Telling in Henry James: The Web of Experience and the Forms of Reality

by Lynda Zwinger

Overview

Telling in Henry James argues that James's contribution to narrative and narrative theories is a lifelong exploration of how to "tell," but not, as Douglas has it in "The Turn of the Screw" in any "literal, vulgar way." James's fiction offers multiple, and often contradictory, reading (in)directions. Zwinger's overarching contention is that the telling detail is that which cannot be accounted for with any single critical or theoretical lens-that reading James is in some real sense a reading of the disquietingly inassimilable "fictional machinery." The analyses offered by each of the six chapters are grounded in close reading and focused on oddments-textual equivalents to the "particles+? James describes as caught in a silken spider web, in a famous analogy used in "The Art of Fiction+? to describe the kind of "consciousness+? James wants his fiction to present to the reader.

Telling in Henry James attends to the sheer fun of James's wit and verbal dexterity, to the cognitive tune-up offered by the complexities and nuances of his precise and rhythmic syntax, and to the complex and contradictory contrapuntal impact of the language on the page, tongue, and ear.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501330674
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/23/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.32(d)

About the Author

Lynda Zwinger is Professor of English at the University of Arizona, USA, and Editor of Arizona Quarterly. She is editor, with Patrick O'Donnell, of Approaches to Teaching Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and author of Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Henry James On Telling
Chapter 2 The Europeans in the House of Fiction: "a foreigner of some sort"
Chapter 3 Morganizing the Body of "The Pupil"
Chapter 4 The Silver Clue Fish in The Golden Bowl
Chapter 5 In the Vestibule of "The Jolly Corner"
Chapter 6 Telling On Henry James
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

Zwinger's provocative ... prose underscores her insistence that "reading" James (as opposed to "code-cracking") is "messy, layered, distracted, peripatetic", and her own ransacking analysis uncovers much to admire and be grateful for.
Times Literary Supplement

In a series of skillfully rendered, implacably unruly readings, Lynda Zwinger reads Henry James as the reader James hoped for: a field of awareness as finely spun as a spiderweb suspended without any purpose other than a full openness to the pervasive presence of what might otherwise be lost beyond telling.
Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College, USA

Offering a compellingly rich analysis of James's theory of the novel, Zwinger reads the writer's acts of 'telling' in the sharply focused style that James devoted to jokes, perverse claims, and 'dirt' in general. By this last term especially, Zwinger demonstrates how James's language implies something unconscious or unspoken, even as he insists on the authorial ability to tell them. A remarkable read!
Dale Bauer, Professor of English, University of Illinois, USA

From the Publisher

In a series of skillfully rendered, implacably unruly readings, Lynda Zwinger reads Henry James as the reader James hoped for: a field of awareness as finely spun as a spiderweb suspended without any purpose other than a full openness to the pervasive presence of what might otherwise be lost beyond telling.

Donald E. Pease

Offering a compellingly rich analysis of James's theory of the novel, Zwinger reads the writer's acts of 'telling' in the sharply focused style that James devoted to jokes, perverse claims, and 'dirt' in general. By this last term especially, Zwinger demonstrates how James's language implies something unconscious or unspoken, even as he insists on the authorial ability to tell them. A remarkable read!

Dale Bauer