The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  8 Rabinowitz summarizes these various options like so:

  Mary McCarthy argued that Kinbote was really a member of the Russian department named Botkin; Andrew Field claimed that Kinbote had in fact been invented by Shade; and Page Stegner suggested that perhaps, to the contrary, Shade had actually been invented by Kinbote. Kevin Pilon wrote a chronology of Pale Fire as if all events—including those in Zembla and those in Shade’s poem—had really occurred. John Stark, on the other hand, insisted that actually only “Nabokov and Pale Fire (in a sense) are real; any layer inside them (actually in the novel) is imagined, and none of those inside layers is more real than any other,” although, curiously, he also criticized Shade for the realism of his poetry . . . and praised Kinbote for a commentary that is “purely imaginary.” (122)

  9 Radhika Jones’s “Father-Born: Mediating the Classics in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe” offers an especially good reading of the role of Roxana.

  10 I am making this up. In reality, Janet’s favorite author was Woolf and mine was Joyce, so we were reasonably compatible from the start, even if her author did look down on mine. But the story tells better this way, I think.

  Conclusion

  1 My thanks to SCT participant Leon Hilton for bringing this essay to my attention.

  2 See Louis Menand, “What Comes Naturally.”

  3 In “Re-Minding Modernism,” David Herman offers a still stronger endorsement of the idea that modernism is not merely amenable but congenial to the projects of cognitive literary criticism: “Modernist narratives can both be illuminated by and help illuminate postcognitivist accounts of the mind as inextricably embedded in contexts for action and interaction” (249).

  4 In his initial essay, Kramnick complains that “the recent reception of long and ambitious works by Boyd and Dutton has in the main given literary Darwinism a free pass on the science” (323), and his footnoted example is my review of Boyd in American Scientist. Guilty as charged, and not for a good reason, either: I severely underread Boyd’s adaptationist claims and the importance attached to them. As Kramnick then proceeds to point out, Boyd, Carroll, Dutton, and company are very deliberately choosing sides in a scientific dispute, on the side of E. O. Wilson and evolutionary psychology and against Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin’s critique thereof. Indeed, they tend to speak of the dispute as if it were a standoff between Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots in which one side simply beat down the other, as Kramnick points out in the follow-up essay:

  Fighting the fight against Gould and for Wilson is one of their major pastimes. Boyd is right that the controversy is old. That is why I quote from more recent criticism of the genetic foundations of evolutionary psychology, including those by biologists like Marcus Feldman and philosophers of science like Elizabeth Lloyd. And yet I’m not sure that anyone in the relevant fields is quite so confident that the quarrel was [as Boyd writes] “resolved within biology against Gould and in favor of adaptationism” (397). The history of science is not a tennis match. (442–43).

  I regret missing this important—indeed, crucial—aspect of Boyd’s work on first go, and thank Kramnick for the correction.

  5 I owe this observation to Krista Quisenberry, a student in the spring 2013 graduate seminar in which we read both Boyd and Zunshine.

  6 Cf. William Deresiewicz (no defender of theory he—indeed, no defender of academic criticism in any form): “I have read any number of Darwinian essays about Pride and Prejudice (one critic calls it their ‘fruit fly’), but I have yet to read one that told me anything interesting. The idea that the novel is about mate selection does not count as an original contribution.”

  7 For a devastating account of Boyd’s hostility to theory and inattention to the language of texts, see Dubreuil, “On Experimental Criticism.”

  8 I discuss the Sokal affair and its aftermath at some length in the first three chapters of Rhetorical Occasions.

  9 The phrase “literary competence” is a minor misstep on Kramnick’s part; Boyd and Carroll took exception to it in their replies, and Kramnick withdrew it. But it harks back to an earlier moment in literary theory, at the high-water mark of structuralism, when Jonathan Culler elaborated on a form of “literary competence” analogous to that of Chomskian “linguistic competence.” See Culler, Structuralist Poetics.

  10 See Cohen’s Atlantic essay, “Of Mice and Men: The Execution of Marvin Wilson.”

  Works Cited

  Adaptation. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper. Columbia, 2002.

  Amis, Martin. The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000. New York: Vintage, 2002.

  Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. New York: Anchor, 1972.

  Augustine. Confessions. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1961.

  Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver. 20th Century Fox, 2009.

  Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.

  Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

  Baucom, Ian. “History 4°C: Search for a Method.” Lecture, School for Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, 17 June 2013.

  Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New York: Grove, 1957.

  ———. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove, 1955.

  Berger, James. The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

  Bérubé, Michael. “Disability.” In New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, 87–89. London: Blackwell, 2005a.

  ———. “Disability and Narrative.” PMLA 120.2 (2005b): 568–76.

  ———. “Humans, Superheroes, Mutants, and People with Disabilities.” TEDx talk, Penn State University, 10 October 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7VEMQEsy4s.

  ———. “Narrative and Intellectual Disability.” In Blackwell Companion to American Literary Studies, edited by Caroline Levander and Robert Levine, 469–82. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

  ———. Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

  ———. “Term Paper.” In Profession 2010, 112–16. New York: Modern Language Association, 2010.

  Biklen, Douglas. Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

  Blamires, Harry. The Bloomsday Book: A Guide through Joyce’s “Ulysses.” London: Methuen, 1966.

  Bloom, Paul. “Who Cares about the Evolution of Stories?” Critical Inquiry 38.2 (2012): 388–93.

  Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

  Boyd, Brian. “Evolution and Literary Response.” In Telling Stories: Literature and Evolution/Geschichten erzählen: Literatur und Evolution, edited by C. Gansel and D. Vanderbeke, 64–76. Berlin: De Gruyter.

  ———. “For Evocriticism: Minds Shaped to Be Reshaped.” Critical Inquiry 38.2 (2012): 394–404.

  ———. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

  Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage, 1985.

  Bruinius, Harry. Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity. New York: Knopf, 2006.

  Burton, Stacy. “Benjy, Narrativity, and the Coherence of Compson History.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 7.2 (1995): 207–28.

  Carroll, Joseph. “An Open Letter to Jonathan Kramnick.” Critical Inquiry 38.2 (2012): 405–10.

  Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote. Translated by Walter Starkie. London: Macmillan, 1957.

  Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222.

>   Coetzee, J. M. Foe. New York: Penguin, 1986.

  ———. Life and Times of Michael K. New York: Penguin, 1983.

  Cohen, Andrew. “Of Mice and Men: The Execution of Marvin Wilson.” Atlantic, 8 August 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/of-mice-and-men-the-execution-of-marvin-wilson/260713/.

  Cohen, Philip. “‘The Key to the Whole Book’: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the Compson Appendix, and Textual Instability.” In Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation, edited by Philip Cohen, 235–68. New York: Garland, 1997.

  Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1953.

  Crist, Stephanie Allen. “Should We Label Characters?” Shift, Journal of Alternatives: Neurodiversity and Social Change, 1 October 2010. http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/10/01/should-we-label-characters/.

  Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.

  Davis, Lennard, ed. The Disability Studies Reader. 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 2013.

  Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Edited by Michael Shinegal. New York: Norton, 1993.

  ———. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress. Edited by John Mullan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

  de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

  de Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” diacritics 3.3 (1973): 27–33.

  Deresiewicz, William. “Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism.” Nation, 8 June 2009, 26–31. http://www.thenation.com/article/adaptation-literary-darwinism.

  Dick, Philip K. Martian Time-Slip. Boston: Mariner, 2012.

  ———. We Can Build You. Boston: Mariner, 2012.

  Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Naval Treaty.” In The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 447–68. New York: Doubleday, 1986.

  ———. “Silver Blaze.” In The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 335–49. New York: Doubleday, 1986.

  Dubreuil, Laurent. “On Experimental Criticism: Cognition, Evolution, and Literary Theory.” diacritics 39.1 (2009): 3–23.

  Dutton, Denis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

  Ex Parte Briseno. 135 S.W.3d 1, 2004 WL 244826 (Tex. Crim. App.).

  Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

  Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

  Flesch, William. Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

  Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings. London: Edward Arnold, 1974.

  Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 101–20. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

  Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts.” Sewanee Review 53.2 (1945): 221–40.

  Friedman, C. S. This Alien Shore. New York: Daw, 1998.

  Galaxy Quest. Dir. Dean Parisot. Perf. Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman. DreamWorks, 1999.

  Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

  ———. “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” In The New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, 335–74. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

  Geffen, Arthur. “Profane Time, Sacred Time, and Confederate Time in The Sound and the Fury.” Studies in American Fiction 2.2 (1974): 175–97.

  Godden, Richard. “Quentin Compson: Tyrrhenian Vase or Crucible of Race?” In New Essays on “The Sound and the Fury,” edited by Noel Polk, 99–138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

  Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.

  Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

  Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1996.

  Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2004.

  ———. “The Curiously Irresistible Literary Debut of Mark Haddon.” Interview with David Welch, 2003. www.powells.com/authors/haddon.html.

  Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam, 1988.

  Henderson, Cary. Partial View: An Alzheimer’s Journal. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1998.

  Herman, David. “Re-Minding Modernism.” In The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, edited by David Herman, 243–72. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

  Holland, Norman. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

  Homer, Odyssey. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007.

  Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. New York: Vintage, 2006.

  Johnson, Barbara. “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd.” Studies in Romanticism 18.4 (1979): 567–99.

  Jones, Radhika. “Father-Born: Mediating the Classics in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe.” Digital Defoe 1.1 (Spring 2009). http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/archive/spring09/features/jones.shtml.

  Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1946.

  Kempley, Rita. “‘Magic Negro’ Saves the Day, but at the Cost of His Soul,” Washington Post, 7 June 2003, C1.

  Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.

  Keyes, Daniel. Flowers for Algernon. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966.

  Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Vintage, 1975.

  Klein, Andy. “Everything You Wanted to Know about Memento.” Salon, 28 June 2001. http://www.salon.com/2001/06/28/memento_analysis/.

  Kociemba, David. “‘This Isn’t Something I Can Fake’: Reactions to Glee’s Representations of Disability.” Transformative Works and Cultures 5 (2010). http://journal. transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/225/185.

  Kramnick, Jonathan. “Against Literary Darwinism.” Critical Inquiry 37.2 (2011): 315–47.

  ———. “Literary Studies and Science: A Reply to My Critics.” Critical Inquiry 38.2 (2012): 431–60.

  L’Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962.

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

  Lyon, Janet. “On the Asylum Road with Woolf and Mew.” Modernism/Modernity 18.3 (2012): 551–74.

  McRuer, Robert. “Introduction: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” In Crip Theory, 1–32.

  ———. “Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory, Bob Flanagan, and the Disciplining of Disability Studies.” In Crip Theory, 171–98.

  ———. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

  Melville, Herman. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Edited by Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer. New York: Norton, 2005.

  ———. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. New York: Norton, 1999.

  Memento. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano. Columbia/Tristar, 2000.

  Menand, Louis. “What Comes Naturally.” New Yorker, 25 November 2002. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2.

  Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

  Monk. Created by Andy Breckhman. Perf. Tony Shalhoub, Bitty S
chram. USA Network, 2002.

  Moon, Elizabeth. The Speed of Dark. New York: Ballantine, 2004.

  Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Vintage, 1962.

  Noll, Steven. Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

  Noll, Steven, and James Trent, eds. Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2004.

  Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon, 1997.

  Osteen, Mark, ed. Autism and Representation. New York: Routledge, 2007.

  ———. “Autism and Representation: A Comprehensive Introduction.” In Autism and Representation, 1–47.

  Parry, Benita. “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J. M. Coetzee.” In Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, edited by Derek Attridge, 149–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

  Pirandello, Luigi. Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello. Edited by Eric Bentley. New York: Dutton, 1952.

  Poore, Carol. “‘No Friend of the Third Reich’: Disability as the Basis for Antifascist Resistance in Arnold Zweig’s Das Beil von Wandsbek.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 260–70. New York: Modern Language Association, 2002.

  Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006.

  ———. Prisoner’s Dilemma. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002.

  Prendergast, Catherine. “The Unexceptional Schizophrenic: A Post-Postmodern Introduction.” In The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed., edited by Lennard Davis, 236–45. New York: Routledge, 2013.

  Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011.