After the Fall: Theory and Its Stories

BOOK REVIEWS examine. Why, for example, in their attack on culturalist theories of English studies is there no mention of the work of Raymond WiUiams? I find it equally strange that they make no reference to Patrick BrantUnger 's book-length attempt to define the place of cultural studies within Uterature departments: Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (1990). Nor is there any reference to any of the essays gathered together in Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler's massive Cultural Studies (1990). No mention is made of the work of Frederick Jameson. Only one book by Jerome McGann (who has done more than anybody else to explore the relationship between theory and textual editing) is cited. In their questioning of the abiUty of structuralism to define an intellectually defensible object of literary study, they do not address the considerable attention that Robert Scholes has paid to this problem in the work that he has done within the structuralist/semiotics tradition. Further, their account of the poUtical dimensions of early English studies is too short to be useful, and it overlooks the considerable archival work that Franklin E. Court has done on this topic and published in Institutionalizing English Literature (although to be fair to Guy and SmaU, perhaps they did not have access to this book, as it was published in 1992). Finally, their biggest omission is that they never really give us an adequate account of their own solution to the problems of how, exactly, EngUsh studies should define its object of study and construct an appropriate theory of practice. By noting these limitations, however, I'm not suggesting that people within the profession can afford to overlook Guy and SmaU's arguments. If one wants to refute them, one must do it with the same care to logical argument that they employ. It seems to me apparent that it would be useful for people within the profession to work on their ability to offer to the pubUc and to other academic professionals logically and intellectually sound explanations of what English studies does and why it is of value. Addressing Guy and SmaU's arguments should provide a good occasion for this. John L. Kijinski --------------------- Idaho State University After the Fall: Theory and Its Stories Janice Carlyle and Daniel Schwarz, eds. Narrative and Culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. vi+ 277 pp. Cloth $48.00 Paper $18.00 409 ELT 38:3 1995 David Richter, ed. Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views of Reading Literature. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's 1994. xiii + 297 pp. $40.00 TO READ THESE TWO BOOKS together is to wonder about the power of stories. The institutional narrative that authorizes each book is clear enough. In her introduction, Janice Carlyle sets her volume (whose essays range across a French actress in Middlemarch who admits to having stabbed her husband onstage to a tale told at the annual Liar's Festival in southwestern France about how Joan of Arc reaUy wanted to sell firewood) within the burgeoning area of cultural studies. In his introduction, David Richter presents his volume (whose essays range from Helen Vendler on loving literature because of the sheer literary power of its imagining to Steven Greenblatt loving The Tempest because of the sheer urgency of its relations with colonialism) as part of the disciplinary conversation about the role of theory. Richter wants to enable students to hear the conversation because it wiU be good for them. Carlyle is more vexed not only because she has not co-edited a textbook but because she is not sure whether her stories ultimately have to do with ideological resistance or with control. Richter has a story: Theory as a FaU—not so much from Innocence as into a more openly conflictual condition of Experience. Gerald Graffs weU-known injunction to teach-the-conflicts appears as the Foreword to the book and permits Richter to finesse the question of whether or not his FaU is Fortunate in consequence (or even spiritual in nature). Instead, the FaU is simply inescapable. We are all, students and teachers , necessarily always already worried anyway about Why We Read, What We Read, and How We Read...