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Woloch, Alex

March 20, 2017 by admin

WORK TITLE: Or Orwell
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 4/18/1970
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:

https://english.stanford.edu/people/alex-woloch * https://profiles.stanford.edu/alex-woloch * https://cap.stanford.edu/profiles/viewCV?facultyId=54102&name=Alex_Woloch

RESEARCHER NOTES:

 

LC control no.:    n  00086284 

Personal name heading:
                   Woloch, Alex, 1970- 

Found in:          Whose Freud?, 2000: CIP t.p. (Alex Woloch) data sheet (b.
                      April 18, 1970)

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PERSONAL

Born April 18, 1970.

EDUCATION:

Columbia College, B.A., 1992; Yale University, M.Phil., 1995, Ph.D., 1998.

ADDRESS

  • Office - Stanford University, Department of English, 450 Serra Mall Bldg. 460, Rm. 201, Stanford, CA 94305-2087.

CAREER

Stanford University, Stanford, CA, assistant professor, 1999-2005, associate professor, 2005-.

MEMBER:

Nineteenth-Century Literature (editorial board, 2008-13), Modern Languages Association (Executive Committee, Division on Prose Fiction, 2009-14).

AWARDS:

Sonya Rudikoff Memorial Prize, Best First Book in Victorian Studies, Northeast Victorian Studies Association, 2003; A. Bartlett Giamatti Supplemental Fellowship in the Humanities, Yale University, 1992-94; John T. Roberts Fellowship, Yale University, 1992-96; Exchange Scholar, École Normale Supérieure, 1995-96; Yale Dissertation Fellowship, Yale University, 1996-97; Richard E. Guggenheim Faculty Scholar, Stanford University, 2013-16. 

WRITINGS

  • (Editor, with Peter Brooks) Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2000
  • The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2003
  • Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2016

Contributor of essays and articles to periodicals.

SIDELIGHTS

Alex Woloch is an associate professor of English at Stanford University. He is the editor, with Peter Brooks, of Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture and the author of two books: The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel and Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism.

Whose Freud? and The One vs. the Many

Whose Freud? came as a result of a symposium held at Yale University in 1998 to “assess the status of psychoanalysis as a discipline and discourse in contemporary culture.” Woloch and Brooks divide the book into six sections covering topics such as psychoanalysis as a science, theories of the mind, psychoanalysis and historiography, sexual identity, hermeneutics, and exploring truth in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Library Journal reviewer David Valencia called Whose Freud? “an excellent academic treatment of the relative value of Freud at the turn of the millennium geared to psychology and humanities professionals.”

In The One vs. the Many, Woloch asks the questions “Does a novel focus on one life or many?” and “How can many people be contained within a single narrative?” Woloch investigates how characters are distributed throughout a book, especially a book with many minor characters. He refers to a “character-system” in which all of the characters, both major and minor, need to fit within a unified structure. Woloch puts his emphasis on a few literary works, including  Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Le Père Goriot to investigate these relationships.

Reviews of The One vs. the Many were mixed, sometimes within the same review. William Olmsted, writing in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, found the study lacking in certain areas, with important points missed. However, he wrote, “At its best The One vs. the Many offers exemplary formulations about the positioning of characters (and not just minor ones) with respect to the manifold concerns of the realist novel. The bibliography—with its many items from the 1960s through the 1980s—gives the impression that The One vs. the Many is re-opening an older discourse about character in the novel. Woloch’s backward glance nevertheless opens new vistas concerning how thematic criticism need not be separated from narratological analysis, a juncture aptly described as ‘the socionarrative competition between the one and the many.’”

In Modern Language Quarterly, Jesse Matz wrote: “Perhaps the best proof of the rare breadth of Woloch’s study is what he makes of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Attention to its essential forms (its modes of description, its focus on consciousness, its style of panorama, its habits of caricature, authorial commentary, and generic revision) is always also attention to its social inflections and to the precise historical developments in which these forms and social commitments together intervened.” Matz continued: “Asymmetrical characterization is a formal universal that takes on particular dynamics within the specifically nineteenth-century conflict between inequitable distribution and the shaky democratic impulse of the day. A rigorously historicized social problem is the provocation for and the critical target of a formal universal transformed in the process of engagement.” Matz concluded: “And this broad and thorough approach to the specific forms of cultural history links form and history across the moral center of the realist novel: whereas other treatments of the realist novel might attain to formal or historical acuity only through the kind of neutrality most conducive to formal and historical treatments alike, Woloch captures also (or most importantly) the ethical motives in play, as well as the ethical prerogatives that have made this form survive history and last into our cultural moment.”

Or Orwell

In Or Orwell, Woloch looks at George Orwell and his writing, which has been overlooked in recent years as the emphasis has shifted to Orwell’s politics. He feels that Orwell’s “simple prose” was in fact masterful writing that was entertaining, incisive and inspiring. Reviewer D.C. Maus, writing in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, was impressed by the volume and wrote: “Woloch captures … the ethical motives in play, as well as the ethical prerogatives that have made this form survive history and last into our cultural moment.”

Modern Philology contributor William Cain was impressed by Woloch’s work but was troubled by its length: “There is a problem with this admirable book, however, and I think that it is a serious—or perhaps I should say, an unfortunate—one: Or Orwell is much too long. I admire its author greatly, but in my view while he has been rigorous in his engagement with Orwell, he has not been rigorously prudent and economical in the presentation of his own claims and arguments.” Cain continued: “His book would have profited from tough-minded editing by both author and publisher, an insistence that less indeed can be more.” Cain added, however, that “Woloch’s treatment of Orwell’s organization of language is impressive in its interpretive precision and textual specificity. He is expertly familiar with the texts, and along the way he fills in well the relevant biographical, historical, and literary-theoretical contexts. Or Orwell brings a much-needed exactitude of approach to this invigorating but often elusive writer.”

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

  • Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2016, D.C. Maus, review of Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, p. 1479.

  • Library Journal, September 1, 2000, David Valencia, review of Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, p. 233.

  • Modern Language Quarterly, 2005, Jesse Matz, review of The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, p. 400.

  • Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2005, William Olmsted, review of The One vs. the Many, p. 156.

  • States News Service, February 16, 2016, “Stanford Professor Uncovers Roots of George Orwell’s Political Language,” review of Or Orwell.

  • Victorian Studies, 2005, Deidre Lynch, review of The One vs. the Many, p. 281.

ONLINE

  • Modern Philology, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu (December 13, 2016), William Cain, review of Or Orwell.

  • Stanford University Web site, https://english.stanford.edu/ (May 11, 2017), author faculty profile.

  • Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2000
  • Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2016
Library of Congress Online Catalog 1. Whose Freud? : the place of psychoanalysis in contemporary culture LCCN 00027261 Type of material Book Main title Whose Freud? : the place of psychoanalysis in contemporary culture / edited by Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch. Published/Created New Haven : Yale University Press, c2000. Description ix, 342 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0300081162 (cloth : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER BF175.4.C84 W46 2000 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Or Orwell : writing and democratic socialism LCCN 2015015042 Type of material Book Personal name Woloch, Alex, 1970- author. Main title Or Orwell : writing and democratic socialism / Alex Woloch. Published/Produced Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, [2016] Description xix, 410 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9780674282483 Shelf Location FLM2016 097055 CALL NUMBER PR6029.R8 Z89 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ONLINE CATALOG Library of Congress 101 Independence Ave., SE Washington, DC 20540 Questions? Ask a Librarian: https://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-contactus.html
  • The One vs. the Many - 2003 Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
  • stanford U - https://english.stanford.edu/people/alex-woloch https://profiles.stanford.edu/alex-woloch?tab=bio

    Alex Woloch
    Professor
    B.A. Comparative Literature, Columbia College, 1992
    M.Phil. Comparative Literature, Yale, 1995
    Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Yale, 1998
    At Stanford Since:
    1999
    About

    Alex Woloch is Department Chair. He works on literary theory and criticism, narrative theory, and the history and theory of the novel. His teaching is focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and covers the broad development of the European and American novel. He is particularly interested in problems in formal analysis, the aesthetics of realism and representation, and the relationship between literary form and reference.

    He is the author of Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (Harvard UP, 2016) and The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton UP, 2003). He is also the co-editor, with Peter Brooks, of Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Yale UP, 2000).

    Essays and articles include:

    "Form and Representation in Auerbach's Mimesis" in Affirmations: of the modern (Vol 2.1, 2014)
    "Orwell and the Essay Form: Two Case Studies" in Republics of Letters (4.1, 2014)
    "Daniel Deronda: Late Form, or After Middlemarch" in A Companion to George Eliot, eds. Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw (Blackwell, 2013)
    "Partial Representation," in The Work of Genre: Selected Essays from the English Institute (ACLS, 2011)
    “Character Insecurity in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility,” in Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Novel, eds. Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles (Ohio State UP, 2011)
    “A New Foreword" to Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly (reissued by U of Chicago Press, 2008)
    “Break-Ups and Reunions: Late Realism in Early Sayles,” in Sayles Talk: Essays on Independent Filmmaker John Sayles, eds. Heidi Kenaga and Diane Carson (Wayne State UP, 2005).

    (Photo by Ved Chirayath)

    Publications
    Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism

    Bio

    Alex Woloch works on literary theory and criticism, narrative theory, and the history and theory of the novel. His teaching is focused on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature and covers the broad development of the European and American novel. He is particularly interested in problems in formal analysis, the aesthetics of realism and representation, and the relationship between literary form and reference. He is the author of The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton UP, 2003) which attempts to reestablish the centrality of characterization -- the fictional representation of human beings -- within narrative poetics. He is also the co-editor, with Peter Brooks, of Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Yale UP, 2000). He is currently working on a study of George Orwell and the problem of engaged writing. Recent work includes "Partial Representation," in The Work of Genre: Selected Essays from the English Institute (ACLS, 2011); “Character Insecurity in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility,” in Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Novel, eds. Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles (Ohio State UP, 2011); “A New Foreword" to Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly (reissued by U of Chicago Press, 2008); “Break-Ups and Reunions: Late Realism in Early Sayles,” in Sayles Talk: Essays on Independent Filmmaker John Sayles, eds. Heidi Kenaga and Diane Carson (Wayne State UP, 2005).
    Academic Appointments

    Professor, English

    Administrative Appointments

    Associate Professor, Department of English, Stanford University, Stanford CA (2005 - Present)
    Assistant Professor, Department of English, Stanford University, Stanford CA (1999 - 2005)
    Director, Undergraduate Studies, English Department, Stanford University (2001 - 2003)
    Director, Undergraduate Studies, English Department, Stanford University (2004 - 2006)
    Co-Chair, Search Committee in British Literature, English Department, Stanford University (2007 - 2008)
    Director, Honors Program, English Department, Stanford University (2008 - 2010)
    Director, Graduate Studies, English Department, Stanford University (2011 - Present)

    Honors & Awards

    Sonya Rudikoff Memorial Prize, Best First Book in Victorian Studies, Northeast Victorian Studies Association (2003)
    Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Scholar, Stanford University (2013 - 2016)
    John T. Roberts Fellowship, Yale University (1992 - 1996)
    A. Bartlett Giamatti Supplemental Fellowship in the Humanities, Yale University (1992 - 1994)
    Yale Dissertation Fellowship, Yale University (1996 - 1997)
    Exchange Scholar, Ecole Normale Supérieure (1995 - 1996)

    Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations

    Member, Editorial Board, Nineteenth-Century Literature (2008 - 2013)
    Member, Executive Committee, Division on Prose Fiction, Modern Languages Association (2009 - 2014)
    Member, Advisory Board, Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. Peter Logan (2006 - 2010)
    Reader, Book Manuscript Submissions
    Reader, Oxford University Press

    Reader, Princeton University Press
    Reader, Columbia University Press
    Reader, Article Submissions, Comparative Literature
    Reader, Article Submissions, Studies in English Literature
    Chair, Graduate Studies Committee, English Department, Stanford University
    Member, Department Advisory Committee, English Department, Stanford University
    Member, Curriculum Committee, English Department, Stanford University
    Member, Graduate Admissions Committee, English Department, Stanford University
    Chair, Undergraduate Studies Committee, English Department, Stanford University
    Member, Department Advisory Committee, English Department, Stanford University
    Member, Curriculum Committee, English Department, Stanford University
    Elected Member, Department Advisory Committee, English Department, Stanford University (2007 - 2010)
    Member, Creative Planning Committee, English Department, Stanford University (2005 - 2006)
    Member, Creative Planning Committee, English Department, Stanford University (2007 - 2008)
    Member, Undergraduate Studies Committee, English Department, Stanford University (1999 - 2001)
    Member, Graduate Student Admissions Committee, English Department, Stanford University (1999 - 2000)
    Member, Graduate Student Admissions, English Department, Stanford University (2005 - 2006)
    Director, Center for the Study of the Novel, Stanford University (2007 - 2010)
    Member, Steering Committee, Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities Program, Stanford University (2005 - 2006)
    Member, Planning and Promotions Com., Div. of Languages, Literatures and Culture, (DLCL), Stanford U. (2005 - 2006)
    Co-Chair, Search Committee in British Literature, English Department, Stanford University (2007 - 2008)
    Member, Mabelle-Mcleod Lewis Fellowship Committee, Stanford University (2006 - 2013)
    Member, Steering Committee, Modern Thought and Literature Program, Stanford University (2011 - 2012)

    All Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations (28)
    Professional Education

    B.A., Columbia College, New York, Comparative Literature (1992)
    M.Phil., Yale University, New Haven CT, Comparative Literature (1995)
    Ph.D., Yale University, New Haven CT, Comparative Literature (1998)

    Contact

    Academic
    woloch@stanford.edu
    University - Faculty Department: English Position: Professor
    BLDG. #460, Rm. 307
    Stanford, California 94305-2087
    (650) 723-4594 (office)
    (650) 725-0755 (fax)

    Additional Info

    Mail Code: 2087

    Links

    Curriculum Vitae PDF

    All Publications

    Character Insecurity in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Novel Woloch, A. edited by Levine, C., Ortiz-Robles, M. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2011
    Partial Representation The Work of Genre: Selected Papers from the English Institute Woloch, A. edited by Warhol, R. Cambridge MA: English Institute in collaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies. 2011
    A New Foreword Enemies of Promise Woloch, A., Connolly, C. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 2008
    Section of Chapter One, “Narrative Asymmetry in 'Pride and Prejudice'" Jane Austen’s 'Pride and Prejudice': Modern Critical Interpretations Woloch, A. edited by Bloom, H. New York: Chelsea House. 2007
    Minor Characters The Novel Woloch, A. edited by Moretti, F. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2006
    Break Ups and Reunions: Late Realism in Early Sayles Sayles Talk: Essays on Independent Filmmaker John Sayles Woloch, A. edited by Kenaga, H., Carson, D. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2005
    The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel Woloch, A. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003
    Toward a Theory of the Minor Character Il Romanzo Woloch, A. edited by Moretti, F. Milan: Editore Einaudi. 2003
    Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture edited by Brooks, P., Woloch, A. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2000

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    CURRENT!EMPLOYMENT
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    Stanford!University
    ,!Stanford!CA
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    Associate!Professor,!Department!of!English.
    !
    !
    July!2005!
    II
    !
    present
    !
    Assistant!Professor,!Department!of!English.
    !
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    September!1999
    —
    June!2005
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    EDUCATION
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    Yale!University
    ,!New!Haven!CT
    !
    Ph.D.,!
    Comparative!Literature.!December,!1998.
    !
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    Passed!with!distinction.
    !
    M.!Phil.,!Comparative!Literature.!March!1995.
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    !!!!!!!!!!!!
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    Columbia!College
    ,!New!York!NY!!
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    B.A.,!Comparative!Literature,!May!1992!
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    Cum!Laude.!
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    PUBLICATIONS
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    !
    Books
    !
    !
    The$One$vs.$the$Many:
    $
    Minor$Characters$and$the$Space$of$the$Protagonist
    $
    in$the$Novel
    $
    $
    Princeton:!Princeton!University!Press,!2003.!
    !
    $
    (Winner,!2003!Sonya!Rudikoff!Memorial!Prize,!Best!First!Book!in!Victorian!Studies,!
    !
    !
    Northeast!Victorian!Studies!Association)
    !
    (Section!of!Chapter!One,!“Narrative!Asymmetry!in!
    Pride$and$Prejudice
    ,”!reprinted!in!
    Jane$
    Austen’s
    !
    Pride!and!Prejudice
    :$Modern$Critical$Interpretations
    ,!ed.!Harold!Bloom.!New!
    York:!Chelsea!House,!2007).!
    !
    Reviews!Include:!
    Comparative$Literature
    ,!
    Dickens$Stud
    ies$Annual
    ,!
    London$Review$of$Books
    ,!
    Modern$Language$Quarterly
    ,!
    Modernism/
    Modernity
    ,!
    Nineteenth
    K
    Century$French$Studies,$
    Studies$in$English$Literature
    ,!
    New$Left$Review
    ,!
    Victorian$Studies
    .!
    !
    $
    Whose$Freud?:$The$Place$of$Psychoanalysis$in$Contemporary$Culture
    .!
    !
    Co
    I
    editor,!with!Peter!Brooks.!New!Haven:!Yale!University!Press,!2000.
    !
    !
    !
    Articles and Contributed Essays
    “Orwell and the Essay Form: Two Case Studies,”
    Republic of Letters
    (
    forthcoming
    )
    “
    Daniel Deronda
    : Late Form, or After
    Middlemarch
    ,
    ”
    Blackwood
    Companion to George Eliot
    ,
    eds. Amanda Anderson and Harry Shaw. West Sussex UK: John Wiley & Sons,
    2013.
    “Partial Representation,”
    The Work of Genre: Selected Papers from the English Institute
    , edited by
    Robyn Warhol. Cambridge MA
    :
    English Institute in
    collaboration with the American
    Council of Learned Societies,
    2011.
    “
    Character Insecurity in Austen’s
    Sense and Sensibility
    ,”
    Narrative Middles: Navigating the
    Nineteenth
    -
    Century Novel
    , eds. Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz
    -
    Robles. Columbus: Ohio
    State
    UP, 2011.
    !
    “
    A!New!Foreword,”!
    Enemies$of$Promise
    ,$
    by!Cyril!Connolly,!reissued!from!Chicago:!Chicago!UP,!
    !
    2008
    !
    !
    “Minor!Characters,”!
    The$Novel
    ,!ed.!Franco!Moretti.!Princeton:!Princeton!UP,!2006.!
    !
    !
    “Break
    I
    Ups!and!Reunions:!Late!Realism!in!Early!Sayles,”!in!
    Say
    les$Talk:$Essays$on$
    $
    Independent$Filmmaker$John$Sayles,
    !
    eds.!Heidi!Kenaga!and!Diane!Carson.!Detroit:!
    !
    Wayne!State!University!Press,!2005.!
    !
    !
    “Toward!a!Theory!of!the!Minor!Character,”!
    Il$Romanzo
    ,!Volume!4,!ed.!Franco!Moretti.!Milan:!
    !
    Editore!Einaudi,!2003.!
    !
    !
    Work
    !
    in!Progress:
    !
    !
    Or#Orwell:#“As#I#Please”#and#the#Poetics#of#Democratic#Socialism
    #
    (under!
    advance!
    contract,!
    Harvard!UP)
    !
    #
    This!book!argues!that!Orwell’s!prolific!work!in!the!1930s!and!40s!articulates!and!enacts!a!
    democratic
    U
    socialist!aesthetic!theory!that!is!still!of!value!in!our!own!theoretical!moment.!I!
    concentrate!less!on!particular,!free
    U
    standing!readings!of!individual!te
    xts!than!on!Orwell’s!
    politically
    U
    charged!engagement!with!the!problem!of!writing!as!such,!and!the!flow!of!his!
    work!through,!and!against,!different!forms!and!genres.!By!foregrounding!Orwell’s!
    experimental!writing
    U
    practice
    !
    (as!it!emerges!in!relation!to,!rather!than!in!spite!of,!his!plain!
    style!prose)
    ,!we!can!see!stronger,!generative!connections!between!Orwell’s!work!and!
    modernist!literary!culture
    ,!as!well!as
    !
    contemporary!literary!and!critical!theory.
    !
    While!the!first!
    half!of
    !
    my!book!ranges!across!Orwell’s!writing!
    UU
    !
    including!discussions!of!“A!
    Hanging”(1931),!
    The#Road#to#Wigan#Pier
    !
    (1936)!and!
    Inside#the#Whale
    !
    (1940)!
    UU
    !
    the!second!half!
    develops!an!extended!analysis!of!a!single!writing
    U
    project:!the!eighty!newspaper!columns!
    enti
    tled!“As!I!Please”!(1944
    U
    47)!which!Orwell!writes!for!the!Socialist!weekly!
    Tribune
    .!
    !
    !
    Future!Project
    !
    !
    Partial#Representation:#Realisms#in#an#Unequal#World
    #
    #
    Arguing!against!a!common
    U
    view!of!realist!aesthetics!as!one!
    which
    !
    seeks!to!directly!or!
    adequately!redu
    plicate!the!world!in!unmediated!
    form,!I!want!to!consider!both
    !
    aesthetic!and!
    critical
    U
    th
    eoretical!traditions!of!realism!that
    ,!by!insisting!on!the!rifts!b
    etween!discourse!and!
    story,!set
    !
    in!motion!a!complicated!interplay!between!reference,!form!and!social!
    com
    prehension.!Key!examples!include!paintings!by!Bruegel,!Dickens’s!
    The#P
    ickwick#Papers
    !
    and!
    Bleak#House
    ,!Erich!Auerbach’s!
    Mimesis
    ,!film!criticism!of!Andre!Bazin!and!films!of!Mike!
    Leigh!and!John!Sayles.!
    !
    !
    !
    CONFERENCE!PAPERS!AND!LECTURES
    !
    !
    Invited!Talks
    !
    !
    !
    ELH!
    Colloquium,!“Orwell’s!Formalism”
    !
    !
    Johns!Hopkins!University,!Department!of!English,!May!2013
    !
    !
    “Getting!to!Work:!Irony!and!Socialism!in!
    The#Road#to#Wigan#Pier
    ,”
    !
    Brandeis!University,!English!Department!and!the!Journalism!Program,!November!
    2012
    !
    !
    “
    Pickwickian
    !
    Reform:!Partial!Representation!in!Dickens
    ”
    !
    !
    Boston!University,!Lectures!in!Criticism!Series,!November!2012
    !
    !
    “Growing!Up!Absurd”
    !
    !
    Stanford!University,!Post45!conference,!November!2012
    !
    !
    !
    Harvard!University,!British!Literature!Colloquium,!April!2007
    !
    Emo
    ry!University,!Comparative!Literature,!English!and!Film!Studies!Departments,!
    April!2007
    !
    !
    “Orwell,!in!Theory”
    !
    !
    University!of!Chicago,!English!Department,!Departmental!Lecture,!February!2007
    !
    !
    “Form!and!Insecurity!in!
    Sense$and$Sensibility
    ”
    !
    !
    University!of!
    South!Carolina,!English!Department,!January!2007
    !
    !
    Graduate!Student!Colloquium!on!
    The$One$vs
    .
    $
    the$Many
    !
    !
    University!of!California!at!Irvine,!English!Department,!October!2006
    !
    !
    “Character!Insecurity!in!
    Sense$and$Sensibility
    ”
    !
    !
    Johns!Hopkins!University,!English!
    Department,!October!2005
    !
    !
    Keynote!Lecture,!Jane!Austen!Society!of!North!America,!Northern!California!Region,!
    !
    !
    !
    Annual!Conference,!September!2005,!Stanford!University
    !
    !
    “Politicizing!Jane!Austen,”!University!of!California!at!Los!Angeles,!The!Center!for!
    !
    !
    !
    S
    eventeenth
    I
    !
    and!Eight
    eenth
    I
    Century!Studies,!March!
    2005
    !
    !
    Discussion!of!
    Jane$A
    usten
    ,
    $
    or$the$Secret$of$Style
    !
    by!D.A.!Miller
    !
    !
    Center!for!the!Study!of!the!Novel,!Stanford!University,!
    May!
    2005
    !
    !
    !
    “Social!Representation!and!Literary!Form:!Auerbach’s!
    Mimesis
    ”
    !
    !
    Consortium!for!the!Novel,!University!of!California!at!Berkeley
    ,!February!2005!
    !
    !
    “Minor!C
    haracters/Minority!Identity
    ”!
    !
    !
    The!Future!of!Minority!Studies!Project,!with!Paula!Moya!and!Michael!Hames
    I
    Garcia,!
    !
    SUNY
    I
    Binghamton,!October!
    2004
    !
    !
    “Orwell!and!the!Poetics
    !
    of!Democratic!Socialism”
    !
    !
    Symposium!on!“Orwell,!Literature!and!Politics:!Then!and!Now,”!Stanford!
    !
    University,!
    December!
    2003
    !
    !
    “Cha
    racter
    I
    Space!in!Realist!Fiction
    ”!
    !
    !
    Seminar!of!Victorian!Culture,!Humanities!Center,!Harvard!University
    ,!October
    !
    2003.!
    !
    !
    “Parti
    al!Representation:!Realism!in!an!Unequal!World”!
    !
    Center!for!the!Study!of!the!Novel,!Conference!on!“The!Persistence!of!Realism,”!
    !
    Stanford!University
    ,!May!
    2003.!
    !
    !
    !
    “The!One!vs.!the!Many:!Character
    I
    Space!in!the!Nineteenth
    I
    Century!Novel”!
    !
    Nineteenth!Century!&
    !
    Beyond!British!Cultural!Studies!Working!Group,!University!of!
    !
    California!at!Berkeley
    ,!February!
    2003.!
    !
    !
    !
    Conference!Papers
    !
    !
    “‘Quite!Bare’:!Realism!and!Reticence!in!Orwell’s!‘A!Hanging’”
    !
    !
    American!Comparative!Literature!Association,!“Rethinking!Realism”!
    seminar,
    !
    !
    Brown!University,!April!2012
    !
    !
    “Orwell’s!Formalism”
    !
    !
    Narrative:!An!International!Conference,!Society!for!the!Study!of!Narrative!Literature,!
    !
    !
    Universit
    y!of!Texas,!Austin,!May!
    2008!(Panel!Chair,!“Socialist!Aesthetics”)!
    !
    !
    “’Semisociological’:!Orwell
    ,!Connolly!and!the!Horizons!of!Literary!Criticism”
    !
    !
    Modernist!Studies!Association,!Long!Beach!CA,!November!2007
    !
    !
    “Late!Realism!in!Early!Sayles”
    !
    !
    Narrative:!An!International!Conference,!Society!for!the!Study!of!Narrative!
    !
    Literature,!
    University!of!Vermont,!
    April
    !
    2004.
    !
    !
    “Bruegel’s!Formal!Realism:!The!Implied!Person!Between!Structure!and!Reference”!
    !
    Narrative:!An!International!Conference,!Soc
    iety!for!the!Study!of!Narrative
    !
    Literature,!University!of!Calif
    ornia!at!Berkeley,!March!
    2003
    .!(Panel!Chair,
    !
    “Rethinking!
    Characterization:!Novel,!Painting,!Film”).
    !
    !
    “Partial!Representation:!
    Bleak$House
    !
    and!the!Failure!of!Chartism”
    !
    !
    Literature!and!Democracy!Conferenc
    e,!Emory!University,!Feb
    !
    2002.
    !
    !
    “King!Lear!Lost!In!Paris:!Balzac’s!
    Le$Père$Goriot
    !
    as!Modern!Tragedy”!
    !
    American!
    Comparative!Literature!Association,!“The!Politics!of!Novelistic!Form”!
    !
    Yale!University,!February
    !
    2000.
    !
    !
    “Getting!to!Work:!Irony!and!Socialism!in!
    The$Road$to$Wigan$Pier
    ”!
    !
    !
    Works
    I
    in
    I
    Progress!Colloquium,!Department!of!Comparative!Literature,!Yale!
    !
    University.
    !
    May!4,!1999.
    !
    !
    !
    “Irony!and!Socialism:!Orwell’s!
    The$Road$to$Wigan$Pier”$
    $
    $
    Major!Author!Panel:!George!Orwell,!New!York!State!Conference!on!Language!and!
    !
    Literature,!SUNY!Cortland,!October!19,!1998.
    !
    !
    Colloquia,!Seminars!and!Other!Activities!
    !
    !
    Discussant,!“Rec
    ent!Work!on!the!Theory!of!the!Novel”!(pre
    I
    circulated!material!from!
    The$One$vs$$
    $
    the$Many
    )
    $
    University!of!California!at!Berkeley,!April!2007
    $
    !
    Panelist,!“The!Dynamics!of!Plot”!at!“Theory!of!the!Novel!for!the!21
    st
    !
    Century”!
    !
    !
    Stanford!University,!Center!for!the
    !
    Study!of!the!Novel,!April!2007
    !
    !
    The!Dickens!Universe,!University!of!California!at!Santa!Cruz
    !
    !
    Co
    I
    Instructor,!Graduate!Seminar,!
    Little$Dorrit
    ,!with!Hilary!Schor,!
    July!2005
    !
    !
    Co
    I
    Instructor,!Graduate!Seminar,!
    Bleak$House
    ,!with!Natalka!Freeland,!July!2001
    !
    !
    Co
    I
    Instructor,!Graduate!Seminar,!
    Our$Mutual$Friend
    ,!with!Natalka!Freeland,!July!2000
    !
    !
    !
    Panel!Respondent,!“Representation,!Resistance!and!Knowledge,”!at!“Realism!in!the!World”!
    !
    Stanford!University,!May!2005,!Future!of!Minority!Studies!Project
    !
    !
    Guest!Lecture
    !
    on
    !
    “Narrative!Asymmetry!in!
    Pride$and$Prejudice
    !
    and!
    Emma
    ”
    !
    !
    Graduate!Seminar,!“Third!Person!Narration!in!the!Novel!and!Film,”!Prof.!D.A.
    !
    !
    !
    Miller
    ,!
    University!of!
    California!at!Berkeley,!March!
    2002
    !
    !
    Workshop!Leader!on!
    Ulysses
    !
    at!
    “Extre
    me!Joyce:!Reading!on!the!
    Edge
    ”
    !
    North!American!James!Joyce!Conference
    ,
    !
    University!of!
    California!at!Berkeley,!July!
    2001.
    !
    !
    !
    PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
    !
    Editorial!Board,!
    Nineteenth
    K
    Century$Literature
    ,!2008!
    II
    2013
    !
    !
    Executive!Committee,!Division!on!Prose!Fiction,!Modern!Languages!Association,
    !
    2009
    I
    14
    !
    !
    Advisory!Board,!
    Blackwell$Ency
    cl
    opedia$of$the$Novel
    ,!ed.!Peter!Logan,!2006!
    II
    2010
    !
    !
    Reader,!Book!Manuscript!Submissions,!Oxford!UP,!Princeton!UP,!Columbia!UP
    !
    !
    Reader,!Article!Submissions,!
    Comparative$Literature
    ,!
    Studies$in$English$Literature
    $
    !
    TEACHING!EXPERIENCE
    !
    !
    Courses!at!Stanford!University
    !
    !
    Graduate!Seminars:!Recuperative!Criticism!
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Problems!in!Narrative!Theory:!Fictional!Complexity!and!the!
    Nineteenth
    I
    !
    !
    !
    !
    !
    Century!Novel!
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!!!
    Readings!in!Close!Readi
    ng
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!!!
    Realisms!and!Anti
    I
    Realisms:!Auerbach,!Lukács,!Bazin
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    British!Literature!of!the!1930s
    !
    (co
    I
    taught!with!Nicholas!Jenkins)
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!!!
    Represent
    ation!and!Repression!in!Fiction!(grad/undergrad)
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!!!
    Representation!and!Co
    ncealment!in!Fiction!(grad/undergrad)
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!!!
    Pedagogy!Workshop!(for!first!year!graduate!students!before!TAing)
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!!!
    !
    Lecture!Courses:!Introduction!to!the!Novel!
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!
    The!Novel:!Defoe!to!Nabokov!
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!
    Nineteenth
    I
    Century!British!Fiction!
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    British!Literature!of!the!1930s!(co
    I
    taught!with!Nicholas!Jenkins)
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!
    Narrative!and!Narrative!Theor
    y!(
    2012
    I
    13)
    !
    !
    Undergraduate!Seminars:!Charles!Dickens
    !
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!
    Dickens!and!Urban!Literature
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Orwell:!Literature!and!Politics
    !
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!
    Dickens!and!Shakespeare!(co
    I
    taught!with!Stephen!Orgel)
    !
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!
    Honors!Seminar:!Methods!of!Literary!Criticism
    !
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!
    Novel!an
    d!Epic:!Cervantes,!Eliot,!Joyce!
    !
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!
    Novel!and!Epic:!Cervantes,!Flaubert,!
    Joyce
    !
    !
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!
    The!Protagonist:!Tragedy,!Novel,!Film
    !
    !
    Freshman!Seminars:!Orwell:!Literature!and!Political!Engagement
    !
    !
    Courses!at!Yale!University
    !
    !
    Lect
    ure!and!Seminar!(Team!Taught):!
    Fic
    tion!and!the!Forms!of!Narrative
    !
    First
    I
    Year!Honors!Seminar:!
    T
    he!European!
    Literary!Tradition
    !
    Te
    aching!Assistant/Section!Leader:!
    Forms!and!Ideas!of!the!Renaissan
    ce;!Modern!American!
    !
    Fiction;!The!Victorian!Novel!
    !
    !
    Graduate!Student!Dissertation!Committees,!Stanford!University
    !
    !
    1.!
    Criscillia!Benford,!“The!Multiplot!Novel!in!Victoria
    n!Literature!and!Culture”!(2004)
    !
    !
    2.!
    Christine!McBride,!“From!Story!to!Style:!The!Discourse!of!Possession!in!Jamesian!
    !
    Narrative,!1888
    I
    1903”!(2005)
    !
    (Alden!Prize!for!top!dissertation!in!English)
    !
    !
    3.!
    Zena!Meadowsong,!“
    Myth,!Machines,!and!the!Naturalist!Inven
    tion!of!Modernism
    ”!(co
    I
    !
    advisor,!2006)
    !
    (Alden!Prize!for!top!dissertation!in!English)
    !
    !
    4.!
    Susan!Schuyler,!“Crowd!Control:!Rereading!Victorian!Popular!Drama”!(co
    I
    advisor,!2007)
    !
    !
    5.!
    Ulka!Anjaria,!“Novel!Forms:!Literary!Realism!and!The!Politics!of!Modernity!in
    !
    India,!1920
    I
    !
    !
    1947”!(advisor,!
    2007
    ,!Department!of!Modern!Thought!and!Literature)
    !
    !
    6.!
    Matthew!Garrett,!“Episodic!Poetics!in!the!Early!American!Republic:!The!Politics!of!Writing!in!
    !
    !
    Parts”!(advisor,!
    2008
    )
    !
    (Alden!Prize!for!top!dissertation!in!English)
    !
    !
    7.!
    M
    aria!Wang,!“Victorian!Totalities:!Sociological!Method!and!Narrative!Form!in!British!Realist!
    !
    and!Naturalist!Fiction”!(co
    I
    advisor,!
    2008
    )
    !
    !
    8.!
    Kara!Wittman,!“
    States!of!Wonder!in!the!Nineteenth
    I
    Century!British!Novel”!(2008
    )
    !
    !
    9.!
    Nirvana!Tanoukhi,!“The!Scale!of!
    World!Literature:
    !
    Strategies!of!Contextualization!in!the!
    !
    Postcolonial!Novel!and!Beyond”!(
    2009
    ,!Department!of
    !
    Modern!Thought!and!
    !
    !
    Literature)
    !
    !
    10.!
    Mike!Reid
    ,!“The!Rational!Double
    ”!(
    2009
    )
    !
    !
    11.!
    Sarah!Allison
    , “
    Moral Style in Victorian Fiction
    ” (co
    -
    advisor
    ,
    2011
    )
    12.
    K
    enneth
    Ligda, “Serious Comedy: British Modernist Humor and Political Crisis”
    (advisor
    , 2011
    )
    (Alden Prize for top dissertation in English)
    13.
    Michael Benveniste, “
    The American Ideology:
    Culture and Plot in Post
    -
    Cold War
    U.S.
    Fiction and
    Politics
    ” (co
    -
    advisor
    , 2012
    )
    (Alden Prize for top dissertation in English)
    14.
    Justin Eichenlaub, “
    The Suburban Imagination: Aesthetics, Desire and Space in Nineteenth
    -
    Century Britain”
    (co
    I
    advisor,!2012)
    !
    !
    15.!
    Jillian!Hess,!“Commonplace
    I
    Book!Stylistics
    :!R
    omantic!and!Victorian!Technologies!of!
    !
    Reading!and!Writing”!(2012)
    !
    16.
    Rebecca Richardson, “
    Narrative Ambition: Victorian Self
    -
    Help and Competition”
    (co
    -
    advisor,
    2013
    )
    17.
    Geordie Hamilton, “The Rhetoric of Realism: American Literature and Democratic Form”
    (
    2013
    )
    18.
    Meredith Walker, “Th
    eory of the Novella: Britain, 1875
    -
    1925
    ” (in progress)
    19.
    Kathryn Van Arendonk, “Episodic Storytelling in Serialized Victorian Fiction a
    nd Televisual
    Narrative” (in progress)
    20.
    Irena Yamboliev, “Ornament
    al Form
    :
    Anti
    -
    Realist Aesthetics in the Nineteenth
    -
    Century
    Novel
    (co
    -
    advisor, in progress)
    21.
    Allison Rung, “
    Locomotive Modernism:
    Conventions of the Railway in the British Novel,
    1900
    -
    1950” (advisor, in progress)
    22.
    Long Le
    -
    Khac, “At the Edge of Narrative: The Ethnic Short Story and the Problem of
    Minorness” (in progress)
    23. Nate Landry, “The Anti
    -
    Intellectual Novel” (co
    -
    advisor, in progress)
    24. Connie Zhu, “Three Long Novel
    s and Other Stories: The Length of Fiction in the Victorian
    Age” (advisor, in progress)
    Departmental
    !
    Service,!
    English,!
    Stanford!University
    !
    !
    Director!of!Graduate!Studies,!2011
    I
    present
    !
    !
    II
    !
    Chair,!Graduate!Studies!Committee
    !
    !
    II
    !
    Member,!Department!Advisory!C
    ommittee
    !
    !
    II
    !
    Member,!Curriculum!Committee
    !
    !
    II
    !
    Member,!Graduate!Admissions!Committee
    !
    !
    Director!o
    f!Undergraduate!Studies,!2001
    I
    3,!2004
    I
    6
    !
    !
    II
    !
    Chair,!Undergraduate!Studies!Committee
    !
    !
    II
    !
    Member,!Department!Advisory!Committee
    !
    !
    II
    !
    Member,!Curriculum!Committee
    !
    !
    Co
    I
    Chair,!Search!Committee!in!British!Literature,!2007
    I
    8
    !
    !
    Director!of!Honors!Program,!2008
    I
    2010
    !
    !
    Elected!Member,!Department!Advisory!Committee,!2007
    I
    10
    !
    !
    Member,!Creative!Planning!Committee,!2005
    I
    6,!2007
    I
    8
    !
    !
    Member,!
    Undergraduate!Studies!Committee,!1999
    I
    01.
    !
    !
    Member,!
    Graduate!Student!Admissions!Committee,!1999
    I
    00
    ,!2005
    I
    6
    !
    !
    Non
    U
    Departmental!
    Service,!Stanford!University
    !
    !
    Director,!Center!for!the!Study!of!the!Novel,!2007
    I
    10
    !
    II
    !!
    organized!symposia,!book!discussions,!lectures
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!
    II
    !!
    began
    !
    a!new!research!group,!the!Working!Group!on!the!Novel,!co
    I
    sponsored!as!a!
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Stanf
    ord!Humanities!Center!workshop
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!
    II
    !
    organized!conferences!on!“Race!and!Narrative!Theory,”!April!2008!(co
    I
    organized!
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    with!Michele!Ela
    m);!!“Politics!and!the!Novel,”!April!2009;!!“Novel!and!Film,”!April!
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    2010
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!
    II
    !
    organized!book!discussions!(with!invited!authors)!with!Peter!Brooks,!
    Henry$James
    $
    $
    $$$$$$$$
    $
    $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
    Goes$to$Paris
    ;!Catherine!Gallagher,!
    The$Body$Economic
    ;!Suzanne!Keen,!
    Empathy$and$the$
    $
    $
    $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
    Novel
    ;!Joseph!Slaughter,!
    Human$Rights
    ,
    $
    Inc
    .,!Garrett!Stewart,!
    Novel$Violence
    ;!Ian!
    !
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Duncan,!
    Scott’s$Shadows
    ;!Nicholas!Dames,!
    The$Physiology$of$the$N
    ovel
    .
    $
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!
    II
    !
    Organized!the!annual!Ian!Watt!lecture,!featuring!Fredric!Jameson,!Bruce!Robbins,!
    !
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Benedict!Anderson
    !
    !
    Member,!Steering!Committee,!Interdisciplinary!Studies!in!Humanities!Program,!2005
    I
    06
    !
    !
    Member,
    !
    Planning!and!Promotions!Committee,!Division!of
    !
    Languages,!Literatures!and!Cul
    t
    u
    re
    !
    !
    (DLCL)
    ,!2005
    I
    6
    !
    !
    Member,!Mabelle
    I
    Mcleod!Lew
    is!Fellowship!Committee,!2006
    I
    13
    !
    !
    Member,!Steering!Committee,!Modern!Thought!and!Literature!Program,!2011
    I
    12
    !
    !
    Fellowships
    !
    !
    Richard!E.!Guggenhi
    m
    e
    !
    Faculty!Scholar,!Stanford!University.!2013
    U
    16.!
    !
    !
    Exchange!Scholar!with!the!
    Ecole#Normale#Supérieure
    #
    A!year!of!independent!research!in!Paris!(Sept.!1995
    I
    June!1996),!as!a!fellow!in!the!Yale!University!
    French!Department!
    –
    !
    Ecole$Normal$Su
    périeure
    !
    exchange!program.!
    !
    !
    !
    Yale!University!Fellowships
    !
    John!T.!Roberts!Fellowship,!Sept.!1992
    I
    !
    May!1996.
    !
    A.!Bartlett!Giamatti!Supplemental!Fellowship!in!the!Humanities,!Sept.!1992
    I
    !
    May!1994.!
    !
    Yale!Dissertation!Fellowship,!Sept.!1996
    I
    May!1997.
    !
    !
    Foreign!L
    anguage!and!Area!Studies!(FLAS)!Summer!Grant
    !
    Middlebury!College!French!School,!Summer!1993.!
    !
    !
    FOREIGN!LANGUAGES
    !
    French;!Ancient!Greek;!German!(reading)
    !
    !
    AREAS!OF!INTEREST
    !
    Literary!theory
    !
    and!criticism
    ;!narrative!theory;!British!nineteenth
    I
    century!literature;!
    European!
    and!American!novel;
    !
    politics!and!literature;!theories!of!representation

  • ctr study of the novel - stanford - http://novel.stanford.edu/team-member/alex-woloch/

    Alex Woloch works on literary theory and criticism, narrative theory, and the history and theory of the novel. His teaching is focused on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature and covers the broad development of the European and American novel. He is particularly interested in problems in formal analysis, the aesthetics of realism and representation, and the relationship between literary form and reference.

    He is the author of Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (Harvard UP, forthcoming 2015) and The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton UP, 2003). He is also the co-editor, with Peter Brooks, of Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Yale UP, 2000).

Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture
David Valencia
125.14 (Sept. 1, 2000): p233.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Yale Univ. 2000. 352p. permanent paper. ed. by Peter Brooks & Alex Woloch. index. ISBN 0-300-08116-2. $40; pap. ISBN 0-300-08745-4. $19.95. PSYCH

This work records the activity of a 1998 symposium at Yale, whose goal was to "assess the status of psychoanalysis as a discipline and discourse in contemporary culture." Reflecting the conference's format, the book is divided into six sections focusing on the legitimacy of psychoanalysis as a science, its various theories of the mind, psychoanalysis and historiography, sexual identity, hermeneutics, and the quality of "truth" in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Each section is composed of an introduction, presentations by the seminar participants (including Judith Butler and Leo Bersani), and discussion. Pulling no punches, Brooks (humanities, Yale Univ.) and Woloch (English, Stanford Univ.) begin with Frederic Crews's scathing, provocative attack on Freud's theories as a science. The other sections provide some equally thought-provoking presentations on such disparate topics as Freud and homosexuality and the "psychoanalysis" of Nazi architecture. Within its broad intellectual scope, this book illustrates the intriguing crossroads of Freud's 19th-century sensibilities with our own. An excellent academic treatment of the relative value of Freud at the turn of the millennium geared to psychology and humanities professionals.

--David Valencia, King Cty. Lib. Syst., Federal Way, WA

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Valencia, David. "Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2000, p. 233. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA65492926&it=r&asid=a311adb46a61e46235886b59f8b180c9. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A65492926

QUOTED: At its best The One vs. the Many offers exemplary formulations about the positioning of characters (and not just minor ones) with respect to the manifold concerns of the realist novel. The bibliography--with its many items from the 1960s through the 1980s--gives the impression that The One vs. the Many is re-opening an older discourse about character in the novel. Woloch's backward glance nevertheless opens new vistas concerning how thematic criticism need not be separated from narratological analysis, a juncture aptly described as "the socionarrative competition between the one and the many"

Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many
William Olmsted
34.1-2 (Fall-Winter 2005): p156.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Nebraska Press
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/
Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pp. IX + 391. ISBN 0-691-11314-9

Although the title of Alex Woloch's wide-ranging book suggests a work on philosophy or current events, the subtitle--Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel--offers a better clue about the contents. A prologue focused on the Iliad sets up the book's presiding question: "How can many people be contained within a single narrative?" (11). The introduction then proposes to examine how narratives deal with the problems of distributing "the character-space" among "heroes" and minor characters while maintaining their places within a unified structure, "the character-system" (14). Although Woloch's concerns lie primarily with formal analysis, he utilizes his narratological categories so as to include matters of theme, symbol, and social significance, e.g., to explore how the realist novel"is generated out of the relationship between inequality and democracy" (31).

The first chapter's study of Austen's Pride and Prejudice sets the stage for the book's major focus on Dickens and Balzac, since the asymmetry of Austen's narrative models the disequilibrium found in the other novelists. Woloch sees Austen in terms of a "struggle to produce a closed and ordered fictional universe that reflects a fundamentally fragmented and disordered social one" (59). Ultimately, Woloch finds that Austen triumphs because she manages to link Elizabeth Bennet's "interior development to the dispersion and fragmentation of the many other minor characters, producing a textual structure homologous to the social structure of capitalism" (124). Woloch has little to say about capitalism; however, he offers many useful critiques of interpretations that lock minor characters into excessively stabilizing functions or symbols. In Woloch's view of the novel, neither Gilbert and Gubar's deconstruction of an allegedly "repressed master narrative" nor Mary Poovey's reduction of a character like Charlotte Lucas to "a general ideology for which she stands" does justice to Austen's use of characterization for both thematic and functional purposes (95-97).

Chapter 2 examines the "significance of Dickens's distorted and exaggerated minor characters and the over-significance of minor characters within the novels" (125). Woloch here provides many interesting insights into how a novel like The Pickwick Papers revolves around charged interactions between protagonist and minor characters, themselves always the origin of strangeness or singularity (135, 143). At times, however, the chapter has a rushed look, as when Woloch jams discussions of Schiller, Gaskell, Mayhew, and Engels into four pages on minor characters and the division of labor (160-63).

Chapter 3 offers a reading of the character-system in Great Expectations along the lines previously established. While occasionally a minor character like Barkis in David Copperfield could become immortal precisely through his repeated eccentric phrases, the minor characters in Great Expectations overwhelm the protagonist and become all the "more memorable as they get distorted" (178). Woloch establishes a typology of minor characters, here described as "narrative workers" in order to link their narratological functions with the theme of labor. By such means he tries, successfully in my view, to substantiate his major claim that the novel "explores and dramatizes two essential, conflicting dimensions of the minor character: as symbol, subordinated and thematically instrumentalized in relation to the dominant protagonist, and as a competing center of narrative interest, defined by his social positionality" (208).

For NCFS readers the most relevant part of The One vs. the Many will be Chapter 4 on "Characterization and Competition in Le Pere Goriot and La Comedie humaine." Rastignac or Goriot? Woloch turns away from interpretations that opt for one character or that "shift from this fragmented character-field to a unified thematic one" (244). Instead, he relies on Lukacs and Robbe-Grillet to set up a collapsible polarity between static and dynamic typification (258). As competitors and "co-protagonists" Rastignac and Goriot are not only opposed as narrative foci but as representatives of competing structures within the multiplicity of Parisian reality. Woloch assigns Goriot a space ("The Interior as Exterior") where subjective suffering "is apprehended only through exterior forms" (265) while opposing him to Rastignac ("The Exterior as Interior") whose consciousness "is completely shaped by interactions" with the world of Parisian society (270). This interesting chiasmus leads to a solid discussion of how the novel's "dynamic interaction between these two character-spaces" perpetuates a "gap" that "both expresses the fracturing of an actualized interiority into two component parts (related to each other but radically separate) and highlights the economic structure that converts personal worth into exchange value" (281). It's possible to disagree with this judgment (after all, Rastignac's care for the dying Goriot is free from economic motives) while appreciating Woloch's way of mapping relationships.

As the last quotation suggests, Woloch has a strong sense of how character functions both to drive a given narrative and embody larger realities. Yet the analysis of Le Pere Goriot seems cursory in comparison to the preceding study of Dickens. Woloch elects to discuss a minor character like Poiret rather than tackle the more challenging problem of Vautrin's role in the novel, a choice that needlessly restricts our understanding of Rastignac's character. Not only does Woloch ignore the currents of same-sex desire in Le Pere Goriot, he also pays no attention to how the category of "minorness" is inflected by gender. And while Woloch puts Dickens's description of Mr. Jingle to excellent critical use, Balzac's descriptive mode is largely overlooked.

At its best The One vs. the Many offers exemplary formulations about the positioning of characters (and not just minor ones) with respect to the manifold concerns of the realist novel. The bibliography--with its many items from the 1960s through the 1980s--gives the impression that The One vs. the Many is re-opening an older discourse about character in the novel. Woloch's backward glance nevertheless opens new vistas concerning how thematic criticism need not be separated from narratological analysis, a juncture aptly described as "the socionarrative competition between the one and the many" (306, my emphasis).

William Olmsted, Valparaiso University

Olmsted, William

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Olmsted, William. "Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many." Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 34, no. 1-2, 2005, p. 156+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA140206444&it=r&asid=c4d24de5a0b72463585ccea1ee9df49d. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A140206444

Woloch, Alex: Or Orwell: writing and democratic socialism
D.C. Maus
53.10 (June 2016): p1479.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Woloch, Alex. Or Orwell: writing and democratic socialism. Harvard, 2016. 410p bibl index ISBN 9780674282483 cloth, $45.00; ISBN 9780674495074 ebook, contact publisher for price

53-4295

PR6029

2015-15042 CIP

In this thoughtful, somewhat esoteric book, Woloch (Stanford Univ.) takes a stand on an issue that has riven Orwell criticism in recent decades. He argues that Orwell's plain prose style--encapsulated by Orwell's own, oft-repeated dictum "Good prose is like a windowpane"--is neither hostile toward literary theory nor incompatible with the leftist politics from which such theory arose in the 1970s and 1980s. Woloch's case that Orwell was neither a hypocrite nor a sellout is generally convincing. The result is a book that breathes important new life into the scholarship on an author whose actual writing has frequently become obscured by arguments over his person and/or his politics. The audience for this book is, however, limited by the primary sources with which Woloch has chosen to engage. Focusing on Orwell's nonfiction--particularly The Road to Wigan Pier ( 1937)--and on his newspaper columns works extremely well to support Woloch's contentions, but this method is likely to leave behind readers who are not already deeply conversant with Orwell's overall body of work. For such readers, this book should definitely be paired with a broader, more inclusive study. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--D. C. Maus, State University of New York College at Potsdam

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Maus, D.C. "Woloch, Alex: Or Orwell: writing and democratic socialism." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1479. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942706&it=r&asid=110f3a1fa1460899384f24ee18ec50a8. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

QUOTED: Perhaps the best proof of the rare breadth of Woloch's study is what he makes of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Attention to its essential forms (its modes of description, its focus on consciousness, its style of panorama, its habits of caricature, authorial commentary, and generic revision) is always also attention to its social inflections and to the precise historical developments in which these forms and social commitments together intervened. Asymmetrical characterization is a formal universal that takes on particular dynamics within the specifically nineteenth-century conflict between inequitable distribution and the shaky democratic impulse of the day. A rigorously historicized social problem is the provocation for and the critical target of a formal universal transformed in the process of engagement. And this broad and thorough approach to the specific forms of cultural history links form and history across the moral center of the realist novel: whereas other treatments of the realist novel might attain to formal or historical acuity only through the kind of neutrality most conducive to formal and historical treatments alike, Woloch captures also (or most importantly) the ethical motives in play, as well as the ethical prerogatives that have made this form survive history and last into our cultural moment.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942706

The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel
Jesse Matz
66.3 (Sept. 2005): p400.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Duke University Press
http://dukeupress.edu/
The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. By Alex Woloch. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. ix + 391 pp.

You do not ask after her children, but neither can you treat Lady Macbeth just as a matter of form. And where does that leave you? As a literary character, she is no reference to real personhood, but neither is she just a function in a formal structure. Singling out either reference or function gets her wrong. Can you have both at once? Theories of literary character have never said how--never explained how a character is at once an implied person and a structural dynamic. Of course, critical practice has often mixed these opposite characteristics, easily seeing how Lady Macbeth (for example) fulfills her dramatic function in and through her historic inhumanity, but in theory her human and formal beings are unreconciled. Theory--caught between structuralisms and historicisms, between formalist and ethical approaches--has divided character from itself and left us unable to say how and why it works.

Until now, with Alex Woloch's transformative study The One vs. the Many. For Woloch, this theoretical deadlock is but a bad imitation of the literary dialectic that is itself the essence of characterization. "The literary character is itself divided, always emerging at the juncture between structure and reference" (17): literary character largely exists to theorize this very juncture, but when we theorize in turn, we end up pitting reference against structure again. The One vs. the Many "recasts theoretical conflict back into literary process" by explaining how the conflict between a character's full personhood and its narrative function is the key cultural reason for characterization and, more specifically, a main source of the realist novel's social significance (17). In doing so, the book ends a century's critical infighting with a visionary appreciation of the meaning of fictional people.

Woloch begins from a deceptively basic point with vast implications: like society, fiction cannot apportion equal attention to all of its people. Some get more than others, and some get special kinds of attention, and "narrative meaning takes shape in the dynamic flux of attention and neglect toward the various characters who are locked within the same story but have radically different positions within the narrative" (2). As a narrative decides who gets attention and who gets neglect, it not only creates its characters but structures what Woloch calls its "character-system" (14), the socioformal network of human relations that amounts always to a theory of social representation. In the way that it integrates its many "character spaces," the character-system develops a necessary "asymmetry," in which it betrays its social dimension (14). For its uneven attributions of significance, of depth, of intensity, are corollary to the allowances of humanity made to individual members of real human society. Just how they are corollary, however, is no simple matter, and it takes real ingenuity, of which Woloch seems limitlessly capable, to move us from Dickens's broadly neglected minor characters or Austen's allegorical sisters to the social theory they embody.

When, for example, Elizabeth Bennet finally becomes a fully weighty human being, she does so only through the "flattening, fragmentation, and dismissal of many minor characters who facilitate the process as negative examples" (55). As she deepens, a "culture of superficiality" emerges around her, and this asymmetrically shaped character-system makes her characterization a trenchant social critique. Its inequality--the unfair way that "Elizabeth's singularity is contingent upon every other character in the novel" (123)--is Austen's way of singling out the real form of social inequality newly at work in her England: "The disturbing recession of equality to the invisible horizon of Austen's narrative shows the profound and perhaps unique way she grasped the emergent structure of modern capitalism and represented it on the literary plane" (124). Elizabeth becomes a richly figured character, with all the depth and history necessary to imply a real person, at the expense of others, who are reduced to functionality. This imbalance is enough like real-world social inequality (in structure if not in content) for Pride and Prejudice to criticize the inequities essential to modern capitalism. As Woloch unfolds his minutely drawn map of the twin territories of old Hertfordshire and new capital, the homologies between them strikingly prove how the character-system not only comments on implied societies but "brings an inherently social dimension to narrative form as such" (17).

Never are these homologies crudely drawn. In every case Woloch traces them into fine readings and elegant theories. He manages to justify the bold claim that "minor characters are the proletariat of the novel" in his "labor theory of character" (27), in which he correlates Marxian forms of "specialization" to those at work in novelistic caricature. He also theorizes to great effect perhaps the most socially important form of novelistic reader response when he discusses the way that inequitable character-systems invite us to imagine fairer ones. As minor characters "enfold the untold tale into the telling," making us uneasy when such as the sympathetic Charlotte Lucas serve only to better the fortunes of an Elizabeth Bennet, we try to imagine untold tales from fairer worlds and must confront the structural restrictions against them. All this and more is conveyed through rich, pitch-perfect readings (of evolutions and variations of minorness, of the specializing languages of "flat" description, of key character doublings) that are as absorbing as the texts they explicate.

What makes them so absorbing is their original, intense, and ceaseless reportage from all the new territories opened up by Woloch's take on the "social dimension [of] narrative form." To argue that the structure of narrative's distribution of attention to its implied people is its main means of criticizing the real-world distribution of social and political resources and justice is to open borders too long closed--at one end by theories that only pretend at sociohistorical responsibility (what Dorothy J. Hale has called "social formalism"), at the other by those whose politics turn a tin ear to the languages of aesthetic engagement. (1) The One vs. the Many delivers exceedingly well on its promise to transform this stalemate into a dynamic interchange, and makes it fuel for brisk and heady ventures all across the critical landscape.

Perhaps the best proof of the rare breadth of Woloch's study is what he makes of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Attention to its essential forms (its modes of description, its focus on consciousness, its style of panorama, its habits of caricature, authorial commentary, and generic revision) is always also attention to its social inflections and to the precise historical developments in which these forms and social commitments together intervened. Asymmetrical characterization is a formal universal that takes on particular dynamics within the specifically nineteenth-century conflict between inequitable distribution and the shaky democratic impulse of the day. A rigorously historicized social problem is the provocation for and the critical target of a formal universal transformed in the process of engagement. And this broad and thorough approach to the specific forms of cultural history links form and history across the moral center of the realist novel: whereas other treatments of the realist novel might attain to formal or historical acuity only through the kind of neutrality most conducive to formal and historical treatments alike, Woloch captures also (or most importantly) the ethical motives in play, as well as the ethical prerogatives that have made this form survive history and last into our cultural moment.

In doing so, Woloch gives Dickens in particular some of his strongest advocacy yet. How minor characters "surge forth" in his novels, and toward what end, is beautifully explained in Woloch's account of the way that Dickens's "major" characters are "swarmed by the very minorness they create through [their] centrality" (178). What it takes to produce a central character, analogous to what it takes to maintain social inequality, is made a savagely critical formal problematic as Dickens stresses the "strange prominence" that is caricature's version of economic specialization (129). His trademark "strong minor characters" (133) and their lasting appeal are justified here as never before by Woloch's keen sense (ethical, formal, historical) of what gives them their strength.

Woloch's last main concern is Balzac, primarily the way that his competing character spaces in Pere Goriot jostle for a narrative prominence that would match Parisian eminence. The One vs. the Many also includes helpful analogies between the social forms of the nineteenth-century realist novel and their prototypes in Homer, Shakespeare, and a range of other British, French, and Russian writers. What the book does not cover, it estimates prospectively in provocative summary statements, many of which will surely become the basis for important new work in narrative theory, nineteenth-century studies, the history of the novel, and interdisciplinary work on cultural forms.

Scholars wishing to build on Woloch's work may want to take up the following questions: How might this "socioformal" treatment of narrative gain from further research into sociological theories that are likewise concerned with the way that "representation" distributes attention? Sociology has concerned itself with any number of ways to negotiate between the one and the many; which of its schools or theorists shed the most light on these negotiations as they happen in the literary form that is most sociological in its sympathies? And the social homologies in question here: what exactly defines and determines them, especially in the homology (most provocatively stressed here) between economic and characterological subordination? How do these homologies and related socioformal dynamics vary in the years before and after the nineteenth-century novel--in the early novel, for example, or in the modernist and postmodernist narratives for which the gap between the one and the many is so acutely critical? As "the many" spread beyond London and Paris, what becomes of their socioformal subordination to their narrative centers? What difference does genre make? If a novel is comic rather than realist, or realist in a naturalist way, or out to mount a romantic critique of realist biases, what becomes of the way that it distributes attention and the social critique at work in that mode of distribution? Finally, if characters in Austen, Dickens, Balzac, and others have been reactions against the social structures that condition real personhood, have they had any effect on those structures--any ascertainable roles in the changing of the fortunes of "the many"?

More pressing than these larger questions, however, are the smaller ones we can now put to the many characters too long left unexamined. "Flat or round?" finally has a worthy set of follow-up inquiries; if we people our criticism Woloch's way, we may finally start to finish the work that novelistic character begins, rather than undo it.

Jesse Matz is associate professor of English at Kenyon College. He is author of Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (2001) and The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction (2004).

(1) Dorothy J. Hale, Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Matz, Jesse

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Matz, Jesse. "The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel." Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 3, 2005, p. 400+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA135340725&it=r&asid=c091caa01ee3e14d8061d62091403543. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A135340725

The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel
Deidre Lynch
47.2 (Winter 2005): p281.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu
The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, by Alex Woloch; pp. ix + 391. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2003, $65.00, $21.95 paper, [pounds sterling]41.95, [pounds sterling]13.95 paper.

How is it that nobody has heard of Jane Austen's Confusion and Conviviality? In Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book (2002), the protagonist Thursday Next learns the reason. The story of this novel's extraordinary fate is recounted to Thursday by none other than Marianne Dashwood, in a scene in which the twenty-first-century heroine, propelled inside Sense and Sensibility (1811), meets her nineteenth-century counterpart. "There was a revolution," Marianne whispers: "They took over the entire book and decided to run it on the principle of every character having an equal part, from the Duchess to the cobbler!" The result was catastrophic. The novel was--in Fforde's sci-fi, Lewis Carrollian phrase--"boojumed."

One way to describe Alex Woloch's ambitious project in The One vs. the Many is as follows: this book on minor characters and their relations with protagonists gives us the means of applying to actually existing novels the cautionary tale about the limits of democracy and the precariousness of narrative order that Marianne tells about the nonexistent Confusion and Conviviality. Through readings of Pride and Prejudice (1813), Great Expectations (1861), and Le Pere Goriot (1834), Woloch offers a series of brilliant insights into the "distributed field of attention" (17) that orders our experience of narrative. After reading him one becomes conscious as never before of the asymmetries that novels establish, and also scrutinize, while they carry on their characterizing, and of the manner in which novels offset their production of singular protagonists with their production of those environing figures who by their very nature are (like the children in Jude the Obscure [1894-95]) "too menny." Woloch grants novel readers a new language to describe our strange affective attachments to that latter group, narratives' "workers" and "eccentrics" (25), who stand out from the crowd only to be absorbed back into it and yet manage even so to "enfold the untold tale into the telling" (42). In Woloch's account, as that last evocative quotation suggests, novels are structured by their awareness that they do not grant all characters, cobblers as well as duchesses, equal shares of roundness or of attention. Ever conscious that narrative focus could well be placed elsewhere and shifted from their centers to their subordinated margins, novels inscribe "the very absence of voice that the distributional system produces" (42).

Woloch begins with the Iliad and ends, symmetrically, with Oedipus Rex. But nineteenth-century fiction is at the heart of his book, because the realist novelist's project of engaging both psychological inwardness and social diversity is facilitated by asymmetric structures of characterization that lock together both round protagonists and flat minor characters. For Woloch those asymmetric norms represent, as well, a formal structure capable of comprehending the dynamics of alienated labor within a capitalist order's class structure. His "Labor Theory of Character" proposes that the "functions" to which minor characters, the novel's proletariat, are consigned inevitably take on new social meanings as industrialization hardens the "division of labor" and as that system constricts--or flattens--human beings to "increasingly specialized roles" (26).

These echoes of the negotiations between form and history that once engaged Marxist critics such as Lucien Goldmann and Gyorgy Lukacs sometimes give The One vs. the Many an old-fashioned feel--although such untimeliness has undeniably tonic effects. Woloch's decision to work wholly within a traditional comparativist mode means, similarly, that there are few surprises in his cast of novelists: he prompts readers to reread, rather than sending them to something new. It is surprising that Walter Scott is omitted from Woloch's scheme. Surrounding his insipid, passive heroes with scene-stealing minor characters, and drawing interest from his plots' centers to their peripheries, Scott is (perhaps along with Tobias Smollett) the major architect of the character system that is associated by this book exclusively with Dickens. Symptoms of Woloch's adherence to an old-style comparativism are visible elsewhere. His description of how the opening of Pride and Prejudice makes us uncertain whether the narrative will be about five marriageable Bennet sisters or one is tremendously smart. But it is strange that to describe this jostling for narrative attention he draws on Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and neglects, for example, Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), whose account of her world's inequitable allotment of the signs of personhood seems equally pertinent. (Why are "all women to be levelled, by meekness and docility, into one character," Wollstonecraft asked, indicating one reason Austen's marriage plotting must also plot a protagonist's struggle not to get lost in the crowd.)

For Woloch as for the great mid-twentieth-century theorists of realism, real history is the (nineteenth-century) history of class relations. He describes how Austen's ways of making some fictional personages minor register "the new, dynamic competition ... emerging in her period" (60) and also register "the division of labor" (156), and yet he nowhere acknowledges that the gender system was being refashioned alongside the class system during that period or that gender entails its own distorting division of labor. Woloch's is very much a Victorian Austen, not an eighteenth-century or Romantic novelist. Another missed opportunity here is accordingly the neglect of the novel in letters--the form in which Pride and Prejudice was originally written. Woloch's chapter on Austen might well have considered whether the equitable time-sharing between "co-protagonists" (245) that for him is finally unrealizable in nineteenth-century novels might have enjoyed a quite different standing in epistolary fictions.

For all its innovations, then, this account does proffer one overfamiliar lesson: I have learned once again that novel studies as a field remains reluctant to grant eighteenth-century writers even bit parts, and that this is so even in books that are, like this rather prolix one, able to accommodate Homer and Sophocles. I was reminded, too, that literary history was simpler and tidier back when gender was something outside history, before critics began to connect the rise of the novel not simply to the rise of capitalism but also to, for instance, the transition from the control of marriage to the deployment of sexuality that centers Foucauldian histories. The clarity and magisterial tone that are the consequence of Woloch's return to the selective canon and the historical "grand narratives" that informed early work on realism number among his book's many, many virtues. Even so, some readers might, after reading Woloch, long for a little more confusion and conviviality.

DEIDRE LYNCH

Indiana University

Lynch, Deidre

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lynch, Deidre. "The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel." Victorian Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, 2005, p. 281+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA134680909&it=r&asid=4725038e09979e64750eddccd12034d4. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A134680909

STANFORD PROFESSOR UNCOVERS ROOTS OF GEORGE ORWELL'S POLITICAL LANGUAGE
(Feb. 16, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 States News Service
STANFORD, Calif. -- The following information was released by Stanford University:

Through a close reading of George Orwell's nonfiction prose, Stanford English Professor Alex Woloch shows how language and democratic socialism played roles in the British writer's stand against totalitarianism.

By Samuel Huneke

The Humanities at Stanford

In his new book on George Orwell, Stanford English Professor Alex Woloch writes that Orwell's anti-totalitarianism can only be understood in relation to his democratic-socialist political beliefs.

Eric Arthur

British writer George Orwell's writing and democratic-socialist political beliefs are the subject of a new book by English Professor Alex Woloch.

And much of this is revealed in how Orwell used language, according to Woloch, a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century fiction and literary theory and the chair of the Stanford Department of English. For his book Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Woloch studied Orwell's essays, journalism and documentary writing, especially a series of columns that the British writer penned for the socialist weekly Tribune. Titled "As I Please," those columns represent a part of Orwell's writing that scholars have never examined so closely before.

In doing so, Woloch seeks to understand Orwell's often hard-to-pin-down political views while highlighting the "very complicated texts he crafted to express his political opinions." If "we all have a responsibility to make political judgments," Orwell's work "illustrates how deeply such judgments can be informed by the craft and constraints of writing."

Political thinking, in this light, can draw on the same resources as literary writing: irony, experiment, variety and imaginative precision, he said.

Perhaps by reading Orwell more carefully, and paying attention to his formal and linguistic subtlety, Woloch suggests, society today can create a more humane political culture.

Beyond 1984

To those readers familiar only with Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell is one of the greatest anti-communist and anti-totalitarian writers of the 20th century, Woloch noted. To others, he is an avatar of plainspoken common sense.

But Woloch rises above this stereotypical image of Orwell as "a naturally virtuous person," by examining the author's writing and reconciling Orwell's ethics and political vision.

For example, Woloch said, Orwell's 1946 essay "Why I Write" reflects his primary political orientation. In it, Orwell famously stated: "Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."

Woloch believes that each of the two halves of this statement must be given equal weight, and that we cannot understand Orwell's anti-totalitarianism if we do not consider it in relation to his democratic-socialist thought.

However, a key Cold War introduction to Animal Farm in the United States simply omitted the last phrase - "for democratic socialism, as I understand it" - leaving only what Orwell was "against." The absence of the phrase serves as a metaphor in Woloch's book for Orwell's own persistent engagement with the elusiveness and complexity of language, writing and form.

Between theory and politics

Woloch became interested in Orwell in part through his own political commitments and his sense that Orwell's work speaks to contemporary political concerns. He finds it suggestive, and a little amusing, that the first serious U.S. presidential candidacy of a self-identified democratic socialist (Bernie Sanders) should occur just as his book is being published.

At the same time, the book is motivated by a set of scholarly and theoretical concerns. Much of English literary criticism in the last three decades has been dominated by different strands of deconstructive theory, which, as Woloch puts it, "can find political ideology in almost any writing." In other words, deconstructive theory looks for the subliminal political ramifications of literature.

While this approach has been fruitful in interpreting any number of written works, it falls short when confronted with an author like Orwell. That is because Orwell's political commitments are clear to even the most naive reader, Woloch said. He noted, "Theory doesn't always know what to do with a writer like Orwell."

Woloch uses close reading and theory to get underneath the skin of Orwell's prose, not to reveal hidden political opinions, but rather to show how Orwell's language informs and makes possible those views.

This new turn is in part made possible by the first complete works of Orwell, published in the 1990s. The complete works, which included his prolific journalism alongside his more well-known novels and essays, made clear to scholars just how important something like the weekly "As I Please" column could be to understanding the writer.

"We want a figure like Orwell, we want that voice to comment on [the terrorist attacks in] Paris or to comment on [Donald] Trump. But my book is about the complexity of bearing witness. It's about the complex forms of writing that a writer like Orwell would want to enable and foster," Woloch said.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"STANFORD PROFESSOR UNCOVERS ROOTS OF GEORGE ORWELL'S POLITICAL LANGUAGE." States News Service, 16 Feb. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA443452831&it=r&asid=bd555fca068e6039083ddef72d25f0e4. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A443452831

Valencia, David. "Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2000, p. 233. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA65492926&asid=a311adb46a61e46235886b59f8b180c9. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017. Olmsted, William. "Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many." Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 34, no. 1-2, 2005, p. 156+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA140206444&asid=c4d24de5a0b72463585ccea1ee9df49d. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017. Maus, D.C. "Woloch, Alex: Or Orwell: writing and democratic socialism." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1479. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA454942706&asid=110f3a1fa1460899384f24ee18ec50a8. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017. Matz, Jesse. "The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel." Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 3, 2005, p. 400+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA135340725&asid=c091caa01ee3e14d8061d62091403543. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017. Lynch, Deidre. "The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel." Victorian Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, 2005, p. 281+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA134680909&asid=4725038e09979e64750eddccd12034d4. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017. "STANFORD PROFESSOR UNCOVERS ROOTS OF GEORGE ORWELL'S POLITICAL LANGUAGE." States News Service, 16 Feb. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA443452831&asid=bd555fca068e6039083ddef72d25f0e4. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.
  • modern philology
    http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/688054
    Word count: 1074

    Book Review
    Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism. Alex Woloch. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. xix+410.
    William E. Cain

    Wellesley College
    ONLINE: Dec 13, 2016

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    Alex Woloch’s Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism is a sophisticated, painstaking scholarly book that requires patience from its readers but from which critics, teachers, and students of George Orwell’s life and work will learn much. In part 1, Woloch provides finely grained explications of “A Hanging” (1931), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and the collection Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940), which includes studies of Charles Dickens, boys’ weeklies, and Henry Miller. In part 2, he concentrates again in copious detail on Orwell’s eighty “As I Please” newspaper columns, written from 1943 to 1947 for the Socialist weekly Tribune. Woloch focuses throughout, as he explains, “on the sheer activity of writing, the intricate, ongoing process of composition itself” (xix), paying special attention to Orwell’s complex dramatizations of his commitment to democratic socialism across the span of his career.

    Woloch’s treatment of Orwell’s organization of language is impressive in its interpretive precision and textual specificity. He is expertly familiar with the texts, and along the way he fills in well the relevant biographical, historical, and literary-theoretical contexts. Or Orwell brings a much-needed exactitude of approach to this invigorating but often elusive writer, whose best essays are entertaining, incisive, inspiring, and, sometimes, quite perplexing and even maddening. Often we sense that Orwell is declaring a position, taking a stand, but as Woloch’s scrutinies of the language attest, ultimately we cannot be sure what these positions and stands really are: the style keeps functioning both to orient and disorient our responses.

    There are sharp observations in Or Orwell about the strangeness of Orwell’s writing, its tensions and dissonances (17). Woloch comments astutely too on the nature of literary “form” for Orwell—“conspicuous, disruptive, and inassimilable” (29)—and he delves into the complex meanings and implications of “intention” (what Orwell means, what he wants)—intricate, circuitous, “perhaps more canny, but not shattered or effaced” (52). Interiority, self-actualization, skepticism, tragedy: Woloch examines these themes and others through very close reading in original, compelling ways.

    Woloch is especially good on the appeal and difficulty of Orwell’s theory and practice of a “plain style,” which combines “directness and obstruction,” and which both engages and unnerves the reader, as “A Hanging,” for example, graphically illustrates (66). He has a keen feeling for the movements and tones of Orwell’s prose, its restlessness, steady beat of self-correction (89), and vexing irony and negation (119). This sustained engagement with Orwell’s language is an important contribution: it makes us realize how complicated Orwell is when he addresses imperialism, social class, labor, and other subjects. We think we know Orwell, who seems so clear and accessible, but it is not apparent that we do or for that matter that he does himself. Woloch makes us perceive that to a large extent Orwell is always striving in his writing to know his own mind—and the reward for us is the exercise of our minds through the consciousness-unsettling experience of reading him.

    Or Orwell secures a place for Woloch among this writer’s most significant scholars and critics. As his cogent pages on Raymond Williams’s enlightening, but flawed and controversial, book on Orwell (179–83) suggest, Woloch is committed to returning us to the texts themselves, and to the extremely attentive act of reading that Orwell demands—and that our emphasis on his political views has led us to neglect. Woloch’s book has much in it along these lines that is sharp and illuminating, for example, a shrewd set of comments on Orwell’s “representations of window panes” in his writing (1997), and, more generally, it will kindle a new appreciation for both the topical and permanent value of the “As I Please” columns—self-reflexive, dialectical, exploratory about the relationships (and boundaries) of aesthetics and politics (205). Perhaps the central claim that Woloch makes and establishes is this: Orwell’s “work is ‘consciousness raising’ not in the sense of transmitting a valorized set of positions or perspectives but rather of enacting the dynamic movement of consciousness itself, as it moves from induction—immersion—to structure” (313).

    There is a problem with this admirable book, however, and I think that it is a serious—or perhaps I should say, an unfortunate—one: Or Orwell is much too long. I admire its author greatly, but in my view while he has been rigorous in his engagement with Orwell, he has not been rigorously prudent and economical in the presentation of his own claims and arguments.

    This book is 400 pages in length. It includes a prologue, a very long introduction, an interlude, and six chapters, each of which takes twice as much space as it really needs. At the back, distractingly, Or Orwell also contains sixty pages of footnotes, many of which should have been radically trimmed or cut. Woloch’s reflections in these footnotes on political ideology and desire (337), the importance of placing “meta-critical pressure” on statements that critics make about Orwell (368), and so on—this is all well and good, but to me part of the job of writing a book is knowing that some things, even good things, are better omitted, both from footnotes and, even more, from the main text. We do not need to know all of a scholar’s thoughts, just those that truly matter for the main thrust and purpose of his or her argument.

    Woloch is a perceptive, scrupulous reader—we would benefit from more critics like him, deep interpreters of literary language—but in this too-long book he risks burying his best insights in the midst of prolix and repetitive writing. Here, Or Orwell suffers by comparison with Robert Colls’s recent George Orwell: English Rebel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), which has far fewer discursive footnotes, a livelier style, more range of reference, and is 100 pages shorter. Woloch is more profound than Colls in his treatment of Orwell’s language, but his book would have profited from tough-minded editing by both author and publisher, an insistence that less indeed can be more. I want to emphasize the distinction of Or Orwell even as I express my concern that it might not have the impact that it should.

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