Passionate Doubts

This absorbing new study discusses theories of interpretation and construction of the self in six important contemporary novels. In semiotic analyses of John Barth's LETTERS, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire , John Hawkes' Travesty , Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow , Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser , and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood , Patrick O'Donnell argues that contemporary fiction takes interpretation as its subject and as the very impetus for its making. In an introductory dialogue and a cl