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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Illinois Press
By Patrick O'Donnell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Pp. xii+224. $32.95.
Patrick O'Donnell's newest book is not big, but its scope and implications loom large. Compounding literary theory with criticism and history, O'Donnell traces the history of subjective individuality as he finds it represented in figurations of voice by British and American novelists spanning a century. He draws upon theories of narrative, writing and speech, psychoanalysis, and subjectivity to demonstrate how representations of voice in modern narrative reveal complicated and sometimes contradictory notions of personal identity. Discussing tropes of voice in Our Mutual Friend, Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom!, Under the Volcano, and JR "as a part of an attempt to understand the relation between the circumlocutions of voice and the construction of modern identity" (p. 4), O'Donnell contends that "as the hallmark of modernism" (p. 7), the multiplication of voice is a significant "event within the evolving history of subjectivity" (p. 6). The body and particularly the body-in-speech, the voice, are important to his project.
O'Donnell adopts feminist somatic theories to illuminate the significance of linguistic representations of the body and how they are constructed, inscribed, and repressed in narrative texts. Among the foremost of those whose formulations concern the interstices between language...
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