Précis

ELT 42 : 2 1999 graduate major training, the work gathers a handful of wise and witty observations on pet peeves and neat ideas for improving our stock in trade and performance. The conclusion must be obvious: "That students who graduate in English should be excellent readers, ready to encounter unfamiliar texts, to situate them, interpret them, and criticize them—these are the goals of an English education with respect to the consumption of texts." ("Consumption " here indicates that reading well is only half the English story, producing/writing well, the other.) Yet with all the well-experienced insights and practical hints that this stalwart of the profession provides, I fear we're no closer to that blessed state than before the publication of this easygoing and bemused book. A way out, up or on offers itself, however, in Scholes's keen observation that the field can no longer offer the literature of England as its primary subject matter. "English," he notes, "is now a foreign literature in a (relatively) familiar language. In the United States, American literature is assuming the central place among several Anglophone literatures, displacing the literature of England itself." This hardy revisionist would, of course, do wonders with or to the traditional canon, and makes some sharp thrusts about stuffy canons altogether. But he joins the reconstructed Stanley Fish in acknowledging English's need to define (if not preserve) a distinctive subject matter, as all academic disciplines must do, according to the laws of professional survival. Yet except for the caveat that "we can no longer take it for granted that the literature of England (as opposed to literatures in English) should be the center of English studies," he ventures few steps toward extending the canon to third-world literature written in English. Avrom Fleishman Johns Hopkins University I Précis I Cassandra Gainer University of North Carolina, Greensboro Lemke, Sieglinde. Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 183pp. $45.00 Using a literary example from Ellison's The Invisible Man in which ten drops of black pigment have been added to a bucket of white paint to create "the pur238 est white that can be found," Lemke provides a metaphor that illustrates the purpose of her book—to show how black or African culture played a vital part in the shaping of modernism. "This book," she says "argues that the First World owes much of its symbolic cultural capital to sources found throughout the Third World." But she by no means argues that "all modernism was informed by African art." An original study, this book focuses primarily on cubism , jazz and the performances of Josephine Baker to provide examples of how transatlantic modernism was truly a cultural exchange between black and white. Utilizing examples from dance, sculpture, painting, music and literature , Lemke provides strong evidence for a modernism that is considerably more diverse than conventionally believed and paves the way for the term "Primitivist Modernism" to become a recognized catch phrase. Logan, Deborah Anna. Fallenness in Victorian Women's Writing: Marry, Stitch, Die or Do Worse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. 236 pp. $34.95 From Mary Magdelene to Monica Lewinsky, history and literature have never been at a loss for words when it comes to fallen women. This was especially true in the Victorian age, when sexual and moral standards created an unattainable ideal for women. Logan focuses on the work of female writers to illustrate the social factors creating the period's "Madonna-or-harlot" polarity that cast so many women, including single or working mothers, the childless, the anorexic and even writers, as fallen. Logan asserts that this book will have special meaning now, at the height of the feminist backlash when "the rhetoric may change with the times, but the issues remain the same." Chapter 7, "'The Problem to Be Solved, the Evil and Anomaly to Be Cured,'" contains a substantial discussion of Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, but for the most part Fallenness in Victorian Women's Writing focuses its attention on High Victorian writers like Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. Marsh, Joss. Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and...