Characters In Novels Research Articles

Sideshadowing and Tempics.

Sideshadowing and Tempics Gary Saul Morson (bio) Tempics and the Bias of the Artifact Time is of the essence. All of us directly experience our lives as opening into an uncertain future. We possess no guarantee that each event in our lives will prove to be of significance or will fit a meaningful pattern. But successful narrative art, unlike life, does typically ensure such significance, which is one reason almost everyone senses the artificiality of even the most realistic story. However precise the author may be in recording the texture of daily life, the very fact of a work’s structure renders its temporality radically different from that of real life. 1 In life, most people would regard it as futile to forecast one’s future on the basis of what would make the most effective story. But in reading literature, this way of thinking about characters’ lives is often justified. In novels there is a point when all loose threads must be tied together. But real time is an ongoing process without anything resembling literary closure. Writers who have wanted to represent time as open have therefore sometimes struggled against this narrative demand for structure and closure. And yet for very good reasons, a work without these twin insurers of unity is likely not to be effective at all. It appears that literary structure is not neutral with respect to philosophies of time. Lessing contended that art forms carry inherent predispositions, 2 and we may say that narratives, insofar as they rely on structure, are predisposed to convey a sense of fatalism, determinism, or otherwise closed time. It is relatively easy to make a narrative’s temporality isomorphic with—the same shape as—closed time, but many writers have felt it almost impossible to create isomorphism with open time. That was the task set by those two extreme devotees of realism, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—Tolstoy in order to represent the radical contingency of the world and Dostoevsky to represent human freedom. They developed remarkably interesting ways to resist the bias of the artifact—to overcome what I like to call Lessing’s curse. Their most interesting method for doing so was a device I have named sideshadowing. [End Page 599] Let me project beyond my own examples and my earlier work to where I want to go in the future. It seems to me that the history of poetics, from Aristotle to the present, has, for all the variety of interpretive schools, almost always found meaning in narrative by reading out its eventness. A poetic reading shows us how the unfolding of incidents completes a pattern, how the work, when finished, is graspable as a synchronic structure that has simply required time to unfold. The work is spatialized, and so real eventfulness exists only for the characters. For the reader, the work becomes graspable in all its artfulness after reading is over, when it is contemplated as a whole or reread. Indeed, for an experienced reader, even a first reading constitutes an anticipated rereading. Time becomes symmetrical, so that events may be explained not only by what precedes them but also by where they must lead to complete the structure in the best possible way. The future is given, as is the past, and the present moment of any event possesses no special meaning. But in life, and for most novelistic characters, time is asymmetrical. While the past is fixed, the future is experienced as open and the present possesses real presentness, in which the weight of chance and choice may lead to many different outcomes. From this sense of presentness, we derive the capacity for regret and other emotions that depend on an uncertain future and a momentous present. Unlike most art, life is genuinely eventful and set in open time, with loose ends and without closure. And yet, some artworks have managed to overcome the bias of the artifact and convey a sense of open and asymmetrical time. Contemplating such works, critics, largely by default, have continued to read poetically and force a structure where one is lacking. The signs of ill-fit between work and interpretive method are apparent, but there is nothing else...

Worldview and the Use of the Near White Heroine in Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces

I first became aware of Pauline Hopkins in 1976 while researching my dissertation, The Mulatto Woman as Major Female Character in Novels by Black Women: 1892-1937 (Lewis, 1981), in American Studies at the University of Iowa. I found a disturbing trend of the exclusive depiction of women of African descent in the works of Hopkins, Frances Ellen Harper, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Nella Larsen-a trend that can now include Harriet Wilson's (1859/1983) Our Nig. The most difficult times in my research were with the novels of Hopkins. None of her four works depict a dark-skinned African American major female character, although in her last novel, Of One Blood, she gives considerable significance to an Ethiopian queen, but she is not recognizably African (Hopkins, November 1903-January 1904). Harper (1892/1969), her older contemporary, had contrasted the near-White image of Iola Leroy with a minor character who is a recognizable full-blooded African woman of great beauty and dignity. Major female characters in Fauset's novels are never more than bronze colored, but she presents as many females who cannot pass for White as she does those who can. Larsen's (1929/1969) Passing is clearly concerned solely with the passing phenomenon, and of necessity, major female characters look White; the tensions in life of the heroine in Larsen's (1928) Quicksand are a result of her being a recognizable Black woman, albeit exotic, in predominantly White communities.

The Inventiveness and Inventedness of Identity Formation in History and Literature

The Inventiveness and Inventedness of Identity Formation in History and Literature Nell Irvin Painter. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. xi + 369 pp. ISBN 0-393-02739-2 (cl). Elaine K. Ginsberg, ed. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 298 pp. ISBN 0-8223-1755-9 (pb). Shirley J. Yee For the past decade or so, feminist scholars from a number of disciplines , including history, literature, cultural studies, and poUtical theory, have examined the ways in which identity and the self are mutually constructed in historical and contemporary settings by both scholar and subject. The phenomena of representation and self-representation in history and literature become strikingly clear in Nell Irvin Painter's Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol and in Elaine K. Ginsberg's anthology of essays, Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Both point to the simultaneous inventiveness and inventedness of identity formation. Blacks who passed as whites and whites who passed as black, women who passed as men and vice versa, and the life of historical figures such as Sojourner Truth all illustrate the creativity of individuals and their ability to act as agents in the invention and reinvention of themselves whether in real life or as fictionalized characters in novels. At the same time, historians and novelists have also constructed identities for their subjects, so that individuals become known in ways that writers want them to be known and understood . Thus, I would expand Samira Kawash's statement in her essay in Passing that "the distinction between true Jiistory and fictional narrative is not in the text but in the reader" (60) to argue that what is at stake is the very notion of what constitutes "true history" and that both the reader and the writer are comphcit in the construction and perpetuation of the narrative. The life of Sojourner Truth in an excellent example of the ways in which a narrative over time has come to represent the "truth" about an individual while at the same time obscuring her Ufe. Olive Gilbert's Narrative of Sojourner Truth, published by Truth in 1850, has served as the standard primary text on her life.1 Using this text as weU as other primary written documents and visual images of Truth, Painter seeks to uncover Truth, the person, and in the process deconstruct Truth, the myth. Painter's biography must be discussed within the context of her larger work on © 1998 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 10 No. 1 (Spring) 1998 Review Essay: Shirley J. Yee 175 Truth, which reveals the tension that often exists between representation at the hands of historians and self-representation.2 Painter traces Truth's life from her birth in 1797 to her death in 1883, unveiling the rich and complex life of the woman born Isabella Van Wagenen—a slave from Ulster County, New York, who on 1 June 1843 reinvented herseff as Sojourner Truth. Painter reveals little-known but critical aspects of Truth's life. She reminds readers that in many ways Truth was not unlike other rural African-American women of her time. As a slave, and later as a wage-earning free black woman, work defined her daily life. She learned to negotiate for her needs as much as she was able under the confines and uncertainties of institutional slavery. As the author points out, it was New York slavery, not southern slavery, that shaped Truth's slave experience, despite the connections abolitionists later made between Truth—the supposed symbol of slave womanhood—and slavery in the South. One of Painter's most important contributions, both to our knowledge of Sojourner Truth and to the history of the rural northeast during this period, is her extensive discussion of the religious influences in Truth's life. Painter reveals Truth as a deeply religious person whose faith provided her with spiritual strength throughout her life. She situates Truth's religious convictions within the larger context of the Second Great Awakening that swept the region during the 1820s and 1830s and her exposure first to the New York Methodists and Dutch Reformed Church and then her more active involvement with...

Novelistic Figuration, Narrative Metaphor: Western and Russian Models of the Prima Donna

A TTENDING THE OPERA was de rigueur for characters in novels by the likes of Balzac, Stendahl, Thackeray, and Wharton, and the opera prima donna makes frequent appearances in nineteenth-century fiction as part of the background detailing for realist works.' But the prima donna's presence in literature was largely a matter of form. Her status as uncredited bit player was partly due to the state of mind of the fictional spectators, who are typically absorbed by their private dramas and barely conscious of the opera playing before them. In addition, the very conventionality of the opera-house scene in realist fiction seems to have caused writers, characters, and readers to pay these set pieces and their performers little notice. The prima donna thus served primarily as a decorative prop within nineteenthand early twentieth-century literary culture. This article examines a handful of novels-three of them En-

Nerval in the Library, or The Archives of the Soul

WHAT CAN WE SAY ABOUT THE WRITER'S relations with the library? They are usually bad ones today. This was not always the case of course. In the Middle Ages those authors whom we expect to transport us into a world of enchantments, battles, and love took the greatest pride in copying, translating, knowing, unearthing a rare book from the depths of a cabinet, citing a fellow writer, being library rats and book worms, perhaps because their libraries had so few books. Medieval representations of literature gave little place to inspiration and valued work and imitation above all, without furor poeticus or at most with the titillation of love. In the Renaissance scholarship and inspiration, rehabilitated on the antique model, were happily wed. But as the centuries passed the price attached to literary creation was unduly inflated and the poet became a sacred figure. Writers, though they lived surrounded by books and, in France, served their time on the benches at the Jesuit colleges or the Republican lyce'es would blush, whatever use they made of libraries, to admit that their creative activity had anything to do with library visits. There are, of course, people who practice this occupation. scholar just barely makes a sympathetic novelistic character, one with whom the author can even identify at least in part, so long as the scholar does not entirely confuse himself with the pedant he too modestly believes himself to be-such as Sylvestre Bonnard, Monsieur Bergeret, or, in an infinitely more subtle and oblique way, Simon the Pathetic, who is not so modest and does not really consider himself a pedant. But if we exclude several tendentious, deliberately mystifying novels, balancing their evident weight against their real superficiality-novels like La Gloire de l'empire by Jean d'Ormesson-libraries ordinarily provide the writer with a preliminary, even shameful scaffolding that will be dismantled to reveal a work that stands alone. As for the writer's reflections on the library, they readily lead, at least in the twentieth century, to a specular vertigo contesting the nature of literary creation and, more radically, the very possibility of interiority; hence, The Library of Babel, the case of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, and many other texts by Jorge Luis Borges. In every instance the library is associated with the airlessness of knowledge or speculation rather than with expansiveness. Recourse to the library subverts or stands in opposition to any submersion in oneself. I come now to Gerard de Nerval because his experience of libraries, like the place of the library in his work, contradicts these generalities as exceptions that

Maria Zambrano's Theory of Literature as Knowledge and Contingency

Maria Zambrano's work contradicts the common notion that there is a dearth of philosophy and literary theory in Spain. She argued that Spanish conceptual thinking is embedded in literature in the form of a razin poetica, a concept that, unlike traditional philosophical reason, includes the emotions. Zambrano's philosophical approach to literature focuses on the nature of the self in society in such books as Filosofia y poesia, Pensamiento y poesia en la vida espafiola, and La confesiin como genero literario. The ideas developed in these books, when applied to analyses of specific texts, such as Don Quixote and several of Gald6s's novels, reveal knowledge and selfhood as contingent upon gender and nation. Zambrano's essays on particular texts focus on female characters who best represent reason and Spain's sense of nationhood. Benigna of Misericordia is the novelistic character she finds most suited to her theories of literature as the locus of Spanish poetic reason.

Saint of Authority and the Saint of the Spirit: Paul Sabatier's Vie de S. François D'Assise

Men may glorify as discoveries some insignificant trifles that supply little or no evidence and bestow name of new documents on late accounts of doubtful authenticity, but there is nothing further to be known concerning St. Frances, and ... Bollandists, Chalippe and Papini, writing ore than a century ago, knew as much, more or less, concerning St. Francis, no new fact, episode, or saying had been added to his life. MGR. FALOCI (1902) The criticism of Franciscan origins is still in its infancy. PAUL SABATIER (1901) The divide separating two mentalities represented in epigraph runs like a fault line through later nineteenth century Roman Catholicism. On many theological fronts -- biblical studies, apologetics, ecclesiastical history -- proponents of traditional positions who considered everything of fundamental importance to have been said were confronted by expansions of critical methods who saw themselves mapping out little-explored territory. The traditional hagiography was not exempt; it too faced a critical revisionism characterized by methods and a mentality informed by historical criticism. The often oppositional relations between traditionalists and progressives formed part of context for Catholic reception of a nonCatholic's biography of St. Francis of Assisi. In November of 1893 Paul Sabatier (1858-1928) published at his own expense his Vie de S. Francois d'Assise.(1) Its author was an unknown; he had published nothing previously in Franciscan studies. Yet book enjoyed an almost instant success; by following March biography was translated into English and German. It received sufficient notice from Vatican to be placed on Index of Prohibited Books and from French Academy to be awarded crown of honor. Even those most opposed to its portrait of Francis acknowledged its influence.(2) Both popularity and influential character of Sabatier's biography invited comparison with another biography published three decades earlier: Ernest Renan's Vie de Jesus (1863).(3) It too was prefaced by a critical study of sources and like Sabatier's effort was suffused with a romanticism that permeated portrait of its principal subject. While a number of factors have been adduced to account or success of Sabatier's Vie de S. Francois,(4) two that it shares with Renan's Vie de Jesus are worth closer consideration here. On one level, Sabatier's liberal Protestantism appeared more palatable to Catholics than did Renan's overt rationalism. The former's critical conclusions were less extreme, treatment of his subject more respectful by comparison. But if application of method was more restrained, spirit which informed method was no more acceptable. On another level, their criticism converged; it naturalized miraculous and ultimately rationalized supernatural. To Catholic traditionalists historical criticism appeared to be a means of recreating Jesus or Francis into critic's own image and likeness. The Lives produced by such critics were less biographical representations of their subjects than presentations of a thesis. As such they took on character of novels -- fictionalized renderings more indebted to authorial imagination than to historical reality. In short, Sabatier, like Renan, had produced a roman-a-these. Or, more properly, given reactions to influenced conclusions of criticism, a roman-a-hypothse.(5) The spirit which traditionalists detected in these works and which made them uneasy was only partly rooted in historical criticism. That spirit also reenacted a romanticism which contributed to Franciscan revival and was a factor in popularity of both Renan's and Sabatier's Lives. As C. N. L. Brooke has observed, the nineteenth-century romantics found (or thought they found) a man after their own heart, a lover of mankind, a lover of animals, an apostle of liberty -- a libel romantic in thirteenth century. …

George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and the Fiction by Elizabeth Grubgeld

George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and the Fiction by Elizabeth Grubgeld, pp. 308, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994, $49.50 Like wits in a Restoration comedy, the friends of George Moore honored his person with a rodomontade of abusive epithets: Moore was a codWsh crossed by a satyr, the gray mullet, a boiled ghost, an overripe gooseberry, the white slug, a large distinguished carp, an aborted egg, a very prosperous Mellon’s Food baby, and a cat-mummy from the Egyptian Department of the British Museum. In her important new book on Moore, Elizabeth Grubgeld collates these insults, but characteristically she takes them quite seriously as the starting point for a penetrating analysis of the Edwardian social climate of caricature out of which they come, with its competitive display of wit and what Beerbohm called its lust for bedeviling the unfortunate human body. Previously, there has sometimes been a certain ad hominem strain in Moore criticism, not surprising among his contemporaries, who were often trying to give as good as they’d gotten, but peculiar when found among contemporary scholars, What this book by Grubgeld oVers instead is a learned, theoretically astute, comprehensive, and sympathetic look at the writings of George Moore. The author of a study like George Moore and the Autogenous Self has clearly set aside a signiWcant part of her lifetime for its preparation. To put the study of George Moore on a serious footing, and to show others the peculiar appropriateness of Moore’s work to the questions that animate literary criticism today, Grubgeld has at least mentioned, and often analyzed, thirty-eight diVerent publications by Moore. And her scholarly habits are impeccable: she keeps in mind the chronology of Moore’s life, the changes over time in his conception of Wction, the diVerences between one edition and the next, the letters of Moore to others, the letters others exchanged about Moore, and the history of discussion about each book she herself treats. That is just to list the general categories of Mooriana. In addition , she has some ongoing theoretical interests, which lead her to engage with recent research in genre studies in general, autobiography in particular, letters in one quite original chapter, and, to a smaller extent, gender studies. Her special slant is to treat the characters in novels as their own autobiographers, and the narrator of the autobiographies as if he were a character in a novel, and thus a function of plot, scene, chronology, and narrative voice. What is left out of account? She is not much interested in the history of reception, or, with the exception of her chapter on Parnell and His Island, in most of the matters that excite cultural materialists. This is not, obviously, a criticism of her book, which entertains a startling variety of theoretical claims without losing its way or giving up its independence of judgment. BOOK REVIEWS 186 Grubgeld’s abiding interest is in what Michel Foucault called “the author function .” For some time before this article, literary scholars had been repeating Roland Barthes’s argument about the “death of the author”: once a writer entered into making a text, the language he inscribed took on a life of its own, most distinctly a life not the author’s, and many meanings of its own, none of them the author’s. Foucault put the question in an entirely new light: what are the uses, he asked, to which we put the concept of the author? What is its function especially in ancient literature, where we shelve and publish things under the name of Callimachus or Diodorus? These names mean to us no more than certain grammatical features, genre tendencies, periods and places of activity; about the men, we know nothing. In short, the “author function” becomes a way of naming our conception of the way a group of writings happens to cohere. What Grubgeld lights upon is the fact that GM, as friends called him, did not just write individual consumption commodities, one novel after another, good or bad, to be ascribed to “George Moore,” the name on the title page. He studiously elaborated a complex and developing identity for public consumption...

Raynal romancier et politique

Muriel Brot : Raynal, novellist and political writer. The 8th book of the Histoire des Deux Indes owes much to Charlevoix's Histoire du Paraguay, and although the "tragic tale of a Spanish lady" is merely one of many borrowings, it was extensively rewritten in a way which emphasizes its novelistic character. In addition, although Raynal preserves Charlevoix's manichean perspective, he inverses the roles, rehabilitating the Indian, while the Spaniard (the victim in the original version) becomes a bloodthirsty barbarian whose methods of colonisation are both inhuman and politically inept. The literary base is both a satirical tool and a means of developing criticism of the Spanish — which until then had been only concerned with political and economic issues — to include humanitarian and ethical considerations.

Attribution theory and the novel

This article considers how attribution theory and research can be applied to the study of readers' judgments about the behavior of characters in novels. Readers, ostensibly in the position of observers, can be induced by the nature and range of information provided in the novel to adopt a more actorlike stance toward characters. By manipulating perspective and the narrator's stance toward characters, authors can influence the likelihood that readers will make more situational or more dispositional attributions to account for characters' behavior. Furthermore, readers will probably differ in the information they attend to and in their propensity to identify or take an actorlike stance, because of their own attributional style and because of the effects of self-relevant material on attributional responding. Examples from Forster, Jane Austen, and Tolstoy are analyzed to suggest the range of attributional issues that could be investigated empirically, along with some suggestions on the methods most suited to addressing them.

Imagination and the Psychotherapeutic Process

SUMMARY. Imagination is a neglected topic in psychoanalysis and in psychotherapy because we have an inadequate conception of the phenomenon. This inadequate conception renders imaginative activity intractable to investigation. I offer a framework for thinking about imagination that remedies this defect, and I show how we might use this framework to develop a procedure by which to investigate different kinds of imaginative activity. I illustrate this procedure by investigating the kinds of imaginative activity that support two mental abilities. One is our ability to respond to fictional objects (characters in novels). The other is our ability to respond to the mental states of others ‐ an ability I refer to as psychological understanding. Phantasy characteristically operates to block an imaginative understanding of others. And I propose that a fundamental condition for a person to achieve normal object relationships is an ability to imagine the mental life of another person. I conclude by suggesting how this framework allows us to investigate a psychotherapeutic culture. And I outline an approach to investigate the psychotherapeutic culture of a residential therapeutic community.

Critical Studies on Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (review)

Reviewed by: Critical Studies on Gonzalo Torrente Ballester Paul Ilie Janet Pérez and Stephen Miller , eds. Critical Studies on Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. Boulder: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1989. 196 pp. $40.00. Best sellers and postmodern fiction rarely originate in the same author, but Spain's eighty-year old Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, born into the same generation as Nobel Prize winner Cela, indeed successfully mixes conventional realism with metafictional fantasy. However, Torrente's career follows no linear sequence. The fifteen critical essays in this collection suggest that his penchant for parody, together with an abiding interest in myth, reveal themselves early and continue into maturity while alternating with such realistic novels as the trilogy Los gozos y las sombras. Torrente circumnavigates the straight course of contemporary narrative history from the Joycean intellectual hero (Javier Marino 1943) to the science fiction and/or serious spy novel of Hawkes, Pynchon, Burgess, Calvino, and Fowles (Quizá nos lleve el viento al infinito, 1984, studied in this collection by Kathleen Glenn). Torrente's long-term narrative diversity, no less than his affinities with international currents, stands out in this collection of fifteen essays. Janet Pérez summarizes the main points of each essay in a panoramic Introduction. Stephen Miller and she divide the collection into three groups: studies of individual works, of techniques and themes common to several novels, and of Torrente's literary theory. Despite these distinctions, the studies coincide in enough concerns to produce a connecting axis of critical problems inherent in most of Torrente's fiction. The most recurring observations involve his ironic and self-conscious humor, his metafictional subversions, political demythifications, and preoccupations with multiple-narrative personalities. Torrente's lesser-known works share prominence in this book with the more popular ones. The 1951 novel La princesa durmiente va a la escuela comes under a [End Page 639] speech-act analysis by Leo Hickey and reveals its echoes of Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote by virtue of "floutings of the Consistency maxim." The worrisome issue of Torrente's youthful alliance with right-wing movements surfaces in other early works that thematize fascist ideology, except that they apply mythological vehicles parodically in order to elude censorship, as Margarita Benitez shows for Ifigenia and El retorno de Ulises. Further light on Torrente's opinions emerges from an interview with Francisca and Stephen Miller, published here. Torrente's fiction's political underside is exposed by Frieda Blackwell's comprehensive view of literature-within literature. Despite his ludic postmodernism, the fiction-history relationship is reversible, as Lynne Overesch-Maister shows. Torrente complicates his intellectual task by his fiction's proteic dimensions, notably the metafictional characters in novels like Fragmentos de apocalipsis, described by David Herzberger, and the multiplication of narrative personality in Yo no soy yo, evidently, described by Carmen Becerra. Nevertheless, whether it is a quest for purity in a miracle play, as presented by Robert Nugent, or a conflict of good and evil in the apocalyptic terms described by Amparo Pérez Gutiérrez, Torrente lends himself to the formalist and intertextualist approaches of Santiago López Torres, Jaime Carbajo Romero, and Genaro Pérez. Ultimately one turns for guidance to Torrente's historiographical and artistic concepts, here represented by his aesthetic of grotesque reality, explained by Angel Loureiro, by the compendium identified by Janet Pérez in La rosa de los vientos, and, finally, by the "Apuntes literarios" studied by Miller. Paul Ilie University of Southern California Copyright © 1990 Purdue Research Foundation

The Essay in Recent Anthologies of Literary Criticism

This genre blurring is more than just a matter of Harry Houdini or Richard Nixon turning up as characters in novels or of midwestern murder sprees described as though a gothic romancer had imagined them. It is philosophical inquiries looking like literary criticism [or] scientific discussions looking like belles lettres morceaux. [The] present jumbling of varieties of discourse has grown to the point where it is becoming difficult either to label authors [or] to classify work. (Adams and Searle 514-15)

Beyond Stereotype: Blind Characters in Novels for Children

Beyond Stereotype: Blind Characters in Novels for Children

Gravity's Angel: The Ideology of Pynchon's Fiction

Thomas Pynchon's fiction hardly seems formalist or humanist, but recent criticism dedicated to it has gone to great pains to show that. Pynchon's disregard for conventions of novelistic character, style, and closure would certainly appeal to deconstructive critics interested in the critique of these metaphysically-oriented values. It would also attract Marxist critics interested in an undoing of the humanist repressions that produce those forms and values. What is surprising-at first glance-is that Pynchon would appeal to advocates of the canonic tradition of great literature and defenders of liberal humanism. Charles Clerc, however, is not deterred by the appearance of Pynchon's text:

Literature and Negation (review)

Shorter Reviews277 There are too many such disdainful and oracular pronouncements in this essay. It is also marred by Tanner's attempt to cover too much territory at one go; one has to have marathon powers to follow him all the way. Unlike critics who focus either virtually exclusively on Wagner's music or superficially on the libretti as literary works, Tanner takes the philosophical content of Wagner's oeuvre seriously. He finds a (not the) key to the proper understanding of Wagner in what he argues persuasively is Wagner's refusal of transcendent redemption. Tanner's handling of this critical concept is stunningly skillful, and by its means he is able to unify and integrate material which many other Wagner critics have found incoherent or inconsistent. Parsifal, for example, became the capstone of Wagner's lifelong labors, and not, as many have thought, a bit of Christian religiosity in Wagner's spiritually relapsing senility. Tanner's way of interpreting Wagner gores many oxen, and will, no doubt, occasion great furies. I look forward eagerly to the publication of his forthcoming Cambridge University Press book, Wagner, Nietzsche and Tragedy. Simon Fraser UniversityD. D. Todd Literature and Negation, by Maire Jaanus Kurrik; xi & 276 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, $22.50. Not too long ago a discussion of philosophy in literature would involve one of two things: either a survey of philosophical views held by characters in novels, or an analysis of the literary style of some particular well-chosen philosopher who embellished his or her text with literary niceties such as metaphor and rhythmic prose. In Literature and Negation, Maire Jaanus Kurrik continues to a deeper level the work of mining down this peripheral and glancing contact between the two disciplines, taking it to an intersection where ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology do not just inform the opinions and actions of characters in books, but are involved in the very shape and aim of literary construction. To do this, Kurrik covers a staggering amount of territory. She summarizes virtually every philosophic view of negation of any significance since Plato and then adds short correlative discussions of well-known literary works such as Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Timon of Athens, and Emma, to name just a few. The form of the literary work and the underlying project which it realizes are seen in the context of the philosophical problem of negation and affirmation. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, according to Kurrik, the prevailing concern is with the struggle, through the negation of the flesh, the devil, and mortality, either to a final Christian mystical affirmation (as in Paradise Regained) or to the terminal negation of suicide (as in Timon of Athens or Racine's Phaedra?) Turning from God, the nineteenth-century novel 278Philosophy and Literature plots the self's journey through the negation of repression, conflict with society, and failure to see oneself and others clearly, to a new sense of "selfhood" where negations are recovered and affirmed. (Tolstoy's Levin discovers the joys of threshing wheat, Jane Austen's Emma discovers she wants to marry after all, etc.) In the post-modern period the focus again shifts, this time from the self to language. Now the negations are the linguistic negations of Derrida and Saussure, and the escape from the endless, hollow web of linguistic "différance" (Derrida's neologism) is the new "negative" affirmation of deletion or erasure, delivering us in Beckettian silence from the endless repetitive turning of our objectless language. Post-modern literature, rejecting nineteenth-century romantic notions of plot and character, explores the meanderings of "langue" and dreams of its eventual overthrow in a new scientific language (Robbe-Grillet), or a non-language of the future. At the end, jarringly out of sequence, Kurrik tacks on a short section on tragedy concentrating on Greek drama. There is no central thesis or recommendation in Negation and Literature. Instead, it is a survey of philosophical views combined with a series of literary interpretations, and it often reads like a series of notes waiting to be made into a book. The unstated and interesting suggestion is that the shape of literary thought is itself philosophical, and that there is...

OLD PEOPLE IN CONTEMPORARY NOVELS: A STUDY OF STYLE AND CONTENT

The relation of fiction to society may be interpreted from several points of view. As any other medium of mass communication, fiction is a source of information and attitudes, and an indicator of popular perspectives. In addition, fiction responds to its own rules. Necessities and conventions of representation in a particular form lead to certain combinations that are attributable neither to reflections of the situation nor to the intention to influence. This paper examines the place of the aged in novels published in the United States during the years 1931‐1970. Because of the different ingredients that go into the creation of characters in novels, no simple relationship of contact with social conditions or attempted influence by an author can be discerned. A realistic picture of the presentation cannot concentrate on the status of old heroes and heroines, but on the manner in which old people become part of the general scene or setting within a whole presentation of a novel. One can contrast this approa...

Érico Veríssimo and the Creation of Novelistic Character

Érico Veríssimo and the Creation of Novelistic Character