Margaret Atwood

Earl G. Ingersoll

Margaret Atwood talks to a host of interviewees, including Joyce Carol Oates and Graeme Gibson, about a range of subjects. She discusses feminism, Canadian literature, the differences between novels and poetry, how she started writing and who it is she feels she writes for.

Conversations

A Conversation with Walter Tevis

Virginia Hyde

The Cambridge sources embody the most recent textual scholarship, and critical references include theoreticians like Gilles Deleuze, Theodor Adorno, and Judith Butler."

D.H. Lawrence's "thought-adventures"

Windows to the Sun

Stan Sanvel Rubin

Judith Kitchen

Based on the holdings of the Brockport Writers Forum Videotape Library, this collection of lively discussions of craft with nineteen contemporary poets illuminates the state of American poetry and poetics today.

Conversations with American Poets of the Eighties

The Post-confessionals

Filming Forster focuses upon the challenges filmmakers confronted in producing film adaptations of E. M. Forster’s fiction. Working on the principle of an interactive relationship between two equally valuable modes of storytelling, this book maintains that the film adaptation and adapted text shape the meaning of each other in a continuing process of mutual illumination.

The Challenges of Adapting E.M. Forster's Novels for the Screen

Filming Forster

Mary C. Ingersoll

Conversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994 literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews represent the development as well as the continuation of McCann's interests. The number and length of the later conversations attest to his star-power. Let the Great World Spin earned him the National Book Award and promises to become a major motion picture. His most recent novel, TransAtlantic, has awed readers with its dynamic yoking of the 1845-1846 visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland, the 1919 first nonstop transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, and Senator George Mitchell's 1998 efforts to achieve a peace accord in Northern Ireland. An extensive interview by scholar Cecile Maudet is included here, as is an interview by John Cusatis, who wrote Understanding Colum McCann, the first extensive critical analysis of McCann's work. An author who actually enjoys talking about his work, McCann (b. 1965) offers insights into his method of writing, what he hopes to achieve, as well as the challenge of writing each novel to go beyond his accomplishments in the novel before. Readers will note how many of his responses include stories in which he himself is the object of the humor and how often his remarks reveal insights into his character as a man who sees the grittiness of the urban landscape but never loses faith in the strength of ordinary people and their capacity to prevail.

Conversations with Colum McCann

Filming Forster focuses upon the challenges filmmakers confronted in producing film adaptations of E. M. Forster s fiction. Working on the principle of an interactive relationship between two equally valuable modes of storytelling, this book maintains that the film adaptation and adapted text shape the meaning of each other in a continuing process of mutual illumination."

The Challenges in Adapting E.M. Forster's Novels for the Screen

Textuality and Closure in Margaret Atwood's 'Alias Grace'

Engendering Metafiction

Earl Ingersoll introduces the fiction of Steven Millhauser, whose distinguished career of more than four decades includes eight books of short fiction and four novels, the latest being the Pulitzer Prize–winning Martin Dressler (1996). In Understanding Steven Millhauser, Ingersoll explores Millhauser’s twelve books chronologically, revealing the development of the thematic interests and narrative strategies of a major contemporary American writer and a master of fiction who cares as deeply about his craft as the modernists did earlier in the past century. While most examinations of an author’s work begin with at least a biographical sketch, Ingersoll has faced distinct challenges because Millhauser has resisted efforts to read his fiction through the lens of his biography. Responding to an interviewer’s request for a brief biography, Millhauser provided the succinct “1943–.” Part of such resistance, Ingersoll argues, arises from Millhauser’s belief that if readers have too many questions about an author’s work, the author has failed and no amount of response can redress that failure. Millhauser’s central characters, such as August Eschenburg and J. Franklin Payne, are often themselves artists or technicians who are “overreachers,” and Ingersoll shows that Millhauser’s early expressions of literary realism have given way to interest in departures from the “real.” For Millhauser, “stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate to our dreams.” Millhauser’s strength is the ability to sustain obsessions because works of fiction succeed insofar as they are able to supplant reality. As a master fabulist, Ingersoll argues, Millhauser is preoccupied with extravagance both in the subject matter of his fiction and in his style. Whether it is Martin Dressler doing himself in by designing and constructing increasingly complex hotels or the miniaturists in the short story “Cathay” pushing their impulse to extremes, past the eye’s ability to see their art objects, Millhauser’s fiction is full of such an impulse, which can produce prolific artists as well as compulsive lunatics. The triumph of Millhauser’s craft, Ingersoll shows, is that it merges a fascination with the relationship between imagination and experience with a precise and allusive prose to produce works seamlessly joining the everyday with the radical and fantastic, in forms ranging from travelogues of the imagination to works merging the waking world with the world of dreams.

Understanding Steven Millhauser

Virginia Crosswhite Hyde

"Terra Incognita": D. H. Lawrence at the Frontiers, edited by Virginia Crosswhite Hyde and Eari G. Ingersoll, is a collection of nine essays by scholars from five countries. They show ways in which Lawrence explored not only remote regions of the earth but also consciousness and human relations. The book also considers implications of terms like "frontier," "boundary," and "place." It gives readings that are the first to utilize new texts and research in the final prose volumes of the Cambridge Lawrence Edition. This includes all the essays Lawrence wrote in America about Southwestern and Mexican Indians (Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, 2009). Writers are Michael Hollington, Judith Ruderman, Edina Pereira Crunfli, Tina Ferris, Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, Jack Stewart, Keith Cushman, Julianne New-mark, and Paul Poplawski. In addition to the essays, the book contains eight pages of color illustrations. It will interest both general readers and scholars of Lawrence and of twentieth-century literature. Lawrence wrote of "terra incognita," referring above all to genuine "face-to-face" contacts with our surroundings and with other people, beyond confining walls of the status quo with its counterfeit encounters. These contacts are his ultimate frontiers where, in particular, he sought new understanding of class, race, and relationship. The 1920s emerge in these essays as a great watershed in his life and work, when he traveled the earth and settled for a time in America, addressed issues of colonialism and multiculturalism, wrote alongside activist John Collier for Pueblo property rights, and not only published some of his finest fiction and poetry but also helped to launch scholarly interest in his works. Visual art is by Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Dorothy Brett. A little-known Lawrence landscape illustrates "terra incognita" in a particularly graphic way. Although Lawrence and O'Keeffe did not know each other in New Mexico, their love of austere Southwestern landscape proves comparable in her graphic medium and his literary work. Dorothy Brett, an English-born painter who lived with the Lawrences in America, depicted Pueblo ceremonials in paintings that can be compared and contrasted with Lawrence's literary descriptions of similar dances. Contributions range from territorial outposts in Roman Europe, to Polar expeditions of the last "Heroic Age" of exploration, to Lawrence's own residence in the American Southwest and Mexico. Writers employ ideas by a wide range of theorists, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Edward Said, and Yi-Fu Tuan, as well as a galaxy of Lawrence critics.

D.H. Lawrence at the Frontiers

"Terra Incognita"

Earl G. Ingersoll convincingly argues that his study is a "return to Lacan," just as Lacan himself believed his own work to be a "return to Freud." In this study of trope and gender in Dubliners, Ingersoll follows Lacan’s example by returning to explore more fully the usefulness of the earlier Lacanian insights stressing the importance of language. Returning to the semiotic—as opposed to the more traditional psychoanalytic—Lacan, Ingersoll opts for the Lacan who follows Roman Jakobson back to early Freud texts in which Freud happened upon the major structuring principles of similarity and displacement. Jakobson interprets these principles as metaphor and metonymy; Lacan employs these two tropes as the means of representing transformation and desire. Thus, psychic functions meet literary texts in the space of linguistic representation through the signifier: metaphor is a signifier for a repressed signified, while metonymy is a signifier that displaces another. Rejecting traditional psychoanalytic readings of Dubliners, Ingersoll’s New Psychoanalytic Criticism embraces Shoshana Felman’s view that psychoanalysis is not a body of truths to be applied to literature but rather a literature in itself to be read intertextually with what we more conventionally consider literary texts. In its theoretical framework, this study is Lacanian not by following Lacan as the traditional psychoanalytic critic would follow Freud or Jung as the master explicator of the literary text but by doing Lacan. Ingersoll credits Lacan not as the scientist Freud tried and failed to become but as the poet Freud was, especially in his earlier period. Basing his idea of the connections between gender and the tropes in the writings of feminist theorists and critics such as Luce Irigaray, Jane Gallop, and Barbara Johnson, Ingersoll argues that sex and gender are not necessarily linked. In Dublin, the capital of a patriarchal society, Joyce reveals the relevance of the opposition between metaphor/motion/empowerment as the "masculine" and metonymy/confinement/vulnerability as the "feminine." In this context, metaphor must be privileged over metonymy as "masculinity" is privileged over "femininity"— not because what is is right but because Joyce is describing a world that readers have always recognized as morally and spiritually deficient.

Engendered Trope in Joyce's Dubliners

Waiting for the End examines two dozen contemporary novels within the context of a half century of theorizing about the function of ending in narrative. That theorizing about ending generated a powerful dynamic a quarter-century ago with the advent of feminist criticism of masculinist readings of the role played by ending in fiction. Feminists such as Theresa de Lauretis in 1984 and more famously Susan Winnett in her 1991 PMLA essay, Coming Unstrung, were leading voices in a swelling chorus of theorist pointing out the masculinist bias of ending in narrative. With the entry of feminist readings of ending, it became inevitable that criticism of fiction would become gendered through the recognition of difference transcending a simple binary of female/male to establish a spectrum of masculine to feminine endings, regardless of the sex of the writer. Accordingly, Waiting for the End examines pairs of novels - one pair by Margaret Atwood and one by Ian McEwan - to demonstrate how a writer can offer endings at either end of the gender spectrum.

Gender and Ending in the Contemporary Novel

Waiting for the End

John Cusatis

John Banville (b. 1945) is a distinguished novelist and winner of several prestigious awards, including the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sea. As a teenager Banville hoped to be a painter, and although he ultimately decided he lacked the talent for it, his passion for painting continues to influence and inform his work. Banville conceives the novel as a work of art aimed not at the present, but for the ages. He aspires to create narratives that offer readers a sense of what it is to be conscious, human, and feeling, and aims to convey his conviction that “the familiar is always unfamiliar, the ordinary extraordinary.” Conversations with John Banville is the first interview collection with this esteemed writer and includes eighteen interviews that reflect on nearly five decades of work, from his first book, Long Lankin, to his novel Mrs. Osmond and memoir, Time Pieces. The collection also includes discussions about—and with, in the case of James Gleick’s 2014 interview—Banville’s alter ego, Benjamin Black, who writes crime novels. Highly engaging and insightful, Banville’s interviews offer a variety of writerly autobiography regarding what he has aimed to do in his work and how he continues to pursue perfection, which he has known from the beginning must be impossible.

Earl G. Ingersoll

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