Reader-response Criticism Research Articles

Revisiting Forgiveness as a Pastoral Theological “Problem”

Jesus calls on his followers to forgive, lest they risk the denial of Divine forgiveness. Such forgiveness should not be confused with human forgiving. Human forgiveness is identified as a pastoral-theological “problem,” especially in the context of intimate violence. A working definition of forgiveness is provided and the nature of this “problem” is explored. Reader-response criticism is identified as a way to read Jesus on forgiveness. A compassionate understanding of forgiveness is encouraged.

Stanley Fish with respect to the reader

The present study is an investigation of the reader-response theory on three works of Fish. In Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics (1970), Interpreting the Variorum (II) (1976), Normal Circumstances (1978), Fish charts the progress of his evolving interpretive method. For this study, first, a comprehensive reading is done on Stanley Fish's three major works as well as on different attitudes toward the reader-response theory. Then, Fish's contribution to the development of reader-response theory is traced and the concurrence and contradictions of his ideas are shown with other critics such as William Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, and Norman Holland. Finally, the relevance and impact of his ideas in contemporary society are drawn. Key words: Reader-response criticism, interpretive community, affective stylistic.

One text, many stories: The (ir)relevance of reader-response criticism for apocryphal literature in the Septuagint

This article investigated the value of reader-response theory for the reading of apocryphal texts in the Septuagint. The groundbreaking work on reader-response theory developed by Wolfgang Iser in his book The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, written in 1978 served as the theoretical point of departure. Although the reader-response theory has been scrutinised and criticised heavily during the last three decades, Iser made a very valuable contribution to the reading of literature. My assumption is that religious texts have to be read in the same way as other literature and therefore literary theories such as Iser’s can be conducive for responsible interpretation. The article consists of the following parts: introductory remarks on the value of reader-response theory for the interpretation of apocryphal texts; a short overview of reader-response criticism; a discussion and evaluation of three different aspects of Iser’s theory, namely ‘gaps’ in texts, ‘asymmetry’ between readers and texts and the concept of ‘the implied reader’. The findings of the investigation will be given in part five (Findings).

Creating a sense of place in fantasy fiction

This paper focuses on the reader’s experience of setting or ‘place’ in fantasy fiction. While in manywritten genres the setting is considered ‘background’, in fantasy fiction it often becomes one of the keyelements of the narrative. Creating a vivid setting without losing the interest of readers is integral tothe success of a fantasy work, and as such it warrants close investigation. The discussion throughoutthe paper involves a critical analysis of current theories and insights proposed by writers and reader-response critics in relation to the creation of a sense of place. It is argued that existing literature thatprovides advice, theory, and guidance to writers usually places emphasis on character developmentand narrative structure, often with a limited or author-focussed consideration of setting. Yet reader-response critics like Wolfgang Iser have examined how readers ‘complete’ the world of the text, andthese critical insights could aid writers of creative fiction in refining their practice. For this reason, theauthor contends that the development of a set of understandings or principles that balances reader-response theories with writing practice is an important way forward in thinking about the creation ofplace in fantasy fiction.

“Sallets in the Lines to Make the Matter Savoury”: Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in <i>Hamlet</i> 2.2

“Sallets in the Lines to Make the Matter Savoury”: Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2 Philip D. Collington In a conversation with the players visiting Elsinor, Shakespeare’s Hamlet requests a performance of Aeneas’s speech to Dido about the fall of Troy. “I remember one said there were no sallets [i.e., herbs or spices] in the lines to make the matter savoury,” Hamlet recalls, “nor no matter in the phrase that might indict the author of affectation, but called it an honest method, as wholesome as sweet.”1 In addition to its rhetorical purity, Hamlet appreciates the exclusivity of a speech that “pleased not the million” but received approbation by “others whose judgements in such matters cried in the top of mine” (2.2.428–30). In his sensitivity to the way literary utterances can be affected by stylistic interpolations (“sallets”), semantic insertions (“matter”), and audience responses (“’twas caviare to the general. But it was—as I received it . . . an excellent play” [lines 428–31]), Hamlet evokes signal concerns of Russian cultural philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. In his essay “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–35), Bakhtin outlined how cultural contexts and individual responses prove as important in determining meaning as authorial intention or the language’s denotative content.2 Anticipating by a half-century such approaches as intertextual, new-historical, and reader-response criticism, Bakhtin posited a triangular hermeneutic whereby the author’s voice, sociohistorical contexts, and audience responses intersect and “interanimate” discourses whose words are already stratified with semantic layers (DN 296). The intersection of semantic elements renders each utterance a “hybrid construction” whereby the speech of one becomes the speech of many: many styles, many speech manners, many “semantic and axiological belief systems” (DN 304–5). To Bakhtin, the novel exemplifies such hybridity because there stylistic and semantic interpolations coexist within a higher artistic unity. In the novel, centrifugal energies of heteroglossia (the existence of a “diversity of individual voices” [DN 262]) are harnessed by centripetal energies of [End Page 237] monologism (the organizing presence of the author’s or narrator’s voice [DN 272]). A novelist is therefore less an originator than an “orchestrator” (DN 366) of languages yoked together by the “superstructure” of this most encompassing literary form (DN 409).3 One factor that has discouraged the application of such insights to Shakespeare’s plays is Bakhtin’s insistence that drama is precluded from dialogism because plays lack a centralized controlling presence: “the system of languages in drama is organized on completely different principles, and therefore its languages sound utterly different than do the languages of the novel. There is no all-encompassing language, dialogically oriented to separate languages” (DN 266). Drama is purely centrifugal, a cacophony of characters and voices with no organizing principle.4 This present study will argue the contrary; that the plurivocality of drama can generate the lively dialogic interanimations that Bakhtin limited to novelistic discourse. Using as a test case a single scene from Hamlet (act 2, scene 2), I will outline how Shakespeare incorporates what Bakhtin terms social “speech genres” and literary “inserted genres,” ranging from Voltemand’s language of diplomacy, Polonius’s hair-splitting pedantry, and Hamlet’s sentimental letter and poem to Ophelia; to Hamlet’s bizarre riddles, philosophical musing, and sophomoric gossip with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. There are also a street ballad, a satirical character sketch, an excerpt of Senecan bombast, and a soliloquy by the prince. Each social speech genre and literary inserted genre is set against more naturalistic exchanges of dialogue (whether in prose or in verse), exchanges that advance plot and characterization without being encoded with identifiable literary or social subgenres. These framing passages do not represent an authorial presence or voice (as they might in the novel); instead, they provide an unobtrusive linguistic baseline against which the embedded forms and styles contrast markedly. Rather than simply juxtapose disparate linguistic styles and forms, Hamlet creates what Bakhtin terms “dialogic reverberations” (DN 284) when interpolated styles and forms overlap and interanimate one another, creating multiple layers of meaning—such as when individual characters appropriate the speech genres of others (e.g., Rozencrantz attempts to debate philosophy with the more erudite...

Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism. Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola . Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+320.

<i>Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism</i>. Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola . Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+320.

Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus by Emily Baragwanath

438 PHOENIX W. Scheidel propose une analyse comparée de deux modèles monétaires, d'une part celui de l'Occident qui a principalement frappé des métaux précieux et s'est peu à peu imposé à une grande partie du monde, d'autre part celui de la Chine qui a utilisé le bronze et qui fait ainsi figure d'exception : il attribue le second choix au manque de ressources précieuses, aux faibles besoins monétaires d'armées composées de conscrits et au mimétisme consécutif à la victoire de Qin. La plupart des articles, on le voit, présentent des mises au point sur des questions bien connues et sont assurément d'un grand intérêt, mais l'ensemble comporte somme toute assez peu de nouveautés. Le volume est présenté avec soin et élégance. Il se termine par une longue bibliographie et un index. Université Laval, Québec Léopold Migeotte Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus. By Emily Baragwanath. Oxford University Press. 2008. Pp. x, 374. Despite being a revised version of a recent Oxford doctoral thesis (2005), Emily Baragwanath's study displays a maturity of research and layered insight more typical of seasoned scholars' work. The book's central aim is to illuminate Herodotus' portrayal of human motivation and his articulation of individual characters' psychology, a major focus of his inquiry in the Histories. In pursuing this goal, Baragwanath is interested in not only how Herodotus motivates the narrative action but also how he motivates his audience. She thus interprets his authorial strategies as multifaceted, and her discussion reveals much about his apparent desire to bring readers into the process of evaluating expressed motives. One of Herodotus' intentions, she argues, is to delineate for his audience the qualified and provisional nature of his explicit ascriptions of motivation. Her general approach employs analytic techniques and terminology familiar from reader-response criticism, relying especially upon Wolfgang Iser's polar text-reader model of communication,1 as well as the concept of "focalization" from narratology. The result is an overarching concern with Herodotus' prompting of readers to respond actively to his content, and Baragwanath's guiding conviction is that he presents varying perspectives as a means of "enfranchising his readers as capable judges" (20). Echoing Herodotean subdivision, the study consists of nine substantial chapters. The first introduces this notion of active, engaged readership, and it responds to Plutarch's il lustrations of Herodotean inconsistencies by observing the historian's intentional, agonistic framework for assessing varying accounts. Chapter Two explores the Homeric background to the two aspects under consideration in Herodotus' narrative: active reader response and the psychology of motives. Chapter Three then outlines several instances in which Herodotus' characters display psychological interests parallel to his own, emphasizing in a metatextual way his focus on the aitia of the wars. Chapter Four considers the challenges in determining motives, especially the frequent dissonance between intentions and outcomes. Here Baragwanath fruitfully argues that Herodotus' ascriptions of motives can hint at variant readings and foreground ironies in a potentially destabilizing manner. Chapter Five elucidates Herodotus' polarizing technique of presentation via the Athenian digressions of Books I, V, and VI. His uses of alternate versions and changing focalization urge readers 1W. Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore 1974); id., The Act ofReading: A Theory ofAesthetic Response (Baltimore 1980). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 439 to examine more skeptically both the motives people claim and the audience's own earlier conclusions. Chapter Six examines Herodotus' portrayal of ideal motives in his Ionian Revolt narrative, and the problematic and complicating nature of rhetorical contexts. Several observations here set up nicely Baragwanath's approach in the final three chapters. The first of these scrutinizes Herodotus' treatment of the Athenians' decision to fight, and its significance in view of the impediments to other states' actions. Chapter Eight evaluates the interaction of Xerxes' failure, especially its precipitating factors, with Herodotus' statements about the king's motives. Here she emphasizes the role of focalization in the historian's discussion of such causes. The book culminates by dissecting Herodotus' presentation of Themistocles' motives. Using this material, Baragwanath...

Explaining Literature: A Reflection on the Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader

Explaining Literature: A Reflection on the Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader Steven Knapp (bio) In a series of essays published over some three decades, the late Ralph Rader developed a theory of literary explanation that was remarkable for a number of reasons. Among them were the clarity and hence intentional vulnerability of its hypotheses and its unembarrassed focus on the established classics of English literature. Rader drew his examples almost exclusively from the canon of the English and Irish novel, Defoe to Joyce, and of English lyric poetry from Gray to Eliot. This at a time when the larger enterprise of literary criticism was busily expanding if not dissolving the canons of the various national literatures and probing the boundaries between high literature and other modes of discourse. Rader’s concentration on the canon was, however, a direct and deliberate consequence of an extraordinary explanatory ambition. He aimed at nothing less than defining the essential nature of literary objects and, in the process, providing a basis in our shared experience for the explanation and resolution of interpretive controversy. One of the impressive features of Rader’s theory is the complexity he generates out of a fairly small set of conceptual resources. This is easiest to see in his clearest and most comprehensive statement of the theory, his retrospective essay “Literary Constructs,” published in Poetics in 1989. The ambition mentioned above is evident in the paper’s abstract, where it is stated with characteristic precision, if also with a characteristically forbidding syntax and vocabulary: The overall aim of the paper is to show how a single theoretical perspective can articulate and collaterally explain and illuminate both the micro-facts, the pre-analytical [End Page 104] shared invariants of our immediate tacit reading experience of literary works, and the macro-facts of our collective experience. The most crucially significant of these macro-facts are patterns of agreement—and particularly disagreement—in the interpretations which have grown up around major works and rendered them critically problematical. It is in critical disagreement that the complexities of experience most perplexingly but also (potentially) most fruitfully manifest themselves, since the very limitation of understanding that such interpretive shortfall reflects provides a rich test for further explanatory inquiry if we appreciate the fact that patterns of disagreement are as specific as a spectrograph to individual works and therefore offer for decoding an implicit structural characterization of the works as objects of our experience. (337) The first premise—in many ways the key to Rader’s whole theory—is familiar from the early writings of Stanley Fish and other proponents of reader-response criticism: that readers share the same fundamental experience of the work, even if they follow different trajectories in interpreting what they have experienced. It follows that one should be able to work backwards along those trajectories, tracing the conflicting interpretations to their common source in the original experience. Rader goes on to state a second major premise: that one’s hypothetical reconstruction of the experience produced by a single literary work can be both tested and expanded by applying the same hypothesis to other works in the same genre, with due attention to the evolution of genres through history. Or as he continues in the same abstract, “[e]xplanatory accounts of individual forms gain power the more their implications are extended to provide collateral and comparative accounts of other members of the same or related genres and, as possible, their historical development as well” (ibid.). This reciprocal relation, in Rader’s account, between the explanation of individual works and groups of related works underlies his clearest statement in this essay of his largest ambition, which is to turn the study of literature into (something like) a true science: “[t]he aim is one general to explanatory endeavor on the scientific model, to seek at once the greatest generality and the greatest particular[ity] of explanation on the basis of the most cogent set of assumptions for doing so” (339). There is one final premise that does not appear in Rader’s abstract but arrives later in the article: that the form to which our experience of a work responds—at least in the case...

Glossing Speakers, or bookmaking for amateurs

Speakers: Performance, Photography and the Loud Page is a book made by the performance company These Horses (Emma Bennett, Lucy Cran, Bill Leslie) in collaboration with photographer Anne Tetzlaff, published in 2007 by Bonfire Books as the first in a series of book projects by artists working in the field of performance and time-based media. My article takes the form of an illustrated glossing of this book, proposing the book as performance, as a site, as a labour of love. The article engages with discussions around the definition of artist's book and bookworks, and with questions of reading and reader-response criticism. While avoiding defining an artist's book, in the same gesture the article situates Speakers in relation to works by Ed Ruscha, Bernhard and Hilla Becher, and John Baldessari. The form of the glossary considers particular uses of words in These Horses' text, and plays with the cross-referencing and recurrence of terms through the book. The book is placed in a discursive and critical context, while remaining open to different disciplines and conventions of engagement.

Empathy and the Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Empathy and the Novel Tara McGann Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 242 pp. $65.00. Does novel reading make you more empathic, even more moral? In this groundbreaking study, Suzanne Keen subjects to scrutiny the assumption that novel reading induces empathy, thereby motivating altruistic behavior. Further, Empathy and the Novel questions the notion that culturally valued works kindle morality better than popular fiction. Nonetheless, while complicating an assumed coincidence between novel reading and empathy, she distinguishes herself from critics of empathy and of empathic reading. Unlike those who decry the indulgence and withdrawal from real engagement that they see empathy as encouraging, as well as its reliance upon universal categories, Keen sees empathy as a “precious quality of our social natures” (viii). She writes, “I do not quarrel with the intrinsic value of human empathy, nor do I regard narrative empathy as a cheat or a fake” (146). Rather, Keen asks that we examine what she terms the empathy-altruism hypothesis in a spirit of open exploration rather than either uncritically presuppose or simply reject it. That scientific bent to her project determines the book’s structure as well as its admirable commitment to cross-disciplinary investigation. Attempting to study [End Page 263] narrative empathy comprehensively and empirically, Keen skillfully knits together modes of inquiry as varied as narratology, neuroscience, moral philosophy, reading studies, developmental and social psychology, cognitive literary studies, feminist and postcolonial literary criticism, and reader-response criticism. Given the density of this weave, the book’s lucidity and accessibility across disciplines is impressive. So too is its rigor. The preface squarely takes on the assumption that novel reading, by stimulating emotional responsiveness and the role-taking imagination, helps readers become moral world citizens. The problem, as the book will establish, is that no evidence exists to support this comforting scenario. Yet Keen does not reject out of hand that such evidence could be found even as she dismantles inflated claims for narrative empathy, which “need not definitively perform renovations of civic virtue nor of individual behavior to be recognized as a core component of emotional response to fiction” (ix). The preface lays out the book’s project of understanding what creates narrative empathy as well as its manifold effects. As noted, Keen does not disdain empathy and indeed takes seriously the reading experiences and expectations concerning character identification of middlebrow novel readers, who are the overwhelming majority of the dwindling population of novel readers and usually women. In shedding light on a critically ignored dimension of novel reading, this book exposes such a bias as a gender bias. Before setting forth on its project, the book defines empathy: “In empathy, sometimes described as emotion in its own right, we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others” (5). It surveys contemporary scholarship on empathy and considers its popular representation, namely how in popular as well as academic discourse, empathy is still often gendered as a supposedly female trait. In exposing literary critics to the way psychologists approach the study of empathy, the first chapter seeks to bring information to a conversation between literature and psychology, for many who want to cultivate empathy turn to novels to achieve this goal. However, as Keen argues, prosocial behavior need not arise from empathy, nor can we assume that empathy leads to altruism. Further, we cannot assume that narrative empathy translates to compassion towards living human beings, let alone to taking action to benefit others. Narratives can be used to confirm prejudice or even stoke hatred. In this chapter Keen provides an example of the kind of studies that will need to be conducted, relating one with her own students, who were asked to respond to three narrative texts, one an excerpt from a novel. Keen wanted to find out which genres and narrative techniques generated the greatest empathy among her students as well as test her hypothesis “that fiction deactivates readers’ suspicions and opens the way to easier empathy” (29). There is something about the very fictionality of a novel that disarms readers, she contends, inviting them to identify with characters. The field of psychology can also learn much from...

Uma leitura interdisciplinar de estudos sobre leitura

The research intends to present a comparative analysis of a few studies concerning reading, derived from literary theory and linguistics. The reader-response criticism has been focused and, specifically, we have emphasized the aesthetic response theory, widely spread since the 1970s by Wolfgang Iser.

"To Make a Novel": The Construction of a Critical Readership in Ian McEwan's Atonement

Much of critical response to Ian McEwan's novel Atonement has focused on metafictional elements of work's narrative structure, as well as Briony Tallis's revelation in final pages that she in fact authored text. Critics have asked whether novel earns this epilogue or whether it is an abrupt rendering of a straightforward realist narrative into what David Lodge has called a postmodernist metafiction (87). Brian Finney counters readers who find that ending inappropriately resorts to a modish self-referentiality (69) by asserting that text's narrative structure actually supports Briony's final admission from first page. He argues, read this novel as a work of that is from beginning to end concerned with of fiction (69). Of Briony's engagement with he states: She attempts to use to errors that caused her to commit. But chasm that separates world of living from that of fictional invention ensures that at best her fictional reparation will act as an attempt at atoning for a past that she cannot reverse. Atonement, then, is concerned with dangers of entering a fictional world and compensations and limitations which that world can offer its readers and writers. (69) Briony's attempts to make amends for her crime through will inevitably fail; in fact, this seems to be point. Although atonement is only possible through act of writing, result of that writing remains limited by restrictions of fiction. To put it simply, cannot absolve or undo transgressions that have taken place in real world. Although I agree with Finney's observations about these implications of and their application within Atonement, his reading does not account for fact that Briony is herself a fictional construct. reality that she renders as is not a material reality; it exists only within pages of novel. McEwan's move to reveal Briony as author makes transparent another narrative aspect that novel explores: relationship of to text. For if Atonement is a novel concerned with making of fiction, it is also a novel concerned with reading of as well as reading of experience. Briony's crime has been widely read as one of literary imagination, but it is also one of poor reading comprehension. Nevertheless, adult Briony has learned value of reading, and she constructs a narrative that continually reminds of this crucial role. In this sense, McEwan positions Atonement against earlier narrative models that were also concerned with author-reader relationship, specifically 18th-century novel and modernist novel. In his critique of reader's role, McEwan presents an implicit argument about ethical responsibility for readers of contemporary fiction. Readers hold final power of interpretation, judgment, and atonement; to meet these aims, they must maintain a stance toward text that involves both critical assessment and empathetic identification. As we will see, both tasks prove necessary for readers of Atonement. By emphasizing reader's role in this novel, and, in particular, reader's position to grant or withhold atonement that Briony seeks, my discussion speaks to broader debates within response criticism over whether (and how) meaning can be fixed within a text. Since ascent of deconstructionist criticism asserting that all texts are inherently relative and decentered--a notion embodied in Roland Barthes's radical claim that The birth of must come at death of Author (150)--reader response critics have had to reconsider certain foundational aspects of their theory. Who is the reader of a text in light of postmodern and poststructuralist theory? Do signs embedded within a text point toward a correct reading, or do individual readers determine anew their own authoritative meaning? …

Studying the Ancient Israelites: A Guide to Sources and Methods (review)

Reviewed by: Studying the Ancient Israelites: A Guide to Sources and Methods Kenton L. Sparks Studying the Ancient Israelites: A Guide to Sources and Methods, by Victor H. Matthews. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic; Nottingham, UK.: Apollos, 2007. 232 pp. $21.99. How can students new to the study of Ancient Israel conveniently acquire a foundational competence in the discipline? This is a problem that every instructor of ancient Israelite culture and literature has asked explicitly or pondered implicitly. One part of the solution is now this modest book from the pen of Victor Matthews, which surveys a broad range of basic facts, modern and ancient sources, and theoretical issues related to the study of Israel and the Hebrew Bible. Topics covered include historical geography (Chapter 1), archaeology (Chapter 2), literary study of the Hebrew Bible (Chapter 3), social scientific methods (Chapter 4), and Israelite history and historiography (Chapter 5). Let us consider each chapter in turn. Regarding geography, Matthews provides an overview of the various regions and geographical features in Israel, as well as an introduction to ecological factors like climate and water sources. Trade routes, political entities, and major cities and towns in the region are also described. In chapter two, on archaeology, Matthews colorfully describes the actual process of planning and carrying out an archaeological dig and helps readers understand the logic of ceramic typologies and their use in dating archaeological strata. The chapter also includes a brief discussion of Israelite architecture—both rural and urban—and of ancient textual finds that enlighten our reconstruction of ancient [End Page 183] Israelite society and our reading of its texts. Chapter three turns to the Hebrew Bible itself, focusing on the interpretive methods employed by modern scholars in their study of the Bible. On the menu are literary criticism, folklore studies, textual criticism, source criticism, form criticism, tradition criticism, narrative criticism, structural criticism, rhetorical criticism, reader-response criticism, canonical criticism, and ideological criticism (including feminist criticism). In the course of the discussion, readers are further introduced to various points of debate and discussion in the discipline, such as the vigorous dispute between "minimalists" and "maximalists" about the Bible's value as a historical source. The chapter on social sciences will probably be the densest for uninitiated readers. An assortment of sociological concepts and terms are introduced here, including ritual, liminality, socially shared cognition, emic/ etic distinctions, sociological models (e.g., Radcliffe-Brown's "structural-functionalist" approach), endogamy and exogamy, patrilineal/agnatic descent, and patron/client relationships. The final chapter on history and historiography is less theoretical, excepting the introduction to Charles Pierce's "semiotics of history." The balance of the chapter orients readers to the nature of the ancient sources available for reconstructing history. The scant but telling evidence for Israelite archives is supplemented by the Old Babylonian evidence from Mari, where thousands of contracts, receipts, and letters illustrate the kinds of materials that ancient Israelite historians may have used as sources for their work. The historical value of the Israelite historical narratives is then tested by a comparison of those narratives with archaeological sources and texts from elsewhere in the ancient Near East. This exercise, which compares the Neo-Assyrian and biblical accounts of Sennacherib's attack on Judah in 701 BCE, reveals that the biblical texts are tolerably close to events that actually took place at the time. But in both the Neo-Assyrian and biblical stories one notices the subtle ways in which political ideology shaped and distorted the historical presentation. Though Hezekiah was soundly defeated by Assyria, his version of the history accentuated the fact that Jerusalem was not sacked; conversely, in the Assyrian version Sennacherib claims to have trapped Hezekiah in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage," which sounds like a victory but actually implies that the Assyrian siege of the city failed. Matthews often illustrates the theoretical discussion of his chapters by applying it to test cases from the history and literature of ancient Israel. So, for instance, chapter one applies the insights of historical geography to the story of Absalom's revolt in 2 Samuel 15–17. Similarly in Chapter 5, the methodological discussion of historiography is elucidated by applying that discussion...

Silhouettes de l'ironie by Pierre Schoentjes

870 Reviews on the family,detailing the observations and prescriptions of an impressive range of cultural figures from the period, including arch-royalist Louis de Bonald, Fourier, Leroux, Michelet, and perennially under-studied Catholic sociologist Frederic Le Play, the closest thing the intellectually pallid Second Empire had to a great soci ological and economic mind. The author deals less polemically than Reid with the development of a set of sentimentalized 'familyvalues' in the earlier part of the cen tury,yet retains an awareness of the continuing relevance of that shift?the end of each thematic section projects the issue at hand forwards into the family politics of the twenty-firstcentury. Perhaps surprisingly given Bernard's distinguished career as a literarycritic, the ideas of novelists are addressed only in so faras' [les] hommes de lettres se veulent hommes de savoir, et [. . .] opinent doctement sur les affaires du monde' (p. 23), which effectivelyexcludes from consideration themore symbolic 'thought' of the literary textproper. Indeed, Bernard's literaryallusions tend to refer only to plot?this novel contains a divorce, this a successional disagreement, and so on?without suggesting how novelistic treatments of such themesmight encode more than themere historical fact that divorce and successional disagreements ex isted.Yet this is doubtless a quibble, since literary criticism is clearly not a central aim of the book; Penser lafamille rather sets out to create an indispensable, three dimensional working model of thenineteenth-century family,and in this it ismore than successful. St John's College, Cambridge Andrew J.Counter Silhouettes de Vironie. By Pierre Schoentjes. Geneva: Droz. 2007. 372 pp. 51.61. ISBN 978-90-70489-16-8. This study is a follow-up to the author's previous book on irony, Poetique de Vironie (Paris: Seuil, 2001). More precisely, they are very much complementary studies: whereas Poetique de Vironie gave pride of place to theoretical developments, Silhouettes de Vironie takes a more pragmatic approach and consists of, at least in the firsthalf, a close textual analysis ofworks by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers: Balzac, Jules Janin, JulesVerne, Huysmans, Gide, Vercors, Camus, Albert Cohen, Kourouma, Toussaint, and Echenoz. The second half of the book (Accents historiques' and 'Contours') focuses respectively on the interplaybetween ironyand history and on the interdisciplinary nature of irony (with, among other topics, a verywelcome foray intophotography). The chosen texts/authors are varied and often highly original. For example, in a study of the two francophone writers Kourouma and Toussaint, Schoentjes sheds light on the complex links between Trancophonie' and irony.The analysis of irony inHuysmans's A rebours is perhaps less innovative (and more predictable) in so far as ithad already been studied, notably, among others, by Daniel Grojnowski inAux commencements du riremoderne: Vespritfumiste (Paris: JoseCorti, 1997): see in particular his chapter on Tronie laforguienne', pp. 125-32. The fact that Grojnowski isnotmentioned in this study is clearly an oversight. MLR, 104.3, 2009 871 Schoentjes insists that ironybelongs to three distinct fields: rhetoric, hermeneu tics, and ethics. One of the great virtues of the book is that itdraws our attention to the 'modulations' or 'inflections' of irony, that is to the differentways inwhich ironic potentialities can be perceived/identified and to thevarious factors (historical or other) on which theydepend. The third part concentrates on the politics and ethics of irony (by stressing the common philosophical ground between irony and anarchy), as well as on the massive popularity of irony infin de siede culture and thinking (see the lengthy discussion of thepros and cons ofAlcanter de Brahm's 'point d'ironie'). The analysis iswide-ranging and stimulating. Irony is shown tobe a very fluid and ever-evolving concept. Finally, Silhouettes de Vironie offers a survey of the various ways inwhich irony shapes literature, (popular) culture, art forms, and of how it informs key twentieth-/twenty-first-centuryintellectual debates. A bibliography, updating thevery useful one included inVoetique de Vironie, and an index would have been welcome additions, but overall, Silhouettes de Vironie makes for indispensable reading for all researchers and studentswith an interest in irony,nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, intertextuality,and reader-response criticism. It is a very useful tool indeed as itseeks to shake up some of our preconceptions...

Balzac: le roman de l'autorité. Un discours auctorial entre sérieux et ironie by Christèle Couleau-Maixent

MLR, 104.3, 2009 871 Schoentjes insists that ironybelongs to three distinct fields: rhetoric, hermeneu tics, and ethics. One of the great virtues of the book is that itdraws our attention to the 'modulations' or 'inflections' of irony, that is to the differentways inwhich ironic potentialities can be perceived/identified and to thevarious factors (historical or other) on which theydepend. The third part concentrates on the politics and ethics of irony (by stressing the common philosophical ground between irony and anarchy), as well as on the massive popularity of irony infin de siede culture and thinking (see the lengthy discussion of thepros and cons ofAlcanter de Brahm's 'point d'ironie'). The analysis iswide-ranging and stimulating. Irony is shown tobe a very fluid and ever-evolving concept. Finally, Silhouettes de Vironie offers a survey of the various ways inwhich irony shapes literature, (popular) culture, art forms, and of how it informs key twentieth-/twenty-first-centuryintellectual debates. A bibliography, updating thevery useful one included inVoetique de Vironie, and an index would have been welcome additions, but overall, Silhouettes de Vironie makes for indispensable reading for all researchers and studentswith an interest in irony,nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, intertextuality,and reader-response criticism. It is a very useful tool indeed as itseeks to shake up some of our preconceptions by tackling known and less-known texts from a decidedly original (and ironic) angle. Durham University Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze Balzac: le roman de Vautorite. Un discours auctorial entre serieux et ironie. By Christele Couleau-Maixent. Paris: Champion. 2007. 855 pp. 135. ISBN 978-2-7453-1359-1. Although itmay no longer be necessary to defend Balzac's style against erstwhile detractors such as Sainte-Beuve, Faguet, and Lanson, and, more recently, against critics of his approach tofiction including Robbe-Grillet and even Barthes, Christele Couleau-Maixent joins Eric Bordas, Fran9oise van Rossum-Guyon, and, more re cently,Nathalie Solomon, Aude Deruelle, Claire Barel-Moisan, and Jacques-David Ebguy in offering a fresh, broadly stylistic reappraisal of Balzac's practice of the novel. Illustrating what she understands by Te discours auctorial', Couleau-Maixent shows Balzac enhancing his authorial status by generating in the reader a need for an auteur induit' (understood as 'tout ce que le texteme donne ? croire ? propos de l'auteur' (p. 95)) which gives greater legitimacy both to thenovel as un genre serieux' (p. 109) and to Balzac as its source and guarantor. This legitimacy is,moreover, reinforcedwhen authorial authority isdelegated toparticular intradiegetic narrators (whose very identity may be defined in terms of theirdiscursive function), to groups of characters in dialogue, or to a narrative teleology permeated with authorial markers such as epigraphs, self-citations, and explanatory incipits or decipits. All of these 'discours d'escorte' are, moreover, self-servingly incorporated into a 'patchwork 872 Reviews textueF (p. 259) of discourses and meta-discourses, producing a new form ofhybrid novel. Thus, contrary to what earlier detractors might have claimed, one of the main conduits for this hybridized but cumulative 'discours auctoriar is not the (ominiscient) narrator but the anonymous, virtual, personnage generique' such as the 'lecteur inscrit, implique, fictionnalise', 'qui [donne] ? La Comedie humaine sa coherence' (pp. 409, 408). This coherence is reinforced by other, related forms of self-authentification such as proverbs, maxims, citations, repetitions, and inserted documents, which subject thework to a constant process of renaming and re-evaluating itsown Veal'. When the vehicle for this 'real' ismetaphorical (as in Le Lys dans la vallee), ironic (even in Seraphita), or simultaneously serious and potentially parodic as when le roman balzacien [. . .]met [. . .] l'ideologie a Vepreuve du pathos (p. 583), authorial discourse becomes evenmore ambivalent, while remaining, as ever,purposeful and self-legitimating: '[l]e discours auctorial prend place ? l'articulation du roman et du monde' (p. 587). Particular examples of this articulation' can, moreover, be found in the Balzacian Bildungsroman which discovers rather than tmcovers the Veal'. The work is, therefore, forever on themove, forever there but also elsewhere, as when it reinscribes the past in the present and inscribes the future in the past in a desperate attempt to archive' the nineteenth century, but whose very failure confirms the authority of itswould-be...

“The Way I See It”: As a Paradigm for Reader-Response Criticism

“The Way I See It”: As a Paradigm for Reader-Response Criticism

Joyce’s Reading Bodies and the Kinesthetics of the Modernist Novel

James Joyce famously described Ulysses as epic of human body, and many of his early and influential readers have obligingly emphasized significance of organs associated with each episode in Joyce's schemas. (1) Initial reviewers less enchanted with Joyce's opinions also focused on bodies and somatic responses, describing novel as indecent, vile, scatological, and an ordinary (Brooker 26-27). Fears of text's effects on bodies of readers contributed bans on Joyce's works, for as Katherine Mullin points out, a model of reading was assumed by most social purity campaigners. ... The theory that young people were drawn mimic what they read found constant reiteration (34-35). (2) In US obscenity case against Ulysses publishers Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, both prosecution and defense suggested that a text produces corporeal effects. The defense attorney, John Quinn, gave as exhibit physical response of Assistant District Attorney Joseph Forrester a reading of Nausicaa--Just look at him, still gasping for breath at conclusion of denunciation, his face distorted with rage--using somatic evidence argue that far from filling Forrester with lewd desires or sending him to arms of a whore, Ulysses deterred such behavior (Brooker 20). Quinn lost case, but US District Judge John Woolsey agreed with him when he overturned ban in 1933, claiming whilst in many places effect of Ulysses on reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend be (Court Lifts Ban). Ulysses was published in US because it was believed produce right sorts of effects on reading bodies. The bodily experiences of these early readers, however humorous in retrospect, indicates a sensitivity Joyce's new techniques in Ulysses. More recent critics, rejecting censoring tendencies of both emetic and aphrodisiac models, may also overlook ways Joyce's text depicts moving bodies and encourages somatic responses from readers. Poststructural theories postulate instability of text, author, and reader and thereby also discourage a generalized discussion of effects of texts on reading bodies, which are difficult substantiate and certainly not universal. Still, several textual strategies in Ulysses do engage kinesthetic potential of language, borrow a term common three influential fields in early twentieth century: physical culture, social purity, and psychological aesthetics. In physical culture, especially new art of modern dance, kinesthesia was theorized as a modern modality of perception; influential dance theorist Rudolph Laban defined it as the sense by which we perceive muscular effort, movement, and position in space (111). (3) Social purity's model of kinetic reading and mimicry and its effectiveness in banning Joyce and sparking his parodic humor have been detailed by Katherine Mullin. Kinesthetic responses art were also focus of contemporaneous field of psychological aesthetics, overlooked but significant aspect of modernist aesthetic theory. Studies in psychological aesthetics suggested that a kinesthetic sense enabled perception of traces of bodies, both artist's and subject's, in various art forms: record of brush stroke on canvas, impression of sculptor's hands on clay, or way a still figure in painting, photography, or sculpture seems captured in motion. Applied literature by Vernon Lee (1856-1935), psychological aesthetics examined impact of language on reading bodies and constitutes part of prehistory of reader-response criticism. Kinesthetic readings attend how a text encodes gestures and motions of characters, bodies that produce words, and movements required by speech. The aesthetic questions pondered by both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses echo contemporaneous debates in psychological aesthetics concerning body's role in perceiving art. …

Loving Mountains, Loving Men (review)

Reviewed by: Loving Mountains, Loving Men Christopher B. Stewart Loving Mountains, Loving Men. By Jeff Mann. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. Pp. 248.) Jeff Mann has created a rich, multi-genre autobiography in Loving Mountains, Loving Men. Primarily about his deepening sense of self over the first half of his life, the narrative locus is the intersection of Mann's sexual and regional identities. It is a needed and welcome addition to a small but growing body of regional queer literature, but it would be a mistake to corral Mann's text in the hollow between "Appalachian" and "gay man." This narrative is much more: it is an intellectual, literary, cultural, and spiritual memoir that covers an important period of transition affecting most of the communities in which Mann participates. Through autobiography, poetry, and the prose poem, Mann deftly explores both the abiding and the mercurial aspects of selfhood with an honest, keen, and insightful personal voice. The multiple genres seem to reflect the author's effort to bring together the disparate aspects of his identity into one coherent expression. The text speaks from the integrity that motivates authentic self-examination, from the deepening that comes from learning to love self and others, and from the spiritual power of place. A persistent theme is the familiar Appalachian love of the land and of traditional folkways. Through Mann's eyes, we see those features, and Appalachian masculinity, anew—he writes, for example, of the ambience of 1970s forestry school at West Virginia University (28-29), and of the Appalachian penchant for summer shirtlessness and how it caught his adolescent attention (25). Another persistent theme is out-migration and the longing to return, but in Mann's case out-migration is motivated by the desire for greater acceptance of sexual difference in a more cosmopolitan environment, and for intellectual opportunity. This is reflected in his undergraduate dual majors of forestry and English. Like many of his peers, he ultimately finds a healthy synthesis by living in regional college towns and pursing a professorial career. Twenty years separates this reviewer's experience from Mann's, but much remains the same. Growing up in southern West Virginia twenty years [End Page 127] after Mann, I recognize much, but I also see a significant amount of change from what I regard as a homespun libertarianism—an Appalachian "mind your own business" culture that values both liberty and eccentricity. Like Mann, I experienced teen angst and was fearful of authentic self-expression. But, truth be told, I have experienced very little overt discrimination in Appalachia and find no higher incidence here than in more cosmopolitan areas. While I appreciate Mann's work very much, I also have reservations about the text's emphasis on intolerance as a feature of Appalachian culture. As a whole, the book does an excellent job of representing the variety and complexity of Appalachian responses to homosexuality. At no point in the narrative is Mann truly without supportive friends or growing family members or blessed mentors. At the same time, the narrative seems to rely strongly on a tone of struggle that may no longer be typical of the post-high school Appalachian queer experience, especially for those of us whose families are not or are only nominally Christian. As an example of reader-response criticism, my thoughts about intolerance in Appalachia may suggest the broader national changes the region has participated in since the 1980s. This would underscore the value of the book as a window on the cultural history of an under-documented place and period. I am grateful for any addition to the literature of non-urban queer experience because it is rare. Mann acknowledges a similar trajectory in his experiences and says, "Eventually, instead of feeling like a queer oppressed by redneck Appalachians, I began to see the oppression that Appalachians and homosexuals have in common. Clear enough, when you start to count all the queer jokes and hillbilly/West Virginia jokes you've heard" (44). As the first of its kind, Mann's text is invaluable for any survey of sexuality or gender issues. This would be true in general, but especially under Appalachian, southern, or rural...

The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, or, What's Literature Have to Do with It?

The ease with which Wolfgang Iser's work on the act of reading was assimilated into US critical debates in the 1970s and early 1980s seems to make it an exception to Edward Said's observation that theories take on different meanings as they travel from one national context to another. If the work of other influential theorists at the time—Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard—highlighted their “foreignness,” the concurrent rise of a home-bred version of reader-response criticism and Iser's engagement with Anglo-American writers and critics helped him to pass through US customs as if he had nothing to declare. In fact, his work crossed the US border with such ease only because some of its key concepts were misunderstood. Helping to generate his widespread popularity at the time, that misunderstanding also contributed to the relative neglect of his work once reader-response criticism was no longer a fad in faddish America. What, after all, was to be gained by reading work no longer on the cutting edge?

Literatura e pragmatismo: pressupostos teóricos contemporâneos da crítica literária

O presente artigo trata das tendências contemporâneas da crítica literária, enfatizando as relações entre literatura e pragmatismo, a partir de conceitos como os de recepção, sistema e institucionalização literárias.