Lawrence, Film Theory & Literature

BOOK REVIEWS (Carbondale, 1965), devoted more than twenty pages to a study of the manuscripts of three poems from The Wind among the Reeds. One may well ask whether the Cornell edition wül lead to a revision of Bradford's findings; I think that the CorneU editorial board should have addressed this question. I suggest that they rethink their ban on critical evaluation of the manuscript versions and their development. The editor of The Heme's Egg had an easier task; there are only two unpublished versions prior to the printed text of 1938, one a manuscript, the other a typescript. The manuscript is already fairly close to the final text; the typescript is so close that it has been possible to cite variant readings from the published text Ui the footnotes. The reader is further helped by running titles over the transcriptions, indicating the scenes and lines of the published text. There is little work involved m tracing Yeats's revisions; apparently the whole play was well fixed m his muid before he began to write it down. For this reason, Alison Armstrong's introduction is not much concerned with editorial and technical matters; instead she focuses, quite helpfuUy and Ui disregard of the editorial board's policy, on questions of interpretation and on the possible sources and their transformations at Yeats's hands. There is, Ui fact, very little to be said about the changes from manuscript to published text. The decision made by the editorial board of the Cornell Yeats to publish reference works rather than critical studies is perhaps understandable , but it does not work weU, as these two volumes show. A preliminary discussion of the relevance of the manuscripts of The Wind among the Reeds to a poem's meaning by way of a few exemplary analyses should not be beyond the scope of the editor. On the other hand the reference character of the edition cannot be very pronounced when the manuscript material, as in the case of The Heme's Egg, is not particularly substantial or diversified. Yeats's early poetry is altogether more interesting Ui this respect; but, as noted above, there are formidable obstacles on the way to a sensible presentation and I am not sure that they can be overcome satisfactorily. K. P. S. Jochum ________________ Universität Bamberg Lawrence, Film Theory & Literature Linda Ruth WUliams. Sex in the Head Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. xi +178 pp. $30.00 IN THE PAST DECADE, studies such as Anne Friedberg's Win131 ELT 38: 1 1995 dow Shopping and Rachel Bowlby's Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and ZoL· have instructively eroded traditional boundaries between the study of visual and literary texts. WhUe the politics and definitions of "cultural studies" remain Ui contention, one undisputed effect of these debates has been the reanimated attention to the relations between film and modern literature as co-products of culturally -produced ways of seeing. Thus Gavriel Moses Ui The Nickel Was for the Movies is able to describe the subgenre of the "film novel," structured by cinematic forms and themes, and Joan Copjec's recent anthology, Shades of Noir, can seamlessly include essays on Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich Ui its project to challenge and redirect older assumptions about film noir as genre or closed set. Yet the example of the Copjec anthology Ulustrates how the political stakes, especially for feminism, are raised Ui this redefined area of film/literary/cultural studies. An important precedent of the Copjec anthology is E. Ann Kaplan's 1981 coUection, Women in Film Noir, still Ui print and still vividly persuasive, with all its grainy stUls and militant 1970s feminist usages of Lacan. Shades of Noir is able to broaden its political questions to include race, the cult of private enjoyment, and homelessness, but Ui its project as "cultural study," what is lost is the urgency of specifically feminist questions, the hard and even bitter sex and gender questions intrinsic to film noir, the references to essays Ui Kaplan are polite but not central. In contextualizing Linda Ruth WUUams's Sex in the Head, I...