On his book In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust
Cover Interview of October 09, 2011
The wide angle
This book is broadly in the field of narratology—that is the examination of how stories are structured and built. It deals with the questions of how time and change are represented, how novels set up or imply a meaningful sense of connection between the individual and others, between the individual and his/her own past, or with the human past more generally.
It is an attempt really to bring together two fields, narratology, as I said, and “queer theory” which is a critical approach concerned with understanding the place of homosexuality in literature and culture.
While the texts I analyze in the book do not all, by any means, deal with homosexuality per se, haunting them, I argue, is the question fundamental to a gay life, or to a life outside of marriage and reproduction, which is, how does one make a meaningful narrative out of one’s life without producing progeny?
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The wide angle
This book is broadly in the field of narratology—that is the examination of how stories are structured and built. It deals with the questions of how time and change are represented, how novels set up or imply a meaningful sense of connection between the individual and others, between the individual and his/her own past, or with the human past more generally.
It is an attempt really to bring together two fields, narratology, as I said, and “queer theory” which is a critical approach concerned with understanding the place of homosexuality in literature and culture.
While the texts I analyze in the book do not all, by any means, deal with homosexuality per se, haunting them, I argue, is the question fundamental to a gay life, or to a life outside of marriage and reproduction, which is, how does one make a meaningful narrative out of one’s life without producing progeny?