Choice 评论
Using selected American writers of "realism," Barrish (Univ. of Texas, Austin) hypothesizes that those authors shaped much of the thinking about social class distinctions, both between classes and within their own middle class. Barrish builds on Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Eng. tr., CH, Mar'85) in arguing that in conveying fictionally their sense of "good taste," the so-called realists established their own careers and reputations. They shaped social class distinctions by how they situated their characters toward the "crudely material reality." Combining Bourdieu's sociological glimpse of the material distinctions of class with a poststructural rhetorical analysis, the author offers a fresh perspective of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Abraham Cahan, and EdithWharton. For example, he shows how the "favored characters" in The Rise of Silas Lapham, Penelope Lapham and Tom Corey, have an ethnographic sense of their own middle-class subculture, an intellectual stance that Howells privileges and that thereby contributes to his own intellectual social status. Especially thought provoking is the chapter on Wharton, in which Barris focuses on the neglected Twilight Sleep (1927). Barrish concludes by exploring how the same "dynamics of distinction" applies also to recent critical theory in the theorists' efforts to establish their own intellectual authority. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. B. M. McNeal Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania