Abstract

… [T]o trace the problematic of writing in the Norris canon is foremost to confirm Fried’s claims about its pervasiveness. Indeed, he now intimates that the problematic pervades the fiction of “other important writers of the 1890s and early 1900s,” work by Jack London, Harold Frederic, and Henry James . On the one hand, this pervasiveness muddies an already ambivalent use of the term impressionism ;10 on the other hand, it augments Fried’s sense that the thematization of writing attained particular moment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To my eye, nonetheless, the moment dissolves once its historical isolationism confronts “literary history.” 10. Fried explicitly addresses this ambivalence, explaining that “I am unpersuaded by the many attempts that have been made to define that concept either in relation to French impressionist painting or in terms of a fidelity to or evocation of the ‘impressions’ of one or more characters , but I see no comparably useful designation for the global tendency that Crane, Norris, and Conrad all instantiate” . The term, as I see it however, serves precisely to exclude the global tendency as it is instantiated elsewhere. And yet, to the degree that “impressionism” can now designate a confrontation between the sight of writing and the impressionist emphasis on sight as traditionally understood, Fried, despite all disclaimers, revivifies that tradition . Bill Brown, assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, is presently completing a book on the “economy of play” in the work of Stephen Crane