Echo Chambers provides an illuminating discussion of the representation of “voice” in novels by Dickens, Joyce, Faulkner, Lowry, and Gaddis. Focusing on the paradoxes of “voice” as an indication of how different authors understand the contradictions of “identity,” O'Donnell charts the recent history of subjectivity as reflected in the development of modern fiction. With strong theoretical underpinning—O'Donnell skillfully utilizes the theories formulated by Bakhtin, Derrida, Bersani, De Man, Deleuze, and Guattari, among others, and the semiotics of voice put forth by Julia Kristeva—Echo Chambers shows how identity is inherently contradictory, conflicted, and multiple.

This insightful volume compellingly demonstrates that “voice” is a revealing (because contradictory and heterogeneous) site where language, the body, culture, and subjectivity meet. Echo Chambers makes an important contribution to the study of modern literature, the semiotics of identity, and cultural poetics as they are informed by the projections of voice in modern narrativ

Patrick O’Donnell, Eberly Professor of American Literature at West Virginia University, has taught at universities of Arizona, California-Davis, Bordeaux, and Stuttgart and the Karls-Eberhand University of Tubingen. His previous books on modern and contemporary fiction include Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretations in Contemporary American Fiction (Iowa, 1986) and John Hawkes. He is the editor of New Essays on “The Crying of Lot 49” and coeditor of Intertexuality and Contemporary American Fiction and is now working on a book about paranoia and contemporary American fiction.