Run by Ann Patchett

I read this book because I enjoyed Patchett's earlier Bel Canto. This novel starts off on a bit of a red herring; the reader learns about a statue that has been in Bernadette Doyle's family since they lived in Ireland, and although the book examines closely questions of family and inheritance, Bernadette fades off in a disappointing way. Most of the book's action happens in one day; this fact made the story a little cramped and improbable, but not intolerably so. The title plays nicely on both political and physical meanings of the word run. I would have liked more of Sullivan Doyle (the black sheep of the family)'s story, and more of Father Sullivan's relationship with his nephew Teddy. However, I felt the story came together nicely into a challenging but loving tale of a family coping with crisis.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

I recently re-read this book and was particularly struck by the way that Jacobs both appeals to and rejects the possibility of a female community across gender lines. It seems that this sisterhood is only possible as the potential sisters are farther and farther removed from slavery and the sites of her suffering (and Karen Sanchez-Eppler makes a good point about motherhood replacing chastity as the female virtue which Jacobs uses as a standard). I was also struck, this time, by her persistent inclusion of many stories and narratives into her own; even though she is never beaten or sent to work in the fields, she includes stories of horrific brutality directed against slaves. Finally, I was interested in the contests surrounded around writing--which allows Jacobs to compete with Dr. Flint in terms of her cunning.

Resisting History by Barbara Ladd

I think I could have found this book more helpful than I did. In some senses, Ladd seems to be trying to recuperate the way Faulkner writes women in As I Lay Dying and Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse. Her concerns are gender, choice, agency, authorship, and the act of writing in As I Lay Dying, A Fable, The Golden Apples, and Tell My Horse. She contends that the presence of women and hybridities in these stories challenges the monolithic narrative of History and divides it into several different narratives. Her readings apply Walter Benjamin's Marxist analysis to these texts and attempts to include the study of space in addition to Benjamin's temporal approach. As this review may indicate, though, I had trouble following exactly what unified this study.

The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Professor Bloch uses a delightful tone, and I found his analysis quite relevant to the text at hand. The book is quite well-designed, presenting the story before anything else, and then giving a mathematical analysis of some of the figures in the story. I appreciated the care used to select the mathematical examples; for while some were easier to follow for me than others (I found the analysis of the structure of the library spatially a little difficult), he used the math to make very good points about the implications of the story. While Professor Bloch held back from giving a full reading of the story, I found his analysis quite useful in my own ways of thinking about the truly unimaginable size and nature of the library. This book should not scare off anyone because of its mathematics.

Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler

I read the first edition (published in 1960) of this book. Fiedler writes more casually than academics today: he neither uses extensive footnotes nor includes a bibliography, and at times his perspective on women seems a bit off to me. Still, this book is mammoth (both in size and reputation).

Fiedler starts by tracing the history of the seduction novel in England and elsewhere. He contends that love and death are two of the most salient themes of the American novel, and that in American literature, the Clarissa figure becomes split into a dark lady and an angelic, fair lady. He identifies James Fenimore Cooper's historical romances with those of Sir Walter Scott, and traces a gothic tradition that starts with Charles Brockden Brown, goes through the work of Poe, to a full-blown Faustian bargain, whether done by Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, or in Moby Dick, or in Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, Fiedler identifies gothic as the most successful form in America. Fiedler also traces the male homosocial bond that crosses racial boundaries, and identifies this bond as extremely important (Huck-Jim, Ishmael-Queequeg, and Natty Bumpo-Chingachgook all provide examples). He also reads Faulkner (especially Absalom, Absalom!) and Pierre to great profit.

The Melodramatic Imagination by Peter Brooks

In this book, Peter Brooks investigates melodrama as an historical genre that grows, quite literally, out of musical dramas and pantomimes produced in France during the first half of the nineteenth century. He demonstrates that these productions dramatize what he calls the moral occult, or virtue for the sake of virtue. They supposed a Manchiean world view, with two extremes and no middle ground. I found his reading of these early French plays very convincing--he seems to have a strong sense of the genre and the time period. He claims that as nineteenth century drama moves away from the excess of the form, this struggle becomes better set off in the novel. He ends by reading two authors: Balzac and James. Both of these authors receive a general reading before Brooks gives a close reading of Pere Goriot and The Wings of the Dove in his successful demonstration of his theory that while Balzac's melodrama is external, James presents an internal melodrama of consciousness. Although this book does not deal with authors or even genres that particularly interest me, I would go back to this theory and use it if my interests develop in this direction.

How Novels Think by Nancy Armstrong

This book combines intelligent work in theory and history with close readings of a number of novels to illustrate its central thesis, namely that the novel, as a form, makes the concept of the individual, as we understand it today, possible.

Armstrong contends that 18th century novels show how a bad subject chooses to join society and how the self-discipline necessary to do so actually increases freedom. Victorian novels use women to displace man's "savage" characteristics, and to maintain the illusion of the development of mankind in a linear, monogeneic fashion, although vampire and other gothic stories trouble this concept with the possibility of polygenity.

I found this book very smart, and helpful, although sometimes it was difficult for me to follow her arguments. I thought she did a good job of deploying close readings to support her claims.