At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text

The referential and marginal features of footnotes serve different functions in criticism and literature: scholarly footnotes shore up the text by enclosing it and limiting its claims; in fiction, footnotes extend textual authority by enlarging the fictional context. Both inner- and outer-directed, these two kinds of notations display a self-conscious anxiety about the critical and creative acts they annotate. Scholarly notes mask this ambivalence by claiming extratextual authority; literary notes highlight the ambivalence by consciously dividing the text against itself. This essay examines the ways footnotes in Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegans Wake parody the notational convention and draw attention to the faulted authority of its discourse by flouting scholarly claims to objectivity and neutrality, by calling into question the relations of author and reader on textual grounds, and by using self-reflexive narrative methods to illustrate the rhetorical double bind that keeps all language at the margin of discourse.

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Specimens of Double Bind.

PsycCRITIQUES ◽

10.1037/007907 ◽

1965 ◽

Vol 10 (4) ◽

Author(s):

Norman F. Watt

Keyword(s):

Double Bind

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What Lies Beyond the Double Bind?

Contemporary Psychology ◽

10.1037/017597 ◽

1979 ◽

Vol 24 (10) ◽

pp. 770-771

Author(s):

THOMAS C. TODD

Keyword(s):

Double Bind

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Double bind theory and analagous confusion techniques in the induction and maintenance of multiple personality disorder and dissociative states

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e609912012-042 ◽

1985 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Steven Feldman

Keyword(s):

Personality Disorder ◽

Multiple Personality Disorder ◽

Double Bind ◽

Multiple Personality ◽

Dissociative States

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Rewriting Textual Authority: Exploring Uses of Texts Within Indigenous Language Programs

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e643192011-001 ◽

2010 ◽

Author(s):

Mindy Morgan

Keyword(s):

Indigenous Language ◽

Language Programs ◽

Textual Authority

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‘The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track’: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Irish University Review ◽

10.3366/iur.2012.0007 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 32-52 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Anne Mulhall

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Literary Culture ◽

Woman Writer ◽

Double Bind ◽

Women Poets ◽

Substantial Body ◽

Growing Body ◽

Critical Attention ◽

Irish Women ◽

Under Construction

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

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