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A Casebook on William H. Gass’s The Tunnel Edited by H. L. Hix Dalkey Archive CONTENTS: The Tunnel: A Topical Overview H. L. Hix Gass Pain Debra Di Blasi Sentenced to Sentences . . . Poetry and The Tunnel Jonathan Barron Confronting The Tunnel: History, Authority, Reference Melanie Eckford-Prossor Götterdämmerung in the West: William Gass’s Little Big Novel Jim Barloon Selected Bibliography Contributors This casebook investigates William H. Gass’s The Tunnel. H. L. Hix provides a topical overview as an introduction to the novel. Debra Di Blasi’s "Gass Pain" says The Tunnel suffocates in its similes and does not make its narrator wicked enough. Jonathan N. Barron argues in his "Sentenced to Sentences" that in Gass’s novel it is lyric poetry -- rather than fiction or history -- that triumphs over fascism. Melanie Eckford-Prossor’s "Confronting The Tunnel" contends that the novel’s insistence on intra-textual irony, combined with its denial of extra-textual irony, makes it intellectually challenging but ethically repugnant. Jim Barloon’s "Götterdämmerung in the West" sees The Tunnel as a deflated and deflating novel: a flatulent proclamation "of whatever’s left untoppled in the transcendental realm" after the death of God. |
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