With its tight focus on figuration in a hypercanonical trio of authors—Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf —Dora Zhang’s Strange Likeness feels almost deliberately unfashionable. Its fine readings, its deft deployment of narrative theory, its rigorous illuminations of the uses of description and metaphor in modernism, all read in many ways like the work of an earlier and more confident moment in the history of literary studies. It is refreshingly free of the cant that can seem everywhere now: the trumped-up claims for ethical urgency, the desperate engagements with novel and often barely relevant theoretical frameworks, and the confused substitution of criticism for politics. At a moment when not just modernist studies but literary studies writ large are facing institutional eclipse, it is thrilling to be reminded that, in the right hands, the old tools can still do so much. (This is not to imply that Zhang insulates herself from contemporary theoretical developments. In particular, she avails herself of some of the newer ways of talking about emotion that have become popular in recent years.) Zhang goes in chronological order—from James to Proust to Woolf—but I’m going to begin at the end, with Woolf. Zhang picks out a feature of Woolf’s writing that every reader of Woolf will recognize, even if they hadn’t been aware that they had noticed it before. That’s the tendency, in moments of charged epiphany, or baffled love and inarticulate affection, or accesses of transcendence or just the suspicion of transcendence, for Woolf’s free indirect discourse to resort to the demonstrative or the deictic, “This” or “That.” Think of Mrs. Dalloway’s “This moment of June,” or, more idiosyncratically, “She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herse
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