Reviews for Postmodern Vernaculars: Chicana Literature and Postmodern Rhetoric

The average rating for Postmodern Vernaculars: Chicana Literature and Postmodern Rhetoric based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-27 00:00:00 Richard Taylor How novels work is that they haunt you like a ghost, wind about your limbs like an anaconda, shake you like the wind shakes the barley, burn you like the eyes of a cop with too many bad stories to tell, charm you like next door's underwear hanging on the line to dry, electrify you like the Soviet Union 1920 to 1925, orbit you like cats in boats on the Sea of Tranquillity, make you come back for more like a tragic ex, and little Lolita will give you the third degree, Seymour Glass will look out of your mirror, and Ishmael will say well - you know what to call me. What do I call you? George Eliot said If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. This book is an intellectual autopsy of novels, what bits go where, why they work, why they don't - the title, the epigraph, the prologue, the framing device, the inadequate narrator, skaz, direct addresses to the reader, omniscience (what kind of science is that?), free indirect style (thank you Jane Austen), character, motive, antihero (oh Flashman), real people (hello Dr Crippen, bonjour tristesse), roman a clef (who is really who? really? wow) and fleuve (sweet Thames flow softly), genre, thrillers, romance, satire, magical realism, historical, voices, dialect (wotcher mate - ugh), dialogue, languages, translation, telephone conversations (there's one in Proust!), cliché, swearing, structure, time, chapter titles, or not, inset narratives, parallel narratives (I always remember how to spell parallel because there are two parallel lines in the middle of the word), story (what happens), narrative (how you get told about what happens), plot (what made what happened happen), not all novels have plots, not all novels have stories, prolepsis (ooh, I'd see a doctor dearie), details, location, weather, meals, brands, style, parataxis (they won't get you home), paragraphs (there's an eleven-page paragraph in Kafka), diction, amplification (thank you Philip ROTH), parenthesis (huh?), hyperbole (Money - Money - MONEY), pastiche (Possession), heteroglossia (Ulysses), streams of Woolf, letters (My dear Count), emails, similes, ekphrosis, manes (no that's just horses), names (I have real problem with very silly names and I'm looking at Thomas Pynchon), coincidences (of all the gin joints), literariness, symbolism, Russian dolls, false endings (like in I Got You Babe), and real endings (like now).

Review # 2 was written on 2011-12-03 00:00:00 Vicki Miccoli I do like a lot of literature, but strangely books about books are rarely as interesting or as compelling as the books themselves. If you've ever had the misfortune of picking up a big bulky guide to the literary canon, or flipped through the introduction to a penguin classic, you've probably experienced the very dry writing style of an english scholar. So beginning to read, John Mullan's How Novels Work, I was apprehensive of delving into some of the technical and over-pretentious writing I'd associated with most books about books. And indeed, there are a lot of words that were entirely new to me upon reading them, chapters such as 'Ekphrasis', 'Heteroglossia', 'Parataxis' or 'Skaz', all of which are sure to help you out in your next game of scrabble. But despite this, there is an inherent accessibility to the book which I appreciated greatly. John Mullan, in case you don't know, is a professor or English and columnist, and the book was sprouted out of various articles he wrote for The Guardian newspaper. The book is split into eleven chapters, and each of these are divided into even smaller sections of specific details in novels - each of these are about 2-10 pages and are very digestible. You get very concise yet informative sections on the use of swearing, chapter titles, villains, emails, false endings and aspects of the novel that you wouldn't even have thought to look at. The blurb of the book includes some of these specific ideas, asking questions such as 'Why is Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time printed in sans serif font?' Yeah, I had no idea either. This book is also works really well for recommending future novels to read, and I myself have added more than a few to my Goodreads, although do be aware that many of the books are discussed and torn apart in great depth (I in fact haven't read the whole book technically, since I skipped the parts detailing the plot of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone which I'm reading right now). The one flaw I'd give to this is that it can be jarring to find out an entire plot of a novel in a couple of lines, in such an offhand way, and for a few of the books I failed to really take the examples in. Also I suppose structurally there isn't much that really holds it together, it has a lot of depth, but not much scope. I dipped into this book in and out over the course of 5 months, and it never really grabbed me enough to read chunks of all in one go - but to an extent that's fine, and it's great to use as a reference book. I have in fact quoted this in my A level coursework, so it has already proved useful in studying.