Browsing by Subject "James, Henry, 1843-1916 -- Criticism and interpretation"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Celebrity and the Body in 'The Bostonians'
    (2012) Miller, Lawrence J.; Stadler, Gustavus
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    Literature as Performance: Founding Spaces for Voice
    (2005) Clark, Prentiss; Zwarg, Christina, 1949-
    In the recent history of literary studies, audience-oriented criticism emerges as a dominant trope for understanding the relationships between texts, authors, and readers. Barthes’s reclassification of the reader as a producer, and his elevation of an open, plural, “text” over a “work” that “closes on a signified,” emphasizes modern conceptions of reading as a form of writing. Yet, the specific processes that poststructuralism advances point back to older modes of criticism in an illustration of the dynamic relationship between history and literature. Thus, as Derrida resists logocentrism and dismantles traditional metaphysical hierarchies, viewing writing as both written and spoken language, he reaffirms the necessity of the text. I want to remain in the post-structuralist mode of thinking, allowing for the reader’s interpretive authority, but through that mode of thinking point out the inextricable link to the text itself, which provides the reader with voice. Granting the text performative power allows it to retain prescriptive agency and escape classification as a closed/fixed “work” for consumption. I propose reading the productive collapse of hierarchies such as speech/writing and speech/action in Henry James’s The Bostonians through the lens of performance in order to explicate and expand upon Derrida’s deconstructive practices. Ultimately, through the reverse process of using a text to read theory, rather than theory to read a text, I want to suggest that literature performs what culture has yet to articulate.
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    Positively Uncertain: The Refutation of Scientific Monism in Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” and Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla”
    (2011) Raghavan, Krishnan; Burshatin, Israel; Schönherr, Ulrich
    During the latter half of the nineteenth‐century, scientific discourse came to dominate the sociopolitical climate of Western Europe as a result of the immense fertility of discovery in the natural sciences at the time. The scientific skepticism of the era shaped the supernatural narratives “Le Horla” by Guy de Maupassant and “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James in obliging these authors to craft a more liminal, “realistic” supernatural. Both author’s fantastic narratives remain ultimately ambiguous; however, this ambiguity subverts and critiques the forward progression mandated by positivist doctrine. Positivism is denigrated on a narrative level in both stories through the representation of techniques of positivist psychology as ultimately impotent. Maupassant and James’ aesthetic approaches towards this “new supernatural” ultimately champion a more pluralistic perspective than that of positivism.
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    Re-Defining Meaning in Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle"
    (2003) Bobé, Diandra; Sherman, Debora