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BOOK REVIEWS Joyce's most difficult text, particularly if readers make sure to edit out a few of the dissonant notes. Mark Osteen Loyola College in Maryland Experimental Self Judy Little. The Experimental Self: Dialogic Subjectivity in Woolf Pym, and Brooke-Rose. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. xiii + 204 pp. $29.95 TAKING ISSUE with feminist theories of difference that assume that dominant culture speaks in a single voice, as does the individual subject who opposes its hegemonic world view, Judy Little offers instead a more nuanced model of the dialogism through which characters in the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Barbara Pym, and Christine Brooke-Rose experiment with the articulation of selfhood. "Theories that affirm an oppositional discourse (a different female subjectivity opposing a patriarchal social structure, or a conflicted single subjectivity constructed of masculine and feminine discourses) are a useful but often limited resource for describing the texts of women writers," and especially of twentieth-century women writers, Little suggests. Building on the work of critics such as Patricia Yaeger, Dale Bauer, Beth Rosenberg, Anne Herrmann, and Peter Hitchcock, who themselves build on and amend Mikhail Bakhtin's work, Little seeks to describe the "dialogic mix of appositional discourses—discourses not readily or accurately identifiable in terms of [a] masculine/feminine opposition"—in these three writers' fiction (emphasis added). Scholars such as Yaeger and Bauer, Little notes, "have found in women's writing much dialogic play between the imaginary and the symbolic"; but little acknowledgment has been made of "the dialogic play within and among the symbolic discourses that women writers are adapting and transforming ." Rosenberg, Herrmann, and Hitchcock move in this direction in their studies, respectively, of Woolf, Woolf and Christa Wolf, and working -class writing. Little tries to take this mode of analysis still further as she develops "a concept of subjectivity [that] involves maintaining a dialogue among several Western discourses of the self as these are creatively appropriated and modified into new, appositional structures." Woolf's, Pym's, and Brooke-Rose's textual strategy, she suggests, involves "a kind of splicing of the available paradigms of the self, a conversational interplay of ideologies, an exercising of the dialogic imagination." "The experimental selves and voices in these texts speak 241 ELT 41 : 2 1998 many discourses. Most of the major characters or narrators could be described as unsuccessfully socialized, and as a result, they resist society's oppositional gender paradigms." "Speaking a variety of hybridized discourses, the voices are ideologically mobile. They create alternative languages and in the process critique and transform the 'self as several [dominant] traditions have variously constructed the concept." This approach yields subtle and illuminating readings of Woolf's Jacob's Room and The Waves in particular, as well as of Pym's and Brooke-Rose's fiction more generally. Describing the female narrator of Jacob's Room as an "experimental subjectivity, acquainted with both the trivial and the serious, the (feminine) discourses of social dailiness and the (masculine) discourses of public history, Western literary culture, and war," Little shows how her "complex relational discourse" drawing upon the gossip of other female characters in the novels "effectively evicts Jacob from his own story." Turning the narrative conventions of the male bildungsroman "upside down," Woolf "transforms the male symbolic of quest, empire, and war into a muted, strange, unspeakable otherness." By the time the narrator describes Mrs. Flanders asking Bonamy what to do with Jacob's shoes, the dead Jacob has been reduced to an absence, an empty narrative space, a man whose feet do not need the vacant shoes. ... He is defeated by his manly subjection to the symbolic discourse of war (the political value of which disturbs the narrator's language). Yet Jacob is throughout the text distanced from any narrative affirmation of that discourse of empire, because he is paradoxically inscribed as uninscribable." Thus Jacob comes to hold "the narrative position usually reserved for the female character," "while a woman's voice, from the narratively dominant feminine subculture, dialogically tells his story with a relationship curiosity and concern." In similar fashion, Little focuses her discussion of The Waves on "the subtle hybridizing and retextualizing" of symbolic structures enacted through the...

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