Abstract
This final essay deals with a novel that is relatively little known, partly because it is a first novel published in 1994.1 It was chosen because it explicitly or implicitly questions the significance of adultery in relation to a variety of kinds of contemporary context. In this opening section I attempt some additional contextualisation which should show why this is important.
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Notes
Frances Liardet, The Game (London, Macmillan, 1994). For their helpful and encouraging remarks on preliminary drafts of this essay, thanks to David Bellos, Ann Caesar, Peter Hainsworth, Nicholas White, and, especially, Frances Liardet and Naomi Segal. For any defects in the final version, I am of course to blame.
On public opinion at the turn of the decade, see Jacques Derrida, ‘La démocratie ajournée’, in L’autre cap (Paris: Minuit, 1991). I do not, of course, wish to suggest that this material is easily compatible with that cited in note 2 above. The disjunction between Jameson’s work and Derrida’s would need to be charted by reference to their different responses to Sartre, Althusser and Lyotard.
See Perry Anderson, ‘A culture in contraflow’, in English Questions (London: Verso, 1993), 193–301, for a classic statement of the view that there is some meaningful sense in which British academia swung to the Left while society in general swung to the Right in the 1970s and 1980s. It didn’t feel like that if you had your undergraduate and postgraduate education, as well as your apprenticeship in university teaching, all since 1979. Nor is it easy to make sense of Anderson’s position in abstract principle, since a meaningfully politicised academy would presumably by definition exert some influence.
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© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Smith, J. (1997). Dissolving Adultery: Domesticity and Obscenity in The Game. In: Scarlet Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25446-0_17
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