Jean Rhys

by Sanford Sternlicht MA ’55, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1997.

From the dust jacket: "Jean Rhys is an accessible and up-to-date analysis of [the English author’s] career. Sanford Sternlicht presents the link between Rhys’s life and her work, demonstrating how the two intertwine. Beginning with a biographical and personality sketch, this book looks at some of the problems Rhys faced in her professional and personal life, and how they are projected in her writing. Sternlicht evaluates Rhys’s published work in chronological order, demonstrating her stylistic development. This study provides a unique overview of the life and fiction of one of the major voices of feminine consciousness in the twentieth century."

Sternlicht, a part-time professor of English at Syracuse University, is a theater director, scholar and writer of wide-ranging interests, publishing extensively on subjects from Shakespeare to Grahame Greene. His most recent books include 1995’s All Things Herriot: James Herriot and his Peaceable Kingdom and last year’s New Plays from the Abbey Theatre, 1993-1995.

The Vision of James

by Stephen C. Rowe ’67, Element Books, Rockport, MA, 1997.

From Stephen Rowe’s introduction: ". . . like the philosophy of Socrates, at the beginning of the Western tradition, and like Zen and Feminism as we receive them in our post-traditional day, there is no way James’s philosophy can be contained in solely conceptual terms. What he offers is more a way of living than just a way of thinking or a set of concepts.

"In the same way that we cannot read the dialogues of Socrates with-out understanding dialogue as a transformative practice and without becoming dialogical, so we cannot read James without understanding conversation. In fact, conversation in James is very similar to dialogue in Socrates: it is a kind of relationship that has transformative effects, a kind through which the mature or fully formed being emerges. "Access to our vitality can occur only through relationship, not through drawing back into either ‘morbid introspection’ or lofty conceptualization."

Faulkner’s Literary Children: Patterns of Development

by David Vanderwerken ’68, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York, 1997. 144 pages.

One of William Faulkner’s myriad artistic strengths was his ability to create memorable child characters. Faulkner’s Literary Children focuses on the development, or misdevelop-ment, of Joe Christmas, Quentin Compson, Thomas Sutpen and Isaac McCaslin in childhood and adolescence. This book draws upon the Bildungsroman tradition and twentieth-century theories of human development in an attempt to better understand Faulkner’s "dysfunctional" children in his major earlier novels as well as his creation of two "normal" youngsters, Chick Mallison and Lucius Priest, late in his career.

Vanderwerken is professor of English at Texas Christian University. He received his Ph.D. from Rice University. In addition to publishing widely on twentieth-century American fiction in journals, he is co-editor of Sport Inside Out: Readings in Literature and Philosophy and the editor of Sport in the Classroom: Teaching Sport-Related Courses in the Humanities.