Major Works Of Fiction Research Articles

Autoportraits du Brésil

Self-portraits of Brazil, Mario Carelli. Like all discourses on national identity, the quest for " Brazilianity ", that one can follow through the writings of the intellectuals, poets and novelists, suffers from a two-fold weakness. One weakness is due to its object : national character is more easily described than defined. The other cornes from the ephemeral and ideologically dubious dimension of the concept's références, in particular racial criteria. But that is how Brazil " Brazilianized " itelf, particularly because this perpetual reflexion on the Brazilian, is embodied in major works of fiction.

The Fiction of William Gass: The Consolation of Language

first comprehensive study of works of William Gass addresses extensive correlation between theoretical fictional works places Gass at forefront of contemporary post-realism.Saltzman argues that contrary to charges of moral, artistic, or even political turpitude, innovative fiction of William Gass represents a conscientious effort to contend with indeterminacy through art. fiction of Gass other contemporary writers, world of text is a distinct competitive addition to reality, not a mere description of reality.Saltzman examines Gass s major fictional works, Omensetter s Luck and Willie Masters Lonesome Wife, the collected stories of In Heart of Heart of Country, the extensive novel-in-progress The Tunnel, well as essay collections, Fiction Figures of Life and The World Within Word.

The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton

Camille Wells Slights, 777T Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. xix + 307 pp. $21.00. by P.G. Stanwood This long book aims to describe the importance and general currency of casuistry in seventeenth-century England, on the one hand, and then to show by analogy, on the other, that Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton responded to a common mode of seeing and feeling experience in terms of "cases of conscience." Camille Wells Slights means "to show how the casuistical view of morality as problematic action to be analyzed in terms of divine law, particular circumstances, and individual conscience permeates the ethical and political thought of the time and also how this habit of mind informs major fictional works" (p. 298). Slights is very selective in the works she chooses of her four writers, but she spares us no chance of missing any real or imagined points of contact between the "casuistical paradigm" and such different works as (interalia) Julius Caesar, The Temple, and Samson Agonistes. The term "casuistry" now brings to mind quibbling for its own sake, with a mainly pejorative value, like "sophistry." "Moral theology" certainly sounds better, but this expression, sometimes used alternatively, barely appears in Slights's book. This is unfortunate because some clarification of these terms and of their related history would have helped to give more sense to the first two chapters of her book, on "The Tradition" and "Method as Form." Moral theology is the genus of which casuistry is the species or the particular application. General principles of Christian conduct, whose precepts are contained especially in the Old Testament Commandments and in the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament, speak to the whole of moral behavior; but these principles must be brought to specific cases, and the larger code applied in individual circumstances. Slights is quite right in saying that "casuistry is the process of applying fundamental moral principles to the activities of daily living" (p. 3), yet she might have related casuistry more clearly to the wider theological and traditionally Christian world of which it is a part. 42 BOOK REVIEWS Casuistry received its most notable development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with distinctive contributions from English writers such as William Perkins, Jeremy Taylor, Robert Sanderson and others, whom Slights discusses; but one should realize from reading this book (and does not) that moral theology (accompanied by some kind of casuistry) exists from the beginning of the Church. Slights might at least have given recognition to the patristic teachers — ClementofAlexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian, Cyril ofJerusalem, Augustine, and the two Gregories. And was not St. Ambrose responding to Cicero's De Officiis, a pagan guide to behavior? And what is the position of Aristotle? Or of St. Thomas Aquinas and those who followed him? The English writers on "conscience " knew their roots and their sources, and doubtless Slights knows them, too. The point is that one should not write about casuistry in the seventeenth century without giving some attention to the intellectual world beyond England. Slights, of course, is not writing the history of moral theology and casuistry. This ground is familiar and it is already full; but we should expect some larger historical perspective than we get from a book that calls itself The Casuistical Tradition. Nevertheless, Slights succeeds in reminding us of the currency of casuistical writing in seventeenth-century England and demonstrates with considerable thoroughness the force especially of Robert Sanderson's "Case of the Engagement," not so much the product of a legalistic mind but of one which shows how "the motives from which a man acts, the information available to him about the circumstances of a proposed action and its consequences, and a standard of moral value are inextricably bound together" (p. 59). Now this kind of practical divinity was common in the period under review, and Slights's contention is that it affected the manner in which dramatists and poets (that is, writers of "fictional works") conceived the situations of their characters. Having set the theoretical background of the book in the rather narrow way I have suggested and paraphrasing much of Sanderson's inelegant book, Slights...

James Joyce's Exiles and the Tradition of the Edwardian Problem-Play

JAMES JOYCE'S CRITICAL INTEREST in the theatre of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, John Synge, George Moore, Edward Martyn, and other Edwardian problem-playwrights predates his major works of fiction. The unconventional problem-play, especially the symbolic drama of Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, appealed to Joyce as the most innovative artistic form in which an aspiring artist could capture his vision of that elusive truth of the human condition. In his early definition of drama, he makes the distinction between literary fiction which is dependent on the conventional and circumstantial aspects of daily life, and the problem-play which presents the underlying laws of life "in all their nakedness and divine severity":

Be a Man, Be a Woman: Androgyny in "House Made of Dawn"

Scott Momaday's House Made of Dan,' winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, the first major work of fiction by an American Indian, has become a classic of the American Indian literature. In spite of its acceptance, however, the novel has not been given the critical attention one might expect it to receive. It remains a difficult book, a complex, mosaic work of fiction, as much in the tradition of Joyce and Faulkner as in that of the Indian tale. Momaday, a Kiowa/Cherokee with a Ph.D. in American literature from Stanford, has drawn on his Indian heritage and his white education in creating this book about the bicultural dilemma of the contemporary Indian. Briefly, it is the story of Abel, a young Pueblo Indian who returns to his village after serving in World War II and is unable to integrate himself into the village after his encounter with the white world. He lives with his grandfather and turns to alcohol in his malaise. After killing an albino villager in a fight outside a bar, he is sent to prison. Seven years later, in 1952, he is released and relocated in Los Angeles, where he finds assimilation into white society even more difficult than returning to the world of his grandfather Francisco. After losing his job and suffering a nearly fatal beating by a Chicano policeman, he returns to the village, where he attends his grandfather's final delirium and death. Through his sufferings and through the fragments of wisdom he learns in this last meeting with the old man, Abel begins the road back to spiritual peace, and his triumph is signaled by his joining the ceremonial dawn runners on the morning after Francisco's death and attempting, in spite of his injuries, to run with them. A bare outline of the plot is inadequate to the richness of this novel, with its complex of nearly allegorical characters and its evocation of the geography of New Mexico and the character of contemporary Indian life, both on the reservation and in the urban centers. The basic conflicts of the white/Indian dilemma are central to the novel's meaning, the religious, political, economic and cultural differences which have separated the two races since their earliest contact.

The Sickness Unto Death In The Underworld: A Study of Nihilism

Since the Enlightenment ennui and despair have been among the most dominant themes in western literature. In the twentieth century there scarcely exists a single major work of fiction which views man's nature and destiny under the aspect of hope or fulfillment. Why this should be so is the subject of interminable discussion which, generally speaking, locates the deeper cause in the breakdown of virtually all genuine religiousness with an attendant rise of meaninglessness and emptiness. This development in turn is linked to the various revolutions, particularly the Industrial, that have combined to undermine traditional occidental modes of thought and living. While some critics hold that it is merely a question of modern society becoming gradually accustomed to the blessings so precipitously conferred upon it by technology, thus comparing its present growing pains to those of an adolescent, few seem to disagree on the prevailing exhaustion and anxiety. In addition to the note of doom struck by the best intellectuals of our day — and its fashionableness is no argument against its truth — it would appear that the unreflecting masses independently of being exposed to this literature do not know how to redeem their leisure time, have lost a great deal of capacity for spontaneous participation, and seek despairingly if not eagerly for something vital to which they can relate themselves and through which find renewed structure in their lives.