Customer Reviews

The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics)

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Brillant and acute, if not somewhat idiosyncratic, close-readings of U.S. literary naturalistic texts. Michaels's buoyant prose and the oblique angles he takes in historicizing the texts make for a provoking, worthwhile read. His arguments concerning the masochistic contract (revision of the more conventional deleuzean understanding) and his exploration of the question 'why does the miser save?' are among the most compelling and thrilling close-reads--rather than 'applying theory' to the texts at hand, he offers ways in which the texts themselves produce critical theory. Fabulous work.

This book, by far, goes on my list of one of the worst books I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Pseudo-clever theoretical jumps about texts that oversimplify and completely decontextualize what the texts say. For example, "The Yellow Wallpaper," commonly thought to present a woman who is confined by her husband/doctor in the attic to lead to her eventual madness. According to Michaels, the short story is not about confinement and restriction, but about over-production of hysteria that the unnamed narrator is forced to engage in because of the ideology of her society. Interesting? maybe. Insightful about the Yellow Wallpaper? Not at all. If you are into post-structural theory masturbating over itself 244 pages, please buy this book.