You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As Dr. Gliserman explains in the preface, “This book is about how the human body makes its appearance in those literary texts we call novels
and what message that body transmits” (p. ix). Contending that the body is not merely described in novels, or evoked in imagery, but is embedded in the very syntax of the text, just as DNA is preserved in amber (p. 1), Gliserman draws upon the linguistics of Chomsky, and the related fields of syntactics and semantics, to develop his study of the multiplicity of levels in which the body is manifested in those representative novels he considers. As he “deconstructs” the texts, he forges a connection between these linguistic approaches and the psychoanalytic understanding of the conscious and unconscious manifestations of the body in language. Essentially, what Dr. Gliserman seems to be attempting to do, is to shed light on the “mind-body problem” through an unpacking of the intricately interwoven verbal, symbolic, and nonverbal communications which come forth in a good novel. Almost coincidentally, Dr. Gliserman points out, his analysis of the works selected leads him to a study of trauma, which frequently serves as a theme in literature, and which cuts to the heart of the mind-body connection, through the breaking down of the boundaries of defense which we erect.
It is Gliserman's thesis that an author's style is not merely an artifice, but rather (beyond its consciously crafted language) an unconscious expression of a deeper, bodily (nonverbal) message. He declares: “A novel articulates a body as much as it tells a story. It develops a preverbal, ur-gender, nonverbal and/or unverbalized visceral experience as much as it develops an intricate symbolic interpersonal interaction in a complex setting over space and time” (p. 3). He cites the contributions which feminist writers have made to the awareness of the bodily messages, and the gender-specific communications which are to be found in literature, but he also notes the more u