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THE DISTINCTION OF FICTION. By Dorrit Cohn. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 197. $42.
"Everything has a shape, if you look for it," writes the narrator of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. "There is no escape from form" (p. 27 1) . In her new book The Distinction of Fiction, recent winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Dorrit Cohn sets out to validate this observation in relation to narrative texts.
Cohn's book is elegantly written and demonstrates an impressive knowledge of scholarship in the theoretical field of narratology. Cohn's goal in the study is to define, using formalist methodology, how fiction is different from other narrative genres such as history, biography, and psychoanalytic case studies. She notes that the word "distinction" in her title refers both to "uniqueness" and "differentiation" and indicates her belief that fictional narrative employs formal patterns of world and character construction ruled out by other kinds of narrative forms. She supports this claim using specific examples of narrative fiction and nonfiction: among others, Freud's psychoanalytic case studies, Proust's A la Rechereche du temps perdu, Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Marbot,J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, Mann's Death in Venice, and Tolstoy's War and Peace. Throughout the study, Cohn asserts the unique formal characteristics of fictional narrative; she reasserts the importance of authorial intentionality, extratextual evidence for narrative analysis, and formalist strategies of narrative analysis.
In fact, influenced by Kate Hamburger's The Logic of Literature ( 973) and the works of Gerard Genette, Cohn squares off against many of the critical methodologies dominating literary criticism for the past twenty years. Maintaining scholarly reserve throughout the study, she nonetheless dismisses poststructuralist analyses at various points as hyperbolic, willful misreadings. Cohn keeps her own critical lens tightly focused. For example, in a chapter distinguishing nonfictional from fictional life stories, she attacks claims made by Barbara Herrnstein Smith and argues that the "distinction of person seems to me the enabling move...