Newspaper columnist, sports writer, and author of short stories, Ring Lardner was one of the most popular personalities of the early twentieth century. Douglas Robinson combines careful psychological and cultural analysis to present an important reappraisal of this critically neglected American author.
Robinson's study offers an exploration of Lardner's life and work. He presents a long, in-depth reading of a single short story, "Who Dealt?," as well as a briefer look at several others. He explores the contradictions of Lardner's patriarchal masculinity - how such a dour, sexist alcoholic who hated humor and bad grammar could have created such a rich body of minoritarian writing, steeped in the emergent voices of women and the lower middle class - and the social functions served by Lardner's writing in twentieth-century America.
Ring Lardner and the Other is so titled because it is also an investigation of the "Other," in an expanded Lacanian sense: the speaking of various unconscious voices (mother and father and child, culture and anarchy, majority and minority) through literary characters and their authors and readers. Looking at this element in Lardner's work, Robinson exfoliates Lacan's germinal concept of the Other by interweaving it with a series of theoretical formulations by Bateson, Deleuze and Guattari, and others.
Steeped in masculine psychology and the emancipatory agenda of the profeminist men's movement, the book also engages in dialogue with feminist voices and features in the Appendix an essay by Ellen Gardiner. The first postmodern reading of Ring Lardner, this study emphasizes the complexity and diversity of the voices upon which Lardner drew in his writing. Thus, in addition to the expected literary-critical readership, it will interest Americanists concerned with modernism, with vernacular humor, and with the Chicago school, as well as literary theorists interested in integrating psychoanalytic with cultural criticism.
Industry Reviews
"This is a brilliantly structured experiment in theoretically based criticism....This is an important work detailing the meaning of 'minor' writers. It breaks ground to find new ways to give serious attention to popular literature."--Choice
"A stimulating, idiosyncratic, and original exploration not only of Ring Lardner but of many of the issues raised in his work that continue to disturb contemporary thought."--Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Tulane University
"Robinson's book is far more than a subtle rereading of Lardner. In both his argument and its formulation, he shows how the work of Lacan and Bateson can be the basis of a post-feminist criticism."--David Nye, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study
"There is a great deal to like about this book. Its readings of Lardner are strong and innovative; its structure of dominant/subversive readings is provocative; and its proposed model of reading promises to be extremely useful and productive....The analyses of minoritarian writers are brilliant, and the material about the proletariat as madness and the interpellation of the proletariat into middle class is extremely valuable....The book will stand well as an
important contribution to the growing field of men's studies."--Susan Jeffords, University of Washington
"This volume has a good deal to offer."--American Literature
"This is a brilliantly structured experiment in theoretically based criticism....This is an important work detailing the meaning of 'minor' writers. It breaks ground to find new ways to give serious attention to popular literature."--Choice
"A stimulating, idiosyncratic, and original exploration not only of Ring Lardner but of many of the issues raised in his work that continue to disturb contemporary thought."--Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Tulane University
"Robinson's book is far more than a subtle rereading of Lardner. In both his argument and its formulation, he shows how the work of Lacan and Bateson can be the basis of a post-feminist criticism."--David Nye, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study
"There is a great deal to like about this book. Its readings of Lardner are strong and innovative; its structure of dominant/subversive readings is provocative; and its proposed model of reading promises to be extremely useful and productive....The analyses of minoritarian writers are brilliant, and the material about the proletariat as madness and the interpellation of the proletariat into middle class is extremely valuable....The book will stand well as an
important contribution to the growing field of men's studies."--Susan Jeffords, University of Washington
"This volume has a good deal to offer."--American Literature
