Reading Novels

George Hughes

Description

Reading Novels is a unique piece of practical criticism, a comprehensive "poetics" of a genre that has not attracted a great deal of attention, at least not on this level. It is a reader's and student's guide that reaches beyond issues of individual texts and historical traditions to essential features of the form.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 14 juin 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780826591531
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

reading g n eor o ge v hu e gh l es

reading novels

reading novels

George Hughes

Foreword by Walter L. Reed

Vanderbilt University Press Nashville

© 2002 Vanderbilt University Press All rights reserved First edition 2002

This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hughes, George, 1944- Reading novels / George Hughes. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8265-1399-9 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-8265-1400-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Fiction—Technique. 2. Criticism. I. Title. PN3365 .H84 2002 808.3-dc21 2002001703

Part I 1 2

Part II

3 4 5 6 7

Part III 8 9 10

Part IV 11 12

Contents

Foreword vi Preface xi Introduction 1

Openings 13 Starting the Analysis Space and Time 39

15

Description, Character, Dialogue, and Monologue 55 Description 57 Character and Character Portraits 71 Dialogue 87 Monologue and Stream of Consciousness Free Indirect Discourse 111

Narrative and Narrators Narrative I 119 Narrative II 131 Narrators 148

117

The Language of the Text 161 Sentence Structure and Connection Verbs: Tense, Time, and Voice 183

165

104

vi

13 14 15 16 17

Part V 18

Adjectives 194 Figures: Metaphor, Metonymy, Irony Words and Meanings 213 Repetition and Figures of Construction Lists 234

Endings Endings

239 241

Checklist of Questions for the Analysis of a Passage

Appendix 1. Film and the Novel

249

Appendix 2. Stereotype and Cliché in the Novel 257

Notes

261

Works of Fiction Cited

Select Bibliography

Index

293

287

283

253

199

222

Foreword

George Hughes’sReading Novelsis a unique piece of practical criticism, a comprehensive “poetics” of a genre that has not attracted a great deal of such attention, at least not on this level. It is a reader’s and student’s guide that reaches beyond issues of individual texts and historical traditions to essential features of the form. There are several sophisticated textbooks of this kind that deal with poetry. John Frederick Nims’s Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry,published twenty-five years ago and now in its fourth edition, comes to mind as a comparable volume, both for the catholicity of its examples and the intelligence of its comments. But because of the length of individual novels, perhaps, or because of the difficulty of formal- izing the conventions of a genre that is always foregrounding its departure from tradition, most books on the “rhetoric of fiction,” the “nature of narrative” or “structuralist poetics” that have broken important ground in the last half-century have been aimed at a scholarly, professorial audience, not at a readership of students, teachers of introductory courses, and that endangered species, the general reader. All of these more common readers stand to benefit greatly from this new book. At the same time, Hughes’s engage- ment with a wide range of French structuralist studies of the novel, of narrative, and of language in general

vii

reading novels viii

makesReading Novelsa book that ought to be informative and valuable to many American scholars as well, especially those who teach English and American literature, since this kind of criticism, once fashionable, seems no longer to be widely read in this country. A great virtue of Hughes’s approach is the way it navigates between traditional formalist approaches and postmodern theoretical ones. There was a time, it is true, when the kind of structural analysis of the novel offered here was regarded as shockingly new, unpleasantly scientistic, and decidedly foreign, but from the perspective of a new century (and from the tactful, matter-of-fact way in which Hughes is able to advance struc- turalist terms and techniques), it now seems eminently sane and practical, reassuringly empirical in its concern not with politics or ideologies lurking behind the text but with the way novels construct themselves as systems of significance, with the way readers can make sense of the subtleties and particularities of meaning that this centuries-old European literary art form has always been capable of conveying. The influence of Ian Watt’s classic studyThe Rise of the Novelis still strong in English studies, but it has not led to the kind of classroom-level presentation that, say, Brooks and Warren’sUnderstanding Poetryfor the New Criticism of lyric provided poetry a generation or two earlier. Hughes brings a wide historical range of reference, a strategic preference for English and American examples in his sample passages, and a sophisticated French (and Italian) analytic per- spective to bear on the novel that will be particularly welcome to teachers seeking to introduce their students to a genre that has gone well beyond its rise to literary respectability in eighteenth-century England. Reading Novelsis practical and basic in its presentation, but it is never condescending. It assumes an intelligence and curiosity on the part of its audience that, as a long-time teacher of prose fiction, I find to be quite common among my own students. But it does not assume a great deal of experience in reading novels, in perceiving the devices and decoding their significance in print narratives hundreds of pages in length. This also cor- responds to my experience as a teacher, especially in the last decade. With the competition of other media so strong and insistent, few students I encounter now have spent years reading for pleasure, for escape from bore- dom, or for general self-improvement, as was still common a generation ago among those arriving on college campuses. Students today are per- fectly intelligent and academically ambitious, but they lack the literary competence, as Jonathan Culler has termed it, that comes with long expe- rience in novel reading. They present new challenges to teachers, and it

foreword ix

seems to me that many teachers will see a valuable ally in George Hughes. He stands in a gap that many of us have long felt, providing a working vocabulary for focusing students’ attention on ways of reading that used to go unrecognized and unanalyzed because they were so familiar, and that now go unrecognized and unanalyzed because they are so unaccus- tomed. At the same time, because of the lightness of his critical touch, his determination to avoid turning a toolbox of technical terms into a superstore of critical jargon, and the specificity of the examples he offers from novels of different periods and different styles, Hughes does not threaten to take over the discussion with his assistance.Reading Novels should be a useful supplement to any course on the novel, even those still centered (as most seem to be) on a particular period within a particular national literary history. While this book is aimed first and foremost at the college classroom, it still seems able to serve as an intelligent person’s guide to the novel as well, not (in the current fashion of publishing) “the novel for dummies,” but certainly the novel for those who still read for pleasure and profit. Students and teachers as well as general readers should be pleased to be addressed neither as idiots, on the one hand, nor as initiates into the eso- teric and the arcane, on the other—arguably the pitfall of postmodern literary theory. George Hughes has read widely and deeply—both in re- cent critical studies in “narratology,” as it was once termed, in the French critical tradition and in classic studies in English and American criticism— but he keeps this learning in the background of the exposition, which comes across as attentive and imaginative but not pedantic. The counter- point between the lists of useful critical terms and exemplary passages to which they are applied is lively—neither precept nor example dominates the discussion—and the transitions or segues from one example to an- other are deft. For example, the description of Darcy’s sister in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice,where we learn that she is “little more than sixteen,” is followed by a description from Gissing’sThe Nether Worldof another “girl of sixteen.” Hughes knows when not to quote as well, and how to enliven a technical discussion with an amusing but illustrative anecdote, as when he notes that Ann Radcliffe was herself much less impressed by the sight of Derwentwater in the Lake District than one of her characters in The Mysteries of Udolpho.He also brings in examples from novels, for in- stance from Beckett’sWatt,where the particular technique under discus- sion is self-consciously commented on within the novel. Parodic examples enliven the more straightforward ones throughout.