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REVIEWS heard—is very strong" (131). The debate about the time of day between Petruchio and Kate is crucial. "Man is figured by the sun which is always the same as itself, whereas woman is figured by a waxing waning moon which is always other than itself." Thus, "woman is the other to man, the hetew- to -Homo precisely because her essence is to be this lunatic difference between sameness and difference" (136). While the plot of the play reinforces the spatial, hierarchal, visionary "order of things," the oral residue of Kate's—and Petruchio's—jokes, ramblings, and tantrums, remains to blur distinctions and confuse conclusions. In his reading of Othello, Fineman considers the "formal zero authorial person immanent in Shakespeare's plays," as an extension of the subjectivity effect he traces back to the sonnets (144). This is Keats' notion of Shakespeare 's "negative capability" brought up to date—that uncanny avoidance of moral pronouncement andidentificationwith anyone ofShakespeare'scharacters to the exclusion of another. Fineman might have located this absence of norm in the character of lago, that selfish monster who is who he is not and who manipulates "ocular proof to "perjure" the other. But Fineman chooses instead to focus on the primary sign in the play, Othello's own name, which he traces back to the Greek "ethelo" meaning to wish." But always in Fineman 's reading, while the eye may be "perjured" by the visionary, "the ear" releases the self to the "very speaking oflanguage" (223). Fineman shows that the oral O, the first and last letter in Othello's name, and the sign for zero, for absence and for the negative which Bergson tells us does not exist in nature , is the most repeated sound in the play. In one passage of seven lines, the ejaculatory O which both Hamlet and Othello utter over and over again at their deaths, is repeated no less than six times (5.157-63). Summing up, Fineman tallies nine O's himself, "The voice of the Moor has its own orotundity , verging, as some infer, on hollowness" (151). Coleridge's advice to readers who encounter difficult material is well taken in reading Fineman's final book: assume the fault is in the reader, not the author. We are grateful for Fineman's testament to a Will that effaced his own ego so skillfully that he makes the exploration of our wills possible and still profitable. James R. Andreas Clemson University PAUL JULIAN SMITH. Writing in the Margin: Spanish Literature ofthe Golden Age. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. 219 pp. In general, Hispanism has been slow to recognize new critical and theoretical models, preferring instead New Critical models and other formalisms . In recent years, there has been a change of orientation in Hispanic criticism, marked by a wider acceptance of contemporary theory and by an acknowledgement of the validity of multiple approaches to literary texts. Several factors are crucial with regard to this change: a proliferation of theoretical options, a desire on the part of Hispanists to join the critical mainstream, and, most significantly perhaps, the rise of interest in Latin American literature, a corpus of texts replete with unapologetic ideological 144 THE COMPARATIST agenda and blatant self-consciousness. The new rhetoric and the mix of literature and ideologies lay special claim to Spanish American narrative, rich in ideas and stylistic experiments. And one must bear in mind that, given the reigning temper, the locus of this vein of riches was precisely where it ought to have been: in the margins, of literature and of global politics. In a type of role reversal, Latin America took the lead over Spain, with criticism of Latin American literature establishing directions for work in the peninsular field at a time when theory became a privileged art. In Writingin the Margin, Paul Julian Smith applies poststructural thought to Spanish Golden Age texts, works produced in the mid-sixteenth through seventeenth centuries in a society heavily concerned with bloodlines, honor, and social status. The hierarchical structure of society, rigid censorship, and the imperial power of the State pushed many people—and most writers—into the margins, which become Smith's center. The study is divided...

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