Revolution and the 20th Century Novel (review)

142 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW adjuncts who are forced to teach at several different campuses in order to earn a living wage may well lack the time and energy to follow Shor's example. Many find themselves compelled to rely on last year's lecture notes, despite the idealism that may originally have motivated them to become teachers. The precariousness of their jobs may also inhibit them from deviating too far from traditional pedagogy. Nevertheless, many of the exercises Shor describes can be incorporated even by part-time faculty whose fragmented work lives mirror those of their students. Moreover, although it is possible to fault Critical Teaching and Everyday Life for slighting the impact of some external factors on the learning that can take place within the traditional classroom, it is more appropriate to view the book as creating the utopias similar to those constructed by Shor's students. It presents an ideal, sharpening our awareness of the repressive and alienating aspects of the institutions within which many of us teach and demonstrating the possibilities that exist in alternative settings. Emily Abel NOTES 1.See Burton R. Clark, The Open Door College: A Case Study (New York: McGrawHill , 1970); Jerome Karabel, "Community Colleges and Social Stratification," Harvard Educational Review, 42 (November 1972), 521-62. 2.See Ellen Kay Timberger, "Open Admissions: A New Form of Tracking?" Insurgent Sociologist, 4 (1973), 29-42. 3.Shor, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, p. 22. 4.On Campus With Women, 26 (Spring 1980), 8. 5.U.S. Department of Commerce, A Statistical Portrait of Women in the United States (April 1976), p. 48. 6.See Suzanne Howard, But We Will Persist: A Comparative Research Report on the Status of Women in Academe (Washington, D.C: American Association of University Women, 1978). Paul N. Siegel, Revolution and the20th Century Novel. New York: Monad Press, 1979. In his new book, Paul N. Siegel, the noted Marxist Shakespearean scholar, selects a theme ostensibly alien to the main current of contemporary literature. For decades, Gerald Graff says, the novel has emphasized the "subjectivization and privatization of human experience," ' and the literary hegemony of this tendency can obscure another tradition, the work of great twentieth century writers who insisted on setting their works on the plane of the broadest, most sweeping social action. Siegel seeks to remind us that we continue to inhabit an epoch of capitalism's decline and decay, an era of wars and revolutions, and that memorable novels have indeed recognized it and dramatized it as such. Siegel's Revolution and the20th Century Novel selects ten works, considered products of four periods and contexts: the pre-World War I ascendance of the reformist social democracy (Bennett's The Old Wives' Tate, London's The Iron Heel), the political crises and upheavals of the 1930s (Malraux's Man's Fate, Silone's Fontamara, Wright's Native Son), the post-World War II intellectual retreat (Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Mailer's The 143 REVIEWS Naked and the Dead, Orwell's 1984), and the early years of Soviet "de-Stalinization" (Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward). The books are various, and in some cases, the relation to revolution is oblique. But this differentiated literary heritage allows Siegel to present a complex, many-sided picture of the experience of revolution and the intellectuals' orientation towards it over a broad span of time. The strength of Siegel's book lies in his carefully constructed arguments challenging critical views of several novels. His reading of Native Son, for instance, suggests that Boris Max's courtroom oration is neither a crude reproduction of "party line" nor an intrusive, disruptive element in the book: rather it knits together all the novel's themes, highlighting Wright's understanding (prefiguring Fanon) of the violent rage of the oppressed that helps found a new identity free from the grip of the oppressor. On the other hand, Siegel argues, the thesis of Darkness at Noon—that moral corruption stems from an unqualified reliance on reason—crumbles in the face of a protagonist who by no means relies on consistent or unrelenting logic. "I have sought to engage in what the New Critics call 'close readings,' " Siegel...