Acts of Naming The Family Plot in Fiction

by Ragussis, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780195040708
• ISBN10: 0195040708
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1987-01-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Michael Ragussis re-reads the novelistic tradition by arguing the acts of naming--bestowing, revealing, or earning a name; taking away, hiding, or prohibiting a name; slandering, or protecting and serving it--lie at the center of fictional plots from the 18th century to the present. Against the background of philosophic approaches to naming, Acts of Naming reveals the ways in which systems of naming are used to appropriate characters in novels as diverse as Clarissa , Fanny Hill , Oliver Twist , Pierre , Tess of the d'Urbervilles , Remembrance of Things Past , and Lolita , and identifies unnaming and renaming as the locus of power in the family's plot to control the child, and more particularly, to rape the daughter. His analysis also treats additional works by Cooper, Brontë, Hawthorne, Eliot, Twain, Conrad, and Faulkner, extending the concept of the naming plot to reimagine the traditions of the novel, comparing American and British plots, female and male plots, inheritance and seduction plots, and so on. Acts of Naming ends with a theoretical exploration of the "magical" power of naming in different eras and in different, even competing, forms of discourse.

Table of Contents

Introduction: In the Name of the Child	p. 3
The Naming Plots of Fiction
Clarissa, or the Name Lost	p. 19
Oliver Twist, or the Name Found	p. 35
Pierre, or the American Myth of the Name Transcended	p. 48
Fiction and Family Discourse
The Scarlet Letter	p. 65
"The guilty name"	p. 66
On the border in fiction	p. 76
Bleak House	p. 87
"Kindred mystery"	p. 88
"No one" and "Every one" in fiction	p. 97
The Mill on the Floss	p. 110
The education of father and son	p. 111
"Living twice over" in fiction	p. 122
Tess of the d'Urbervilles	p. 135
"In the name of the Father"	p. 138
"In the name of our love"	p. 146
Coda: Confession in fiction	p. 154
Fiction and the Traditions of Naming
Lolita	p. 165
The science of classification	p. 168
Etymology	p. 177
Allegory, meta-allegory, and parody	p. 182
The "science of pleasure" in Fanny Hill	p. 190
Proust and the erotics of naming	p. 198
Epilogue	p. 215
Naming as ordinary magic	p. 215
The novel as naming plot	p. 229
Notes	p. 245
Index	p. 263
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