Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Review
Author(s): R. R.
Review by: R. R.
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 720-721
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772845
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720 Poetics Today 11:3

of autobiography, and the history of autobiography has become the history

of its mode of reading. Lejeune has written considerably about the nature of
reference in autobiography as emerging from the identity behind the proper
name shared by author, narrator, and protagonist. The proper name appears
as a self-referential gesture within the autobiographical act textually postulat-
ing an identity. Lejeune, however, continues to struggle with the problem of
sincerity as the heart of the difficulty posed by referential art. Lejeune has
also attempted to promulgate a formalist grammar of factors that governs the
perception of a name as real in a text. Lejeune describes autobiography as
a text where the fictive status of the self is conceded and the self is made to
function as an experiential fact. But Lejeune's position is not only that of a
formal idealist. His work also has social and historical dimensions. Since 1975
Lejeune has concerned himself with the production of texts more than with
their reception. At a certain point, after working on Sartre's autobiographi-
cal film Sartre par lui-meme, Lejeune replaced his interest in classic, canonized,
written texts with autobiographical self-expression in a wide range of media.
Lejeune now studies self-expression on a broad base, as a pervasive social
and cultural phenomenon. Autobiography is redefined to admit the manifold
and heterogeneous modes of referential self-expression currently practiced.
Decentering the self and adopting a sociological perspective, Lejeune now
demonstrates the cultural relativity of the concept of author. Autobiography
can be considered a collaborative genre involving several people behind the
writing persona. The test of authorship can be shown to fail as a marker for
the generic identification of some autobiographies. Lejeune has also started
to test the social-cultural context of autobiography and the complex questions
involved in the personal integrity of the story the writer tells, his obligation to
a referential truth, etc. At a certain stage Lejeune placed confession at the heart
of the autobiographical domain to which his own writing eventually moved:
the criticism of autobiography has become an autobiographical enterprise in
itself. In the epilogue to the present collection, the birth of Lejeune's own
autobiographical discourse, based on the free association of language during
the autobiographical act, supplants the conventional model of autobiography.
RR

Lynette Hunter, Modern Allegory and Fantasy: Rhetorical Stances of Contemporary

Writing. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. 215 pp.

Fantasy and allegory are two forms of writing which portray alternative
worlds. These and similar forms (utopia, dystopia, fable) have a marked pres-
ence in twentieth-century literature, a fact that impelled the writer of the
present study to try and understand the profound nature of these modes.
Hunter settles on a rhetorical definition of fantasy and allegory, a definition
which can cure some of the deficiencies in traditional genre theory, where
genre is studied as a fixed form attached to a set of techniques. More recent
genre theories, which describe genre as a mode attached to more or less ap-
propriate techniques, have not been much more successful. The confusion
surrounding allegory and fantasy can be dispelled if these are viewed as par-
ticular rhetorical stances; particular modes of interaction between readers,
writers, and texts in a historical place and time. The chapters of this study

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 New Books at a Glance 721

dedicated to fantasy and allegory present, in each case, twentieth-century

theory and the terms in which it addresses these forms. Recent theories tend to
describe fantasy as a covert mode of persuasion, whereas allegory implements
an overt stance. Hunter is interested in the type of expectations the audience
brings to each mode of writing and the nature of the short- and long-term
effects of each strategy on individuals and on political contexts. To account
for the political ends of fantasy and allegory requires an understanding of the
ideological and epistemological bases of each mode.
RR

Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes, eds., The Comparative Perspective on Literature:
Approaches to Theory and Practice. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1988. ix + 378 pp.
Joseph Natoli, ed., Literary Theory's Future(s). Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1989. vii + 337 pp.

These two books, which appear to start with two different purposes, in practice
reflect, each in its own way, the state of the art, at least in the North Ameri-
can domain. They differ, however, in the rhetorics and particular stresses the
editor(s) of each collection of essays choose to put forward. Koelb and Noakes
started their project in order to grasp the current state of the discipline of
comparative literature in North America. In the attempt to construct an intro-
duction to the discipline which would represent what comparatists actually do
(regardless of how the field is officially defined), the editors treat comparative
literature as an operative model, as a set of goals and practices which enable
the scholar in the field to go about his work. With these ends and suppositions
behind it, the collection aims at supplying a comparative picture of how the
face of the discipline has changed over the years. The essays demonstrate, first
of all, a breaking away from the Europe-centered vision of comparative litera-
ture programs. They also reflect a break with the generic categories set forth
in standard accounts of the field (influence studies, studies of genre, of theme,
etc.), where literary theory was considered just one among these categories.
In comparing the present volume with earlier collections of essays (published
in 1964 and 1968) that had a similar purpose, the editors show that earlier the
main interest had been the study of movements, literary periods, and the his-
tory of themes and ideas. As a whole, comparative literature had traditionally
displayed a tendency toward theoretical discourse (as a result of the move it re-
flected from national to international scope in literary studies) and a tendency
toward history. Comparatists were basically historians and they represented
the ideal of denationalizing our conception of literary history. The great goal
of comparatists like Wellek and Levin was to classify and interpret the world's
literary texts in the context of a coherent cultural development. This urge
toward totalization in the field of an international literary history was already
frustrated in the mid-seventies. The current collection manifests the change
of perspective on comparative literature: the diminished interest in history
and in the history of criticism, yet the steady interest in international literary
relations and the relationships of literature to other arts and disciplines. The
centrality of genre theory is also steadfast, whereas other areas of studies are
introduced here into the canonical portrait of the discipline for the first time,

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