![]() ![]() ![]() (3) A deconstructive approach to Joan of Arc can't remove that impasse, though it can offer a different way of defining it. (2) Two decades of criticism steeped in cultural studies has produced little healing-readers must now imagine a Clemens who is also a pious Twain, a capitalist Twain, a racist Twain, and an anarchic Twain. Such haste to attribute, especially on the basis of a playful and imprecise association, exposes the open critical wound of what properly does belong to Clemens or to Twain, the perennial bane of his critics, which surfaced in James Cox's mid-eighties frustration that we still don't know the difference between them (160). (1) That such an odd consensus arises from critics of a wide variety of hermeneutic persuasions may not be surprising, after all, since the majority more or less identify the author's views with those of Joan's hagiographer, Sieur Louis de Conte, also the novel's narrator, whose initials duplicate those of the "real" person behind the famous pseudonym. Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895) has always been something of an embarrassment: Twain called it "the best of all my books," but his critics see it as an aberrational paean to innocence in the aging writer's trajectory from skepticism to pessimism. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |