In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Studies in American Fiction251 the non-fictional An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport (1980). Thus, one of the most admirable purposes achieved by Klinkowitz's book is that it is useful (a good Vonnegutian aim achieved by a good Vonnegut scholar). But what is more valuable in the service of these authors is that Klinkowitz's interpretations so often make one want to read or re-read many of the novels he discusses. If one has forgotten, for example, just how fine NinetyTwo in the Shade is, Klinkowitz will remind one of its power and evocativeness. Klinkowitz is working in a critical mode here that has almost no parallel in current scholarship concerning contemporary fiction. Books on the recent American novel have tended to be techmque-cum-thematic studies. That is, the techniques of the writers are tied to certain, usually epochal themes such as modernism or post-modernism, self-begetting or self-awareness, the wasteland or the garden, radical innocence or radical experience, inform or exploded form. If the metaphor of the mirror (as propounded in M. H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp) occurs in recent criticism of fiction, it is as a "silverless mirror" such as we find in Charles Caramello's excellent Silverless Mirrors: Book, Self and Postmodern American Fiction, a study that amply illustrates the tendencies noted. But there is a growing list of American critics who are, for whatever ideological reasons, concerned with realism or traditional mimesis in fiction or literature in general, including Gerald Graff, Eric Sundquist, Fredric Jameson, and a few others. By and large, however, such critics have not addressed themselves to specific contemporary American fictionists as Klinkowitz has. Thus Klinkowitz is, perhaps, once again the canary in the coal mine, testing the critical air, as he had been with Literary Disruptions. So if Klinkowitz's new book (which might have been called "The Novel of New American Manners") looks curiously like something out of the past, perhaps one should look more closely, for it may be that in it we are also seeing the future, both of our fiction and our criticism of it. Northern Illinois UniversityJames M. Mellard Brodhead, Richard H. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986. 254 pp. Cloth: $24.95. Richard Brodhead's The School of Hawthorne is an important contribution to American literary history. Its assessment of Hawthorne as "the only American author always to have been part of our significant past" (p. 8) is perspicacious, lucid, provocative, and timely, part of the current critical enterprise of investigating the process of canon formation as a result of cultural mediation. Brodhead offers fresh and complex readings of Hawthorne's work as it was appropriated by Melville, Howells, and James. Carefully examining each of their evolving careers, he discusses the various ways these writers assimilated Hawthorne as they defined their own vocations and wrote their own fiction. When earlier versions of two of the ten chapters appeared in print (those on Melville and on Howells), I praised them (in American Literary Scholarship 1982) as perceptive and instructive analyses of how those writers perceived and appropriated Hawthorne. The revised versions ask and answer even larger questions about these writers' changing selfconceptions in the context of America's emerging literary traditions and attitudes toward high culture. Judging canons as "changing cultural constructions," Brodhead traces the consequences of canonical status. Hawthorne provides an example of how canons are formed and changed, and of "intraliterary" transmission of influence. Brodhead is a careful reader and an astute critic who carefully builds and supports all of his arguments. His 252Reviews readings of literary texts are rich and fresh and his speculations about Hawthorne's influence are provocative. Yet occasionally I have problems with specific interpretations as well as generalizations about Hawthorne's canonization and its effects. Examining a literary relationship mediated by friendship, Brodhead treats Hawthorne as an "enabler" for Melville both as a role model ("the writer gifted to know and speak hidden truths," p. 31) and a literary model. He traces Ahab's monomania to such obsessives as Chillingworth and Ethan Brand; he believes Pierre "organizes itself around the kind of action Melville links with Hawthorne" (p. 39...

pdf

Share