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96Rocky Mountain Review ness of the institutional and discursive spheres of literary production. A masterful analysis of the episode with Cid's daughters establishes that the women "are perceived to be the primary vectors of agnatic ambition for the Cid and his family" (54). In other words, the study convincingly argues that Cid's intentions are to reach a higher socio-economic level and that the text itself attempts to defend those intentions. If this is so, if the epic recognizes a social struggle between Cid's clan and the Infantes of Carrion (members of a higher social status who appear to defend and to promote a modern domination), in what way is the text reactionary ? Harney argues that it is the intention of Cid's political and ideological performance to attack the modern features of Castilian society and, in turn, to ideally recreate traditional, Old-fashioned notions of community . While such a stance might be sincere, and even naïve (as Harney acknowledges ), it is not necessarily reactionary. At the most, this position may be labelled as destined to fail if, and only if, we assume a lineal and smoothly conceived modernization ofSpain. Harney accurately observes that the "epic masterpiece of Spanish literature is pre-Spanish in its origin" (198). Cid is a Castilian issue that became a Spanish hero due to the monologic and exclusionary tendencies of the modern Spanish State. It is pre-Spanish not necessarily because it defends a pre-modern conception of society, but because it does not portray the idea of a nation-based state. This is why the study acutely analyzes that "in trying to recreate the old, he [Cid] forges the new. Seeking to create a new segment of the old clanic reality, he brings into being the very type of polity he thinks to escape" (185). This deep contradiction, finely perceived in Harney's textual analysis, is not a matter of "ideological" position, but rather of the complexity of a literary product that functions as a cultural record. An examination of significant issues concerning the development of Spanish feudal culture, this book needs to be read and discussed. FRANCISCO J. SÁNCHEZ University ofIowa CAROL JACOBS. Telling Time: Levi-Strauss, Ford, Lessing, Benjamin, de Man, Wordsworth, Rilke. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. 239 p. 1 am perhaps the world's worst person to review this particular book. I know it will be of great interest to those working on any author listed in the subtitle because Jacobs' close readings of specified texts are excellent: thoughtful and penetrating, they uncover deep structures that could illuminate an entire oeuvre. Those working on the operations of time in narrative theory will find the entire volume equally suggestive because some of her insights might be reworked to bear on narrative problems. But Jacobs' Book Reviews97 premises as reader/writer are so opposed to mine that I found her book alternately frustrating and fascinating. My problem started when I turned from the title page to the dedication: "For my mother—the first feminist in my life—who made all the difference." I expected some mediation of the gap yawning between her (mother's) feminism and the subtitle's dead white men. I looked in vain. However, the introduction clearly lays out the scope and premises of the book. It draws together the points of contact amongst the chosen works, chief amongst which is first the establishment and then the disempowerment "of the authority to reproduce the past . . . giving way to the complexities of figurai language, of writing, and of interpretation" (5). Endorsing Ford Madox Ford's project of "blastfing] us out of historical complacency" (5), Jacobs' work is clearly informed by poststructuralist thought. The works discussed all "touch on certain temporal and narrative conventions" (4). Time is "the condition of the possibility of telling" (3). Here Jacobs approaches a concept of Bakhtin's that has received comparatively little attention, the chronotope , that conjunction of space and time specific to particular historical moments and narrative genres. Jacobs points out that each of these texts contains "a temporality of sequence accompanied by a linguistic medium of recuperation" (4); she regards as remarkable that they have this...

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