Interrelations of Literature by Jean-Pierre Barricelli and Joseph Gibaldi (review)

Book Reviews235 BOOK REVIEWS JEAN-PIERRE BARRICELLI and JOSEPH GIBALDI. Interrelations ofLiterature. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1982. 329 p. This is the third compilation of position papers on topics in literary scholarship that the MLA has published. In 1967 James Thorpe edited Relations ofLiterary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Contributions, and in 1981 Joseph Gibaldi edited Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. All three are collections of essays by members of the profession that address specific aspects of literary scholarship, provide a synthesis of the major issues raised by research on the subject, and register basic bibliographic references for further investigation. Barricelli-Gibaldi is an updating of the topics covered in Thorpe, with an expansion of the number of interrelations examined. Thorpe contained seven essays (history, myth, biography, psychology, sociology, religion, and music). The present compilation covers thirteen topics (linguistics, philosophy, religion, myth, folklore, sociology, politics, law, science, psychology, music, visual arts, and film). All are completely new essays, signed by scholars other than those who wrote the papers for the Thorpe collection. As the editors state in their introduction, the essays are intended for nonspecialists , characteristically students who are just beginning the formal, academic study of literature. One supposes this means second or third-year students in English, but there is no question that the material is appropriate for the entry-level course on research methods in graduate programs in English or foreign languages. This is particularly true of the essays on topics less central to the sorts of focuses used in undergraduate teaching, like sociology, music, or film. The presentations are written in such a way that they are easily within the reach of undergraduates but provide perspectives for more advanced discussion by graduate students. If users of other similar MLA compilations have felt that the emphasis was too exclusively English (this was certainly true ofthe Thorpe collection and, to a much lesser extent, of the Gibaldi one), they should be pleased at the care taken to illustrate points with references to non-English-language texts. It is therefore to be regretted that the briefly annotated bibliographies are of almost exclusively English-language references, either works published originally in English or a smattering of the French works translated into English. The volume concludes with a useful glossary of terms. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER Arizona State University ...