... Freud states in Studies on Hysteria that “it is difficult to attribute too much sense” to what may seem minor details (such as tics), neurology tends to grant them no meaning whatsoever. Where does this leave a literary-critical hermeneutics that has tended to take the Freudian view here as its default...

...—of the civilization versus barbarism kind. In its place we find national and international inequities and their corresponding social dialec- tic, with its unexpected interrelations and unstable meanings. The latent form is hidden under the ostensible one: the bravery or wildness of the girl gives rise to 104...

... it objectifies but also de-reifies, privileg- ing epistemological disorientation over closure and insisting on its own representational limits. Like Sensational Modernism, Susan Edmunds’s Grotesque Relations approaches the poli- tics of U.S. literary modernism through its estrangement of the sentimental...

..." is the metaphor McCann uses most frequently to explain the relationship of literature to poli- tics). The strength of the study is the irnmemly tight and persuasive nature of the links McCann forges, connections that demonstrate the previously undiscovered cultural and political ambitions that drive...

... the relationship between the body and reading only in terms of a desire that is ultimately sexual. And maybe the psychophysiological and poststructuralist decentering of a "core" self, with "authen- tic" emotions, would allow us to revalue effeminate persons' "everyday experience of emo- tional life...

... to, or by, bright young people as a consequence of their reading selected novels under the guidance of informed, skillful, enthusias- tic, politically sensitive professors of literature. The effects of reading (novels, among other texts) extend considerably beyond the experiences of individual readers. One...

... in Yeats's writing tells a story of authorship that is unassimilable to conventional gendered narratives of literary production (197,200). Georgie's appropriation of the pro- fession and practices of mediumship allowed her to resist Yeats's control, claim an authen- tic authorship for herself...

..., the flexibility and receptiveness of the subject and object gripped in narratives of power. So if I had to name my reading practice, it would be something like a hermeneu- tics of susceptibility, rather than suspicion. By this I mean a reading practice that is willing to follow, rather than to suppress...

... bring a double definition of theory to the reading of novels. First there is the notion that theory, presumably external to the novel in question, enables insightful expla- nations of a passage, character, theme, or some newly discovered narrative tic. This notion of theory—responsible...

... argument relies on a familiar Foucauldian conceit: the invention of nor- malcy required gendered, raaalized, and abnormal others. Her poststructuralist hem- tic, though, emphasizes the incompleteness, equivocation, and instability that disrupt this project. The era's classificatory impulse runs...

... outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authen- tic (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), pp. 232, cloth, $45.00. Consuming Traditions takes as one of its key points of departure the debates in literary, social, and cultural studies over the status and effects...

.... After the chapter on Faulkner, Taylor examines the "racial lie" by which Stein's "Melanctha" uses race as "an enabling tic," a ruse which allows the story's real concerns+lass and sexual- ity-to emerge. Suggesting that the gaps and elisions of Ida offer more genuine insight into the dynamics...

... in chapters on female writers. The habit of thinking that only worries about simplis- tic readings of female agency relinquishes a significant opportunity to factor in masculinity, among other historical constraints on agency. This is decidedly not a book for readers who are impatient with critical...

... into the tics and compulsionsthat is to say, into the very bodies--of Dickens's caricatures? Or, can we really say that the elegiac method of Mill on the Floss is reducible to nostalgia? Or, if the retrospective form of David Copperfield successfully controls David's past, then why is it that Uriah...

..., as his bourgeoisie comprises, linguistically, various vocal tics and peculiarities, each implying a unique worldview: Swann's ironic emphases, the grandmother's Madame de Sévigné citations, Bloch's neo-Homeric pronouncements, Legrandin's evasive lyricism, and so on. Everyone in Proust speaks...

... struts binding the chapters together, but Daly continually surprises with inge- nious ways of making connections between apparently distant forms of culture and poli- tics. Indeed, his manner of working metonymically, moving crabwise across very diverse documents, is formulated as a method...

... conversations in the field and generate new ones. Before Cultures succeeds, then, in its ambition to help us understand not only the before, but also the beyond of identity poli- tics. RALPH E. RODRIGUEZ, Broiu?~University ...

...-but is a relatively recent product, emerging in thd mid-nineteenth-century through the emergence of eugenics, statis- tics, and medical science. Adolphe Quetelet's invention of statistics or Francis Galton's eugenics research helped create a statistical average individual (l'homme moyen...

... Duncan’s own scene of writing. Chapter 2, for example, approvingly traces Lockhart’s conception of the cultural domain occupied by a national literature, a domain that he took to be founded on Scott’s novels and carried forward by Blackwood’s. For Lockhart and Duncan, the Scottish Roman- tic...

... (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), pp. 208, cloth, $45.50. A writer on bad form had best have a sense of style, and Kent Puckett has that. It is on display in the opening sentence of his introduction: “Verbal slips and tics, fashion failures, lapses, gaffes, and blunders: these are, we learn the hard way...