To browse Academia. By design, our title refers to Brooks and Warren's influential textbooks, especially Understanding Fiction. In establishing this intertextuality, we are neither claiming kinship with Brooks and Warren's volume nor launching yet another assault on New Criticism.
Instead, we are invoking their familiar title in order to fix a point of orientation in an increasingly complicated critical land scape, a point that will help us define the ways that the terms understanding, fiction, and narrative-as well as the institutional practices to which they are tied-have altered in the past fifty years.
In the most general sense, understanding fiction and its signifieds have weathered this period the way that any social construct a string quartet, a baseball franchise, a family, an English depart ment survives a half-century: the signifiers have remained intact while the signifieds have been continuously transformed.
Our point is that these alterations in the landscape cannot be ignored. To take one example, consider the issue of organic unity. Where Brooks and Warren could once proclaim with utter author ity and confidence that "A piece of fiction is a unity, in so far as the piece of fiction is successful" xx , contemporary critics of narrative share no such agreement about the relation between unity and success. In other words, rather than holding up unity as a goal to be achieved and a measure of aesthetic success, Rabinowitz focuses on how a rupture in organic unity allows us to read the novel as a site of conflict between ideologies.
An untheorized contribution is necessarily limited, in part, for a reason that others before us have articulated: as the number of new readings increases, the distinctiveness of any single reading fades away. In his essay "Naturalizing Molloy? Thomas Pavel certainly offers a new reading of Beckett's novel. But by highlighting the contrast between hermeneutics and poetics and the relation between tradition and innovation, he contextualizes that reading by asking us to rethink, on theoretical grounds, the consensus that has grown up around Beckett.
