Foreign Languages and International Trade: A Global Perspective ed. by Samia I. Spencer (review)

96Rocky Mountain Review all, of their major works. In every case, his reading is informed by his definition of the mock-heroic genre, which I would summarize, and inevitably oversimplify, as a series of anticlimactic adventures, featuring an exiled, frequently mad protagonist, whose tale parodies the truly heroic and the all too quotidian alike; the final impression created by this irresolvably dualistic mode is one of ambivalence. Salomon uses the criteria for mock-heroic literature deftly to highlight sometimes overlooked features of the texts he treats. While one might anticipate much of what Salomon has to say about, say, Portrait of the Artist, his use of the genre in reference to Finnegans Wake yields more surprising results. Not all of Salomon's readers are going to be satisfied, however, with his definition of the mock-heroic or his discussion of the theory of genre criticism. In particular, Salomon's argument is strongly marked by a "representational bias." That is, he sees his criteria as objective features of texts, which represent objective features of reality, and he largely ignores the potential of genre schemes to create meaning in texts. There are times when his depiction of literary experience resembles a simple causal chain running from historical events through authors shaped by those events into texts shaped by those authors into readers who "receive" the proper meaning. Or, to look at the matter from the other end of the stick, Salomon closely identifies protagonists with their authors and "grounds" his critical judgments on the historical experiences of those authors. As a consequence , hisjudgments are imbued with an air of empirical validity which will reassure some and disquiet others. Given his assumptions and methodology, it's not surprising to find that for Salomon a post-modernist writer like John Barth, whom he fears might be mistaken for a mock-heroic writer, is particularly problematic. In all his work, Barth continually calls causal chains and representational claims into doubt; Barth's is a more tentative "as if" view of the world, whereby phenomena are understood provisionally "as if" they were X or Y and objective validity is treated as simply another chimera. For Barth's protagonists, keeping the faith in their provisional schema takes up all their energy. And the histories they create in their "desperate storytelling" subvert and supplant any empirical notions of history which might be put forward. For Salomon, Barth has collapsed the tension between the heroic and the parodie on the side of the latter, resulting in a literature without the passion or psychological depth of the mock-heroic. But it could be argued that there is a heroic dimension to Barth's belief that all schemes of understanding — myths, fictions, histories, and even genre theories — are constitutive of rather than descriptive of reality. Indeed, it might be further argued that recognizing this heroic dimension is more a function of what the reader brings to the text than what the author puts there. JOHN RAMAGE Montana State University SAMIA I. SPENCER, ed. Foreign Languages and International Trade: A Global Perspective. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. 255 p. This collection of essays consists of the proceedings of an international symposium held in the spring of 1983, and sponsored by the Committee for the Book Reviews97 Humanities in Alabama and Auburn University. The editor gathered together members of the academic community, government, and business to elucidate a topic which is of critical importance to the economic future of the United States as well as the world community at large. According to the preface, written by Rose L. Hayden, "This publication provides a collection of thoughtful essays on a subject that has a profound effect on the future of every United States citizen. As such it deserves a national audience ..." (xiv). Aside from the introduction by the editor, the volume contains six sections which comprise from three to six essays each, authored by some of the foremost educators, politicians, and business people in this country. Some of the contributors are Jerry Wind, Lauder Professor, and professor of marketing and management of the Wharton School; S. Frederick Starr, President of Oberlin College; Paul Simon, United States Senator from Illinois, and Presidential candidate; and...