In order to provide a comparative perspective on different post-modernist styles, while maintaining a manageable field of study, in this chapter we will focus on:
Don Delillo’s White Noise. (London: Picador, 1985) [ISBN 9780330291095 (hbk); 9780330291088 (pbk)].
Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Book One of The New York Trilogy. (London: Faber and Faber, 1987) [ISBN 9780571152230].
But some of the other novels you might wish to focus on include:
Italo Calvino If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Angela Carter Nights at the Circus
Robert Coover Pricksongs and Descants
William Gibson Neuromancer
Philip Roth The Counterlife.
LeClair, Tom In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987) [ISBN 9780252014833].
Lentricchia, Frank (ed.) Introducing Don DeLillo. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991) [ISBN 9780822311447 (pbk); 9780822311355 (hbk)]. The essays by John McClure and Eugene Goodheart are especially worthwhile.
Lentricchia, Frank (ed.) New Essays on White Noise. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) [ISBN 9780521398930 (pbk); 9780521392914 (hbk)].
Borone, Dennis (ed.) Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) [ISBN 9780812215564 (pbk); 9780812233179 (hbk)].
Annesley, James Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. (London: Pluto, 1998) [ISBN 9780745310909]. A very readable and insightful examination of the theme of consumption in contemporary fiction.
Barth, John ‘The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction’, Atlantic 245 1980, pp.65–71.
Baudrillard, Jean Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983)
[ISBN 9780936756028]. The best introduction to Baudrillard’s writing.
Brooker, Peter (ed.) Modernism/Postmodernism. (London and New York: Longman, 1992) [ISBN 9780582063587 (hbk); 9780582063570 (pbk)]. A strong selection of essays that illuminate the key differences and similarities between modernism and post-modernism.
Cohen, Josh Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing. (London: Pluto, 1998) [ISBN 9780745312071 (pbk); 9780745312125 (hbk)]. A theoretically informed treatment of post-modernism, focused on the relationship between writing and visual culture.
Connor, Stephen Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997) [ISBN 9780631200529]. A very good general introduction.
Foster, Hal (ed.) Postmodern Culture. (aka The Anti-Aesthetic.) (London and Sidney: Pluto, 1985) [ISBN 9780745300030]. An excellent collection featuring many brief but seminal analyses of post-modernism.
Graff, Gerald ‘The Myth of The Postmodernist Breakthrough’ in Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society. (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1995) [ISBN 9781566630979]. Forceful refutation of the very distinction between modernism and post-modernism – a useful counterpoint to the other texts.
Gregson, Ian Postmodern Literature. (London, Hodder Education: 2004) [ISBN 9780340813713]. Helpfully explores the application of the term ‘postmodernism’, including its historical context, major theorists and limitations, to novelists including Carter, Ashbery, Abish, Morrison, Rich and Rushdie.
Harvey, David The Condition of Postmodernity. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) [ISBN 9780631162940 (pbk); 9780631162926]. A superb, very expansive analysis of postmodern culture, taking in historical, economic, geographical and sociological perspectives.
Hassan, Ihab The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and
Culture. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1987)
[ISBN 9780814204283 (pbk); 9780814204191 (hbk)].
Hutcheon, Linda The Politics of Postmodernism. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) [ISBN 9780415280167; 9780415039918].
Hutcheon, Linda Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. (London: Methuen, 1984) [ISBN 9780416371406]. On ‘self-reflexive’ or ‘meta’ fiction.
Huyssen, Andreas After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986) [ISBN 9780333455333 (pbk); 9780333455326 (hbk)]. A fascinating treatment of the transition from modern to post-modern culture in terms of the rise of mass culture.
Jameson, Fredric Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (London: Verso, 1991) [ISBN 9780860915379 (pbk); 9780860913146 (hbk)]. A demanding but seminal analysis of post-modern culture in terms of the development of multinational capitalism.
Kroker, Arthur and David Cook The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyperaesthetics. (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988)
[ISBN 9780333461808 (pbk); 9780333461792 (hbk)]. Focuses on idea of hyper-reality – some may find it a little too delirious!
Lyotard, Jean-François The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) [ISBN 9780816611737 (pbk); 9780816611669 (hbk)]. Very worthwhile for those who want to probe more deeply into the subject.
McCaffrey, Brian (ed.) Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-bibliographic Guide. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986) [ISBN 9780313241703]. A very useful pointer to other writings and interesting essays on the subject.
McHale, Brian Postmodernist Fiction. (London: Routledge, 1989)
[ISBN 9780415045131].
McHale, Brian Constructing Postmodernism. (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) [ISBN 9780415060141 (pbk); 9780415060134 (hbk)]. The author covers broad cultural field of post-modernism.
Nicol, Bran The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) [ISBN9780521679572]. Useful overview of the preoccupations, styles and techniques used by postmodern novelists including Beckett, Borges, Burroughs, Pynchon, Carter, Atwood, Morrison, Gibson, Auster, Delillo and Ellis.
Pfeil, Fred Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture. (London: Verso, 1990) [ISBN 9780860919926 (pbk); 9780860912774 (hbk)]. A diverse and entertaining collection of essays.
Ross, Andrew (ed.) Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993) [ISBN 9780852246542 (pbk); 9780852246474 (hbk)].
Wilde, Alan Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic Imagination. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) [ISBN 9780801824494]. A useful discussion of post-modern irony.
The aim of this chapter is to introduce and explain some of the key concepts in post-modernist theory and cultural practice, and to demonstrate their relevance to an understanding of developments in the contemporary novel.
Remember that you must cover at least two texts by different authors in answers to Section B examination questions.
The terms ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-modernism’ have become part of the mainstream language of our culture, employed frequently by radio, TV and print media commentators, usually with a great deal of imprecision. Far from clarifying the term, this overusage seems to have succeeded only in rendering it yet more obscure and confusing.
This chapter will try to make some sense of this term, first of all by pointing to the many different ideas and practices associated with it – for one of the only points of consensus among those who have attempted to define post-modernism is how difficult it is to define! There are so many competing versions of post-modernism, generated by disciplines as diverse as literature, philosophy, architecture, history and sociology, that a single and authoritative account of it is impossible. More to the point, we shall see that any such account, for most theorists of post-modernism, is undesirable; for if there is anything that can be said to characterise the post-modern sensibility, it may be a resistance to fixed definitions and externally imposed dogmas.
Nevertheless, if we are to attain some insight into the post-modern, it is worth beginning by making a distinction between two different usages of the term, the one descriptive, the other prescriptive. For some commentators, ‘post-modernism’ has been useful as a term primarily as a way of describing and accounting for the many different social, cultural, political and economic transformations that have occurred in recent years.
If the phrase ‘recent years’ seems a little vague, it is because yet another dispute among theorists centres on when post-modernism started. Although most theorists date the ‘post-modern turn’ somewhere about the 60s, others, such as Dale Carter, identify the emergence of the Cold War (i.e. after World War Two), when America and the West transformed into ‘consumer societies’, as the beginning of the period. Others still, such as Frank Kermode and Gerald Graff, deny the very term ‘post-modernist’ itself, insisting that ‘modernism’ never ended!
Activity
What is it, if anything, that you think distinguishes the culture of the late twentieth century from previous cultures? Is it the dominance of consumerism and mass culture? A scepticism about grand political projects such as communism? Is it the economic and technological interconnectedness of different parts of the world? Or is it the instability of cultural, social and sexual identities? Look at the novels under discussion and identify which of these features they most clearly place in the foreground.
Others, especially contemporary French thinkers, have taken up the term not merely for the purpose of neutral historical description, but as a means of developing a distinct philosophical attitude appropriate to the fragmented and accelerated consumer society of the late twentieth century.
It’s worth noting from the outset that the ‘descriptive’ and ‘prescriptive’ approaches to post-modernism set out below are by no means mutually exclusive. A descriptive account such as Jameson’s will have clear implications as to how the culture of the future should work, while a prescriptive version like Lyotard’s will be grounded in a specific set of social and historical observations.
We’ll begin by examining the descriptive, historical account of the post-modern, associated with thinkers such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, as well as Andreas Huyssen, Linda Hutcheon and Brian McHale. We will then see how some of the phenomena associated with post-modernity are dramatised in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. This will be followed by a summary of Lyotard’s prescriptive model of post-modernism, illustrated by Paul Auster’s City of Glass.
Activity
Each of the writers cited above highlights different aspects of the culture of post-modernity. We’ll discuss Harvey and Jameson below; for further reading, however, Huyssen’s After the Great Divide provides a cultural–historical approach to post-modernism, emphasising the importance of gender and mass culture to the emergence of a post-modern culture. Hutcheon’s two texts, The Poetics of Postmodernism and The Politics of Postmodernism, provide good overviews of the diverse fields of contemporary culture, whereas McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction concentrates on literature, and so may ultimately be the most useful for students of English.
David Harvey identifies the roots of the ‘post-modern condition’ in a series of major economic shifts that took place during the early 70s. With the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement (which fixed the price of gold and the convertibility of the dollar) in 1971, and the Oil Crisis of 1973, came the new global economic regime of ‘flexible accumulation’. The relatively regulated, state-managed economy that had prevailed in the West up to this point gave way to one characterised by perpetual flux in labour markets, a new diversity and instability in patterns of production and consumption, and constant technological innovation. Harvey, employing an essentially Marxist methodology, argues that these economic shifts produced parallel cultural shifts, whereby the ‘relatively stable aesthetic’ of the modernist period is succeeded by ‘a post-modern aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle and the commodification of cultural forms’.
Identifying similar changes in the global economy, Jameson’s work on post-modernism offers a more expansive account of the new cultural forms to which those changes gave rise. The unstable, fractured world of multinational capitalism, he argues, has given rise to a number of tendencies in contemporary cultural life. These include what he calls ‘the waning of affect’, by which he means the loss of any real emotional or psychological investment in the work of art by the artist. Compare, for example, a modernist text such as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a post-modern text like Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. Joyce’s deeply personal exploration of the anxiety and alienation of the young Stephen Daedalus contrasts starkly with the flat, disinterested and amoral tone of Ellis’s narrator Troy. It is as if the post-modern sensibility is too disaffected to express authentic human emotion and experience, producing a literary style that critic James Annesley has described as ‘blank’.
A further, related, feature of post-modern culture identified by Jameson is what he calls a tendency to ‘pastiche’ – the imitation of ‘dead’ or redundant literary, architectural, filmic or other styles, not for the sake of parodying them, which would imply a specific moral or political intent, but simply to celebrate the diversity of styles for their own sake. Post-modernism refuses to privilege the style of any one period – whether Classical, Romantic or Modern – as the ultimate and authoritative one. Jeff Noon’s recent novel, Automated Alice, which acutely imitates Lewis Carroll’s style to tell a third, ‘cyberpunk’ Alice story, illustrates this tendency very clearly, fusing as it does Carroll’s Victorian style with a distinctly 1990s’ sensibility.
Finally, Jameson speaks of the ‘derealisation’ of the world in post-modernist culture, the constant blurring of the boundaries between reality and fantasy. His example is Disneyland, both a ‘real’ and a ‘fictional’ space. Examples of ‘derealisation’ abound in post-modern fiction, for example in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, whose first sentence describes the sky as ‘the colour of television tuned to a dead channel’. What Gibson achieves through such a description is the confusion of ‘nature’, or reality (the sky), with ‘culture’, or unreality (television), pointing to the ways in which the media have penetrated everyday life to such an extent that they are now an inextricable part of our reality.
This last point has been taken up with particular force by the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. In post-modern culture, Baudrillard argues, cultural products ‘are conceived from the point of view of their own reproducibility’, by which he means that today’s mass cultural objects have never existed other than as copies, or what he terms ‘simulations’.
Activity
Try to locate some examples within contemporary culture of what Baudrillard means by ‘simulations’. What would it mean, for instance, to speak of the ‘original’ Mickey Mouse or the ‘original’ Big Mac?
This concept of simulation, as we will now see, is particularly central to our first illustrative text, White Noise.
White Noise is narrated by Jack Gladney, a professor of ‘Hitler Studies’ at a small American campus university. The novel recounts a series of encounters with death and disaster experienced by Jack and his family. In the first part of the novel, we are introduced to Jack’s family and friends, specifically to their experiences with, and ideas about, the television, shopping malls, supermarkets and college that make up life in the small town of Blacksmith. Taken together, these spaces form an illuminating picture of post-modern American culture.
Early on in the novel, Jack and his friend, Murray Jay Siskind, a visiting professor with a special interest in ‘Elvis Studies’, visit a tourist attraction near Blacksmith known as ‘The Most Photographed Barn in America’. The incident establishes one of the novel’s most insistent preoccupations: the ‘derealisation’ of experience described by Jameson. The barn is deemed worth visiting not for any notable historical or architectural features, but simply because it is ‘most photographed’. In other words, it’s not the barn in itself that gives it meaning, but the camera-snapping tourists that surround it. Murray suggests that it is impossible to ‘see’ the barn except through its mediation by the cameras: ‘Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn’.
In the second part of the novel, Jack and his family are forced to evacuate Blacksmith because of a toxic chemical cloud, named ‘The Airborne Toxic Event’ by the media, floating over the town. Again, the event takes on meaning only through its representation by the media, a point comically illustrated by the responses of Jack’s daughter and stepdaughter, Denise and Steffie, to the radio reports. The girls develop the ‘symptoms’ of exposure to the cloud only after the radio announces what those symptoms are. Thus, when they begin to develop sweaty palms after the relevant announcement, Jack’s son Heinrich informs his stepmother Babette that ‘There’s been a correction…They ought to be throwing up’.
Activity
What is it that DeLillo is trying to convey about the nature of reality in contemporary culture and society through these incidents? Try to locate other incidents of the novel that expose a gap between appearance and reality. Do you feel that DeLillo is critical of society’s increasing ‘derealisation’? Does he find anything in this tendency to celebrate?
In particular, examine the effect of simulated culture on the family. What kind of a family are the Gladneys? In what ways do they conform to the stereotypical American nuclear family, and in what ways do they differ from it?
Despite the comedy, DeLillo’s point is profoundly serious. He is suggesting that even a momentous and terrible event such as a chemical disaster can be stripped of any meaningful reality by the mass media and technology. In the final part of the novel, Jack becomes embroiled in a plot sparked by his wife’s secret consumption of an experimental drug named Dylar, which claims to ward off the fear of death. Babette’s need for Dylar implies that in a culture in which every aspect of life, from food to the family, is simulated, the ultimate ‘authentic’ experience, death, becomes too terrifying to contemplate.
Activity
Why do you think DeLillo is so preoccupied with death in White Noise? Why does the thought of death so insistently disturb his central characters? What does he seem to be suggesting about our relationship to death and dying in a ‘simulated’ culture?
DeLillo’s novel, then, very acutely dramatises the experience of post-modern culture. Unlike the novel we’ll discuss below, City of Glass, it is not especially experimental in form – one might say it is a novel ‘about’ post-modernity rather than a post-modernist novel, exploring post-modern themes without necessarily expressing a post-modernist sensibility. Nonetheless, the element of pastiche that Jameson identifies is clearly present in the novel, in its ironic employment of mass cultural genres. Part One reads like a family sitcom (like the ‘Brady Bunch’ , the Gladneys are not an ‘organic’ family – of the four children, only one belongs to both parents), Part Two like a disaster movie and Part Three like a thriller.
Activity
How do the novels you have read compare with other post-modern cultural products? Watch the Coen Brothers’ movies, some of the finest examples of post-modernist pastiche; look at Andy Warhol’s silkscreen portraits and Bruce Nauman’s neon installations, which illustrate very clearly the idea of the ‘waning of affect’; and try to find a photograph of John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, which Jameson regards as the exemplary post-modern building. Which aspects of narrative and imagery in these cultural forms can be identified in DeLillo and Auster?
We now come to Jean-François Lyotard’s philosophy of post-modernism, which he sets out in his book The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard’s argument can be summed up by his description of the prevailing attitude of contemporary society as being one of ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. By this rather daunting phrase, he means that we no longer believe in grand ideological projects that claim they can resolve all human problems and create a utopia.
Activity
How do the novels you have read undermine the idea that tensions and contradictions in society can be ‘resolved’? To what extent can the Dylar narrative in White Noise and the story of Peter Stillman’s experiment on his son in City of Glass be seen as implicit critiques of utopian thinking?
The major political systems, or ‘metanarratives’ of ‘modernity’, fascism, communism and global capitalism, all impose one model of ethics, politics and society on individuals. History, and most obviously the Nazi Holocaust, shows that such imposed systems can wreak unspeakable horror. In contrast to the modernist illusion that all conflicts can be resolved by a single system, Lyotard argues for a world of ‘small’, or micro-narratives, ideas and activities coexisting not in absolute harmony but in creative tension. Against the assumption that all thought and action can be driven in a single direction, he suggests they can take many paths from many different groups and individuals.
Both the French theorists discussed in this chapter, Baudrillard and Lyotard, are complex and demanding writers. If you want to find out more about them, it may be worth reading an introductory text first: Bill Readings’ Understanding Lyotard and Douglas Kellner’s Jean Baudrillard are both recommended. If you’re more ambitious and want to read the writers themselves, start with Baudrillard’s short volume, Simulations, and Lyotard’s The Postmodern Explained to Children.
Lyotard’s argument for social and political diversity, in which a plurality of social voices can coexist creatively even when in conflict, can be seen at work in a different form in a number of post-modernist literary texts. From the French nouveau roman of the 1960s (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras) to the playful work of Italians Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, to experimental American writers John Barth, Donalde Barthelme and Robert Coover, literature in the last few decades has rejected the idea of a single, authoritative narrative voice (or ‘metanarrative’) that can organise and ‘explain’ the events recounted.
Where a classic realist such as Dickens imposes the authority of his own narrative voice on the diverse range of characters and attitudes in his novels, giving them a certain ideological and moral coherence, the narrators of post-modern novels are typically unreliable, unstable, multiple or a combination of the three. Even James Joyce’s great experimental work, Ulysses, despite its celebration of a plurality of different speech registers and literary styles, ultimately imposes a unifying mythic pattern on that plurality.
A central feature of post-modern fiction, which arises out of its distrust of narrative authority, is what is called ‘self-reflexivity’, or ‘metafiction’, in which the author shatters the storytelling illusion by being self-conscious about how the text we are reading is written. In so doing, he or she unmasks the ‘realism’ of the traditional novel as an illusion. As we’ll now see, City of Glass illustrates this tendency very clearly.
Activity
What other examples of ‘self-reflexivity’ can you identify in contemporary literature and culture? Can you think of instances of self-consciousness in recent films or television programmes, for example? What effect does such self-consciousness have on our reading or viewing of the text? Does it simply intrude upon the ‘straight’ telling of a story, or does it make the story more interesting and unpredictable to read?
City of Glass is a classic example of the post-modernist approach to narrative, raising questions about its own status as a text and about the nature of authorship. It questions the very possibility of narrative realism, ingeniously undercutting the illusion of a reliable narrator through its self-reflexive strategies. The first book in Auster’s New York Trilogy, it is a pastiche of the detective story, which subverts the conventions of the crime genre by failing to resolve the web of events in a neatly resolved pattern.
At the start of the novel the central character, Daniel Quinn, a detective writer whose wife has died, is phoned in the middle of the night by an unknown person asking for ‘The Paul Auster Detective Agency’. Initially he informs the caller that he has the wrong number. However, when the same caller rings and asks for Auster again, he replies, ‘This is Auster speaking’, a decision that leads him to assume the role of detective in a strange and elaborate case. Quinn/Auster’s brief is to find and tail the father of his employer, Peter Stillman. Stillman is the victim of an experiment performed on him by his philosopher father, who locked his son in a room throughout his childhood in order to test an obscure theological thesis about the ‘original’, ‘pure’ language of God.
During the course of the novel, Quinn tracks down and visits the ‘real’ Paul Auster and tells him of the events that have taken place. ‘Auster’ turns out to be a writer whose biography very closely resembles that of the Auster we know to be the author of City of Glass! However, ‘Auster’ the character claims to know nothing of the Stillman case and, when told by Quinn of what has happened, remarks, ‘If I had been in your place, I probably would have done the same thing’.
Activity
How does the encounter between Quinn and ‘Auster’ illustrate the strategy of metafictional play? Consider how, by relegating himself to the status of a minor character in his own text, at the mercy of contingency, chance and randomness, Auster undermines the traditional conception of the author as the invisible but all-knowing ‘God-like’ force at the centre of the book. What is the novel suggesting about the relationship between ‘authorship’ and authority or control?
The novel’s plot plays consistently with the ideas of contingency and chance. Waiting in secret for the elder Stillman at Grand Central Station, Quinn spots him coming off a train, only to find seconds later that a second man is walking directly behind the first, ‘his face the exact twin of Stillman’s’. Quinn finally decides to follow the ‘first’ Stillman, but the arbitrariness of this decision offers a sly self-reflexive comment on the arbitrariness of the novelist’s choices. Auster demonstrates that at every point, the novelist is forced to carry his story at random in one direction rather than another, so that every actual plot is haunted by the ‘ghosts’ of other, unrealised plots.
The elder Stillman’s curious ideas about, and experiments with, language further explore the theme of contingency. Stillman finds that the existing form of human language is inadequate because it is imprecise. For example, we continue to call a broken umbrella an umbrella, even though ‘“it can no longer perform its function” and has therefore “ceased to be an umbrella’’’. Stillman’s project is to iron this imprecision out of language, to make our words ‘at last say what we have to say’.
This is his apparent motivation for isolating his son from the world for his first nine years; he believes that, cut off from the world’s corrupting influence, the boy will speak the perfect, uncorrupted language of God. In fact, however, the experiment fails, and the boy grows up to speak incomprehensible gibberish such as ‘Wimble click crumblechaw beloo’. The attempt to remove indeterminacy from language, to put ourselves in absolute control of our words, Auster implies, is doomed to fail. In Lyotard’s terms, we might say that the attempt to impose a single, authoritative ‘meta-narrative’ on the inherent diversity and complexity of language will inevitably collapse.
Activity
You may find it useful to compare City of Glass with a more traditional detective story such as Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. What are the central differences between the two authors’ approaches to the genre? How do the methods of Chandler’s detective, Marlowe, compare with those of Quinn? By responding to these questions, you should glean some instructive insights into the differences between traditional-realist and post-modernist fiction.
After studying the aspects of post-modernism covered in this chapter of the subject guide, you may wish to go on to study other topics that might overlap with post-modernism and could be applied to other questions of Section B of the examination. The following list is by no means exhaustive:
By the end of this chapter, having studied the essential reading and some of the recommended critical texts, you should: