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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Newcomb: The Imagined World of Charles Dickens

The Imagined World of Charles Dickens

Mildred Newcomb

Mildred Newcomb reconciles the contradiction between endless variety and persistent reiteration in Dickens by demonstrating that the fanciful inventions are all variations on a stable set of themes. These themes constitute Dickens's mode of experience: his way of converting the people, things, and events he encountered into a “totally felt” experience. Combined into a myth or allegory, these felt interpretations in turn became a total belief system.

Professor Newcomb discusses the concept of death-related and life-related images, whose ability to group by analogy or association into pictorial clusters of Gestalts creates pictures with complex interrelationships among their parts. Newcomb explores the marsh/river configurations as death-related images and the significance of the clock/watch and the nature/toy/book configurations as life-related images. She also develops the images of the blighted garden, adults disguised as children, and children suspended in an Edenic enchanted world within these configurations. Finally, she explores the implications of ghosts, graveyards, fire, and trees.

Just as the individual images combine and interweave into unified pictures, so do these pictures combine and interact and merge complexly together to create a dense texture of meaning. In addition, a single image can insinuate an entire picture into an apparently unrelated description. The result is a totally felt interpretation of life without speculation or digression from the author.

Newcomb concludes that the world Dickens imagined is clearly evident from a study of his various images and themes. He tells the story of a nineteenth-century Everyman as he travels from life to death along a road beset with dangers imperiling his soul.

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Warhol: Gendered Interventions

Gendered Interventions

Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel

Robyn R. Warhol

A project in “feminist narratology,” Gendered Interventions is the first book to bring together these two vital movements in contemporary literary theory. Until now, most narratologists have ignored gender in their systematic study of the “narratee” in fiction; feminists—always interested in pointing to signs of gendered differences in texts—have studied “story” but not “discourse” in novels. They have used narratology’s insights to examine what is told, but not how it is told. Robyn Warhol argues that the two approaches are reconcilable, that feminism can give narratology a grounding in historical context, and that narratology can give feminism a precise method and vocabulary for identifying signs of gender in the way texts are written.

Though the applicability of feminist narratology is by no means limited to one period or genre, Gendered Interventions illustrates the theory with reference to realist novels (by Gaskell, Stowe, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and others) written in the mid-nineteenth century. The “interventions” in question are instances of direct authorial address, where “omniscient” narrators pause in their storytelling to speak to “you.” This study identifies a gendered difference in the ways men’s narrators are generally more self-consciously distancing, literary, and metafictional; whereas women’s are generally more engaging, earnest, and reality-directed in their interventions.

Victorian women, with rare exceptions banned from all public forums, used interventions in realist novels to transmit serious political, social, and religious messages beyond their domestic circles. From the preachers who were their fathers, brothers, and husbands, they borrowed the exhortative address to “you,” a trope that was gendered masculine when delivered from a pulpit or platform, but came to be gendered feminine in fiction. Warhol argues that the feminine connotations of direct address in novels are responsible for the low critical reputation the technique has always held; and she asks why literary theory has avoided the trope until now.

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Phelan: Reading People, Reading Plots

Reading People, Reading Plots

Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative

James Phelan

James Phelan, skillfully combining practical and theoretical criticism, presents an original, coherent system for analyzing two fundamental elements of narrative—character and progression. Arguing persuasively for a rhetorical approach to these elements, Phelan offers detailed readings of novels by Austen, Dickens, James, Orwell, Hemingway, Fowles, Calvino, and others. These readings also illustrate and elaborate a new set of principles and methods for analyzing narrative as rhetoric. In addition, Phelan engages in a fascinating series of metacritical discussions that distinguish his method from other modes of interpretation and demonstrate the implications of his system for numerous significant issues in the interpretation of narrative

In the course of his arguments about Pride and Prejudice, 1984, and “The Beast in the Jungle” Phelan provides a new, carefully nuanced account of the nature and function of theme in narrative. His analyses of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Great Expectations, and If on a winter’s night a traveler reveal the ways in which an author’s calling attention to a character’s artificiality can influence narrative dynamics, especially by complicating the relations among a narrative’s implied audiences. Finally, as Phelan assesses the nature, context, and consequences of what he regards as the sexist characterization of Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms, he provides a model of resistant reading.

Phelan’s attention to the intricacies of character and progression is deeply revealing of the complex communications sophisticated story-tellers invite their readers to share. Phelan’s skill in theoretical argument will make Reading People, Reading Plots of challenging interest to other theorists, including those whose competing claims he so fully and fairly examines. At the same time, his precise, closely focused discussions of individual works will be welcomed by practical critics and classroom teachers as contributions of genuine originality and freshness.

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