Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction (review)
Indeed, such over-neatness troubles the book's writing as well. Perdigao states the complicated main ideas of her argument clearly, and consistently ties points of analysis back to them, but she reiterates these ideas past clarity and toward tedium. Such constant repetition does deliver the sense of an airtight argument, but at the price of not allowing it or us to breathe; the argument often moves along in mincing steps that make the reader long for a larger leap. Substantively, the argument at times makes a few inappropriate leaps, such as flirting with the complicated concept of memorializing throughout the book without fully engaging it theoretically, then smuggling in the grand gesture of a 9/11 comparison in the conclusion—a big finish that the book does not earn. Still, From Modernist Entombment to Postmodernist Exhumation does offer a fresh way of conceptualizing literature's responses to and depictions of a growing interest in the paradoxical workings of language and their intersections with the material world in the twentieth century. And with her bald prefacing of her intention to discuss "how symbols make meaning and are made meaningful, for grievers, for survivors, for all of us" (viii), Perdigao aligns herself with an exciting and evolving body of recent work that reads the tension between body and text, and the crises of signification that arise out of it, as ways of coming to meaning in texts and in the world, rather than as impediments to both.