Literary Commodity Research Articles

Rescate editorial. Nunca es tarde cuando la dicha es buena (1858) de Tomás Gutiérrez

This editorial rescue presents and contextualizes, within Nineteenth-Century Argentine literature, the sentimental brief novel or “novelita”, entitled Nunca es tarde cuando la dicha es buena, originally published in Las Violetas. Ensayos Literarios in 1858, by the unknown author Tomás Gutiérrez. This novel, mentioned by Hebe Molina and Myron Lichtblau in their studies of Argentine literary history of the 19th century, has remained unknown since the last decades of the 19th century, until now, when it is rescued from a single copy found in the Argentine Academy of Letters. Its re-edition is framed within a study of the sentimental literature of the 1850s and 1880s and contributes to the understanding of this literature, apparently only passatist and innocent, as a key discourse in the construction of subjectivities, roles of gender, sexual behaviors and forms of intimacy in the decades after Rosismo and before the consolidation of the Nation State in 1880. The moral character, the intertextuality with Christian resonance and its condition, at the same time, of first literary commodity (Velázquez, 2017) converge in the formation of this hybridized cultural device full of rich social implications. Also, the question of love marriage vs. forced marriage appears, both here and in other sentimental novels of the time, shows some of the topics that, around the sentimental sociability of the time, had created generational, racial and social class controversies.

Two Theories

Two Theories

Fascisten som anti-fascist

The Fascist as Anti-Fascist. Teratologen, Literary Criticism, and the Literary Commodity
 The present article takes as its point of departure the debate that ensued when anti-racist magazine Expo revealed that Swedish writer Niklas Lundkvist (a.k.a. ”Nikanor Teratologen”) over several years as ”Ezzelino” had published massive amounts of racist and anti-semitic writings in an online forum. The article suggests that Ezzelino’s ideological stance is in fact detectable in Teratologen’s critically acclaimed literary works as well, and asks why Swedish literary critics have been prone to read the latter as an anti-fascist parody of fascist ideology rather than as an attempt to promote fascist views by rendering them aesthetically acceptable. It traces this inclination to the critics’ adherence to a Barthesian conception of textuality, which delivers the critic from having to think of the author as the historical origin of the literary text. The article goes on to suggest that this textual principle is trumped by the fact that literary texts today appear to us as literary commodities, that is, in a form that re-inscribes the authorial function into the literary text as the very product that is on sale. While critics quite rightly point out that one cannot equate Teratologen with Lundkvist, it is not our understanding of Lundkvist’s intentions that are affected by the revelation that Ezzelino and Teratologen are the same person, it is our understanding of how the Teratologen-commodity functions that changes – or at least, that should change, if we want literary criticism to be a means to resist fascist ideologies.

Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley

Reviewed by: Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley Greg Barnhisel Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture. Evan Kindley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 176. $35.00 (cloth). Even taking into consideration penicillin and the atomic bomb, bureaucracy may be the most consequential and pervasive of twentieth-century humanity’s gifts to ourselves. (Global warming we gave to all species.) Yes, administrative gears ground in ancient Rome and classical China, but in the 1900s bureaucratic organizations and institutions of every type spread like kudzu. Sociologists such as William Whyte and Max Weber documented how, over the first half of the century, bureaucracies proliferated beyond the church, the military, and the government, coming to colonize every aspect of modern life. Even the rambunctious American literary world got “rationalized” (to use Weber’s term) and, by the postwar period, surrendered to bureaucracy. In his pithy Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, scholar and Los Angeles Review of Books editor Evan Kindley shows how once-oppositional modernist “poet-critics” joined the bureaucratic machine and then, from inside, used it to enshrine and perpetuate modernist literature. The book is not just about paper-pushing, though. Instead, Kindley’s larger subject is “justification: the justification of literature, and of the difficult, experimental, elitist, unrepentantly unmarketable literature called ‘modernism’ in particular” (10). How did “modernist poet-critics” explain “what is the point of art” and “why should we pay for it”? To answer this, Kindley turns to writers both familiar (T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden) and surprising (Sterling A. Brown), tracing how these justifications evolved to reflect changing social and political conditions in the United States, as well as the institutional positions held by these poet-critics. (Although Auden and Eliot were as influential in Britain as in the States, Kindley’s lens is focused squarely on America.) Kindley is not the first to adumbrate these poet-critics’ arguments. Theorists from Raymond Williams to Andreas Huyssen to Peter Bürger have documented modernism’s apologiae, and in particular the central role of the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy in making a case for modernism. In the book’s early chapters, Kindley carefully traces the subtly divergent, and changing, positions of Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Archibald MacLeish on aesthetic autonomy—familiar ground, but briskly and clearly recounted. The Depression, though, made recondite squabbles about aesthetic autonomy seem irrelevant. The poet-critics got day jobs, and here Kindley’s book gets truly original. In the 1930s, he writes, “modernist poet-critics went from being slightly less obscurantist bohemians, charged with clarifying byzantine avant-garde practices to bewildered but sympathetic elites, to being civil servants, charged with reinforcing the ideals and institutions of American democracy and enlisting the energies of art in its defense” (73–74). MacLeish, the epitome of the high-minded modernist civil servant, is the key figure here, but Kindley’s discussion of African American poet Sterling A. Brown’s work for the Federal Writers’ Project, and his analysis of Brown’s poem “When de Saints Go Ma’ching Home,” is for me the standout section of this concise book. Considering the position of the black writer joining the federal government in the 1930s, Kindley notes [End Page 430] archly that all poets have to compromise their ideals when going to work for the state, but some writers “had to compromise more than others” (108). Bureaucracies further proliferated and intertwined in the early Cold War period, and the modernists came to use them to their advantage. Although he could have chosen any number of representative examples, Kindley ends his book with perhaps the most important of these: R. P. Blackmur’s work to embed modernism in the university while protecting the independence and autonomy of both the critic and the modernism. Moving modernism to academe would “protect literature from . . . the market for literary commodities,” but modernism had to insist on its autonomy from other market imperatives—notably, the “market for skilled labor” that increasingly organized the postwar university (112). To accomplish this, Blackmur cannily brought in foundations such as Rockefeller, which funded the critical work (in journals and the Kenyon School of English) that...

Hostage by Helge Dascher

in larger studies, and accordingly three of the six chapters scrutinize known authors of presumably different literary traditions for truly original findings that are an essential report to the comparatist academy. The novels Kirsch analyzes are not overly concerned with global perils but rather with clashes or escapes that alter personal reckonings, a choice that implies observing global novels as rooted in a way that is new to the readers but not to the authors. Testing present interpretative currents, the first chapter is triggered by the discontents assumed for world literature, namely making foreignness a literary commodity, literature politically virtuous and aesthetically challenging, and untranslatability. It is evident that Kirsch has not sought the political security clearance committed native critics and authors demand of interpretations like his, and he assuredly concludes (in the chapter on Atwood and Houellebecq) that this form of globalism “is based primarily on the experience of modern Western societies.” His assessment that we are entering “a future in which English is the dominant language” can be tempered by the abundance of world literature in other languages and their novel additions to the themes of climate change, immigration , morality, sexuality, and violence that he dissects. For other chapter pairings like Murakami and Bolaño or Adichie and Hamid, Kirsch construes as positive the cultural encumbrances that were perpetual reminders of their “foreignness” to untutored readers . The chapters devoted to individual authors (Pamuk and Ferrante) prove that cultural mobility and canonicity are social, that leaving home, as in Murakami and Ferrante, invalidates any need to seek the explanatory “authority” of your otherness, whether one is an Indian reading a Turk or an American reading a Nigerian, in English. With completeness in context and unsparingness in form, Kirsch articulates the tangible geopolitical spirit conveyed by these writers, which is ultimately what makes them global. His ecumenical and upbeat analysis successfully draws a “more hopeful picture of world literature than the one painted by critics and theorists,” since “it is impossible to say that all global novels have certain qualities in common.” Timely, direct, and full of good sense—characteristics that make it ideal for translation into other languages—The Global Novel brilliantly discards critical pieties to address numerous arguments for what the twentyfirst -century novel is becoming. Will H. Corral San Francisco Guy Delisle. Hostage. Trans. Helge Dascher. Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2017. 432 pages. Christophe Andre was working as a Médecins Sans Frontières administrator in Ingushetia, just west of Chechnya, when World Literature in Review 88 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2017 he was kidnapped and held for 111 days. His story might well have been forgotten but for Guy Delisle’s extraordinary graphic talent. Delisle manages to get inside Andre’s mind and plumb his soul to provide the reader with a visceral experience of a most frightening and disorienting captivity. Having recorded interviews with Andre, Delisle has firsthand information with which to work. He uses it well but moves beyond mere facts to create a tour de force exploration of resilience. Using only shades of blue-gray, white, and black, Delisle’s panels follow Andre from the beginning to the end of his ordeal. The visuals are not emphatically fascinating in themselves or that varied— how much can you do with a man tied to a radiator in a small room, occasionally visited by a captor with a bowl of thin gruel? It is rather the territory within Andre’s mind that captures the reader and characterizes his movement from optimism and the certainty that his colleagues are plotting his rescue, to deep despair that he has been forgotten, to self-blame and self-incriminatory feelings of impotence. Andre doesn’t have a language in common with his captors, so his only recourse is to interpret their action or nonaction in conversation with himself. At a certain point, two of his captors, all of whom are made singular through the succinct genius of Delisle’s drawing, enter the room and offer him a glass of vodka, which he accepts, drinks with them, then thinks, “Is this fraternizing with the enemy?” Afterward , he berates himself for giving in to the very human craving for interaction. He holds onto...

Elizabeth Thomas, Laetitia Pilkington and Competing Currencies of the Book

ABSTRACTIn their life writing, Elizabeth Thomas (1675–1731) and Laetitia Pilkington (c.1709–50) strategically use the book (as a material object, literary commodity and cultural currency) and the library (as both a physical space and a curated collection of texts) to create meaning and identity. Well-read gentlewomen with literary ambitions, associations with established male writers and a keen understanding of the literary marketplace, Thomas and Pilkington aspired to achieve fame as poets, desiring literary reputation more than the financial remuneration. They also recognized the book as a marker of status within eighteenth-century culture. Yet even as they narratively privilege the book as evidence of their own cultural position and literary viability, they retain only limited control over its possession and circulation, and, ultimately, their own reputations. As their personal situations deteriorated (both faced homelessness and endured debtors' prison), they struggled to remain financially solvent by exploiting the primarily commercial value of the book. Resorting to less reputable means of earning a living within print culture eroded the cultural capital they previously enjoyed. When the book (as owned or produced) becomes most valuable for them in a purely financial sense, it becomes most costly to their professional reputations and literary legacy.

The Review of English Studies Prize Essay: Dressing the Text: Ralph Crane’s Scribal Publication of Drama

The dramatic manuscripts which survive in the hand of the early modern scribe Ralph Crane (1565?-1632?) share a set of characteristics which have come to be associated with the scribe’s influence. This article discusses three of these features—an expurgation of oaths, the introduction of ‘massed entries’, and an unrestrained use of parentheses—and suggests that their presence shows Crane’s conscious refashioning of his manuscripts as overtly literary commodities, as books whose substance and presentation were designed to aid their intended recipient’s careful, solitary reading. Departing from theories that Crane made alterations to oaths to reflect ‘his own principles’, or ‘a personal animus’, that his massing of entries was a time-saving ‘idiosyncrasy’, or that his parentheses were ‘random’, I suggest that these aspects of Crane’s dramatic manuscripts are deliberate scribal choices based on his copy-texts, their status as drama, and a consciousness of their intended cultural use.

Making an Almost Joyful Noise: Augustan Imitation and the Psalms of David

AbstractThis essay examines the transformation of psalmody in the long eighteenth century, from metrical translation set to music and sung by an English congregation into a purely literary imitation designed to be appreciated like any other form of modern poetry. Under the influence of an Augustan theory of poetic imitation, poets move beyond simple paraphrase or translation to create a new literary commodity. While these poems identify themselves as Psalms, assuming the cachet of scriptural authority, they seem largely unrelated to worship or liturgy; they are intended not so much to express private devotion as to ‘amuse’ ingenious readers.

Revolution of Thought/Revulsion of Feeling: Edgar Allan Poe and the Interest Concept

Revolution of Thought/Revulsion of Feeling:Edgar Allan Poe and the Interest Concept Sean McAlister (bio) Style to the idea is like enamel to the tooth. —Victor Hugo, quoted by Edgar Allan Poe, “Critical Notices,” Southern Literary Messenger (1835)1 [R]eally valuable ideas can only be had at the price of close attention. —Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1992)2 There is no indifference to material reality in Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, despite an older critical tradition that took his well-known opposition to “the heresy of The Didactic” to suggest otherwise.3 Poe’s protagonists—his lovers, his criminals, his cadavers and near-cadavers—almost always suffer from a variation of the “nervous intensity of interest” that leads Egaeus to fixate with ultimately disastrous consequences on the teeth of his eponymous beloved in “Berenice,” the tale at the center of my analysis in this essay.4 In his cosmological essays and his tales of mesmerism, Poe’s narrators and dialogists evince what Agathos, in “The Power of Words,” describes as a “deep interest” in the dizzying connectedness of the material universe.5 In his critical essays and reviews, too, Poe displays an abiding concern with the ways that readers invest, sustain, and are rewarded for their interest in reading, the material response to which he names “the poetic effect.” In all these instances of “interest” in Poe’s work, the foundations of disinterested aesthetic contemplation are being unsettled. But, as I will argue in this essay, Poe’s critique of disinterested contemplation should be read as a conformation or adaptation of the category of the aesthetic rather than a rejection of it. If, as Friedrich Schlegel observed [End Page 471] near the end of the eighteenth century, the aesthetic turn toward das Interessante was coeval with the historical emergence of the novel, Poe goes a step further by celebrating, in his own analyses of the psychological implications of Modernity on literary form, the forceful brevity and “unity or totality of effect” associated with the “short prose tale”:6 “During the hour of perusal,” he explains in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales, “the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control.”7 Readerly interest—and not disinterest, the more famous prerequisite of aesthetic judgment—turns out to be the key term for engaging Poe’s aesthetics of the literary commodity. Some Poe scholars, including Meredith McGill and Terence Whalen, have minimized the significance and originality of Poe’s aesthetic theories, focusing instead on the ways his work responded to market instabilities, the cultures of piracy and reprinting, and other contingencies of antebellum authorship, as a kind of corrective to the long-running (and mostly Continental) trend of viewing Poe as an aesthete and an “isolato” (to borrow Herman Melville’s descriptor of himself and Hawthorne).8 Without contesting any of these historicizations, however, I’d like to suggest that Poe’s most enduring and innovative responses to what Jonathan Elmer calls the “figure” of mass print culture are aesthetic ones—that is, responses that treat the aesthetic as a field for experimentation with the new circumstances of authorship in the antebellum United States.9 This essay argues that Poe’s theory of interest—which he develops through a pattern of counterpoints to Kantian disinterest—constitutes one such significant structure of response to the bewildering state of aesthetic contemplation in mass culture. Poe’s writing can be figured, then, at the nexus of eighteenth-century aesthetic discourses that are grounded through Immanuel Kant’s disinterested and subjectively universal power of judgment and an emergent nineteenth-century aesthetics of interest that is antifoundational and more differentiable in its effects than the Kantian scheme. A surprising consequence of Poe’s aesthetic adaptations, which I also examine, is that his theory of interest ends up resonating with some of the later-nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in American thought that have come to be grouped as Pragmatism; the pragmatists’ recurring attention to interest, in this sense, can be understood as continuous—both conceptually and historically—with Poe’s own interested manipulations of the eighteenth-century category of the aesthetic. Writing about Poe’s frequent...

"Harvard in Hell": Holloway House Publishing Company, Players Magazine, and the Invention of Black Mass-Market Erotica: Interviews with Wanda Coleman and Emory "Butch" Holmes II

In the late 1960s, Holloway House Publishing Company, a niche publisher of adult magazines and erotic paperbacks, emerged as an unexpected center of black literary production. Founded in 1959 by two Hollywood publicists, Ralph Weinstock and Bentley Morriss, Holloway House in its early years published an eclectic mix of high- and low-brow materials, including skin magazines Adam and Knight, biographies about Jayne Mansfield and Ernest Hemingway, and the literature of Casanova and the Marquis de Sade. However, following the Watts uprising of 1965, Morriss and Weinstock changed the direction of the Los Angeles-based company by publishing mass-market paperbacks targeted specifically toward black working-class consumers. The two white publishers recognized the uprisings in Watts and in other black neighborhoods across the country as a crisis of representation, and they capitalized on this crisis by creating a culture industry that catered to a large-scale black readership. This was a major development in the world of mass-market literature. Of course, the mass production of inexpensive and entertaining reading material for the American public has a long history, going back to the dime novels of the nineteenth century. But the dime novel and its early twentieth-century successor, the pulp magazine, were literary commodities marketed to whites and ethnic immigrants who worked in America's industrial centers. The novels created by Holloway House represent an important watershed in the history of American popular literature, as these were the first black-authored books to be sold in black communities and purchased by black consumers on a national scale. Holloway House became successful in part because the company put out adult materials that no other press dared to publish. In 1966, Holloway House released its debut black-themed novel, Some Like it Dark: The Intimate Biography of a Negro Call Girl. Ghostwritten by Leo Guild, the book sold well, earning the company as much as six million dollars, according to former Holloway House employee Wanda Coleman. The book's financial success confirmed Morriss and Weinstock's suspicions that there was an untapped market of black readers living in America's ghettos. They began to seek out writers more aggressively by advertising in the Los Angeles black weekly, The Sentinel, and by sending editors down to the Watts Writers Workshop. In 1967, Holloway House established its position as the premier publisher of underground black literature by publishing Iceberg Slim's Pimp. The Story of My Life. The book sold millions of copies, and it inspired countless black writers to craft their own narratives of pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, and junkies for Holloway House. In the early 1970s, Holloway House became an outlet for talented writers such as Donald Goines, Joseph Nazel, Odie Hawkins, and many others to publish their street-themed literature. By distributing these books in inner-city communities, prisons, and military bases across the country, Holloway House bypassed both the East Coast literary establishment and Johnson Publishing Company, the publisher behind Jet and Ebony. Through an alliance of white business interests and black literary talent, black-experience literature emerged as a distinct cultural expression for working-class African Americans whose access to self-representation was limited. Even while remaining virtually unknown to white America and to large portions of middle-class black America, the black-experience novels of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines have had enormous impact on mainstream American culture. In the past decade, for instance, the street literature of Sister Souljah, Vickie M. Stringer, K'Wan, and others has emerged as one of the driving forces of the African American publishing industry, accounting for half of the new titles published by black authors. Although the success of street literature is often understood as an outgrowth of hip-hop music, especially gangsta rap, the opposite is actually the case: the pimp autobiographies and crime novels of Iceberg Slim, Goines, and other pioneers of street literature inspired Ice-T, Ice Cube, The Notorious B. …

"The Other Was Whole": Anne of Green Gables , Trauma and Mirroring

More than a century after its first publication in 1908, L. M. Montgomery's of Green Gables remains exceptionally popular, read worldwide: a dynamic text passed from generation to generation. Anne fans, as Brenda Weber terms men and women who love Montgomery's novel, demonstrate an intense connection to its heroine that passes beyond the confines of their own childhood, perhaps only comparable to the widespread affection retained for Louisa May Alcott's Jo March (Weber 50-51). The considerable amount of consumable product is tangible evidence of the text's draw. In a salutation to Green Gables's centennial, Margaret Atwood details the An- nery available to the text's devotees: Anne boxed sets, notepaper and pencils, coffee mugs and aprons, candies and straw hats. . Green Gables, clearly, has transcended the limits of time and of the narrow geographic space of Prince Edward Island, inflating into a beloved international literary commodity. However, despite a great deal of scholarly attention, the enigma of this popularity has not been entirely resolved, nor all of the dimensions of the text's appeal understood. Fascination with Green Gables is often credited to the unorthodoxy of its eponymous character. Shirley is mercurial to the point of ridiculousness: she is a narcissist; she is a rebel. Nevertheless, by Green Gables's end, she has transitioned into something entirely other, an undeniable movement. This transition is a significant and neglected locus of fascination with Green Gables. Working within the framework of Jacques Lacan's psy- choanalytic orders, I propose that that fascination is fundamentally connected to the pleasures of witnessing Anne's active healing from early childhood trauma, her movement from isolated fantasy and profound mirror distortions to productive social relationships within an embracing community. Scholarship that addresses Anne's appeal has, of course, already proposed manifold answers to this question of textual attraction and longevity. Elizabeth

Metropolitan Modernism and Its West Indian Interlocutors: 1950s London and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature

Using archival sources, interviews, and memoirs, this essay documents the surprisingly extensive connections between London's extant modernists and West Indian writers during the 1950s. With the support of Stephen Spender, John Lehmann, T. S. Eliot, and other luminaries, a vibrant group of Caribbean artists quickly established themselves as known literary commodities. Such forms of collaboration between metropolitan intellectuals and their colonial counterparts were structured by shared interests in high culture. London's modernists feared English culture was faced with terminal decline; West Indian writers exploited that fear by insisting that the metropolitan culture industry badly needed an infusion of colonial talent. The brevity and fragility of these bonds, however, led to the emergence of postcolonial literature as a distinct but marginal cultural niche. London's postwar identity as center of global cultural production, I suggest, was intimately connected with the recruitment and assimilation of colonial intellectuals.

Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence

Charlotte Dacre's relatively neglected fictions create a unique space in the dialectic of violence that characterizes so much of British Romanticism. Her simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from violence is reflective of an era that apotheosized the sublime, which formed its imagination on the bloody Revolution in France and the increasingly visible brutalities of industrialism, and that made the Gothic its most popular literary commodity. But Dacre's peculiar contribution to this hermeneutic is to build through her four major novels a mythology by which violence emerges, most of all, from feminine libidinous drives. This essay, therefore, begins by contrasting Dacre's approach to feminine sexual desire with that of two other notable women writers of the period, Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Mary Tighe. The essay continues to explore Dacre's most purely Gothic expression, Zofloya (1806), particularly through the scene in which Victoria stalks, attacks, and murders a girl whom she perceives to be her sexual rival. And it concludes with an analysis of a lesser-known novel, The Passions (1811), and its vibrant anti-heroine, Appollonia Zulmer. Troped as noble hunter, ferocious goddess, social critic, and scorned woman, Appollonia is Dacre's most complex vision of the meaning of feminine violence. Still, Dacre's ultimate inclination is toward tragic irony: though she vigorously rewrites the conventional Gothic script (where women are the victims of demonic men), she does not envision anything like the comic release dreamed of, more than a century later, in Hélène Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa."

Literary Ludics

Literary Ludics Warren F. Motte, Jr. I N THIS ISSUE the reader will find a collection of essays as ap­ parently various as the endless forms of play itself. Jean Alter pro­ poses a stroll through the ludibrique, that so-called subliterature where, as he says, “ Pérotisme se sublime en pornographie.” His canon is composed of twelve novels, chosen from the same dubious display in (one imagines) a dingy provincial train station. Between readings of Orgies spatiales and Les Amazones de Bavière, Alter elaborates a theory of pornography as ludic economy. In so doing, he in effect performs the ludic as well, offering a game of catch-the-allusion to his reader, scriptor ludens in search of a lector ludens. Frédérique Chevillot, after rewriting Roger Caillois, focuses on the relation of the text and the metatext that the author tenders as gloss. Giving particular attention to the incipits of three metatexts by Raymond Roussel, Italo Calvino, and Marcel Bénabou, she questions the manner in which the text initiates itself, and suggests that the primal lie which she finds in each clears away a fictional space and allows the writing to proceed (a suggestion, it may be noted in passing, not without implications for this preface). Postulating an agonistic game involving rule and fiction, Chevillot will speculate, also, upon why Marcel Bénabou did not write any of his books. Susan Ireland, touring “ The Comic World of Jacques Roubaud,” discusses the latter’s first two “ Hortense” novels, and argues that both explicitly in­ scribe the writing act within a ludic frame. She points out processes of carnivalized intertextuality in those novels, quirky borrowings from writers as seemingly diverse as Flaubert, John Buchan, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Raymond Queneau, compositional integers in what Roubaud himself calls a roman-valise. Beneath the obvious (and refreshing) whimsy of these novels, Ireland suggests, Roubaud is presenting a blueprint for a literary experimentalism grounded in play. T. Jefferson Kline invites us to play the game of Kim in Butor’s Degrés. Invoking Johan Huizinga and D. W. Winnicott, Kline says that the game “ serves as a springboard for a vertiginous play of supplementary meanings and figures that increasingly undermine the narrator’s purpose.” As he iden­ tifies metonymic, metatextual, intertextual, and metaphorical levels in the novel, Kline finds points of intersection affording a space for a Vol. XXXI, No. 4 3 L ’E s pr it C réa te u r metacultural reading of the text. As Sydney Lévy presses us into a search for the lost soap, he will evoke along the way some of the privileged games of contemporary writing. Ebulliently reading Proust and Perec, Ponge and Borges, Lévy postulates a ludic dynamic of appropriation whereby literary commodities, like soap, circulate from hand to hand. Manipulated, rubbed, chafed, any soap becomes, he argues, Monsavon; it washes itself even while it scours us clean, in what Ponge calls a “ toilette intellectuelle.” Writing on an empty stomach, I have for my part tried to demonstrate the essential similarity of reading and eating, tempted by the toothsome décor of Alina Reyes’s powerful first novel, Le Boucher. There, erotic games are staged upon a background of raw meat, as animate, sexualized flesh plays against the eloquent carcasses of the cold room. But the real meat of this text resides in the words that compose it; and, as meat is progressively sexualized, so is the process of textuality. Reyes, in short, tells in carnal detail the story of a novel that must be consumed. Benevolently warning his reader from the outset that he intends to turn his back on objectivity and launch into a meandering, narcissistic subjectivism, Jean-Jacques Thomas proposes an analysis of the lies and whisperings of a contemporary writer, an analysis obeying a rather special code, to wit, Thomas’s zip code. Proving once again that a letter always arrives at its destination, he tells us at last, in a rather spec­ tacular explosion de vérité, and after locating his argument scrupulously in the contiguity of those of Nietzsche, Bataille, Breton, Sartre, Caillois, Barthes, and others, the name of the author he’s considering. And...