Summary of literature as discourse by roger fowler
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96ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW "artistic dimensions" of his works; in Bontemps's case, that "other than reviews, Bontemps has received scant critical attention, much of which does little more than suggest fruitful approaches for future critics." The only problem readers will have with Fleming's Guide is determining which annotations are completely his and which the reprinted words of reviewers, critics, etc. Quotation marks sometimes help to distinguish, but frequently the reader is confused. Though Fleming anticipates these problems in a statement he makes in the Preface — "To convey the attitude of the various critics and reviewers I have sometimes quoted significant phrases within my annotations" — some of the annotations do give the reader pause. In spite of this, however, the reference guide is a significant contribution to Black American Literature, a guide which, within its pages, suggests "fruitful approaches for future critics." Once one knows exactly what has been done — and Fleming shows us this very well — one knows exactly what remains to be done, and so might begin immediately after reading Fleming's book. LILLIE P. HOWARD Wright State University Roger Fowler. Literature as Social Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. 215p. Before purchasing this book, the prospective reader is advised to consider several points. The most important of these is that the ten essays comprising it were written between 1973 and 1978, with the result that much of what the author has to say has already been said elsewhere. For example, Fowler refers in his preface to a "crystallization" of his thinking that has resulted in a decision to argue that literature is a kind of discourse. Yet it has been a full five years since the appearance of, for example, Mary Louise Pratt's Totuard a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Barbara Hernnstein Smith's On the Margins of Discourse, and Hayden White's The Tropics of Discourse. The reader is thus likely to wonder what particular significance such a decision has in Fowler's case. Another change for Fowler occurs with respect to nomenclature: stylistics, a type of criticism developed from Anglo-American verbal analysis of literary works, American and European linguistics (including transformational) and French structuralism, now gives way to the more neutral "linguistic criticism." Fowler justifies this change — which hardly needs any justification — by attacking the inadequacy of the Chomskyan basis for stylistics and by referring again and again to the fallacies subscribed to by the "New Critics" and by Jakobson in his theory of poetic language. Fowler does not mention the controversy over stylistics that occurred in the mid-seventies and resulted in the rejection of this type of approach by one of its early advocates, Stanley Fish, whose work Fowler professes to admire. In referring to "recent" developments such as the incorporation of speech act theory into linguistic criticism, Fowler likewise fails to acknowledge that the battle over this type of linguistic approach has already been waged, with the consensus that speech-act theory is simply inadequate to deal with as complex a phenomenon as literature. In short, throughout this book Fowler repeatedly and vehemently beats a number of long-dead horses. Second, the book suffers conspicuously from being a compilation of essays originally prepared for diverse purposes. Chapter Two is a "slightly revised version ... of the author's inaugural lecture as Professor of English and Linguistics at the Book Reviews97 University of East Anglia," and Chapter Three consists of four book reviews that do not appear to have been revised at all but merely juxtaposed — one, two three, four. Other chapters are lectures or articles whose arrangement produces no sense of logical progression. It seems that a linguist familiar with reader-response criticism might have suspected that a group of essays originally directed to a series of diverse addressees is not likely to assume homogeneity when collected, but this does not seem to have been the case. The result is an egregious lack of cohesiveness. What is profitable in the book is Fowler's interest in tying criticism — once it is completely untied from formalisms — to historical causation so that "texts are opened to the same kinds of causal and functional interpretations as are found in the sociology of language...