ABSTRACT
In families of three children, so they say, there is always the odd one out. Here, with the pairing obvious between MacCannell’s ‘brother’ and Showalter’s ‘sister’, there would seem to be little doubt that it must be poor Jane. So where does she fit in? ‘Around 1981’? Not much to write home about there. ‘Academic Feminist Literary Theory’? So this one has grown up, it seems, and left the family for good. In fact, she tells us in no uncertain terms that we should all try to follow suit: ‘lf we are going to understand our relation to the academic institution within which we think and teach and speak, we need to recognize its specific dynamics which are obscured in the recourse to familial metaphor’ (p. 239). The odd one out is always left till last (even though that may also mean she triumphs in the end). So I will defer my reading of Gallop until her siblings have been dealt with. In the meantime, it is the brother, of course, who demands attention first-not just any older brother, in fact, but (to give him his proper name) the Brother. Juliet Flower MacCannell maintains the upper case throughout her discussion of what she calls the Regime of the Brother-a familial, or at least pseudo-familial state, upon which we —western we-have collectively and unknowingly entered since the time of the Enlightenment. Unlike the other two histories in this trio of books, this one involves a very grand narrative, in effect a rewrite of the history of the past two hundred years, with proof furnished by literature (much on Rousseau and Duras, also Stendhal, James, Rhys, Cixous, and even John Galsworthy); a bit of Freud and Lacan; and
the occasional state-of-the-network paragraph to remind us where we worldhistorically are.
