Communities in Fiction 1st Edition by J Hillis Miller ISBN 082326310X 978-0823263103

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ISBN 10:082326310X

ISBN 13:978-0823263103

Author:J.Hillis Miller

Communities in Fiction reads six novels or stories (one each by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes) in the light of theories of community worked out (contradictorily) by Raymond Williams, Martin Heidegger, and Jean- Luc Nancy.

The book’s topic is the question of how communities or noncommunities are represented in fictional works. Such fictional communities help the reader understand real communities, including those in which the reader lives. As against the presumption that the trajectory in literature from Victorian to modern to postmodern is the story of a gradual loss of belief in the possibility of community, this book demonstrates that communities have always been presented in fiction as precarious and fractured. Moreover, the juxtaposition of Pynchon and Cervantes in the last chapter demonstrates that period characterizations are never to be trusted. All the features both thematic and formal that recent critics and theorists such as Fredric Jameson and many others have found to characterize postmodern fiction are already present in Cervantes’s wonderful early-seventeenth-century “Exemplary Story,” “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” All the themes and narrative devices of Western fiction from the beginning of the print era to the present were there at the beginning, in Cervantes

Most of all, however, Communities in Fiction looks in detail at its six fictions, striving to see just what they say, what stories they tell, and what narratological and rhetorical devices they use to say what they do say and to tell the stories they do tell. The book attempts to communicate to its readers the joy of reading these works and to argue for the exemplary insight they provide into what Heidegger called Mitsein― being together in communities that are always problematic and unstable

Table of contents: 

THEORIES OF COMMUNITY: Williams, Heidegger, and Others
Raymond Williams’s entry for “community” in Keywords is straightforward enough, though it is characteristically succinct, comprehensive, and subtle…

TROLLOPE’S The Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community
I advocate in the strongest terms what I call a double reading of novels…

Individual and Community in The Return of the Native
Michael Millgate’s authoritative Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist places The Return of the Native in the context of Hardy’s admiration…

Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo
Henry James, in a review of Conrad’s Chance, says Conrad is “absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing.”…

Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading
I propose to read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves not primarily in the context of philosophers or theorists whose work she knew…

Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes
My goal in this chapter is, by the art they call Tropelia, to make Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy” appear to be a postmodern narrative…

CODA
My chief goal in this book has been to present comprehensive rhetorical readings of eight novels…

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Tags: J Hillis Miller, Communities, Fiction