Patrick O'Donnell

Frame-Up: James, Caché, and the Borders of the Visible

THIS IS THE FOURTH IN A SERIES OF REFLECTIONS ON THE FICTION OF HENRY James in relation to modern and contemporary cinema. In comparing late James novels and stories to the films of Hitchcock, Nolan, and Tarrantino, I have been interested in tracing an arc that runs from James’s visual imaginary and the epistemological complexities he associated with acts of envisioning and representation, to the foliation of those complexities in films that limit— as James does for print narrative—the capacities of the cinematic medium to represent objects, memory, temporality, and mortality. The relationship between James and film that I am interested in is not primarily anticipatory or adaptational, as it is reiterative of a problem—Žižek describes it as one of observation, or more precisely, as one of our modern knowledge about how observation works—that inheres in the act of visualizing per se, whether doing so in terms of anunfolding field of optic possibilities, as described in the famous “house of fiction” metaphor, or doing so for the sake of establishing

Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis's the Recognitions and Postmodern Theory.@@@In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age.

Dewey focuses on seven novels that touch the variety of generic experiments and postures of the post-World War 11 American novel. These novels by Vonnegut, Coover, Percy, Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo represent a significant argument concerning the American literary response to living within the oppressive technologies of the Nuclear Age. Departing from other studies that veer toward speculative fiction or toward the more narrowly defined religious angles, In a Dark Time defines the apocalyptic temper as a most traditional literary genre that articulates the anxieties of a community in crisis, a way for that community to respond to the perception of a history gone critical by turning squarely to that history and to find, in that gesture, the way toward a genuine hope.