Style articles from December 2008

Style archives from December 2008

A mind enslaved?: the interaction of metaphor, cognitive distance, and narrative framing in Chesnutt's "Dave's Neckliss".
December 22, 2008... Charles Chesnutt--African-American novelist, essayist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries--has become the subject of intense scholarly interest in recent years, particularly for his "conjure tales," which Robert...

Unreadable minds and the captive reader.
December 22, 2008... Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine, George Butte and others have been building the case for reframing the action of novels as a busy, collective reading and misreading of minds. Their work at once draws on and supports the idea that we have an evolved...

Text-alteration as an interpretive teaching strategy: the case of "The Snow Man".(The Pedagogy of Literature)
December 22, 2008... However problematic interpretation is, it remains essential, even if close reading is now too often only a prelude to some more distant kind of reading. I will not quite argue here, with Rob Pope, that "The best way to understand how a text...

Updike gets his mojo back.
December 22, 2008... Stacey Olster, ed. The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Xvi + 193 pp. Hardback $75.00; paperback $24.99. Once upon a time, John Updike lost his mojo. For me, anyway. Back in the mid-1960s, just out of...

Narrative and the minds of others.
December 22, 2008... Daniel D. Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. xxiv + 343 pp. Theorists of narrative have recently begun drawing on developments in the cognitive sciences,...

Brian Baker. Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000.
December 22, 2008... Brian Baker. Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000. London: Continuum, 2006. Brian Baker's Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000 explores a range of popular...

Vera Nunning, ed.: Der zeitgenossische englische Roman. Genres--Entwicklungen--Modellinterpretationen.
December 22, 2008... Vera Nunning, ed. Der zeitgenossische englische Roman. Genres--Entwicklungen--Modellinterpretationen. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT-Handbucher zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Studium 9), 2007. 264 pp., $24.50. Published as part of...

Susan B. Rosenbaum. Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture and the Crisis in Reading.
December 22, 2008... Susan B. Rosenbaum. Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture and the Crisis in Reading. U of Virginia P, 2007. xii + 283 pp. $39.50. When Lionel Trilling defined "sincerity" as "a congruence between avowal and actual...

Andrew J. Majeske. Equity in English Renaissance Literature: Thomas More and Edmund Spenser.
December 22, 2008... Andrew J. Majeske. Equity in English Renaissance Literature: Thomas More and Edmund Spenser. New York: Rontledge, 2006. ix + 217 pp. The author states the purpose of this revised dissertation early in his introduction: This book...

John Scattergood. Manuscripts and Ghosts: Essays on the Transmission of Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature.
December 22, 2008... John Scattergood. Manuscripts and Ghosts: Essays on the Transmission of Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature. Dublin: Four Courts, 2006. 320 pp. $65 cloth. John Scattergood's Manuscripts and Ghosts brings together a selection of...

R.M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo, eds.: Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation.
December 22, 2008... R. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo, eds. Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation. Albany: State U of New York P, 2008. xv + 295 pp. $74.50 cloth; $24.95 paper. Berry and Di Leo's edited collection, originally derived...

Peter C. Herman, ed.: Approaches to Teaching Milton's Shorter Poetry and Prose.
December 22, 2008... Peter C. Herman, ed. Approaches to Teaching Milton's Shorter Poetry and Prose. New York: MLA, 2007. xii + 284 pp. $37.50. Peter Herman begins the Preface to this book by noting that "teaching Milton's shorter poetry and prose presents...

William Baker. Harold Pinter.
December 22, 2008... William Baker. Harold Pinter. London and New York: Continuum, 2008. Writers' Lives. 166 pp. $50.00 cloth. $19.95 paper. I packed the review copy of William Baker's Harold Pinter and headed off to France for a family Christmas. With the...

John V. Knapp. Learning from Scant Beginnings: English Professor Expertise.
December 22, 2008... John V. Knapp. Learning from Scant Beginnings: English Professor Expertise. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2008, 310 pp. How can one teach literature (especially old literature) to modern undergraduates who must learn "from scant beginnings"?...

Helen Wilcox, ed.: The English Poems of George Herbert.
December 22, 2008... Helen Wilcox, ed. The English Poems of George Herbert. Cambridge UP, 2007, xlv + 740 pp. $180 hardcover. It is somewhat intimidating to review for a journal called Style the work of a great stylist edited by a scholar whose own style I have...

Amit Marcus. Self-Deception in Literature and Philosophy.
December 22, 2008... Amit Marcus. Self-Deception in Literature and Philosophy. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007. 232 pp. Amit Marcus' first book, based on his 2006 Ph.D. dissertation, can be approached from two perspectives: that of its method,...

Sarah Graham. J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.
December 22, 2008... Sarah Graham. J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Routledge Guides to Literature, 2007, 128 pp. $14.95 paper. If writing literary scholarship especially--but far from exclusively--on contemporary authors can be viewed as investing in...

James Phelan. Experiencing Fiction: Judgements, Progressions and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative.
December 22, 2008... James Phelan. Experiencing Fiction: Judgements, Progressions and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007. 249 pp. $74.95 cloth; $24.95 paper; $9.95 CD. In a famous essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (1953), Isaiah...

Craig Abbott. Forging Fame: The Strange Career of Scharmel Iris.
December 22, 2008... Craig Abbott. Forging Fame: The Strange Career of Scharmel Iris. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2007. xii-192 pp. Literary forgery is prompted by multifarious motives: the literary ambition of Thomas Chatterton can be balanced by the...

Correction.(Correction notice)
December 22, 2008... In my 2007 article in Volume 41.1 of Style, "What if I Sang: The Intonation of Allen Ginsberg's Performances," I state that G. Burns Cooper collected his data on the intonation of performed poetry by ear. Cooper makes it quite clear in...