Collection Of Critical Essays Research Articles

The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice (review)

164Philosophy and Literature actually Greek ecphrasisl Glaringly missing is the Greek of Homer's shield, Apollonius' cloak, Moschus' cup. For matters Roman, where is a proper appreciation of Heinze's discussion ofVirgilian ecphrasisldescriptidi How can Leach relegate the literary problematics of ut pictura poesis to the desert of a physical relationshipbetween the viewer and the objetd'art (pp. 5-6), and later to Lessing's "contrived effort to maintain his principles" (p. 11)? After all, Lessing has had more to do with the discussion of art's "narration" and its reliance upon "imagination " (Einbildungskraft) than the book gives pause to understand. Goethe's reception ofLessing's narrative aesthetics in the eighteenth century, moreover, gave the clue why Leach should have had second thoughts before bundling Republican and Augustan art and literature under the rhetorics of "space" and modern audience reception theory. For Goethe, the humanist, bad art necessitated the use of the imagination (read also "excessive narration" and "critical metaphorics"). Why? Because unbridled imagination runs the risk of trivializing art, literature, and, ultimately, language. Metaphors become inane. Rhetorical linkage becomes only what it is. Yet, rhetoric can too easily trivialize more thanjust the aesthetic object. Leach at one point analogizes about "brush strokes" that make poetry art and art poetry (p. 243). Even Lessing attacked this "painting in words" when he spoke against Caylus. In the classical period Lucían attacked Cebes for the same reason. Why? When rhetoric is not allowed to obfuscate "the text," it is painfully clear: ruled by empty metaphors, we ourselves fall outside of our own human experience. Raymond Adolph Prier The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, edited by Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes; 378 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, $42.50 cloth, $12.95 paper. "Now proceed: compare the literature!" Harry Levin's exhortation as ACLA president in 1968 has been drowned out in the past two decades by a cacophony of new cries, none achieving, and few even seeking, canonical stature in the discipline ofcomparative literature. Therein lies the challenge Professors Koelb and Noakes undertake in this collection of critical essays: how to translate the current Babel of comparatist voices into a discourse intelligible to both the practitioners themselves and all others who may legitimately ask: "What is comparative literature?" Eschewing both the prescriptive and descriptive methods which they claim characterized earlier texts about the nature of the disci- Reviews165 pline, the editors' emphasis is on recent transformations in the field, and the only question they are committed to addressing is: "What are comparatists (primarily North American) doing these days?" The twenty-one contributors, with few exceptions holding advanced degrees and academic positions in comparative literature, respond in complex and contradictory ways. There is an eloquent defense of the discipline, as it has historically been defined and practiced, by Lowry Nelson, Jr. But in an irony characteristic of this collection, Nelson's view leaves his fellow essayists unconvinced. More persuasive are those essays, from all generations of comparatists, which offer vigorous critiques of the discipline. Diagnoses: the discipline is in a state of crisis, "suffering" (Frank Warnke) and "at risk" (Wlad Godzich). Symptoms: Eurocentrism , provincialism, masculinism. Prescriptions: canon revision—inclusion of previously ignored or marginalized literatures (Warnke), notably those of the East (A. Owen Aldridge, Pauline Yu); increased attention to emergent literatures (Godzich, Woon-Ping Chin Holaday); more sophisticated interdisciplinary work (Richard Weisberg, Ulrich Weisstein); hospitality to feminist and Marxist approaches (Margaret Ferguson, Koelb, and Noakes). Paradoxically, diis extended self-criticism is accompanied by a celebration of comparative literature's new prominence and promise: "comparatists . . . representwhatis most progressive and mostinteresting in the teachingofliterature" (Godzich, p. 19). Apparendy, the historical indefiniteness of the discipline has made it uniquely hospitable to, and even an incentive toward, recent and current transmogrifications of intellectual life. Thus, although the editors did not set out to produce a case study of the way the spread of contemporary theory and the increase in global awareness have transformed a particular discipline, TL· Comparative Perspective has special appeal to a diversity ofreaders as an intriguing example ofjust such a study. Readers will be further provoked to consider seriously the implications of these writings in the context of...

The Contemporary Spanish Theater. A Collection of Critical Essays

The Contemporary Spanish Theater. A Collection of Critical Essays

The Contemporary Spanish Theater. A Collection of Critical Essays

The Contemporary Spanish Theater. A Collection of Critical Essays

The Contemporary Spanish Theater: A Collection of Critical Essays

The Contemporary Spanish Theater: A Collection of Critical Essays

Canadian and American Dissertations on Descartes and Cartesianism 1865-1984

Gregor Sebba's monumental Bibliographia Cartesiana; A Critical Guide to the Descartes Literature 1800-1960 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964) is the basic bibliographical tool of pre-1960 Descartes scholarship. While somewhat weak in its coverage of twentieth century Anglo-American analytical literature on Descartes, it is outstanding ic its coverage of continental scholarship. Willis Doney's "Bibliography," in his Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1967), largely rectifies Sebba’s lack of coverage of pre-1960 analytical work on Descartes. Subsequent to Doney's 1967 bibliography, there have been several useful bibliographical updates, including the excellent "Bulletin Cartésien," published annually in the Archives de Philosophie. However, Vere Chappell and Willis Doney's Twenty-Five Years of Descartes Scholarship, 1960-1984: A Bibliography (forthcoming, New York: Garland, 1987) promises to become the definitive update of Sebba. The present bibliography is designed to supplement the above bibliographies by listing Canadian and American dissertations on Descartes and Cartesianism from 1865 through 1984. It lists dissertations alphabetically by author and provides locations in Dissertations Abstracts as well as University Microfilms order numbers, whenever available.

Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady : A Bibliography of Primary Material and Annotated Criticism

Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady: A Bibliography of Primary Material and Annotated Criticism by Marion Richmond, Canadian Publishing Foundation This bibliography of primary material and annotated criticism extending from the publication date of The Portrait of a Lady in 1881 is based, in part, on the checklists compiled by Maurice Beebe and William T. Stafford, published in the first Henry James special number of Modern Fiction Studies 3 (Spring, 1957): 73-81, 90, and the second Henry James special number of the same journal 12 (1966): 117-35, 15861 . The main sources of the Beebe and Stafford checklists are Lyon N. Richardson's bibliography in Henry James: Representative Selections (New York: American Book Company, 1941), reprinted in The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York: Henry Holt, 1945); Eunice C. Hamilton's "Biographical and Critical Studies of Henry James: 1941-1948," American Literature 20 (1949): 424-35; Viola R. Dunbar's "Addenda ..." to the preceding, American Literature 22 (1950): 55-61; and Lewis Leary's Articles on American Literature: 1900-1950 (Durham: Duke U P, 1954). Also incorporated are items for the period 1881-1905 derived mainly from Roger Gard's Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968). Beginning in 1963 one of the main sources is American Literary Scholarship: An Annual (Durham: Duke U P, 1963-1981). Main sources after 1965 are: Abstracts of English Studies. Boulder, Colorado: Colorado U; Calgary, Alberta: Calgary U P, 9 (1966)-26 (September, 1983). American Literary Realism: 1870-1910. Arlington: Texas U, 1 (1967)-16 (Autumn, 1983). American Literature. Durham: Duke U P, 38 (1966-1967)-56 (March, 1984). Budd, John, Comp. Henry James: A Bibliography of Criticism: 1975-1981. Westport, CN; London: Greenwood P, 1983, passim. Gerstenberger, Donna and Geroge Hendrick. The American Novel: A Checklist of Twentieth Century Criticism on Novels Written Since 1789. Vol. II. Criticism Written 1960-1968. Chicago: Swallow P, 1970: 197-200. Henry James Review. Baton Rouge: The Henry James Society, Louisiana State U, 1 (November, 1979)-5 (Fall, 1983). Holman, C. Hugh. Comp. The American Novel Through Henry James. [2nd ed.]. Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing (Goldentree Bibliographies in Language and Literature), 1979: 78-96. Journal of Modern Literature. Philadelphia: Temple U, 1 (1971)-5 (April,1976). McColgan, Kristin Pruitt. Henry James, 1917-1959: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1979. Modern Fiction Studies. Lafayette, IN: Modem Fiction Club of Purdue U, 12 (Spring, 1966)-29 (Winter, 1983). Modern Language Association: Abstracts of Articles in Scholary Journals. New York: Modem Language Association of America, 1971-1974. Modern Language Association: International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures. New York: Modem Language Association of America, 1966-1982. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. New York: Modem Language Association of America, 81 (1966)-99 (May, 1984). Ricks, Beatrice. Henry James: A Bibliography of Secondary Works. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1975: 104-21; 230-399. Scura, Dorothy Mclnnis. Henry James, 1960-1974: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1979. Taylor, Linda J. Henry James, 1866-1916: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1982, passim. This bibliography includes reviews, criticism in books, and articles in literary journals. It also includes introductions to various editions of the Portrait, and articles dealing with other authors and other Volume 7 164 Numbers 2-3 The Henry James Review Winter-Spring, 1986 subjects in which this novel is discussed in some detail. In accordance with the selection criteria adopted by Beebe and Stafford, dissertations, newspaper reviews (except for a sampling of the early newspaper reviews), foreign language criticism, and routine discussions in handbooks and histories of literature are not included. Unsigned reviews are set out in the Appendix. The annotated criticism includes only articles of at least seven consecutive pages together with the shorter classic essays. The constraints of space also made it necessary to exclude all annotated criticism from foreign journals. The material is presented in alphabetical order according to the authors' surnames. Unless otherwise indicated in square brackets all publication dates are of first editions. Publishing facts in most instances have been transcribed from the title page; therefore, the stated names of the...

Language and Literature in an Integrated Culture

James C. Gaston. London Poets and the American Revolution. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1979. 285 + x pp. Michael T. Gilmore. Early American Literature: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. 184 + vii pp. Mason I. Lowance, Jr. The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 335 + xiv pp. Richard C. Vitzthum. Land and Sea: The Lyric Poetry of Philip Freneau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.197 + vi pp. Donald Yanella and John H. Roch. American Prose to 1820: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale, 1979. 653 + xxii pp. National cultures in the early years of their perceived independence tend to generate what might be called classical periods; classical not in terms of the culture's overt imitation of Greek and Roman models, but classical in terms of the unified sensibility and purpose of verbal and artistic expression. This unity is perhaps what distinguishes the great ages of Pericles and Augustus. Yeats's definition of the ideal culture of Byzantium is the paradigm— that in such a classical age, the artisans of all sorts work out of a common, single impulse. History, political theory, verse, architecture and theology all interrelate, and each forms a necessary commentary on the other. Naturally, then, the student of classical literature reads philosophy, scientists and the general rubric of "civilization," while, on the contrary, the student of, say, nineteenth-century British literature confines himself to belles-lettres, with only the occasional footnote-directed smattering of Thomas Huxley, Mayhew, Bentham and the Chartists.

Autobiography and American Characters

Brian M. Barbour, ed. Benjamin Franklin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979.179 pp. Estelle E. Jelinek, ed. Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington, London: University of Illinois Press, 1980.274 + xii pp. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall, eds. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. A Genetic Text. Knoxville : The University of Tennessee Press, 1981. 188 + xiv pp. Albert E. Stone. Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts: Versions of Identity from Henry Adams to Nate Shaw. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.349 + xvi pp. So great is the power of the Franklin persona that, until recently, readers of his Autobiography have far more frequently judged the character than they have the work. Seen by his admirers as a personification of the entrepreneur- ial shrewdness, honest responsibility and self-reliance that emancipated the New World from the Old, he becomes, when limned by his detractors, the grubbily materialistic ancestor of all the Babbitts of America. Where his admirers remark the philanthropist, the diplomat, the experimenter, and reconstruct the spirit of eighteenth-century science and reason, his detractors remark the uninformed heart, the exteriorization of the self, the disdain for the spiritual life, and reconstruct a "prototypical" American business men- tality crushing the emotional and reflective life of the country. In the debate, Franklin's character becomes America's character, and the transubstantiation necessitates endless efforts to situate Franklin in the American scene.

The Glass Menagerie: A Collection of Critical Essays by R.B. Parker (review)

Book Reviews 277 makes An American Odyssey a worthwhile introduction to a fascinating artist fraught with controversy and paradox. ARTHUR TODRAS, UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND R.B. PARKER, ed. The Glass Menagerie: A Collection of Critical Essays. (Twentieth Century Interpretations) Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1983. Pp. ix, 166. $5.95 (PB). On March 31, 1945, a new period in the history of the American drama, and indeed in that of World theatre, had its formal beginning at the Playhouse Theatre in New York. For on the evening of that day, Tennessee Williams's innovative drama, Tlze Glass Menagerie, opened to critical acclaim. Both critics and members of the widening audience which was eventually to see this drama recognized it as an essentially new form, a kind expressive of the realities of life in the world already taking shape in the final period of World War II. Jn Menagerie, Williams succeeded in creating a popular form of poetic quality. In the years between 1945 and his death in 1983, he continued the pattern of experimentation established in this innovative work, seeking to expand its range of images, characters, themes, settings, and modes of action in ways consistent with his changing vision. R.B. Parker's thoughtful selection of essays on Menagerie in the Twentieth Century Interpretations series is a collective study of the idea of form in this early work. The essays assembled by Professor Parker treat both the distinguishing characteristics of this definitive work and the complex process through which its form evolved. The essays­ all of which have been previously published- have been organized in four sections. The first of these includes reviews of Broadway productions of the play by Stark Young, Brooks Atkinson, and Howard Taubman, and an analysis of the film version of the play by Maurice Yacowar. Part Two, "Influences and Variants," focuses on textual studies. Illuminating essays by Gilbert Debusscher and Thomas L. King treat Williams's transposition of literary conventions to the stage. Essays by James L. Rowland, Lester A. Beaurline, and R.B. Parker take somewhat different approaches to the analysis of the text. All three are concerned with the significance of the various versions of the play, including the variant interpretations recorded in the manuscripts housed in collections at the Universities of Virginia and Texas. Beaurline follows the progression of Menagerie from "story to play," while Rowland compares "acting" and "reading" versions of the work. Parker traces the evolution of the form of the play through various stages of development documented in materials deposited at the University of Texas. Essays in Part Three are addressed to Williams's attempts to develop expositional strategies appropriate for the interpretation of the unique characters who people the world of the play. Benjamin Nelson follows Williams in interpreting characters in this early work as functions of memory. Tom Scanlan's essay comments on the playwright's adaptive use of social psychology in rendering his characters. John Strother Clayton Book Reviews interprets Williams's use of imagery, particularly the "sister figure," as a kind of expositional "short-hand." Part Four, "Dramaturgy," offers tentative conclusions about the achievement of this early work. Frank Durham describesMenagerie as a poem written in the language of the modem stage. Roger B. Stein concludes that Williams's success in this work is derived from his ability to achieve a "delicate balance" between the play's poetic form and its social, psychological, and religious contents. The section concludes with Paul T. Nolan's comparison of Menagerie and Arthur Miller's After the Fall as examples of a new dramatic genre - the memory play. The collection of essays assembled by Parker is particularly valuable at this time. It not only offers a highly useful review of criticalinterpretations of The Glass Menagerie, but also provides an opportunity to reexamine Williams's career and to reassess his contribution to the idea of dramatic form, as well as to the literature of the modem theatre. The editor takes this reassessment to be a necessary function, commenting in the concluding lines of his excellent introductory essay that, "Despite the goodwork already done, scholarship on Williams is still only just beginning." An important line of such scholarly and critical...

A Place to Come From : The Nashville Agrarians and Robert Penn Warren

Richard Gray, ed. Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. 260 pp. James H. Justus. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.326 + xiv pp. Neil Nakadate, ed. Robert Penn Warren : Critical Perspectives. Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 1981.328 pp. Thomas Daniel Young and John J. Hindle, eds. The Republic of Letters in America: The Correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate. Lexington; University Press of Kentucky, 1981.232 pp. Thomas Daniel Young. Waking Their Neighbors Up: The Nashville Agrarians Rediscovered. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. 90 + xii pp. Historically, Americans have found the South easier to mythologize than to understand. Indeed, what is one to make of a people who are deeply conserva- tive and yet remain proud of having tried to overthrow the United States government by force and violence? Even today, one cannot drive through the South without confronting rebel flags and car horns that play "Dixie" when stopped at red lights. Although the Civil War was easily the gravest political, military and moral crisis ever faced by the United States, the North has long since relegated that crisis to the safe confines of a history text. For the South, however, the past continues to be a living part of the present. Perhaps for this reason, Southerners are a peculiarly literary people. As Garry Wills has noted: "winners erect their own monuments, while losers ache with music."1

A Response to Perry Nodelman's "Beyond Explanation"

A Response to Perry Nodelman's "Beyond Explanation" Eleanor Cameron (bio) Books for children and youth are rarely accorded the full-page, or even longer, reviews that books for adults are given in the major reviewing media, reviews sometimes gathered later as collections of critical essays. Therefore the truly critical pieces on single works found in Children's Literature would, I should think, be of considerable interest to their authors. Of course it is a curious and even unsettling encounter to read the objective remarks of the critic who has taken apart and keenly penetrated this creative experience, because it is one which has, more than likely, been completely private, very often the work of the writer's unconscious fully as much as his conscious self. And it is the unusual reviewer who will have had the time or the space to cut through to whatever deeper levels of meaning the work might have beneath the surface of story. Therefore, what Perry Nodelman has written on Beyond Silence is something to make the author of it reread with close attention, so as fully to take in the way in which Nodelman's insights were gained over a period of time and then made clear through the three-part structure of his essay. (I say "over a period of time" because in his initial letter to me he said, "I wrote the first draft of my paper a few months after reading the book, having been unable to stop thinking about it.") It is a structure that reveals first of all the critic's exploration of his approval, then of his confusions, and with these two layers finally excavated, of the arrival at his resolution of both approval and confusions. It is an unusual approach, born of Nodelman's apparent desire to be honest in confessing he had difficulties in arriving at his resolution, rather than stating at once his final understanding, as if it had been there all along. To begin with, I will get past a few quibbles. When Nodelman says that my work affirms the "idea that the ordinary perception of time's passage ignores a larger reality," an idea that "underlies and gives order" to all my work, we first come upon that world order. We then [End Page 134] come upon it a second time in its negative aspect when he says that "she seems to value [the English tradition and its immersion in the living past] for its distance from contemporary American life, which she finds disorderly and dismisses as incomplete," and also in the following sentence where Nodelman speaks of the "glamor" the past has for us. We come upon it a third time and in a still different form when he speaks of "Domi's alien and satisfyingly orderly rooms" in the French Museum in The Court of the Stone Children. And there it is a fourth time in the following paragraph: "In Beyond Silence the homage to the order of the past and to the English fantasies that evoke it is more explicit."1 I must say that the idea that I pay homage to the order of the past is entirely Nodelman's, not mine. Perhaps he may unconsciously have got onto this false track when he first used the world order in connection with my conviction about the globe of time, the eternal moment, saying that it gives "order" to all my work (not all of it, actually, but certainly to the two time fantasies). It gives order to the works of any time fantasist, as a matter of fact, as the genre of time fantasy requires the intermingling of the past and present, and sometimes the future in one way or another. But when Nodelman says that I seem "to value [the English tradition and its immersion in the living past] for its distance from contemporary American life, which she finds disorderly and dismisses as incomplete," I must take issue. I do value the sense of the past one feels in the British Isles and have acknowledged in The Green and Burning Tree (as Nodelman observes) that undoubtedly that vivid and immediate sense of innumerable layers of history one...

On Katherine Paterson, Alexander Pope, myself, and some others

author and reviewer of children's books. He has had 21 novels for children and young adults published. He lectures at the School of Education, Exeter University, and was Visiting Professor of English at California State University, San Jose, for 1982-83. He has also had published, by the Horn Book, a collection of critical essays, The Marble in the Water. A second volume of essays, Painted Desert, Green Shade, is scheduled for 1984. David Rees

Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art

In the issue of Partisan Review for Fall 1939 appeared an article by Clement Greenberg entitled Avant-Garde and Kitsch. It was followed four issues later, in July-August 1940, by another wide-ranging essay on modern art, Towards a Newer Laocoon.1 These two articles, I believe, stake out the ground for Greenberg's later practice as a critic and set down the main lines of a theory and history of culture since 1850-since, shall we say, Courbet and Baudelaire. Greenberg reprinted AvantGarde and Kitsch, making no attempt to tone down its mordant hostility to capitalism, as the opening item of his collection of critical essays, Art and Culture, in 1961. Towards a Newer Laocoon was not reprinted, perhaps because the author felt that its arguments were made more effectively in some of his later, more particular pieces included inArt and Culture-the essays on Collage or Cezanne, for example, or the brief paragraphs on Abstract, Representational, and So Forth. I am not sure that the author was right to omit the piece: it is noble, lucid, and extraordinarily balanced, it seems to me, in its defense of abstract art and avant-garde culture; and certainly its arguments are taken up directly, sometimes almost verbatim, in the more famous theoretical study which appeared in Art and Literature (Spring 1965) with the balder title Modernist Painting.

Writing About the Western United States

James K. Folsom, ed. The Western: ,4 Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1979. 177pp. L.L. Lee and Merrill Lewis, eds. Women. Women Writers, and the West. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing, 1980. 252 pp. John R. Milton. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. 341 pp. William W. Savage, Jr. The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History & Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. 179 pp. MEMORANDUM From: Jonah Cetacea, Chairman To: Prof. Izaak Walton Re: Classes in 1981-82 Since the popularity of Canadian Literature of the West continues to result in overflow enrollments, the Class Committee wishes you to teach the long-dormant Western American Fiction next year, in order to accommodate those students wanting to study in the department. Please send your text list.... I will return to this excerpt, but first picture in your mind's eye a saloon in College town, in which five men are playing poker. They come from an ordinary town of its sort, picturesque and populated mostly by Homosapien Scholars and their disciples, who pursue money, promotion, degrees and hockey pucks. At this poker table are Mythhunter, Compiler, Wheeler-Dealer, Teacher, and Reviewerskeptic. They have been winning and losing money for several hours; it is late and they are betting on the last hand of five-card draw. Compiler bets a dollar...and the betting goes on until first Wheeler- Dealer and then Mythhunter decide the game is too rich for their weak cards. Then Compiler folds. Teacher bets three dollars (these modest amounts are typical of Collegetown poker games). Reviewerskeptic likes the odds and raises a dollar, whereupon Teacher calls. His aces and fours beat the kings and tens.

Jocoserious or Without Qualities? The (Hi)story of Recent American Literature

Jennifer Bailey. Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist. London: The MacMillan Press Ltd.. 1979. 157 + ix pp. Warner Berthoff. A Literature Without Qualities American Writing Since 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 204 + xii pp. James Lundquist. J. D. Salinger New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979. 194 + ix pp. David Thorburn and Howard Eiland, eds. John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979. 222 + ix pp. Tellus tellas allabouter...Notes and queries, tipbids and answers, the laugh, and the shout, the ards and downs.1 Thus the blind seer, jocoserious Joyce, mocking our anxious searchings for significance in the writings of what, in his new book, Warner Berthoff calls an era "when all personal being and the natural universe as well are felt to be threatened by vast conspiracies of degradation" (p. 86). The great modernists (Joyce, Beckett or, in Berthoff s narrative of our forefathers' deeds, Miller and Stevens) seem to stand in judgment not only on our world but upon our literature which, he argues, is "without qualities." He is, of course, not alone in his puzzlement : even so enthusiastic a celebrant of postMODERNISM as Ihab Hassan or Jerome Klinkowitz would agree with Berthoff s remark that both "critical partisans and antagonists alike... have felt compelled to raise the question" of whether what passes today for "literature" "really belongs in the category...as commonly understood" (p. 27).

Games, Play, and Entertainments in Stephen Crane's "The Monster"

GAMES, PLAY, AND ENTERTAINMENTS IN STEPHEN CRANE'S "THE MONSTER" Robert A. Morace* Of all the major works of Stephen Crane, "The Monster" is undoubtedly the least discussed and perhaps the least understood. That modern critics have, with too few exceptions, failed to deal significantly with this story is especially curious in light o(contemporaneous reactions to it. Joseph Conrad, for example, to whom Crane had apparently outlined "The Monster" on 28 November 1897,l wrote Crane early in the new year to say that "the damned story has been haunting me ever since. I think it must be fine. It's a subject for you."2 But another friend, Harold Frederic, worried about the effect of such a story on its author's popularity and advised him to get rid of it. Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the genteel Century Magazine, was similarly troubled, though for a quite different reason; as he explained to Crane's American agent, Paul Revere Reynolds, "we couldn't publish that thing with half the expectant mothers in America on our subscription list!"3 Reactions to the story once it was published were similarly divided. On the one side were Rupert Hughes, who saw it as further evidence of Crane's genius,4 and William Dean Howells, who called it "the greatest story ever written by an American."5 And on the other side was Julian Hawthorne, who condemned it as "an outrage on art and humanity."6 Years later one of Crane's admirers, Sanford Bennett (who had witnessed Frederic's reaction), re-read the story and discovered that its haunting effect derived from the simple line "he had no face."7 Yet as the pseudonymous M. Solomon has more recently pointed out, "The Monster" is no mere horror story,8 no mere potboiler , and of this Crane seems to have been well aware.9 Shortly after finishing "The Monster" in early September of 1897, Crane sent the story to McClure's, apparently believing that it was both long enough and good enough to wipe out the $500 he owed them.10 However, quick money was not Crane's only consideration in trying to place this story. Although in December of 1897 he did desperately order Reynolds to "sell 'The Monster'!", by 14 January •Robert A. Morace is an Assistant Professor of English at Daemen College. He has published a number of articles on late nineteenth-century and contemporary American writers. He is currently working on two books on John Gardner, a bibliography and a collection of critical essays. 66Robert A. Morace 1898 he had bartered with Robert McClure for its release (partly by substituting "Death and the Child").11 In his next letter to Reynolds—written more than a month before the 16 March 1898 date when Harper's finally agreed to purchase "The Monster"12—Crane's insistent clamor for money is muted; instead, here the emphasis is on the story as art, not as a merely salable commodity: "... It would be absurd to conjoin 'Death and the Child' with 'The Monster.' They don't fit. Now, 'The Blue Hotel' goes in neatly with 'The Monster' and together they make 32,000. Very little more is needed for a respectably sized $1.00 book. . . ."13 How do "The Blue Hotel" and "The Monster" "fit" together? One link between the stories is thematic: each deals with characters who fail to create that quasi-Christian community which in much of Crane's fiction is made the necessary precondition for man's continued existence in the midst of an indifferent natural world. A second link is structural: each story is intricately developed by means of a game metaphor. In "The Blue Hotel" it is the game of High-Five.14 In "The Monster" it is not any one game but, rather, a complex of metaphoric games, entertainments, and play-like behavior that underlies the meaning of the story and serves to unify its various parts. The game metaphor in "The Monster" has never been studied—in fact it went entirely unnoticed until 1972 when its importance was mentioned in essays by Max Westbrook and Charles W. Mayer. In "Whilomville: The Coherence of Radical Language...

Fitzgerald's Lost City

Fitzgerald's Lost City Stephen L. Tanner Brigham Young University "Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether Fm a character in one of my own novels," Fitzgerald once remarked to a friend.1 We sometimes experience a similar difficulty in distinguishing Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda from his characters, for the autobiographical element in his fiction is pervasive. And there is a corollary to this, natural enough when one stops to think about it, but which has been ignored: the fictional element in his autobiographical writing is significant.2 1 do not mean that he lied about his life in the usual sense of the word, but that he used devices of fiction such as selection, imagery, symbolism, and myth to shape and give substance to his autobiographical essays. The most notable example is "My Lost City,"3 in which he blends literary art with autobiography , as Thoreau and Whitman had done before him, to express his vision of American life and indeed of human life itself. In a remarkable way, displaying subtle and effective artistic strategy, "My Lost City" encapsulates his essential preoccupations and insights as a literary artist. The essay provides us with a fundamental paradigm for interpreting his fiction and helps us understand why it continues to be read, perhaps more now than ever. Before treating the essay itself, it is necessary to describe in a schematic way Fitzgerald's characteristic themes and attitudes. This will enable us to perceive more clearly how they are encapsulated in "My Lost City." Generalizing from his own experience, Fitzgerald once asserted that authors usually repeat themselves. They have two or three really significant experiences in their lives and retell in various disguises their two or three stories "maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen." He confessed that he worked 1.Quoted by Malcolm Cowley, "Third Act and Epilogue," The New Yorker, 30 June 1945, rpt. in Arthur Mizener, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 65. 2."My Lost City," the subject ofthis essay has been treated by biographers and critics only as a biographical document. I know of no literary analysis of it. 3.This essay was delivered to his literary agent in July 1932 but was not published until included in The Crack Up in 1945. It was to have appeared in Cosmopolitan. Fitzgerald's literary agent, Harold Ober, reported in abetter of 19 November 1936 that the magazine had suspended the series in which it was to appear but he had been assured the article would appear soon. It never did. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., As Ever, Scott Fitz - : Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold Ober 1919-1940 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 285. 56ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW best when he faced the fact that all his stories were going to have "a certain family resemblance."4 His own two stories were actually two parts of a single larger story. Sometimes one part is emphasized , sometimes the other, and often they are blended. Combining two of his favorite words, I have labeled the first part Romantic Promise. By this term I wish to signify the complex of hope, dream, yearning, aspiration, expectation, anticipation, idealism, mystery, confidence, and future possibility characteristic of so many of his characters. I suppose it could be called the Gatsby complex. In his fiction, it is an instinct or gift for forward looking that fastens itself upon external symbols such as youth, wealth, the girl, and New York City. Since Romantic Promise always tends to outstrip reality, it leads inevitably to the second part of the story, a concomitant disillusionment that I denote, using a phrase from Frost's "Oven Bird," a Diminished Thing. I intend Diminished Thing to mean the unavoidable aftermath of Romantic Promise: hopes and dreams thwarted, the mystery and excitement become commonplace, the future devoid of expectation and possibility. The Diminished Thing takes many forms in Fitzgerald's fiction — indeed he was fascinated with exploring its many varieties and manifestations — but its typical versions are loss ofyouth, losing the girl or discovering she does not equal...

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon. By WILLIAM M. PLATER. Pp. xviii + 268. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978. £8.75 net. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by EDWARD MENDELSON. Pp. viii + 226. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1978. Cloth, £6.30; paper, £2.50 net. DOUGLAS TALLACK DOUGLAS TALLACK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXII, Issue 125, February 1981, Pages 109–111, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXII.125.109 Published: 01 February 1981

Hobbes's Causal Account of Sensation

Hobbes's Causal Account of Sensation JEFFREY BARNOUW I. Introduction If Hobbes's theory of sensation is notorious for its crudity,~ this is largely because it is scarcely known and rather subtle. The main purpose of this paper is to present an interpretation of Hobbes's account of sensation that should show it to be penetrating and plausible. I say "interpretation" because what Hobbes wrote makes considerable demands on our understanding and offers certain occasions for misunderstanding . Nonetheless, 1 believe his meaning is clear when one reads with a sense of what he was after. A secondary purpose of the paper is to suggest ramifications of Hobbes's conception of sense in the analysis of processes of thought and motivation. It will be shown that his grasp of sensation is such that he necessarily includes aspects of his analysis of memory and desire in his treatment of sensation, for sense itself presupposes memory and desire in the broadest sense, that is, experience and conation. Sense, for Hobbes, is not an immediacy of presence or contact, then, but involves generalized reference to the past in the service of an open anticipatory reference to the future. Hobbes's causal account of sensation cannot be understood apart from the context articulated by experience and conation. This does not mean, however, that Hobbes reduced sensation to a function of comprehensive epistemological or psychological theories . His writings show that the question, What is sensation? is primary for him. 2 In Chapter 25, "Of Sense and Animal Motion," which introduces the concluding part of De corpore, Hobbes writes, I have given to this part the title of PHYSlCS, or the Phenomena of Nature. Now such things as appear, or are shown to us by nature, we call phenomena or appearances. Of all the phenomena or appearances which are near us, the most admirable is apparition itself, x6 d~aiveo0at; namely, that some natural bodies have in themselves the patterns almost of all things.... 3 JD. W. Hamlyn writes, "Hobbes's forthrightness . . . leads to little in the way of subtlety, and he shows no sign of appreciating the fact that there are vast problems in the translation of the phenomena of perception into completely mechanical terms'" (Sensation and Perception: A History of the Philosophy of Perception [London: Routledge & Kegan Pual, 1961], p. 57). A parallel but richer example of this attitude is found in R. S. Peters and H. Tajfel, "Hobbes and HuI1--Metaphysicians of Behavior," in M. Cranston and R. S. Peters, eds., Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Anchor Books, 1972). 2Toward the conclusion of his prose autobiography Hobbes relates, as a turning point of his own interest, that he once found himself among learned men who were discussing "the cause of sensation," when one scornfully asked, "Quid esset sensus," and found, amazingly, that none could answer (Opera Philosophica, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 5 vols. [London: John Bohn, 1839], 1:xx. Cf. n. 8 below.). 3The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1839), 1:38f. [ll5] 116 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY This remarkable passage contains a germ of the monadology; in his view of sensation or appearance as the pattern which some natural (animal) bodies have of a vast variety of other natural bodies, Hobbes imaginatively captures the marvel of sensation even more strikingly than Leibniz. How are we to locate the point of view implied in the last sentence quoted? At one and the same time it reflects a "perspective of sensation" grasping what nature shows to us and a "perspective of science" viewing sensation within nature. This mingling of internal and external points of view is characteristic of Hobbes. It no doubt seemed natural to him, and rightly so. It would be a mistake to take this mingling as philosophical naivet6 on his part, or as bad thinking. He had, after all, the counterexample of Descartes before him, whose assertion of the separation and incommensurability of thinking and extension as distinct substances he rejected explicitly and with insight. 4 Much misreading of Hobbes is due to the pervasive presupposition of a version of Cartesian dualism on the part of his critics. One result...

Spinoza's Metaphysics: Essays in Critical Appreciation (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 87 Space prevents a full-scale extension of this catalog to other chapters and authors. But as a sample, we may note that after assuring us that "neither logical terminism nor the theology of God's omnipotence was the preserve of any school," Left continues to refer to Burley's "nominalismin logic" (p. 87), when Burley defends his realism against Ockham's conceptualism in De puritate artis logicae! What I have said above should illustrate Left's persistent failure to give precise, accurate statements of the philosophical views he is discussing. It may also be noted that Left's style is frequently turgid and his syntax confused. The book contains six incomplete sentences (pp. 5, 6, 43, 51, and 145) and indeterminatepronoun references beyond numbering. Given the wide circulation that Left's books enjoy, his continual production of such sloppy work is not only a disservice to professionals--necessitating, as it does, replies such as this one--but also it runs the risk of spreading falsehood and confusion about a subject that is already misunderstood enough. MARILYNMcCot~ ADAMS University of California, Los Angeles James B. Wilbur, ed. Spinoza's Metaphysics: Essays in Critical Appreciation. Philosophia Spinozae Perennis, vol. 1. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1976. Pp. viii + 163. Paper, Dfl. 37.50. This collection of papers on Spinoza is the fifth to have appeared in English recently,1and it is an expression, Professor Wilbur indicates (preface, p. v), of "the long-standing conviction that [Spinoza's] work repays close attention with a wealth and abundance of insight matched by few other thinkers." The papers included are by Robert N. Beck ("The Attribute of Thought"), Errol E. Harris ("Body-Mind Relation in Spinoza's Philosophy"), Dennis A. Rohatyn ("Spinoza's Emotivism"), Ernest Sherman ("Spinoza and the Divine Cogito: God as 'Self-Performance'"), Stewart Umphrey ("Spinoza's Defense of Human Freedom"), James B Wilbur ("Is Spinoza's God Self-Conscious ?"), William J. Edgar ("Continuity and the Individuationof Modes in Spinoza's Physics"), Robert Pasotti ("Spinoza: The Metaphysician as Healer"), Stanley Rosen ("Hegel, Descartes, and Spinoza"), and Harold J. Allen ("Spinoza's Naturalism and our Contemporary Neo-Cartesians"). Beck maintains (p. 10) that Thought is in some sense prior to the other attributes (and hence, apparently, that Spinoza should have been, but was not, an idealist). His argument (pp. 8-10) relies primarily on Ethics, I, xvii, s; II, vii, c; and II, vii, s,2 in conjunction with a distinction between "active activity" and "passive activity"; but this distinction is not clear, and the passages cited seem to provide no support for the thesis. (On E, I, xvii, s, see below.) Harris attempts to explain Spinoza's position on the mind-body relation, in the course of which he states that the idea or mind of an object is "an active, self-illuminatingawareness" of the object (p. 14), and that the idea of a body "is thus the consciousness which that body has of itself..." (p. 14). The generality of this explanation is threatened, however, by Harris's attempt to explain Spinoza's remark (in E, II, xiii, s) that all individuals are animata. For we are here told (p. 16) t The others (aside from specialissues on Spinozain variousjournals) are: Paul Kashap, ed., Studies in Spinoza: Critical and InterpretiveEssays (Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1972);MarjorieGrene, ed., Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1973); Eugene Freeman and Maurice Mandelbaum,eds., Spinoza:Essays in Interpretation (La Salle, IU.:Open Court, 1973);and J. G. van der Bend, ed., Spinozaon Knowing,Being, and Freedom(Assen:Van Gorcum, 1974). 2The followingabbreviationsystemis used:E for Ethics, whichis cited by part and sectionnumber;"s" for scholium;"c" for corollary;"def." for definition;G for SpinozaOpera,ed. CarlGebhardt,4 vols. (Heidelberg : Carl Winters, 1925),whichis citedby volume,page, and line number. 88 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY that a stone is not aware of itself and not "worthy of the name of consciousness"--even though it has a mind. It is unclear whether Harris attempts to avoid this apparent contradiction. The further suggestion (pp. 14, 18-19) that the mind and body are identical because there is only one substance is surely mistaken, since the mind...