Reading Barbara Pym.
Item
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Title
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Reading Barbara Pym.
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Identifier
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AAI9707109
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identifier
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9707109
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Creator
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Interdonato, Deborah Ann.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rachel M. Brownstein
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Date
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1996
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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Because the novels of Barbara Pym resist the effort to write about them in the usual critical/academic terms, the unique quality that determines their excellence has not been recognized. Pym, however, is a minor writer of major importance, not because she uses comedy or satire or irony or literary allusions, or writes of Anglican clergy or food or anthropologists, or chooses the perspective of women, but because of the sensuous/simple quality of her prose. This simplicity, not predominantly of story, but of style, is one which reflects a natural response (not the affectation of a natural response) to the act of narration itself. Accordingly, it is at the level of the novels' language, at the level of sentence and sentence structure and the fluid narrative movements these constructions create, that Pym's particular excellence resides. This study closely reads Pym's text, choosing four novels representative of the quality of her work and the experience of reading Barbara Pym.;An examination of Some Tame Gazelle, Pym's first published novel, discovers a naturalness of response by the characters within the story, and by the author to the act of narration itself. The following chapter on Quartet in Autumn continues the discussion of naturalness of response and discovers that this response, still effortlessly guiding the narrating voice as it did in Some Tame Gazelle, is inaccessible to the characters of the story, whose posture toward life and to one another is bound by the skittish and the tentative. Excellent Women, though considered the most generally popular Pym novel, is examined as falling short of Pym's usual, natural quality. A discussion of Jane and Prudence explores how the unexamined assumptions of popular/academic criticism, specifically as these attach to unexamined ideas of what constitutes the "the full life," clash with the spirit of a text whose relaxed quality refutes them. What each chapter confirms is that what matters when reading a Pym novel is to respond to, and in, the relaxed and yielding manner it both enacts and enjoins.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
