Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion

Acknowledgments

xxi Acknowledgments This is a book about writing and reading as interaction, something without which this book never could have been written. It is also a book about stories, and since I tell quite a few anecdotes in the main text, I will try to restrict the length of the ones I tell here. I have been fortunate to teach a large number of very smart students at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Dartmouth College; their reading agendas have concretely contributed to what I read and how I think about literature. I particularly want to single out the students in Donald Fanger’s ‘‘Comedy and the Novel’’ course and Susan R. Suleiman’s ‘‘Author , Text, Reader’’ seminar at Harvard, where the specific seeds for this study were planted in me as a graduate teaching fellow; and the students in my Comparative Literature 39 class, ‘‘Trauma and Prose Fiction,’’ at Dartmouth, where I rehearsed the model of narrative witnessing that informs chapter 3. Developing the skills to write this book has taken many years. I want to thank Dorrit Cohn for teaching me how to read closely and Susan R. Suleiman for modeling how to risk who one is and enjoy it. Madeline Maxwell, Jürgen Streeck, and the late Robert Hopper of the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin generously invited me to join the Monday afternoon viewing group, where they introduced me to the tools of conversation analysis and inspired me to consider the insights of sociolinguistics in the context of literature. For first suggesting I read the work of Walter Ong, I am indebted to Margaret Alexiou; and for stimulating conversations on orality and literacy I thank Dina and Joel Sherzer. The Society for the Study of Narrative Literature has been a hospitable place to learn more about narratology and to try out ideas: Jim Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and Gerry Prince need to be singled out for their helpful feedback on this project. For culturally specific explorations of what is at stake in ‘‘talk,’’ I thank my father John G. Kacandes and my friend Michael Hanchard. My first introduction to the Modern Greek texts I analyze in chapter 2 came through the erudite and kind late George P. Savidis; my mother Lucie N. Kacandes helped me Acknowledgments xxii puzzle through the meaning of several critical Greek phrases. My journey into cyberspace would not have been possible without the guidance of my computer-savvy friends, David Bush, Alfred Dupraz, and Marc Comina. My thanks, too, to Sebastian for demonstrating the use of a joystick and for answering all my questions and to Keith for patiently explaining the thrill he finds in Unreal. Concrete aid for writing this book came from Dartmouth College, most especially in the forms of a Burke Research Award and a Junior Faculty Fellowship. Research help from Lauryn Zipse, Laura Montague, Linda Williams, Susan Stiles, and Audrey Choi greatly enriched the historical dimension of the project. My thanks to Gail Vernazza for technical help. Invitations to lecture from the Modern Greek Study Group of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, the Public Lecture Series at Davidson College, the Department of German Studies at Indiana University, the Women’s Studies Research Seminar at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Humanities Forum at Dartmouth College propelled this project forward at critical stages. Series editor David Herman and humanities editor Virginia Wright-Peterson showed an early enthusiasm for the project that has made my interaction with University of Nebraska Press enjoyable and productive from beginning to end. I would like to thank Michael Rubiner for his kind permission to reprint a portion of ‘‘T. S. Eliot Interactive,’’ which originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine (18 June 1995). I would also like to thank the editors and anonymous readers who helped me work through earlier versions of some of the arguments made in this book. The commitment to text-reader interaction in Modern Greek novels discussed in chapter 2 was originally rehearsed in ‘‘Orality, Reader Address, and Anonymous ‘You.’ On Translating Second Person References from Modern Greek Prose’’ (Journal of Modern Greek Studies 8, no. 2 [1990]: 223–43) and in ‘‘The Oral Tradition and Modern Greek Literature’’ (Laografía: A Newsletter of the International Greek Folklore Society 9, no. 5 [1992]: 3–8). A shorter reading of Kolmar’s novel than that which appears in...