*Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study*

Edited by John V. Knapp and Kenneth Womack

The development in recent years of the intersections between the family

and literary study continues to emerge as one of the most productive and

illuminating arenas of contemporary critique. As an interpretative

mechanism, family systems therapy (fst) provides scholars and readers

alike with a revelatory social psychology for evaluating the nature of the

familial structures that often mark our textual experiences. In addition

to addressing the family dynamic through which a given literary character

develops a fully realized sense of self, family systems therapy allows

readers to examine the patterns by which characters function in their

larger intimate systems, whether those systems be social, institutional,

or even global.

Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study offers

a collection of original essays that reflects both the substantial

critical interest in this important contemporary field of inquiry, as well

as its wide range of forays into such disciplines as feminism, gender

studies, ethnicity, race, and cultural studies. Divided into three

descriptive sections, Reading the Family Dance includes interdisciplinary

essays that address various literary works in terms of family systems

therapies respective approaches to our understandings of the self, the

family, and the world. The essays in this volume range through much of the

imaginative literature in English, including British works, ethnic and

canonized American texts, and even the translation of a Brazilian novel;

although many of the works analyzed in this collection were published in

the twentieth century, Reading the Family Dance features essays devoted to

Shakespeare and to various works of nineteenth-century fiction as well.

The volume begins with John V. Knapp's comprehensive and wide-ranging

introduction to family systems therapy and literary study. In addition to

providing readers with an intellectual history of the discipline, Knapp

establishes a contemporary scholarly foundation for the ensuing

collection. The essays by Kenneth Womack, Rosemary Babcock, Gary Storhoff,

and Lee Ann De Reus included in the volume's first section, "The Self:

Family Systems Therapy and the Quest for Identity," examine a host of

issues related to the development of the self, including the onset of

personal identity, sibling differentiation, and interpersonal

communication. In the volume's second section, "The Family: Family Systems

Therapy and the Discourse of Community," the essays by Joan I. Schwarz,

Steven Snyder, Jerome Bump, Sara Cooper, and John V. Knapp discuss the

vocabularies of community that assist families as they develop into

functional units or, conversely, into dysfunctional factions. In Reading

the Family Dance's final section, "The World: Reading Family Systems

Therapy in Extremis," the essays by Todd F. Davis, James M. Decker, Marco

Malaspina, and Denis Jonnes explore the ways in which our culture often

manifests itself in larger family systems. The essays in this section

examine the ethics of these larger communities through their analyzes of

Hollywood's entertainment culture, Renaissance-era family dynamics, and

America's postwar family system.