Susquehanna University Press

"Fand's book is eye-catching and timely in linking the dissolution of the outmoded cult of the individual and model of an isolated concept of self to a new interdependence, harmonious both with the interactivity of the Internet and with Barbara Herrnstein Smith's concept of the "dialogic self" as a "marketplace where all subject-positions.as in the material economy, have an exchange rate of relative worth with respect to everything else." Fand bases her reading of Woolf, Lessing and Atwood reconstructing subjectivity initially on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic self, but she branches out gratifingly soon to explain ways in which Herrnstein Smith (Contingencies of Value, 1988), Gayatri Spivak (The Post-Colonial Critic, 1990), and Rita Felski (Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 1989) theorize possibilites for reconstructing the feminine self. Roxanne Fand alternates chapters synthesizing theory of the concept of self with a particular author's life and work with chapters applying the dialogic concept to a particular novel of that author, to "The Dialogic Design" of The Waves, in the case of Virginia Woolf; to "Nay-Saying as Wall Building" in Doris Lessing's Children of Violence series, her Martha Quest tetralogy in Africa; and to "Herself-A-mazed in a funhouse mirror" in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle. The brilliance of this method is that a reader can glean whatever level of theoretical content is possible for her from the general chapter, then use the application chapter as a handbook to interpreting the novel. Fand displays inventiveness in relating the marketplace economy to dialogism in her introduction and-having moved from dialogism to reinventing the self-she also cleverly relates the communal awareness she has defined as part of the reinvented self to a new theoretical topic, "sustainability.""

CHOICE February, 2002 <Top>

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