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Picture theory : essays on verbal and visual representation / W.J.T. Mitchell.

Mitchell, W. J. Thomas, 1942-. Picture theory : essays on verbal and visual representation / W.J.T. Mitchell. [0226532313 (cloth) :] Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Call#: Van Pelt Library Rosengarten Reserve NX170 .M58 1994

chapter 9 "The Photographic Essay" on James Agee

Form and history in American literary naturalism / June Howard.

Howard, June.. Form and history in American literary naturalism / June Howard. [0807816507] Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c1985.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PS374.N29 H68 1985

'True Art Speaks Plainly': Theodore Dreiser and the Late Nineteenth-Century American Debate over Realism and Naturalism

"'True Art Speaks Plainly': Theodore Dreiser and the Late Nineteenth-Century American Debate over Realism and Naturalism" Nineteenth century prose [1052-0406] 23.2 (1996). pp.76-89

BODIES AND MACHINES - SELTZER,M

Revuew of BODIES AND MACHINES - SELTZER,M in American literature [0002-9831] 65.1 (1993). 158-159.

Reading the symptom : Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and the dynamics of capitalism / Mohamed Zayani ; preface by Jean-Joseph Goux.

Zayani, Mohamed, 1965- .Reading the symptom : Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and the dynamics of capitalism / Mohamed Zayani ; preface by Jean-Joseph Goux. [082043910X (alk. paper) ] New York : Peter Lang, c1999.

As Jean-Joseph Goux explains in his preface, Zayani “argues that capitalism provides the socio-symbolic or the structuring whole within which naturalism is produced and from which it cannot be dissociated” (xii). Chapter 1, “American Literary Naturalism and the Limits of Revisionism,” serves as a very able introduction to what follows, as Zayani analyzes previous scholarship, especially June Howard’s Form and History in American Literary Naturalism and Walter Benn Michaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, and explains his own choice of texts by Norris and Dreiser, “two authors [who] provide a resonant portrayal of some of the most insistent economic forces and unescapable trends that have shaped the period” (16).

Analyzing Norris’s Vandover and the Brute, chapter 2 discusses capitalism as “a system that is inherently ludic” (39). Chapter 3, “The Strategy of Desire in McTeague,” explains that “economy and desire are mutually reinforcing” (58). Zayani rejects the stereotype of the naturalistic novelist as crude and prolix, a writer who prevails through the sheer weight of words and the accumulation of detail; he explains that “there is more in Norris’s language than meets the eye” (95). Chapter 4, “A Rhythmanalytical Approach to the Problematic of Everydayness in Sister Carrie,” shows how, in America’s highly commercial society, Carrie Meeber’s most salable commodity is herself. Chapter 5, “Reading the Symptom: History without Teleology,” concludes the volume by explaining, among other things, why “capitalism cannot be reduced to a purely economic category” (140).

Determined fictions : American literary naturalism / Lee Clark Mitchell.

Mitchell, Lee Clark, 1947-. Determined fictions : American literary naturalism / Lee Clark Mitchell. [0231068980] New York : Columbia University Press, c1989.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PS374.N29 M58 1989

Mitchell argues for a more sophisticated view of both the deterministic philosophy and the stylistic devices of literary naturalism. He studies the way naturalism challenges the moral assumptions of realism, locating the academic resistance to writers like Crane, Dreiser, Norris, and London in their attack on traditional notions of moral agency. In separate chapters, Mitchell discusses "To Build a Fire," An American Tragedy, Vandover and the Brute, and The Red Badge of Courage, and contends that such works have in common an assault on the reader's notion of an autonomous self. He analyzes the way this attack is waged through the formal aspects of naturalistic writing, which uses techniques like repetition and paratactic syntax to convey a sense of unalterable necessity in fiction. His argument that "philosophy and style are one" focuses attention on rhetorical properties of authors whose writing and view of the world are seldom the object of praise.