YES, 34, 2004 YES, 34, 2004 (p. I74) in Florida,leaving his 'California'chapter unwrittenand so, in a sense, his book unfinished. The Kafka text which occupies the last sixteen pages of Lostin America - Der Verschollene (TheMan WhoWasNever HeardOfAgain) - looked to have been left unfinished(asthe story 'The Stoker')on its author'sdeath, only to emerge posthumouslyas rathermore finishedthan TheCastle or TheTrial,though Tambling shows that 'nothing in the text can be reduced to a thesis' and that 'the novel plots other labyrinthsthan [Karl Rossman, the stoker]wanders in'. The fact that Kafka never actuallyknew an America other than the one that eitherfiction or theemigre members of his family could offer him underpinsthe point that 'to be lost without trace is possible anywhere' (p. 197), which prompts Tambling to end his book wondering whether the American city may be 'a place for subjectswithout power, who have had [...] a sense of their subjectivitymauled' (p. 198), though he poses, and leaves, this issue as an unansweredquestion. In what is not a long book it has neverthelessbeen a long trip from the unforgettable opening to BleakHouse(pp. i6-23; Tambling deals sensitivelywith this old chestnut)to the Karl Rossman who is forgotten,and forgetshimself,in 'The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma'. The details which are such a crucial part of Tambling's argument are always fascinating,but they come thick and fast and leave the final impressionthat some of the dust stirredup is taking its time to settle. But anyone interestedin these authorsand in the idea of the city will find LostintheAmerican City rewarding and revealing. UNIVERSITYOF READING JOHN PILLING Dooble Tongue: Scots, Burns, Contradiction.By JEFFREY SKOBLOW.Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2001. 268 pp. /35. ISBN:0-87413-728-4. DoobleTongue self-consciouslydeparts from traditionalforms of academic writing. Analytical criticism, the disclosure of findings made in archival research, insights and connections in discussionare all here, but they are decentred by interruptions of style and page layout. Quotations from Adorno, Montaigne, Eavan Boland, Hugh MacDiarmid, or Burns and his contemporaries, appear in small shaded blocks to the side of paragraphsof allusive prose. Sometimes these quotations are directly edged against what the body-text is saying, sometimes they are simply oblique. This technique of juxtaposition is an evident throwback to Marshall McLuhan and if there is an underlyingthesis informingJeffreySkoblow'sbook it is very close to the notion that the medium is the message. Skoblowsets out with a heightened sensitivityto the distanceor rupturebetween scholarlydiscourse and the animated vernacularof the idiom Burns'sScots poems are active in. Yet this distance is arguablyneither so great nor so unbridgeableas Skoblow believes. At times, his wilful insistence upon it seems arch. For example, the book ends like this: 'Poetry(or shouting)cannot overcome, cannot even significantly undermine, the edifices of a centralizing power: so Burns disappears, and disappears,and each time we roll away the stone, a great absence is revealed. Sing tal larietal,tallarietal,tal larie tay' (p. 243). In the 1970s and i980s, academic criticism of James Joyce and particularly Finnegans [Ilake sometimes employed a similar method of pastiche, presumably to undermine traditional critical exegesis with Derridean quarksof significance.The (p. I74) in Florida,leaving his 'California'chapter unwrittenand so, in a sense, his book unfinished. The Kafka text which occupies the last sixteen pages of Lostin America - Der Verschollene (TheMan WhoWasNever HeardOfAgain) - looked to have been left unfinished(asthe story 'The Stoker')on its author'sdeath, only to emerge posthumouslyas rathermore finishedthan TheCastle or TheTrial,though Tambling shows that 'nothing in the text can be reduced to a thesis' and that 'the novel plots other labyrinthsthan [Karl Rossman, the stoker]wanders in'. The fact that Kafka never actuallyknew an America other than the one that eitherfiction or theemigre members of his family could offer him underpinsthe point that 'to be lost without trace is possible anywhere' (p. 197), which prompts Tambling to end his book wondering whether the American city may be 'a place for subjectswithout power, who have had [...] a sense of their subjectivitymauled' (p. 198), though he poses, and leaves, this issue as an unansweredquestion. In what is not a long book it has neverthelessbeen a long trip from...