Journal of Narrative and Life History - Volume 3, Issue 2-3, 1993

AbstractAlthough traditionally viewed from a phenomenological perspective, Henry James's compositional device of the center of consciousness can be understood rhetorically as a representational strategy that illustrates the problematics of figurative language and causality. The Jamesian reflector does not simply "re-flect" but crucially intervenes in the causal logic of the texts it claims to focalize. The reflector's relation to the material he or she mediates is one of catachresis, or of "translation," of figurative transfer without a nonfigurative ground. But the rhetorical consequences of this catachrestic mediation cannot be reconciled with James's claims for the center of consciousness as the formal and meta-physical ground of his fictions. James's center of consciousness texts typically reach a representational impasse that thematizes this incompatibility and sacri-fices the central consciousness himself or herself in an allegory of this rhetorical situation. (Literary criticism, rhetorical approach)

AbstractContemporary theorists tend to agree on the death of the subject and therefore, it seems, on the death of the first-person realistic novel. Novels like David Copperfield and Jane Eyre seem like extended metaphors for humanism itself-the outmoded view that human beings are the center of their world, that they can know themselves, that their psychology and moral character develop con-sistently, and that they are largely responsible for the courses their lives take. In two recent first-person novels, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989), Kazuo Ishiguro explores such assumptions, providing us with narrators whose selves do seem to be socially constructed and consequently decentered and unstable. Although Ishiguro fully understands and displays the appeal of posthumanist models of the subject, he ends by suggesting that a self no longer author of itself is a self in search of authority. (Cultural criticism, literary criticism)

AbstractChaucer's Troilus and Criseyde suggests in closing that it was written "moost for wommen that bitraised be." The Freudian love of the gaze is helpful in reading for this difference, because the gaze, and the voyeurist and exhibitionist poles of scopophilic desire, have pervasive impact on Chaucer's epic. Oedipal codes are reinforced as the dominant, visual codes of written epic, framed around ambivalence toward women and language: The deception implicit in writing is likewise "built in" to women. Patriarchal society needs to control such tokens of exchange, but paradoxically, as tokens dominate exchange, their value and agentic power increases. Texts proliferate and disagree, allowing play for the agent. Often read beyond the conclusion, Criseyde (as agent) reads and writes herself as well. Thus when the poem's ending exaggerates both closure and open-endedness, leaving the audience in turmoil, it creates an open text "moost for wommen that bitraised be." (Literary criticism, psychological ap-proach; gender studies)

AbstractSylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963/1980) has become one of the classic 20th-century stories of female adolescence. Feminist critics have analyzed this tale of madness and self-destruction primarily in terms of gender conflicts. From a specifically lesbian feminist perspective, this article presents a "stressed read-ing"1 of The Bell Jar, arguing that it is not in the first place the operations of gender ideology, but rather the contradictions of female (hetero)sexuality that play a determining part. The resulting conflicts are shown to operate on the novel's narrative as well as discursive levels. The discussion centers on the two most striking features in which sexual ambivalences surface in the text: the relationship between the narrator and her protagonist and the figure of the Doppelgänger. Behind the mask of the female adolescent, it is argued, the configuration of a truly transgressive,2 lesbian sex/textuality can be discerned. (Literary criticism; gay and lesbian studies)

AbstractAldous Huxley's first piece of published fiction, "The Farcical History of Richard Greenow" (1920), reveals anxieties about authorship and sexual iden-tity that were typical of modernist male writers. This article situates this nou-vella in two contexts. The first concerns Huxley's relationship with his aunt, novelist and social activist Mary Augusta Arnold Ward; the second centers on medical theories of homosexuality presented by Havelock Ellis in Sexual Inversion (1897). The protagonist calls himself a spiritual hermaphrodite because his body is inhabited by two personalities: a male intellectual and an increasingly aggressive female novelist and war propagandist named Pearl Bellairs. As a caricature of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Pearl reveals Huxley's antagonism toward powerful and popular women novelists. But she also provides a way for protag-onist and author to defend themselves against same-sex eroticism. Ideology does not determine desire. Rather, in the story, as in Sexual Inversion, fears aroused by certain desires seek expression in specific cultural forms. (Literary criticism, psychological approach; gender studies)

AbstractIn Delta Wedding, Welty immerses the reader in the world of the traditional home-centered woman. The novel explores the transformational, even sacred, nature of housework and domestic ritual through the experiences of five female characters at different stages of development, from 9-year-old Laura to Ellen, the "mother of them all." Structurally, the novel is organized by the intertwined and repeated circular journeys of the women, journeys that echo primal stories of female development. The repetition and sense of stasis that are integral to these elements as archetypal female experiences have irritated some critics. But the novel provides a framework for the maternal ethic of "holding" and offers a feminist poetics, essential for fully appreciating other texts that celebrate traditional female experiences. (Literary criticism; gender studies)

AbstractThis article discusses the ways in which Leslie Marmon Silko's book Storyteller (1981), and the inscription of Native American oral storytelling techniques in it, challenge theories that assert that narrative is fueled by desire and/or ab-sence or loss. In particular, it examines how this inscription refigures the role of violence, and especially rape, in the series of "Yellow Woman" tales in Silko's book. Each of the article's four parts performs a different approach to understanding the book: The first part questions, by way of staging, a Lacan-based focus on lack in understanding narrative structure; the second discusses the cultural and moral dilemmas of teaching Silko's pieces, and the depictions of sexual coercion in them; the third imagines the possibilities and limitations of a Foucault-based theory of narrative; and the fourth addresses how a per-formance-based reading of the tales provides a way of dealing with these issues. (Oral storytelling theory; performance theory; gender studies; pedagogy)

AbstractCharlotte Salomon's painted life history took shape in an extremely gruesome period: World War II. But Salomon's personal family history is also excep-tional: Almost her whole family committed suicide. This article explores the question of whether it is meaningful, or even legitimate, to refer to a work emerging from such a violent reality as a work of art. The article focuses on the many self-reflective passages in the images and text that deal with the function of art and the ways it is made. It is argued that Salomon did not provide the fate of her family and the horrible war with a deeper meaning in order to liberate herself from their horror. She did not write a realistic account of her reality, nor did she create an alternative world for it. Rather, her life history is a performance in the strictest sense: doing the work of working through her reality. (History; art criticism)A "life-testimony" is not simply a testimony to a private life, but a point of conflation between text and life, a textual testimony which can penetrate us like an actual life. (Shoshana Felman & Dori Laub, 1992, Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, p.

AbstractCultural criticism necessitates not only an examination of the context of the writer but also a broader understanding of the ways in which text and context are integrally interrelated. For pursuing these intersections, Tillie Olsen's short fiction in Tell Me a Riddle is particularly exemplary because of its textual richness and its distinctive ways of drawing on historical context. Interviews with Olsen heighten the significance of her particular context in the 1950s and emphasize the shaping effect that circumstances had on her choices in language and form as she wrote this fiction. Two concerns surface as particularly impor-tant: family life and political activism. An inquiry into these two concerns then suggests the complexity of how voice and circumstance, language and social forces, interact—in the writer, in the text, in the reader, and finally in the choices we might make for shaping alternative understandings of cultural change. (Cultural criticism; literary criticism)

AbstractIn the historical event of the American Revolution, as well as in certain central texts of the American literary imagination, a tension between the power of a community to define itself through language and the resistance of experiential history to such enclosure is represented through a particular form of narrative silence. This narrative form may first suggest repression and the failures of memory. But the American imagination has used narrative silence as a way of representing events that lie outside of the known and planned, in order to preserve the residual life of experience and so to bear witness to the imagina-tion's dependence on the whole of history. In this essay, I argue that this narrative form reveals a central paradox of the American cultural imagination: This imagination successfully encodes its story of community exactly insofar as it creates a place—in language and in thought—for the safely silent acknowl-edgement of the power of experiential knowledge and untold secrets. (Culture studies; literary criticism)

AbstractThe domestic interior plays a significant role in realistic fiction and in 19th-century bourgeois life. The development of conventions for describing interiors in the novel coincides with the historical appearance of elaborately decorated parlors and with the feminization of domestic space. Both middle-class interiors and realistic fiction are characterized by a proliferation of detail, and their stylistic similarity can be mapped onto the emergence of a commodity culture. The fictive rhetoric of materiality and identity reflects complex relations of gender, property, and signification in the social world. (Cultural criticism; literary criticism; gender studies)

AbstractLiteracy, both as a theme and as a narrative structuring device, marks much literature and takes on specific shapes and forms, depending on its relationship to its generic and historical contexts. Set in Pittsburgh, Willa Cather's "Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament" (1905/1983) features the steel world of indus-trialists and laborers, the world of monied capitalists (Carnegie, Mellon, West-inghouse, and Heinz) and of workers aspiring to middle-class safety or, in their daydreams, to the wealth of an employer like Carnegie, who began as one of them and who advanced, as he claims in his autobiographical accounts, in part through literacy. By studying Cather's short story, we can learn how literacy shapes construction of character in fiction and biography as well as construc-tion of persona in autobiographical material. That is, we can learn the integral role that figurations of literacy play in literary narratives. (Literary criticism, dialogic approach and biographical criticism; composition and literacy studies) Dreams are neither ideologically neutral nor politically innocent. (Giroux, 1990)