creative writing and the conflicts between different literary groups in America today.

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DeFalco: Uncanny Subjects

Uncanny Subjects

Aging in Contemporary Narrative

Amelia DeFalco

In the United States anti-aging is a multibillion-dollar industry, and efforts to combat signs of aging have never been stronger, or more lucrative. Although there are many sociological studies of aging and culture, there are few studies that examine the ways cultural texts construct multiple narratives of aging that intersect and sometimes conflict with existing social theories of aging. In Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative, Amelia DeFalco contributes to the ongoing discourse of aging studies by incorporating methodologies and theories derived from the humanities in her investigation into contemporary representations of aging.

The movement of aging is the movement of our lives, and this dynamism aligns aging with narrative: both are a function of time, of change, of one event happening after another. Subjects understand their lives through narrative trajectories—through stories—not necessarily as they are living moment to moment, but in reflection, reflection that becomes, many argue, more and more prevalent as one ages. As a result, narrative fiction provides compelling representations of the strange—indeed uncanny—familiarity of the aging self.

In Uncanny Subjects, DeFalco explores a thematic similitude in a range of contemporary fiction and film by authors and directors such as John Banville, John Cassavetes, and Alice Munro. As their texts suggest, proceeding into old age involves a growing awareness of the otherness within, an awareness that reveals identity as multiple, shifting, and contradictory—in short, uncanny. Drawing together theories of the uncanny with research on aging and temporality, DeFalco argues that aging is a category of difference integral to a contemporary understanding of identity and alterity.

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Grandt: Shaping Words to Fit the Soul

Shaping Words to Fit the Soul

The Southern Ritual Grounds of Afro-Modernism

Jürgen E. Grandt

Taking up where he left off with Kinds of Blue (The Ohio State University Press, 2004), Jürgen E. Grandt seeks to explore in depth some of the implications of the modernist jazz aesthetic resonating in the African American literary tradition. Grandt’s new book, Shaping Words to Fit the Soul: The Southern Ritual Grounds of Afro-Modernism, probes the ways in which modernism’s key themes of fragmentation, alienation, and epistemology complicate the mapping of the American South as an “authenticating” locus of African American narrative. Rather than being a site of authentication, the South constitutes a symbolic territory that actually resists the very narrative strategies deployed to capture it.

The figurative ritual grounds traversed in texts by Frederick Douglass, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and Tayari Jones reveal Afro-modernism as modernism with a historical conscience. Since literary Afro-modernism recurrently points to music as a symbolic territory of liberatory potential, this study also visits a variety of soundscapes, from the sorrow songs of the slaves to the hip-hop of the Dirty South, and from the blues of W. C. Handy to the southern rock of the Allman Brothers Band.

Afro-modernism as modernism with a historical conscience thus suggests a reconfiguration of southern ritual grounds as situated in time and mind rather than time and place, and the ramifications of this process extend far above and beyond the Mason-Dixon Line.

Blackwell: The Quill and the Scalpel

The Quill and the Scalpel

Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science

Stephen H. Blackwell

Most famous as a literary artist, Vladimir Nabokov was also a professional biologist and a lifelong student of science. By exploring the refractions of physics, psychology, and biology within his art and thought, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science, by Stephen H. Blackwell, demonstrates how aesthetic sensibilities contributed to Nabokov’s scientific work, and how his scientific passions shape, inform, and permeate his fictions.

Nabokov’s attention to holistic study and inductive empirical work gradually reinforced his underlying suspicion of mechanistic explanations of nature. He perceived chilling parallels between the overconfidence of scientific progress and the dogmatic certainty of the Soviet regime. His scientific work and his artistic transfigurations of science underscore the limitations of human knowledge as a defining element of life. In provocative novels like Lolita, Pale Fire, The Gift, Ada, and others, Nabokov advances a surprisingly modest epistemology, urging skepticism toward all portrayals of nature, artistic and scientific. Simultaneously, he challenges his readers to recognize in the arts a vital branch of human discovery, one that both complements and informs traditional scientific research.

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Williams, ed.: Contemporary African American Fiction

Contemporary African American Fiction

New Critical Essays

Edited by Dana A. Williams

In Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays, edited by Dana A. Williams, eight contributors examine trends and ideas which characterize African American fiction since 1970. They investigate many of the key inquiries which inform discussions about the condition of contemporary African American fiction. The range of queries is wide and varied. How does African American fiction represent the changing times in America and the world? How are these changes reflected in narrative strategies or in narrative content? How do contemporary fictionists engage diasporic Africanisms, or how do they renegotiate Americanism? What is the impact of cultural production, gender, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity on this fiction? How does contemporary African American fiction reconstruct or rewrite earlier “classic” African American, American, or world literature? Authors under study include Ernest J. Gaines, Ishmael Reed, Edwidge Danticat, Octavia E. Butler, Olympia Vernon, Toni Morrison, and Reginald McKnight, among others.

These essays remind us that the African American literary tradition is about survival and liberation. The tradition is similarly about probing, challenging, changing, and redirecting accepted ways of thinking to ensure the wellness and the freedom of its community cohorts. The essays identify new ways contemporary African American fiction continues the tradition’s liberatory inclinations—they interrogate the ways in which antecedent texts and traditions influence contemporary texts to create new traditions.

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Lee: A Body of Individuals

A Body of Individuals

The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction

Sue-Im Lee

Why are some versions of the collective “we” admired and desired while other versions are scorned and feared? A Body of Individuals: The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction examines the conflict over the collective “we” through discourses of community. In the discourse of benevolent community, community is a tool towards achieving healing, productiveness, and connection. In the discourse of dissenting community, community that serves a function is simply another name for totalitarianism; instead, community must merely be a fact of coexistence. What are the sources and the appeal of these irreconcilable views of community, and how do they interact in contemporary fiction’s attempt at imagining “we”?

By engaging contemporary U.S. writers such as Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Lydia Davis, Lynne Tillman, and David Markson with theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, François Lyotard, Ernesto Laclau, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book reveals how the two conflicting discourses of community—benevolent and dissenting—are inextricably intertwined in various literary visions of “we”—“we” of the family, of the world, of the human, and of coexistence.

These literary visions demonstrate, in a way that popular visions of community and postmodern theories of community cannot, the dialectical relationship between the discourses of benevolent community and dissenting community. Sue-Im Lee argues that contemporary fiction’s inability to resolve the paradox results in a model of ambivalent community, one that offers unique insights into community and into the very notion of unity.

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MacKenzie: The Theatre of the Real

The Theatre of the Real

Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim

Gina Masucci MacKenzie

The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim traces the thread of jouissance (the simultaneous experience of radical pleasure and pain) through three major theatre figures of the twentieth century. Gina Masucci MacKenzie’s work engages theatrical text and performance in dialogue with the Lacanian Real, so as to re-envision modern theatre as the cultural site where author, actor, and audience come into direct contact with personal and collective traumas. By showing how a transgressively free subject may be formed through theatrical experience, MacKenzie concludes that modern theatre can liberate the individual from the socially constructed self.

The Theatre of the Real revises views of modern theatre by demonstrating how it can lead to a collaborative effort required for innovative theatrical work. By foregrounding Yeats’s “dancer” plays, the author shows how these intimate pieces contribute to the historical development of musical as well as modern theatre. Beckett’s universal dramas then pave the way for Sondheim’s postmodern cacophonies of idea and spirit as they introduce comic abjection into modernism’s tragic mode. This exciting work from a new author will leave readers with fresh insight to theatrical performance and its necessity in our lives.

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Mooney: The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality

The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality

Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth Century Novel

Susan Mooney

In The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel, Susan Mooney extensively examines four modernist and postmodernist novels that prompted in their day harsh external censorship because of their sexual content—Ulysses, Lolita, Time of Silence, and Russian Beauty. She shows how motifs of censorship, with all its restrictions, pressures, rules, judgments, and forms of negation, became artistically embedded in the novels’ plots, characters, settings, tropes, and themes. These novels contest censorship’s status quo and critically explore its processes and power. This study reveals the impact of censorship on literary creation, particularly in relation to the twentieth century’s growing interest in sexuality and its discourses.

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Parts: The Chekhovian Intertext

The Chekhovian Intertext

Dialogue with a Classic

Lyudmila Parts

In The Chekhovian Intertext Lyudmila Parts explores contemporary Russian writers’ intertextual engagement with Chekhov and his myth. She offers a new interpretative framework to explain the role Chekhov and other classics play in constructing and maintaining Russian national identity and the reasons for the surge in the number of intertextual engagements with the classical authors during the cultural crisis in post-perestroika Russia.

The book highlights the intersection of three distinct concepts: cultural memory, cultural myth, and intertextuality. It is precisely their interrelation that explains how intertextuality came to function as a defense mechanism of culture, a reaction of cultural memory to the threat of its disintegration.

In addition to offering close readings of some of the most significant short stories by contemporary Russian authors and by Chekhov, as a theoretical case study the book sheds light on important processes in contemporary literature: it explores the function of intertextuality in the development of Russian literature, especially post-Soviet literature; it singles out the main themes in contemporary literature, and explains their ties to national cultural myths and to cultural memory. The Chekhovian Intertext may serve as a theoretical model and impetus for examinations of other national literatures from the point of view of the relationship between intertextuality and cultural memory.

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Lothe, Hawthorn, and Phelan, eds.: Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad

Voice, Sequence, History, Genre

Edited by Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, James Phelan

Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre brings together essays by established critics of Conrad and by leading narratologists that explore Conrad’s innovative uses of narrative throughout his career. Collectively, these explorations by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, Susan Jones, Jakob Lothe, J. Hillis Miller, Zdzislaw Najder, Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, James Phelan, Christophe Robin, Allan H. Simmons, and John Stape amply demonstrate (1) that narrative theory, and especially some of its more recent developments, can help critics generate greater insight into the complexities of Conrad’s work; and (2) that a rigorous engagement with Conradian narrative can lead theorists to a further honing of their analytical tools. More particularly, the volume focuses on the four narrative issues identified in the subtitle, and it analyzes examples of Conrad’s fiction and nonfiction, from early work such as An Outcast of the Islands to his late work of reminiscence, A Personal Record. The volume also provides multiple perspectives on major works such as Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, a cluster of three essays on Nostromo and history, and an afterword by the editors that looks ahead to future work on the interrelations of Conrad and narrative theory.

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Franke: Modernist Heresies

Modernist Heresies

British Literary History, 1883–1924

Damon Franke

In Modernist Heresies, Damon Franke presents the discourse of heresy as central to the intellectual history of the origins of British modernism. The book examines heretical discourses from literature and culture of the fin de siècle and the Edwardian period in order to establish continuities between Victorian blasphemy and modernist obscenity by tracing the dialectic of heresy and orthodoxy, and the pragmatic shifting of both heterodox and authoritative discourses.

Franke documents the untold history of the Cambridge Heretics Society and places the concerns of this discussion society in dialogue with contemporaneous literature by such authors as Pater, Hardy, Shaw, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and Orwell. Since several highly influential figures of the modernist literati were members of the Heretics or in dialogue with the group, heresy and its relation to synthesis now become crucial to an understanding of modernist aesthetics and ethics.

From the 1880s through the 1920s, heresy commonly appears in literature as a discursive trope, and the literary mode of heresy shifts over the course of this time from one of syncretism to one based on the construction of modernist artificial or “synthetic” wholes. In Franke’s work, the discourse of heresy comes forth as a forgotten dimension of the origins of modernism, one deeply entrenched in Victorian blasphemy and the crisis in faith, and one pointing to the censorship of modernist literature and some of the first doctrines of literary criticism.

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Beja and Norris, eds.: Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis

Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis

Essays

Edited by Morris Beja and David Norris

This volume collects the best essays from the 1992 International James Joyce Symposium held in Dublin, which had as its title “In the Heart of Hibernian Metropolis.” Dublin, of course, has special attraction for Joyceans as both the source and subject matter of Joyce's genius, but the essays reproduced here reflect—like the symposium itself—the newest and most exciting trends in Joyce scholarship from around the world.

Tyson: Psychological Politics of the American Dream

Psychological Politics of the American Dream

The Commodification of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Lois Tyson

Because literature is a repository of both society's ideologies and its psychological conflicts, it has the capacity to reveal aspects of a culture's collective psyche: the ways in which ideological investments reveal the nature of individuals' psychological relationship to the world. While it is reasonable to assume that our national literature would offer a fertile field in which to explore the interaction between the ideological and psychological dimensions of American life, critics generally have kept these two domains separate, and the dominant model has consisted of an archaic notion of the individual in society. The two are seen as interactive but essentially discrete entities, often in polarized opposition in which the autonomous individual is a victim of an antagonistic American society.

Lois Tyson's ground-breaking work, Psychological Politics of the American Dream, seeks to draw together these disparate spheres by applying a new dialectical model of existential subjectivity to five representative works of twentieth-century American literature: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Joseph Heller's Something Happened. While previous literary analyses frequently portray the individuals in these works in opposition to society, Tyson ably demonstrates that the texts instead reveal the intersection of psyche—or the self as a product of individual psychological experience—and the socius—or the self as social product—in the American dream, which through its inherent relation to commodification responds to our desire to escape existential inwardness: that anxious awareness of ourselves as creatures, in Heidegger's words, whose “very being is at issue” in an uncertain world.

These five works illustrate the diversity and complexity of the psychological realities American literature can reveal, given a model of subjectivity adequate to the task. Taken together, they point to a growing collusion of psyche and socius: the desire to escape existential inwardness becomes an increasingly “viable” project with the increasing commodification of American national culture.

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Beja and Benstock, eds.: Coping with Joyce

Coping with Joyce

Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium

Edited by Morris Beja and Shari Benstock

Coping with Joyce brings together eighteen scholars who contributed to making the 1986 International Joyce Symposium a landmark in Joycean studies. Their diverse approaches to the intricate Joyce corpus, from Dubliners and Exiles to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, reflect the important changes that have taken place in the scholarly world during recent years, as traditional and post-traditional theorists and critics have found in James Joyce a major area of investigation and interpretation. Five major addresses offer a litany of perspectives: historical biographical, cultural, thematic, linguistic, textual, and sexual. These perspectives are further developed in the subsequent critical studies. Coping with Joyce provides a cross-section of the latest in James Joyce studies, the most recent views of several well-established Joyce scholars and the work of some newer critics in the field.

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Slatoff: The Look of Distance

The Look of Distance

Reflections on Suffering and Sympathy in Modern Literature—Auden to Agee, Whitman to Woolf

Walter J. Slatoff

Professor Slatoff is concerned with the question whether the reading and teaching of literature can be considered decent occupations in a world so much ordered by suffering as the one we inhabit; and his book explores this question by examining in detail a variety of responses to suffering—by authors, readers, and fictional characters. He is particularly interested in such issues as the relative merits of too much compassion as against too little; the relations between compassion and self-crucifixion; the appropriate distances between humans, between humans and other animals, and even between gods and men; the possibilities of human connection and the curious ways people have found to remain simultaneously together and apart; and “what might be called ‘moral aerodynamics’: the motions of highfliers like Icarus, Jesus, Vittorio Mussolini, and Jame Joyce, and the impacts of all sorts of things—from boys to bombs to violets—that can fall from the sky.” He has important things to say too about what he calls “the lonely embraces of artists” and how these generate and shape literary creations.

In a work that covers a remarkable range of major writers, and in which “fiction and reality have not been able to keep their usual distances,’ Professor Slatoff brings into a series of illuminating conjunctions a variety of writers and literary forms (stories, novels, poems, plays, essays, even songs) not usually brought together. He does so in an unconventionally personal voice and manner that he hopes will close to some extent what he regards as an uncomfortable gap between conventional modes of discourse about literature itself, a gap he finds “not only uncomfortable but indecent” when the subject is suffering and sympathy

Professor Slatoff sees his book as “the exposure of a way of responding to literature, a way that offers the reader some of the freedoms and opportunities afforded by current modes of criticism but without depriving the text of its more traditional powers and integrity. It is a way that enables a reader to exercise his sympathies, allows a story to become . . . ‘an occasion for coexistence imaginatively with a fictional person’s way of feeling’; it allows one to be educated or angered by a text, to let a text speak for one, to quarrel with it or simply to be in awe of it—in short, to respond in all the ways a live individual reader, as opposed to a theoretical one, might wish to respond to a text. It allows, finally, . . . the act of reading and writing to be a way of bearing witness, or, to use the language of Martin Buber, . . . a way of being ‘attentive’ and presenting ourselves with less than our usual armor.”

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Beja, Gontarski, and Astier, eds.: Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Humanistic Perspectives

Edited by Morris Beja, S. E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier

This collection of original essays has been assembled to honor Samuel Beckett on his seventy-fifth birthday—a celebration to which the writer himself has made his own contribution in the form of a play especially written for the occasion and entitled Ohio Impromptu. This special piece appears in an appendix to the volume, where it has been reproduced, through a combination of photographic facsimile and textual transcription, in various versions through which it evolved to its final form

Samuel Becket—the Irishman who lives permanently in France and writes primarily in French (though he translates everything he writes into either English or French, depending on the original language of composition)—has achieved fame throughout the world for his work in fiction, drama, and film. A particularly multicultural writer, Beckett’s intellectual interests are so broad and so diverse that his writings in all media are best approached from a variety of disciplines; and this is the approach adopted by the editors of this collection. They have included, not only detailed treatments of literary matters, but also close examinations of such topics as, among others, Beckett’s theater in performance, the philosophical traditions against which he writes, his sense of history and politics, his close relation with the visual arts, the complex uses to which his language is put, and his effort to write “without style.” The result is a series of critical essays that come close to being the measures of the man and the artist they honor—the writer found particularly congenial to he modern sensibility as one in whose work the illusions and deceptions of the outer world resist each system that attempts a faithful, comprehensive, and coherent account, and that, in the end, must inevitably collapse under too great a weight of enigma and error.

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Henke: Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook

Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook

A Study of Ulysses

Suzette A. Henke

Though most critics have been quick to acknowledge the innovative nature of James Joyce’s stylistic experiments, few have pointed out the radical content of Ulysses or the revolutionary view of consciousness that is implicit in the novel.

Suzette Henke makes use of various Continental methods of literary criticism to reconstruct Ulysses as a fictional life-world, and draws upon phenomenology, Geneva criticism, psychoanalytic investigation, and linguistic analysis to illumine the progress of the narrative. Existential philosophy provides the point of departure from which she demonstrates how the principles of Heidegger and Sartre elucidate the humanistic dimensions of Joyce’s work. Ulysses, she maintains, is no mere tour de force: it has meaning “from and in life” and is significant to us as moral beings.

According to Professor Henke, Joyce’s characters move from a world of solipsistic fear to one of shared experience, and from psychological enclosure to an existential liberation of consciousness. Joyce, she suggests, was far ahead of his contemporaries in his understanding of social interaction and psychological development. In Ulysses, he questions traditional notions of identity and reality, of conjugal appropriation and egocentric privilege, and delights in the capaciousness of the human imagination, implying that every individual can become an “artist of life” through myth, sympathy, and creative fantasy.

Dr. Henke offers an original and innovative reading of Ulysses that challenges traditional interpretations and reveals dimensions of the text that have hiterto gone unnoticed or unexplained. Joyce himself, in the later, more experimental episodes of the novel, provides the key to this new understanding, when he insists that the reader, like the characters, explore the ramifications of both temporal and ethical relativity. We are expected to be “time-travelers” in defiance of a serial definition of literature, and are forced, finally, to apprehend the entire novel as a contemporaneous object of consciousness, an autotelic and self-referential phenomenon. The ultimate subject of Ulysses becomes the mind beholding itself in an act of transcendental, creative perception.

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Burkman: The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter

The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter

Its Basis in Ritual

Katherine H. Burkman

The drama of Harold Pinter evolves in an atmosphere of mystery in which the surfaces of life are realistically detailed but the patterns that underlie them remain obscure. Despite the vivid naturalism of his dialogue, his characters often behave more like figures in a dream than like persons with whom one can easily identify. Pinter has on one occasion admitted that, if pressed, he would define his art as realistic but would not describe what he does as realism. Here he points to what his audience has often sensed is distinctive in his style: its mixture of the real and surreal, its exact portrayal of life on the surface, and its powerful evocation of that life that lies beneath the surface.

Katherine H. Burkman rejects the contention of some Pinter critics that the playwright seeks to mystify and puzzle his audience. To the contrary, she argues, he is exploring experience at levels that are mysterious, and is a poetic rather than a problem-solving playwright. The poetic images of the play, moreover, are based in ritual; and just as the ancient Greeks attempted to understand the mysteries of life by drawing upon the most primitive of religious rites, so Pinter employs ritual in his drama for his own tragicomic purposes.

The author explores two distinct kinds of ritual that Pinter develops in counterpoint. His plays abound in those daily habitual activities that have become formalized as ritual and have tended to become empty of meaning, but these automatic activities are set in contrast with sacrificial rites that are loaded with meaning, and force the characters to a painful awareness of life from which their daily routines have served to protect them.

Pinter’s ritual counterpoint is one that reveals the writer’s keen awareness of the rhythms of modern life as well as his awareness of those profound rhythms of sacrificial destruction and renewal that have always informed the best of drama. The playwright explores the celebration that accompanies the most cruel rituals of life, and his plays become an initiation for us from which we may emerge with a clearer insight and some feeling of renewal. It is in Pinter’s highly individual treatment of ancient ritual rhythms that Burkman finds the major import of his compelling art.

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