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I Do, I Undo, I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves. Finn Fordham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 296. $ I 10.00 (cloth).
The title of Finn Fordham's ambitious book looks more elegant on the cover, where the three verbal activities of doing are uncapitalized and unpunctuated, than it does on die inside page, or here, or as it will in library catalogues and bibliographies. "I do I undo I redo" has a Joycean simplicity; "I Do, I Undo, I Redo" seems scholastic. But perhaps die confusion is appropriate, because die book's subject is die dense knot of relations between die "I" and die tilings it makes and remakes, including itself, including literature. W. B. Yeats, who is one of die indefatigable modemist revisers that Fordham discusses, puts die problem clearly in his famous 1908 rebuke to friends who, in noting that die "I" and its "song" were not finally dissolvable, complained that his revisions were wrong. For Yeats, as for Fordham, die self was remade in revision, and revision was die act of a reformed self.
Fordham's book is a very timely contribution to two major recent strands of work in modernist studies: namely, textual genesis and life writing. Its ambition, its pleasure, and some of its difficulty lie in bringing die two fields together. F or example, do writings about die self have a different, or more complex, genesis than more straightforwardly exterior writing (realist fiction, non-fiction)? Fordham refers to Philippe Lejeune, who has argued that autobiographical writing is uniquely complex in genesis, and covers, in his own genetic analyses, a broad range of texts, such as Hopkins's unpublished poetry, Yeats's juvenilia, or die fiction of Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf. But he does not select die most obviously autobiographical or self-reflexive writings: he chooses Ulysses over Portrait of the Artist, and The Waves instead of To the Lighthouse. Bringing die two fields together like this, without making a modal or generic argument, risks, as Fordham courageously admits, having too many moving parts. For example, did Hopkins's syntactically compressed poetry, which was written, as Fordham beautifully shows, on extremely economically used and reused paper, reflect an actual (repressed) self or a desired one ("a waste-free economy of die virtuous self" (92))?...