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BOOK REVIEWS 185

successfully bridging this ‘divide’ in his illuminating and meticulous readings


of Cather’s promotional as well as fictional oeuvre.
doi:10.1093/english/efq006 IRENE VISSER
University of Groningen
The Netherlands

Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. By Jennifer DeVere Brody. Duke


University Press, 2008. ISBN 9780822342359. Pb. £11.99.

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The Essential Guide to English Studies. By Peter Childs. Continuum, 2008.
ISBN 9780826488190. Pb. £12.99.

Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play is not likely to be a best-seller of the Lynne
Truss variety, being firmly in the academic mode and differentiating itself
from prescriptive grammar, even of the populist kind. It is a pity, though,
that its readership may be in the relatively specialist fields of cultural and
performance studies, because it is dazzling in its inter-disciplinarity and
most delightful to read. Jennifer DeVere Brody has produced a study on
performance art which is itself a performance, a play on punctuation which
defamiliarizes the mundane accompaniment to communication which is
punctuation, and reinvents its components as significant cultural markers.
She argues that punctuation provides much of the ‘affect’ of post-
enlightenment Western print culture and, indeed, produces ‘excessive’
meaning: performance ‘affects effectively and vice versa’. The book traces
the ‘handmaid’s tale’ of punctuation from an aid to prose writing, relatively
unexamined or theorized, to a regulator of decorous discourse and draws on
Coleridge and critical influences from the ‘close-reading’ of literary texts to
postcolonial and queer theory. However, this is not a systematic study.
Quoting in justification Stein’s ‘some punctuation is interesting, some is
not’, it is a partial and eclectic series of discontinuous performance medita-
tions, emphasizing the ludic and lewd.
Play is evident from Chapter 1 when the punctuation mark, the dot, is
transformed into the polka dot, representing in its multiplicity a resistance to
congealing, to narrative, and to closure. The book’s second chapter hangs
on the elaborated point, the ellipsis, the fragmentary . . .. It is a highly
ambivalent marker, especially in the interpretation of playscripts and, for
DeVere Brody, it exemplifies the elusive and visceral quality of invisible
blackness and the premise of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), read here as a
‘performance’ of blackness, a kind of visible jazz rhythm. The chapter dedi-
cated to the hyphen is, likewise, about performance and identity.
186 BOOK REVIEWS
Occupying ‘impossible’ positions, the hyphen both links and divides and
thereby problematizes. The exemplar is, again, racial identity, and the mar-
ginal position of people inhabiting double cultures and facing pressures of
incorporation and homogeneity.
Quotation marks are ‘queer’, both denoting authority and authenticity,
and questioning the status of what passes for natural. They mark perform-
ance, although post-structuralism has exploded such distinctions as natural
and performed. Most of this section is a study of the lyric and danced
memory routines of Bill Jones, whose poses are the physical equivalent of
quotations which trouble the distinction between first and third persons and

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equivocate history, truth, sincerity, sexual identity, and any single ideological
position. This equivocation is particularly embodied in the following
Joycean and performative chapter, rich in formal experimentation and lit-
erary and critical allusion in its play on ‘sem;erot;ics’ and ‘colon:zat;ions’.
The final chapter, ‘Cyberpunktuations’ represents the ultimate transform-
ation of the punctuation mark into a visual and affective performance.
Electronic communication is ironically one of the most tangible and grapho-
logical in its transformation of punctuation marks into emoticons.
Although this book claims the right to ‘err with the errant’ in punctua-
tion and style, it is not only engaging, perceptive, erudite and witty, but also
written with punctilious elegance – and no jokes about pandas.
However, if the matter of audience is a small aside with respect to
Jennifer DeVere Brody’s book, it is the major issue with Peter Child’s The
Essential Guide to English Studies and prompts the question ‘essential to
whom’? Part 1 is labelled ‘The basics’ and suggests that the book is intended
to be of use to all students ‘starting or contemplating a higher education
course in English’. The aim is to be ‘practical’ and to that end it advises on
careers and the language of higher education (HE) as well as providing study
and assessment tips. In practice, however, the advice is highly generalized,
banal or even verging on the patronizing.
The credentials of the author for writing a useful and effective study
guide are excellent. Peter Childs has studied literature as an Open University
student and has twenty years’ experience of studying and teaching in all
parts of the HE sector. The book was written with the support of a Higher
Education Academy National Teaching Fellowship. Certainly, there are
some unusual elements which are to be welcomed, yet each seems to miss
its target. For instance, the advice from English undergraduates to prospec-
tive students might be more lively, institutionally specific, helpful, and more
current, if it were on Facebook rather than in a textbook. On the other
hand, the discussion on access and widening participation, on the demogra-
phy of English students and lecturers, and on the English benchmark, is
probably less useful to students than to new lecturers.
BOOK REVIEWS 187
Part 2 is devoted to key skills: reading, research, writing, and note-taking.
Sadly there is little here that is likely to be of practical benefit. For instance,
the question of ‘who and what constitutes English literature’ invokes the
idea of the canon and lists both some potential single-author modules and
key authors with which a student should probably be familiar, a list admitted
to be arbitrary. Part 3 on assessment again contains some useful advice on,
for instance, close textual analysis, but most of the examples are from novels
and neither the terms ‘verse’ or ‘poetry’ even appear in the Index, still less
any actual worked examples. In a textbook designed to help new under-
graduates with the demands of unfamiliar material, this is an astonishing

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omission. On assignments there is a similar mixture of decent advice but a
lack of detail. There is a sample of a poor and a better introduction to an
essay on Macbeth, but this is not developed by any demonstration of what
might turn the one into the other. Similarly, the brief section on plagiarism
is not accompanied by any practical guidance on how to go about writing
an essay in a way which will avoid ending up with a patchwork of quota-
tions, acknowledged or unacknowledged. How do students develop their
own ideas in a way which meets academic expectations? A detailed account
of how to achieve this would have been a real contribution both for students
and markers.
This book looks very thin beside other introductory textbooks for HE
English and its structure does not work well. It might have been organized
better around the student lifecycle, with dissertation writing and employ-
ability located at the end. In trying to be comprehensive but summary, all
things to all students, sadly the book fails to offer much to be recommended
to any of them.

doi:10.1093/english/efp057 KATHRYN SOUTHWORTH


Newman University College

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