Research Catalog

Title

Communities in fiction / J. Hillis Miller.

Author

Miller, J. Hillis (Joseph Hillis), 1928-2021

Publication

• New York : Fordham University Press, [2015]
• ©2015

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Series Statement

Commonalities

Uniform Title

Commonalities.

Subject

• Communities in literature
• Community life in literature
• Literature and society
• Community organization
• Community development

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-325) and index.

Contents

Theories of community : Williams, Heidegger, and others -- Trollope's The last chronicle of Barset as a model of Victorian community -- Individual and community in The return of the native -- Conrad's colonial (non)community : Nostromo -- Waves theory : an anachronistic reading -- Postmodern communities in Pynchon and Cervantes.

Call Number

JFE 16-13922

ISBN

• 082326310X
• 9780823263103
• 0823263118
• 9780823263110

LCCN

2014957907

OCLC

875239779

Author

Miller, J. Hillis (Joseph Hillis), 1928-2021, author.

Title

Communities in fiction / J. Hillis Miller.

Publisher

New York : Fordham University Press, [2015]

Copyright Date

©2015

Edition

First edition.

Description

xiii, 333 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Commonalities

Commonalities.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-325) and index.

Summary

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 books 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 Cervantess 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.

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Research Call Number

JFE 16-13922