... degree zero, where various possible explanations hang in equipoise with one another. Stories accordingly often end with some seemingly unrelated detail that serves to embed the entire tale within in a universe where stories, poems, and inscriptions, each equally unlikely, are forced to compete...

... theory for the way novels embed within their narratives a theory of how they engage the reader; this theory, she argues, is then enacted in the process of reading and again in scholarly engagements with the novels. The sensation novel thus consciously reflects on and develops a theory...

... is a sign of a reader not “getting it,” and he or she never will so long as the impulse to know embeds the presumption that he or she deserves to know. Particularists endorse an ethical reading practice that would keep its distance, in a sense court- ing the rebuff that allows a work to maintain its...

..., or character,” gives an exciting sense of the possibilities of reading along the lines imagined by Best and Marcus. Zhang declares that she is “primarily interested in tracing recurrent patterns and structures across descriptive passages,” doing so “to isolate the assumptions these forms embed and to trace...

... be that no longer embeds an unscrutinized liberalism. ...

... that matter to me, it also embeds these choices in ima@ worlds in which choices matter, in which consequences can be felt on the pulse" (264, emphasis added). I emphasize Wollaeger's phrasing here because it raises the question of what matters most inMadernism, Media, and Propaganda. Coming more from...

..., who otherwise is an emblem of the desire for interracial concilia- tion. Rather, Lee negotiates the complex history and set of racial meanings on a formal level: “What the plot cannot make happen, Lee works to accomplish aesthetically, embed- ding a more idealist vision in his richly imbricated...

... for an American urban environment undergoing partial yet constant modernization; at the same time, they embed in their texts clearly racialized, lasting objects such as Himes's cotton bale, a relic of slavery's “ghost infrastructures,” and Ellison's Black Sambo doll, a “stubbornly durable” artifact of blackface...

... in mind, I suggest instead the following: 1. Our notion of what qualifies as literary-critical theory is overly narrow, and it could be usefully supplanted by a concept of critical “protocol”: the set of normative practices (such as citation) that express embed...

... exposure to the other. Grandison's preoccupations with international relations suggest that we read it as a national allegory, firmly embedded in both international and internal colo- delineates the boundary between England and abroad and that Grandison "passes as citizen...

...-identification as a medium. For An American Tragedy, the novel is as much of a medial object as those it embeds within the narrative. The loops it enacts between its underlying material meta- phors, stamping, and something like a modernist narrative interiority are reflex- ive. “Material metaphor” refers...

...Susan S. Lanser Scholars have rightly argued that one underpinning of the novel as it “rises” in the eighteenth century is its investment in consolidating heteronormativity. Reading narrative form as a site of sexual content, however, makes the case for a sapphic undertext embedded primarily...

..., by letting all things approach “the existence most adequate to their absolute idea” ( Heidelberger 213 , translated in Tihanov, Master 41 ). Dostoevsky's “epics” achieve this theodicy of form outside the bounds of the intentionally composed artistic image; they embed the “absolute” teleological...

... this mistake if we understand nature for him as a stable bedrock over which transient human histories play out. Instead it would seem more productive to understand Hardy’s “natural” or nonhuman world as fully embedded into and inextricable from the human or social world. In any event...

... of modernist writing (thriller; travelogue) is a tactic in what we might call Ishiguro's "neo-modernismthe conscription of structural elements like the novel of consciousness and unreliable narration for projects that embed contemporary concerns not in postmodem simulations or knowing...

... the points of view of the unnamed narrator and the orphaned housekeeper Esther Summerson, enacts the double vision that Michel de Certeau has argued characterizes urban experience, in which the panoptic point of view held by cartographers and city planners serves as a counterpoint to the embedded...

..., as heir desirous, and his success depends on how well he inserts himself into her world of absolute dominion. Smith embeds in Mrs. Rayland a concern for form and family that relies solely on assumptions of inbred "quality" rather than wealth. Mrs. Rayland displays a romantic attachment...

... should read the homologies of this arrival scene: as identifying the networks (both material and cultural [ mādī wa-adabī ]) in which the characters and their objects are already embedded. By beginning his novel in the Beirut harbor, after all, al-Khūrī sets the action in Beirut not simply...

... performers—vivifies a method that does not just dig deeper but moves outward in an inversion of the expansionist credo ­embedded within frontier mythology. What makes the 2008 edition of Collected Works so interesting is the way its archival accumulations tie into a transnational theory...

... in their native habitat. A very different figure signifies within the same scene, a miniaturized gingerbread model of the old Bowden house. An “essay in cookery,” the gingerbread house is a text whose subject is the way Dunnet makes itself from itself, and the scope of what is made. This house is an embedded...