Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (review)

Book Reviews275 admits that he needed "un repoussoir" in order to emphasize the qualities of "Ie génie français"(L'Allemand, Paris: Gallimard, 1919, p. 10). Other major essays (especially Le roman d'aventure and the articles on Proust) are treated with insightand sensitivity. Professor Levy skillfully points out Riviere's strongest side as a man of letters, a concern synonymous with the NRF's raison d'être: his unfailing interest in, and his contribution towards, an aesthetics of the novel. One minor inaccuracy appears on p. 78 where it is stated that "He does not seem to have been at all aware of the profoundly innovative efforts of poets such as Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, Blaise Cendrars . . ." According to Sylvie Paré's "Jacques Rivière, Critique de Marcel Proust" (Ph.D. Diss., University of Arizona, 1974), Rivière was well aware of the writings of Cendrars and Cocteau, for example, but dismissed them as being unimportant. INGEBORG M. KOHN University of Arizona Steven Mailloux. Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. 228 p. "Literary texts and their meanings are never prior to the employments of interpretive conventions; they are always its results. Texts do not cause interpretations, interpretations constitute texts." Even if one finds such statements offensive or dull, there are parts of Mailloux's book that deserve attention. The survey of reader-response criticism in chapters oneand two, for example, is a superb introduction to the theories of Fish, Holland, Bleich, Iser, and Culler. A later chapter, "Literary History and Reception Theory," contains interesting discussions of the critical history of the Appleton text of Red Badge of Courage and of the differences between the early American and British responses to Moby-Dick. Mailloux is a master of synthesis and clarity. The most appropriate audience for the middle and last chapters, however, will be found in one of three groups: neo-Aristotelian critics desiringtosubsume readerresponse criticism within the traditionalist ranks; reader-responsecritics wishingto relate their work to a more established critical tradition; or, committed readerresponse critics in search of a practical model of reader-response criticism. The first group will come away from a reading of Interpretive Conventions enthusiastic, the second group, hopeful, the third group disappointed. From the various models offered by reader-response critics, Mailloux chooses a social one, following in the line of Fish, Iser, and Culler. Thus, the concepts of "inferred authorial intention," "implied readers," and "contitutive conventions" are all central to his argument. Interpretive Conventions perhaps strengthens the traditional case for authorial intention (he acknowledges his debt to E.D. Hirsch) by focusing on recent works in textual criticism ("the author's final intention") and on the work of a number of contemporary speech act theorists, including Skinner, Grice, Austin, and Searle. But despite the new names, the overall pattern is a familiar one: the author, aware of the conventional expectations of his audience, constructs a work intended to elicit certain intellectual and emotional responses on the part of his readership. The critic, then, may reconstructthose intentions through an examination of the various conventions available to particular authors and 276ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW audiences. How much of an advance this represents beyond Hirsch's "willed and shared types" and Culler's "naturalization" the reader must decide. It may be that Mailloux's main contribution to current discourse on the nature and source of meaning within texts is hisemphasison the reading process, especially its dual nature as both a diachronic, linear experience, as the reader moves through the text, and as a synchronic one, since at any given point in the temporal process, non-temporal conventions (shared practices of reading) are being employed. Descriptions of this reading process tracing the adoption and rejection of conventions offer a wealth of new evidence for both traditional and non-traditional critics who are concerned with thedialectic between multiple meanings within texts and legitimate limits to that multiplicity. MICHAEL E. WILLIAMS University of Colorado, Boulder Ralf R. Nicolai. Kafkas Amerika-Roman "Der Verschollene."Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1981. 272p. Nicolai lehnt die von prädominierend ostideologischen Forschen wie Lukacs, Hermsdorf, A.P. Foulkes, P. Reimann, Cl. David, vertretene Hypotheseab...