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The Henry James Review 23.1 (2002) 85-87



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Book Reviews

American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995


Phillip Barrish. American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 213 pp. $54.95.

Philip Barrish's American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995 makes an intriguing and original argument about the relationship between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary realism and contemporary theoretical debates, particularly among poststructuralist critics. What the two groups have in common--a similarity not immediately apparent--is that both derive their cultural prestige from their claims to privileged access to the real. In a gesture that Barrish labels "realer-than-thou" (4), contemporary critics base their claims to intellectual authority on their more definitive grasp of what is more authentically "real"; in their claims to such access, they invariably repeat the moves of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century realists whose fiction Barrish studies in the earlier portion of his volume. His extremely canny and deft readings of the works of four novelists not usually grouped together--W. D. Howells, Henry James, Abraham Cahan, and Edith Wharton--lead him to identify a characteristic move: in locating what constitutes the "real," its claimants argue that "the real materiality of literature more complexly relational and hence less accessible to a positivist gaze" and "more literally in front of our eyes" than a previous critical position asserted (133).

The stakes in these intellectual contests--cultural prestige or "distinction"--place Barrish's work within the theoretical project initiated by Pierre Bourdieu. He signals this theoretical genealogy with his use of the term "realist dispositions," a term he associates with a certain attitude toward--or even taste for--what constitutes the real (3). But while Barrish makes use of Bourdieu's [End Page 85] theoretical paradigm, he also extends and modifies it with his own discoveries. For example, while Bourdieu focuses on the taste differences between classes, Barrish focuses on the taste differences within the middle class--an emphasis appropriate to both the late nineteenth century, when the middle class was gaining hegemony, and the late twentieth century, when literary critics' bids for distinction have to be read in terms of their contests with other middle-class professions.

To say that Barrish abstracts from his readings of nineteenth-century novels a certain characteristic move might suggest that there is something reductive or predictable about his readings. But what is really engaging about this book is, in fact, its extraordinarily layered and surprising readings, the unpredictable ways in which Barrish is able to find a foothold and explore these concerns within a given text. Over the course of the volume, the "real" undergoes a series of mod-ulations, and those who acquire distinction through their ability to apprehend it are a diverse group. In Howells, the "real" shifts from a vernacular style (registered in dialect as a new "nitty-gritty" mode of expression) to a sense of irreconcilable social contradictions whose comprehension is best signaled in a characteristic "realist posture" of "rueful laughs" and "wry smiles." Negativity inheres in other postures identified with realist taste. In a striking reading of The Wings of the Dove in the next chapter Barrish finds the source of Densher's distinction in his "doing nothing," a stance that Densher adopts throughout the narrative and that earns him approbation at the novel's end when it literally provides the phrasing for his refusal of Milly's legacy.

Barrish is especially acute to include Cahan in this study since the issues faced in narratives of cultural assimilation and upward social mobility seem made to order for a Bourdieu influenced analysis. One of Barrish's best insights is the following:

the cultural capital [Cahan's] Yekl 's narrative accrues--like that accrued by the institution of the ethnic realist novel itself--comes from its special access to, yet important distinction from, the broken bits of the real represented in it. Even the most assimilationist of ethnic narratives [. . .] derives cultural capital from its...

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