Overview

An experiment in criticism that explores Henry James’s late works through the lens of minimalism.   Henry James’s last completed novels—The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl—are among the greatest and most demanding achievements of modern fiction. The stories they tell are perverse: characters are compelling even at their most cruel, their actions often calculating and loving at the same time. The novels draw on deep-seated myths but end with an unsettling lack of finality. And their dense, involuted language tracks the movements of consciousness with uncompromising artistry—the ultimate flowering of the late James style. In this work of experimental criticism, John Brenkman is concerned with minimalism in two senses. First, with James’s own minimalism—his intense scrutiny of couples and their erotic energies to the exclusion of so much else. And second, through a kind of minimalization in literary critical reading, Brenkman cuts through James’s amplifications to find the essence that churns beneath the intricate prose of the late novels. Showing how James evokes not only protagonists’ subjectivity but more importantly what only exists in between—that is, between lovers, between spouses, between rivals—Brenkman reveals James’s transformation of the marriage novel and excavation of the couple form itself.

Full Product Details

9780226849430

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Brenkman knows James’s last three novels inside and out, the fields of force that connect them, their stark ambiguities, their continual metamorphoses of vision. His book stands as a fine example of a kind of literary criticism that’s at once rigorous and free, given unapologetically to the play and pleasure of thought, a readiness to take chances, to pursue an individual way of seeing. The maximalist as minimalist! Brenkman makes it true.” * Kenneth Gross, author of ""Dangerous Children: On Seven Novels and a Story"" * “Highly original in construction and masterfully persuasive in its claims, James the Minimalist takes on the methodological task of ‘minimalizing’ the late novels—an attempt to make James less difficult by distilling the multilayered aesthetics of the late novels using techniques of narrative analysis. Brenkman breaks the late novels down into their constituent parts—with what will surely be considered by many to be near-definitive precision.” * Brad Evans, author of ""Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism"" *

Author Information

John Brenkman is distinguished professor emeritus of comparative literature and English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and Baruch College, where he also directed the US-Europe Seminar. He is the author of four previous books, most recently, Mood and Trope: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Affect. He lives in Livingston, Montana. More information at johnbrenkman.com.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available