The Reader in Modernist Fiction, Brian Richardson
The Reader in Modernist Fiction, Brian Richardson, Edinburgh: EUP, 2024 (216 p.), ISBN 978-1-3995-2836-8
Texte intégral
1Brian Richardson is Professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Maryland. He is the author of several monographs on modernism and narrative theory. In his latest book, The Reader in Modernist Fiction, he studies the implications of the recurrence of reading figures in modernist works of fiction published between 1890 and 1938. His hypothesis is that the misreading reader-characters we encounter in these novels help us become more astute critical readers. The main objective here is critical and theoretical, geared towards a reassessment of the reception of high modernist texts. Richardson suggests we can identify a ‘repeated alignment’ of the modernist reader with ‘progressive ideological positionings, and dramatic affirmations of the sexualized body’ (xiv). On a corpus made up of novels, novellas and short stories by Conrad, Joyce, Mansfield, Ford, Woolf, Faulkner, Porter, Bowen, Wharton, and Greene (with an opening to postmodernism and contemporary literature in the last chapter), Richardson researches the figure of what he calls a perceptive ‘modernist reader’.
2In his introduction, ‘Modernist Hieroglyphics and the Implicated Reader’, he puts forth what will be one of his main arguments: ‘Modernism teaches readers how to comprehend misleading statements about the world and unusual constructions within the text’ (1). There is undoubtedly something forward-thinking in this suggestion of a didactic agenda of modernism, that also revises the politics and the accessibility of novels which should not be for ‘savvy interpreters’ only (2). Richardson shows how his work comes as a supplement to recent studies on modernism but also to books addressing the theory of the reader (for instance Ian Watt’s notion of ‘delayed decoding’ in Conrad’s novels, Dorothee Birke’s Writing the Reader, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s ‘reparative reading’, or Michael Warner’s ‘uncritical reading’). Five examples of reader-characters in famous modernist novels are then mentioned as a transition to the first chapter.
3Richardson first looks at ‘Suppressed Narratives, Subaltern Reading, and the Drama of Interpretation’ in James, Conrad, and Ford. He shows that there are but few reading figures in James’s novels. Ford’s The Good Soldier is quickly evoked at the end of the chapter. The pages on Conrad are more substantial. Richardson provides a detailed account of misinterpretation in ‘The Secret Sharer’ and of the many narrative strategies of manipulation crafted by Conrad. He also addresses the obviously self-reflexive quality of his object of study and in a corpus ‘that consistently stages and thematizes narrative interpretation’ (43). Richardson indicates he wishes to go beyond the traditional opposition between ‘surface reading’ and ‘symptomatic reading’, the latter consisting in the discovery and interpretation of what the text represses. He suggests, for instance, that reading and accessing the (homo)sexual undertones in Conrad’s work turns us into ‘critical readers’. Chapter 2 starts on this same motif in Joyce: ‘Reading and misreading are central and ubiquitous in Joyce’s narratives; often, they are connected to some form of sexual desire’ (52). This chapter (‘The Fate of Reading in the Work of Joyce: Illusion, Demystification, Sexuality’) is a close study of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. Richardson mentions (somehow belatedly) some of the tenets of reader response criticism, such as the alternatives of the monistic theory of a model reader and of open and indeterminate reading, and posits that his own approach resists this opposition (as well as that between surface and symptomatic reading). The way the reader of modernist fiction learns to decode, interpret, and interact with the text meets these definitions but also invalidates them. According to Richardson, modernist intricacies cannot be reduced to these theoretical frames. As there always is a multiplicity of implied readers in a modernist novel, there must be some complementarity between various critical approaches so as to ‘explore the depths [the quintessential modernist text] has itself created’ (73).
4In the next chapter, ‘“Books Were Not in Their Line”: The Use and Abuse of Reading in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf’, Richardson moves from a thematic perspective (‘suggestive scenes of failed discussions of literature at dinner parties’, 77) to insightful comments on Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. His reading of the novel brings in the question of ethics, be it in modernist fiction itself or in his own conceptual work, the point of which is to claim that ‘[t]he act of engaging with books can make the readers (and often those who observe the readers) better people, more generous and less self-absorbed’ (102)—something scholars interested in the ethics of fiction will be familiar with. Chapter 4 (‘The Dangers of Reading from Edith Wharton to Ralph Ellison’) is about many authors (Wharton, Faulkner, Porter, Bowen, Greene, Ellison, and Salih). Richardson goes beyond modernism in order to test his first findings on novels published later. This is also what he embarks on in the last chapter, ‘Reading Ruins: From Modernism to the Illegible Texts of Postmodernism and Beyond’. He has fascinating pages on Nabokov’s Lolita, yet other more contentious assertions, such as: ‘Several distinct groups of actual readers—women, gays, and working-class men—are also denigrated by this novel’ (141). The passage about the illegibility of postmodernist fiction adds another dimension to Richardson’s argument. The end of the chapter is about Banville and McEwan’s neomodernist streaks, with three pages on Atonement.
5‘The Stories of Modern Fiction, the End(s) of Misreading, and the Other Reader’s Response’ is the title of the conclusion. Richardson first reformulates the gist of his proposition regarding the didactic aspect of modernist aesthetics: ‘The drama of reading expresses an aesthetic, performs ideological critiques, and transforms the role of the reader’ (164). He adds that his work partakes in the field of hermeneutics. It comes as no surprise that he should then advocate an alternative to the usual literary periodisation and write we should no longer use the terms modernism and postmodernism, but merely study the modernism of post-1890 novels. He also returns to the political aspects of both modernism and his own study, claiming that reading these novels makes readers more aware and critical of ‘normative heterosexuality, and gender hierarchies; national, class, and ethnic discriminations’ (169). Surprisingly, it is in the conclusion that the literature review is to be found (though some titles are mentioned in the introduction). Only here does Richardson situate his work in the field of narrative and critical theory, citing the works of Linda Hutcheon, David Spurr, and Ellen Spolsky, among others. A discussion of some of these previous conceptualisations of reading earlier in the book might have helped grasp Richardson’s own theoretical stance as well as the way he means to supplement these other findings in narrative theory.
6The Reader in Modernist Fiction is a challenging study in reader response criticism. The corpus is so vast that the contextualisation (of both the novels and their interpretations) is not always detailed. Some novels, which perfectly fit with the main line of enquiry here, are not used for in-depth analysis, but serve as further examples or illustrations of what has been proposed before (such as with The Good Soldier or Atonement). Though Richardson’s approach is thematic and his objective is theoretical, further formal or stylistic analyses would have been a fruitful addition to work on the reception of modernist intricacies. The theoretical proposition is compelling. It is at the crossroads of reader response theory, ethics, narrative theory, and even pragmatics, though it is not always very easy to understand how exactly Richardson anchors his work in all these fields. In spite of this, the book is a very convincing study of an impressive number of novels belonging to an equally impressive timescale. Richardson’s overall demonstration is always clear. His work is not only on reading and readers, but also of course on misreading and misinterpreting, which are key notions in literary studies, as testified once again by this new publication. The conceptualisation of the figure of the ‘critical reader’ is very interesting. What Richardson suggests about the didactic endgame of modernism and its ethical and political sides is quite simulating. All this chimes in with other current works in narrative theory, for instance by Marco Caracciolo. It is also a very cogent way to raise again the question of the ethics and politics of form. About Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Richardson writes: ‘Books have a formative influence; they help him recognize and orient his experience’ (56). He contends that this is what modernist novels do to and for their readers. There is no doubt that this is what the experience of reading The Reader in Modernist Fiction also achieves, given the many gaps the book opens in our current schools of thought.
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Laurent Quero Mellet, « The Reader in Modernist Fiction, Brian Richardson », Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 68 | 2025, mis en ligne le 17 mai 2025, consulté le 14 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16571 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/141gs
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.
Haut de page
Afficher l’image

