Briefer Mention

Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 the female subject is not necessarily alienated from words, that the "symbolic contract" and the "social contract" are not identical, and that one learns the mother tongue before one comes to terms with the law of the father. In social and historical context Gilbert and Gubar show how twentieth-century male writers necessarily share the mother or vulgar tongue; with the disappearance of the male preserve of a classical education, men became, like women, confined to the mother tongue and anxious about this confinement. So they sought to multiply its powers, to assert power over it through reason, to transform it into another "patrius sermo" or patriarchal language. One consequence of such efforts is the deliberate difficulty of many modernist texts. Gilbert and Gubar cite Joyce's "Oxen of the Sun" episode as a "parabolic wresting of patriarchal power from the mother tongue" (260). In contemporary criticism, Gilbert and Gubar "provisionally, tentatively" suggest a similar maneuver is at the heart of texts like Jacques Derrida's Glas and Geoffrey Hartman's Saving the Text. Gilbert and Gubar discuss an opposed and powerful current in recent writing by women which they call, after Denise Levertov, "relearning the alphabet." Thus at the end of a broad and often disturbing story of sex wars Gilbert and Gubar suggest new hope. In a pun of their own they find language born not in the "Nom du Pere" but in the "Aplomb du Mere." Female linguistic fantasies, Gilbert and Gubar believe, may create that sort of power often imagined in feminist thought-neither abdication nor achievement of patriarchal power, but female empowerment with all that it implies for social and intellectual change. Mary Ellis Gibson University of North Carolina at Greensboro • Briefer Mention · Bloom, Harold, ed. Gerard Manley Hopkins». New York: Chelsea House, 1986. $19.95 This 1986 contribution to the Modern Critical View series contains Bloom's four-page introduction and eight essays first published in books and journals between the years 1944 and 1985. Coates, Paul. The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. $35.00 While the subject is far from new, Conrad scholars as well as others may wish to peruse Chapter 3 ("Joseph Conrad and the Imagination of 133 Briefer Mention, Volume 32:1, 1989 the Fin de Siècle"). In that chapter's introductory section, Coates says, "The following remarks constitute a set of notes towards a definition of the imagination of the fin de siècle, as exemplified in the work of Conrad. He provides a particularly useful measure of the span of the fin de siècle imagination, for his texts oscillate between its two main poles: the subjectivism and disdain of 'the masses' in the urban ant-hill displayed by the Aesthete, and the objectivism and fascination with sordid surfaces found in the Naturalist." Craige, Betty Jean. Reconnection: Dualism to Holism in Literary Study. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Cloth $20.00 Paper $12.00 Craige admits this is "a polemical book." Though it begins with "an exploration of how literary study developed as an academic discipline during the period of Cartesian dualism," the book "ends with an argument for a change in its practices." She challenges the positions of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy. In tracing the ideological history of literary study in Western culture, she wants to show that the conservative claims on curriculum fail to recognize the link between politics and education. By modeling our educational institutions on a holistic kind of learning, Craige believes we will be able to save the humanities and restore literature to its central place in intellectual debate. Edward Lear: Selected Letters. Ed. Vivien Noakes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. $29.95 This is the first edition of Lear's letters to appear in nearly eighty years. Most of what is printed here has never been published before. The 150 plus letters span the years 1826-1888. Fowler, Alastair. A History of English Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. $30.00 Fowler concedes that a history of English literature may...