Style articles from March 1998

Style archives from March 1998

Drawing fictional lines: dialect and narrative in the Victorian novel.
March 22, 1998... The presentation of dialect in novels often appears to be startlingly inconsistent. Even when the narrator calls attention to the dialect speech of a character, the actual presentation of that speech in the dialogue may differ from what the...

The traffic in men: female kinship in three novels by George Eliot.
March 22, 1998... In an inquiry into gender inequality written in 1975, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex," the anthropologist Gayle Rubin explores the relationship between Claude Levi-Strauss's analysis of kinship structures in...

'This thing I like my sister may not do': Shakespearean erotics and a clash of wills in 'Middlemarch.'.
March 22, 1998... At my local card shop a little book of romantic pictures is on display for Valentine's Day.(1) The only text is Shakespeare's Sonnet 116. The pictures are all of heterosexual couples. Apparently it remains difficult for many people to think of...

Henry James' paradoxical bowl: the reinstatement of doubt in fin-de-siecle America.
March 22, 1998... The philosophic obsession with questions of knowledge and truth tainted much of the American fin de siecle. The opposing and endless epistemological claims of religion and science cast an almost permanent shroud over knowledge and truth,...

Timely interruptions: unsettling gender through temporality in the 'The Story of an African Farm.'.
March 22, 1998... With its odd syntax, desultory structure, and peculiar characterizations, The Story of an African Farm (1883) is an iconoclast among the tightly constructed linear narratives that tended to dominate nineteenth-century fiction. Yet Olive...

Revitalizing the reader: literary technique and the language of sacred experience in D.H. Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover.'.
March 22, 1998... The famous sex scenes in Lady Chatterley's Lover have been celebrated for their beauty, verity, and liberating power. They have also been attacked as tedious, naive, sexist, and obscene. While it has been observed that the scenes represent the...

To blot it all out: the politics of realism in Richard Wright's 'Native Son.'.
March 22, 1998... The strategies of the classic realist text divert the reader from what is contradictory within it to the renewed recognition (misrecognition) of what he or she already "knows," knows because the myths and signifying systems of the classic...

Fiction, pretense, and narration.(critique of 'The Logic of Literature')
March 22, 1998... 1 It is never too late to do something good: take for example the availability, in French translation, nearly thirty years after its first publication (1957), of one of the great works of contemporary poetics. In choosing to translate the...

The Logic of Literature, 2d rev. ed.(Review)
March 22, 1998... Kate Hamburger. Revised, 1968. Trans. Marilyn J. Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973; rpt. 1993. $35.00 cloth; $14.95 paper. 1 It is never too late to do something good: take for example the availability, in French...

Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy.(Review)
March 22, 1998... Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. xxv + 221pp. $37.50 doth; $18.50 paper. In this short book, Barbara Herrnstein Smith undertakes to tackle some of the most vexed issues of modern and contemporary...

Pragmatism: An Open Question.(Review)
March 22, 1998... Hilary Putnam. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995. xii + 106 pp. $16.95 paper. Presented here are three lectures delivered by Hilary Putnam at the Universita degli Studi di Roma in 1992, and the reader should take seriously Putnam's own...

Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings.(Review)
March 22, 1998... Frederick Wegener, ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xvii + 331 pp. $29.95 cloth. This thoroughly researched, annotated, and illuminating collection brings together for the first time the miscellaneous, little-known,...