The clinical novel: phrenology and 'Villette.'
Article Abstract:
Charlotte Bronte's novel 'Villette' is based on a phrenological model of seeing, which compels readers to revise their privileging of depth over surface. The goal of the novel is training the reader to see with Lucy Snowe's clinical gaze. Since sight is entwined with desire in 'Villette,' learning to see like Lucy means learning to desire like her. Although the phrenological model of 'Villette' promises completely externalized characters, Lucy remains enigmatic. The phrenological model leads to a combination of visibility and opacity, rather than total visibility.
Publication Name: Novel
Subject: Literature/writing
ISSN: 0029-5132
Year: 1996
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Engendering naturalism: narrative form and commodity spectacle in U.S. naturalist fiction
Article Abstract:
Edith Wharton's novel 'The House of Mirth' explores the complex relationships between vision, gender and desire in the emergent consumer culture of late 19th century America. The novel portrays the market as an all-pervasive power that determines social relations and is controlled by men. The marketplace is represented as a space of male predation and female danger. The heroine Lily Bart is both an avid consumer and a commodity. The novel shows that men's social invisibility relative to women is an index of their economic and political power.
Publication Name: Novel
Subject: Literature/writing
ISSN: 0029-5132
Year: 1996
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China Man autoeroticism and the remains of Asian America
Article Abstract:
Maxine Hong Kingston's 'China Men' and Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Remains of the Day' are novels written by minority writers that defy intellectual colonization regulated by the author-concept and the autobiography genre that have become the basis of 'Ethnic Studies' in the US. The two novels offer corrective in terms of Asian American literary canonization to view race and ethnicity as theoretical and analytical terms independent of the identity politics of authorship.
Publication Name: Novel
Subject: Literature/writing
ISSN: 0029-5132
Year: 1998
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