David Wallace argues that any understanding of writing studies must include the conception of discourse as an embodied force with real consequences for real people. Informed in important ways by queer theory, Wallace calls to account users of dominant discourses and at the same time articulates a theory base from which to interpret "alternative rhetoric."

To examine the practice of writing from varied margins of society, Compelled to Write offers careful readings of four exemplar American writers, each of whom felt compelled within their own time and place to write in response to systemic injustices in American society.

Sarah Grimké, a privileged white woman advocating for abolition, is forced to defend her right to speak as a woman; Frederick Douglass begins his public career almost as a curiosity (the articulate ex-slave) and ends it as one of the most important rhetors in American history; Gloria Anzaldúa writes not only in multiple languages and dialects but from marginalized positions related to gender, race, class, sexual identity, and physical abled-ness; David Sedaris uses his privileged position as a middle-class white male humorist to speak unabashedly of his sexuality, his addictions, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

Through these writers, Wallace explores a range of strategies that comprise alternative rhetorical practice, and demonstrates how such practice is inflected by social constraints on rhetorical agency and by how writers employ alternative discourses to resist those constraints. Grounding and personalizing Compelled to Write with rich material from his own teaching and his own experience, Wallace considers a number of implications for teachers of writing.

Over the last few decades, Victorian scholars have produced many nuanced studies connecting the politics of crime to the generic developments of the novel—and vice versa. Ellen L. O’Brien’s Crime in Verse grants the same attention and status to poetic representations of crime. Considering the literary achievements and cultural engagements of poetry while historicizing murder’s entanglement in legal fictions, punitive practices, medical theories, class conflicts, and gender codes, O’Brien argues that shifting approaches to poetry and conflicted understandings of murder allowed poets to align problems of legal and literary interpretation in provocative, disruptive, and innovative ways.
 

Developing focused analyses of generic and discursive meanings, individual chapters examine the classed politics of crime and punishment in the broadside ballad, the epistemological tensions of homicidal lunacy and criminal responsibility in the dramatic monologue, and the legal and ideological frictions of domestic violence in the verse novel and verse drama. Their juxtaposition of the rhymes of anonymous street balladeers, the underexamined verse of “minor” poets, and the familiar poems of canonical figures suggests the interactive and intertextual relationships informing poetic agendas and political arguments. As it simultaneously reconsiders the institutional and ideological status of murder and the aesthetic and political interests of poetry, Crime in Verse offers new ways of thinking about Victorian poetry’s contents and contexts.

          

The central thesis of Lawrence Hogue's book is that criticism of Afro-American literature has left out of account the way in which ideological pressures dictate the canon. This fresh approach to the study of the social, ideological, and political dynamics of the Afro-American literary text in the twentieth century, based on the Foucauldian concept of literature as social institution, examines the universalization that power effects, how literary texts are appropriated to meet ideological concerns and needs, and the continued oppression of dissenting voices.

Hogue presents an illuminating discussion of the publication and review history of "major" and neglected texts. He illustrates the acceptance of texts as exotica, as sociological documents, or as carriers of sufficient literary conventions to receive approbation. Although the sixties movement allowed the text to move to the periphery of the dominant ideology, providing some new myths about the Afro-American historical past, this marginal position was subsequently sabotaged, co-opted, or appropriated (Afros became a fad; presidents gave the soul handshake; the hip-talking black was dressing one style and talking another.)

This study includes extended discussion of four works; Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Albert Murray's Train Whistle Guitar, and Toni Morrison's Sula. Hogue assesses the informing worldviews of each and the extent and nature of their acceptance by the dominant American cultural apparatus.

What do Amsterdam prostitutes, NASA astronauts, cross-dressing texts, and Star Trek characters have in common? Only Marleen Barr knows for sure. In Genre Fission, the award-winning author revitalizes literary and cultural theory by proposing an entirely new discourse practice of examining the points where genres and attendant meanings first converge, then reemerge as something new. Part literary analysis, part cultural studies, part feminist critique flavored with a smattering of science fiction and utopian studies, it is witty and eccentric, entertaining and enlightening.

Barr expands postmodern assumptions about cultural studies by suggesting that "genre fission" is occurring among discrete literary and cultural "types" of events--mainstream novels, science fiction, historical narratives, film, paintings, and museum displays. For her literary insights, Barr turns her attention to such mainstream authors as Saul Bellow, John Updike, Marge Piercy, and John Barth as well as science fiction writers Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler and Hispanic American writers Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, and Cristina García, among others.

Barr moves from literary to culture studies by addressing such phenomena from contemporary mass culture as the urban landscapes of New York and Los Angeles, Jackie Kennedy, the Star Trek industry, Lynn Redgrave, Amsterdam's red light district, Lorena Bobbitt, and the Apollo astronauts--to provide only a few of the relevant examples. Thus Genre Fission attains what Barr herself designates (in describing the art of Judy Chicago and Lee Bontecou) as "utopian interweavings of difference," crossing numerous boundaries in order to frame a larger territory for exploration.

A history of fragmentary—or interrupted—writing in avant-garde poetry and prose by a renowned literary critic.
 
In Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature, Gerald L. Bruns explores the effects of parataxis, or fragmentary writing as a device in modern literature. Bruns focuses on texts that refuse to follow the traditional logic of sequential narrative. He explores numerous examples of self-interrupting composition, starting with Friedrich Schlegel's inaugural theory and practice of the fragment as an assertion of the autonomy of words, and their freedom from rule-governed hierarchies.
 
Bruns opens the book with a short history of the fragment as a distinctive feature of literary modernism in works from Gertrude Stein to Paul Celan to present-day authors. The study progresses to the later work of Maurice Blanchot and Samuel Beckett, and argues, controversially, that Blanchot's writings on the fragment during the 1950s and early 1960s helped to inspire Beckett’s turn toward paratactic prose.
 
The study also extends to works of poetry, examining the radically paratactic arrangements of two contemporary British poets, J. H. Prynne and John Wilkinson, focusing chiefly on their most recent, and arguably most abstruse, works. Bruns also offers a close study of the poetry and poetics of Charles Bernstein.
 
Interruptions concludes with two chapters about James Joyce. First, Bruns tackles the language of Finnegans Wake, namely the break-up of words themselves, its reassembly into puns, neologisms, nonsense, and even random strings of letters. Second, Bruns highlights the experience of mirrors in Joyce’s fiction, particularly in Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, where mirrored reflections invariably serve as interruptions, discontinuities, or metaphorical displacements and proliferations of self-identity.

These days, the margins have become a powerful position from which to mount a critique of contemporary society, culture, and text. From gay and lesbian studies to postcolonial or "subaltern" criticism, formerly marginalized perspectives have brought provocative new insights into many fields of inquiry. But until comparatively recently, the extremely powerful, even culture-defining, discourse of textual editing has been immune to such influences.
The Margins of the Text is the first attempt to collect a body of essays concerned with specific aspects of the marginal as they relate to text. The volume is divided into two sections. The first part assembles essays concerned with the margins of textual discourse and explores the function of discourses not previously recognized as significant to scholarly editing, such as those of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. The second section attends to the textual margins in the bibliographical sense--the margins of the book, in which there has been so much recent interest. The two parts of the collection are clearly interrelated, since both study the effects of margins as a form of cultural discourse.
As a whole, the collection spans several periods (medieval, Renaissance, eighteenth-century to modern), several disciplines (drama, literature, art history, politics, and philosophy), and offers a wide-ranging consideration of a single topic as it is manifested in various genres, formats, and media. The contributors are among the most respected textual/critical theorists in their fields.
The Margins of the Text will become a standard reference in the field, and will be read profitably by culture critics and social historians as well as textual critics and editors.
D. C. Greetham is Professor of English and Medieval Studies, City University of New York Graduate School.

From the moment the first English-speaking explorers and settlers arrived on the North American continent, many have described its various locations and environments as empty. Indeed, much of American national history and culture is bound up with the idea that parts of the landscape are empty and thus open for colonization, settlement, economic improvement, claim staking, taming, civilizing, cultivating, and the exploitation of resources. In turn, most Euro-American nonfiction written about the landscape has treated it either as an object to be acted upon by the author or an empty space, unspoiled by human contamination, to which the solitary individual goes to be refreshed and rejuvenated.

In The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place, Wendy Harding identifies an important recent development in the literature of place that corrects the misperceptions resulting from these tropes. Works by Rick Bass, Charles Bowden, Ellen Meloy, Jonathan Raban, Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Sullivan move away from the tradition of nature writing, with its emphasis on the solitary individual communing with nature in uninhabited places, to recognize the interactions of human and other-than-human presences in the land. In different ways, all six writers reveal a more historically complex relationship between Americans and their environments. In this new literature of place, writers revisit abandoned, threatened, or damaged sites that were once represented as devoid of human presence and dig deeper to reveal that they are in fact full of the signs of human activity. These writers are interested in the role of social, political, and cultural relationships and the traces they leave on the landscape.

Throughout her exploration, Harding adopts a transdisciplinary perspective that draws on the theories of geographers, historians, sociologists, and philosophers to understand the reasons for the enduring perception of emptiness in the American landscape and how this new literature of place works with and against these ideas. She reminds us that by understanding and integrating human impacts into accounts of the landscape, we are better equipped to fully reckon with the natural and cultural crisis that engulfs all landscapes today.

Narrative as Communication is the first major treatise on narrative and narrative theory to make use of all the analytic tools developed in the twenty years. Intended as an up-to-date introduction, it carefully defines narrative discourse, distinguishing it from other discourses, and analyzes what it entails by referring to numerous examples spanning a wide range of media and literary works. At the same time, it orients narrative theory in the current debates surrounding the “New Historicism” and postmodern ideology, showing that theories of narrative are necessarily central to any understanding of history.

Not restricted to any single genre, Coste’s text emphasizes the production of narrative meaning in diverse contexts: The Epic of Gilgamesh, a John Ford film classic, French American, and Spanish new fiction, Dante, Shakespeare, the pastoral, the fairy tale, The Communist Manifesto, Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru, a painting by Gustave Moreau. Coste thoroughly and critically examines the usual concepts of voice, character, point of view and narrative syntax, and he develops radical revisions in the notion of fictionality, character, narrative economy and the function of narrative meaning itself. The book is a remarkable synthesis that will likely become a reference for future studies in narratology.

 Poems written in the first person, poems that contain passages of conversation or dialogue, and narrative poems all rely on their readers’ capacity to process discourse. Discourse features in the texts of those poems—features such as temporal and spatial reference, narrative “framing”, and the strategic use of direct speech—inevitably affect the way readers receive the central themes. Recent developments in linguistic theory, including developments that address discourse structure, thus offer literary scholars new tools for approaching a richer understanding of those poems.

One of the most famous living French writers, Marguerite Duras is renowned for her provocative and hauntingly beautiful works of fiction, drama, and cinema. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of Duras's fiction. Susan D. Cohen examines the entire range of Duras's works, combining close textual analyses with a more general discussion of narrativity and its connections with gender, class, and race. The focus throughout is on language, representation, and difference, which Duras explores on every structural level.

Cohen shows how Duras's writings, even the controversial "erotic" works, expose and subvert the repression of women in traditional, dominant discourse and at the same time present an alternative, nonrepressive discursive model. She formulates a concept of creative "ignorance," which she identifies as the generative principle of Duras's textual production and the approach to language it proposes. Cohen also explores the distinctive features of Duras's prose, describing how the writer achieves the ritual, legendary aura that characterizes her work.

Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time examines literary magazines generated during the 1940s that catapulted Caribbean literature into greater international circulation and contributed significantly to social, political, and aesthetic frameworks for decolonization, including Pan-Caribbean discourse. This book demonstrates the material, political, and aesthetic dimensions of Pan-Caribbean literary discourse in magazine texts by Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, George Lamming, Derek Walcott and their contemporaries. Although local infrastructure for book production in the insular Caribbean was minimal throughout the twentieth century, books, largely produced abroad, have remained primary objects of inquiry for Caribbean intellectuals. The critical focus on books has obscured the canonical centrality of literary magazines to Caribbean literature, politics, and social theory. Up against the imperial Goliath of the global book industry, Caribbean literary magazines have waged a guerrilla pursuit for the terms of Caribbean representation.