These questions remain unanswered by the novel, and suggest the fluidity between the roles of author, reader and critic. The Typing Ghost and Caroline share the role of author within the narrative, and it is unclear which belongs in a more authoritative framing narrative due to the ambiguity of the novel’s end. Caroline also straddles the role of the reader, by listening to the narrative that the Typing Ghost recites, and takes on the role of the critic “by making exasperating remarks [that] continued to interfere with the book” (161). In this way, the roles of author, reader and critic are fulfilled by multiple characters, thus decentralising the authority and autonomy of each individual role. By decentralising the notion of authorship, Nicol suggests that Spark generates a complementary model of reading. Once the author becomes a suspicious figure, then the reader’s role needs to alter in response. The reader is invited, required, to become a kind of detective-figure, trying to make sense of the inconsistencies, gaps, and contradictions in the narrative (123). While Nicol only comments upon the author as an unreliable figure, his observations can be applied to the roles of the reader and the critic as well, whose provisionality as literary conventions are foregrounded by the self-reflexivity of metacommentary. The framing narratives, which seem unproblematic at the start of the text, gradually intersect in a way that eludes the neat closure of a “Russian-doll” hierarchy of authority. Another example of the fluidity of author-reader-critic roles occurs in Traveller, where the identities of the various author characters are undermined by Ermes Marana, a translator who disseminates false translations of books in order to fulfill h... ... middle of paper ... ...arsava call Traveller “a novel that ‘compels the reader to ‘play author’’” (Watts 710). Perhaps then, this tension can be resolved by recognising that loci of authority and autonomy shift continuously in “meta” fictions as their self-reflexive nature invites the reader to participate in the text while simultaneously asserting a critical authority in their metacommentary. As Madeleine Sorapure argues, Traveller places “the author on the same level as the reader” (704) and the “plurality and complexity of details in the text react against the totalizing efforts of the Male Reader or the literary critic to subsume these disruptive and affecting elements into a neat, ordered whole” (707). Sorapure’s observation can also be applied to the other two texts and other “meta” fictions that represent authority structures and conventions at the same time as they challenge them.
When reading we often harness particular threads of thought or lenses of critique to gain entry into the implied historic or legendary nature of literature. To accurately process a tale in the light in which it is presented, one must consider the text from multiple viewpoints. Taking into consideration the psychological circumstances of the presenter/author/narrator, we can get a view into how our personal experiences can create bias in interpretation. By placing the elements of the story into the web of relationships used to interpret the external world, we bring a view of the text from the external perspective. All of these factors are at play in the relations between the perspective within a text, creating a form of reality with its own historic and mythic properties. Characters have their own histories and structures, expressed or not, and their perception in the fictional world they reside exerts influence outward to the reader of literature. This influence can create a sense of immersive reality that renders the reading experience to be mythic truth, based in facts but not emotion or direct perception, a somewhat distanced portrayal of events. However it can also be an expression of perceptive truth, events are experienced much they would be in real life – confusing and disjointed. To look into these problems of perspective, I will use examples from “The Red Convertible” by Lois Erdrich to demonstrate how Lyman’s narration style is representative of psychoanalytic concepts, showing how he deals with the situations presented in his life.
“An action-occurs which proceeds from the supernatural (from the pseudo-supernatural); this action then provokes a reaction in the implicit reader (and generally in the hero of the story). It is this reaction which we describe as ‘hesitation,’ and the texts which generate it, as fantastic” (Todorov 195). The fantastic is the moment of hesitation that is experienced by the reader who is confronted by a supernatural event in the story or novel and thus understands the laws of nature are put into question. Todorov uses three conditions that constitute the fantastic, in the first, the reader enters the character’s world and considers it a natural world and so the reader hesitates between determining whether there is a natural or supernatural explanation of the events that occur in the story. The second condition is when the reader identifies himself with the character in the novel and by doing so interprets the events by the characters in the novel. Lastly, the reader must obtain an attitude in relation to the text, and decide what levels or modes of reading he or she will hold. The fantastic can be divided into two genres, the uncanny and the marvelous. The marvelous occurs when a reader must create new laws of nature for the particular event to occur, whereas the uncanny is when reality remains intact and there is an explanation for the event. Todorov argues that the ambiguity persists even after the reader is finished with The Turn of the Screw which is interesting but there are stronger textual clues that support the governess was in a state of hysteria.
It was both a continuation of certain literary trends that had begun to develop themselves as well as something possessed of itself, original, striking, and new. The work of Sherwood Anderson and others had begun to shift literary perspective toward the more dirty and real, but as Louis Kronenberger wrote of the book in the Saturday Review of Literature, “It has sound merit of a personal, non-derivative nature; it shows no important affinity with any other writer, and it represents the achievement of unique personal experience.”
Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford, 2011. Print.
He too quickly dismisses the idea of reading on your own to find meaning and think critically about a book. For him, Graff states that “It was through exposure to such critical reading and discussion over a period of time that I came to catch the literary bug.” (26) While this may have worked for Graff, not all students will “experience a personal reaction” (27) through the use of critical discussion.
The above examples illustrate the way Pale Fire’s interplay of framing narratives confound a search for authority within the text by foregrounding the provisionality of fictional and metafictional devices within the chaotic arrangement of the text’s frames. As such, L. L. Lee argues that the “‘true’ level of Pale Fire is difficult to find . . . . [the] point is that each level is quite as true as the next. The ...
Mastery of the material an author writes about is not merely enough to get one’s point across, yet Butor uses his mastery of how to travel wherever you are in life and, in addition, uses language that presents the picture in such a manner that one does not have to delve deep into the meaning behind the words to retain the full idea portrayed in them. The higher arching purpose to his work, though, turns out to be the overall connection of ties between the book and travel ultimately depends on the book’s “literariness” to determine what journey one might have while reading (83). All in all, the tone of voice and writing style that Butor uses in this piece are second to none in their ability to influence a reader of following his procedure of travel transformation, and a rhetorical analysis essay on his work only reassured the authenticity of the section about how Butor chose to entertain the reader as the main purpose behind his essay. His attitude toward the audience was strong enough to elicit advice that originated straight from the heart, and in doing that, he empowered readers with the ability to look at books and reading differently for the rest of their
Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
Guerin, Wilford L. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1979.
The categories associated with the means of means of characterization are considered to be explicit vs. implicit characterization, auto- vs. alterocharacterization and figural and narratorial as the foci of characterization. The use of certain means of characterization depends upon the preference of the author: his style, intentions and choice of focus. The characters are characterized by 1) what they say themselves, 2) what they do, 3) what the narrator says about them and 4) what other characters say about them. One should not, however, take for granted what is said by other characters since they might not be reliable, especially if one notices certain inconsistencies. This essay focuses on a story called Witness for the Prosecution written by the famous writer of detective stories, Agatha Christie. The plot centers around a crime (the murder of Miss Emily French) and starts with the discourse between Mr. Mayherne, the solicitor, and Mr. Vole, the accused person who swears being innocent of the crime. Later in the story appears Mr. Vole's wife and, acting extremely skillfully, plays the major role in acquitting her husband. The essay attempts to analyse Mr. Mayherne's (Agarha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution) characterization according to the aforementioned characterization parameters.
Perrault displays a stronger authoritative voice that breaks the interplay in the relationship of the narrator, the implied reader and the real reader. Through the validation of explicit authoritative narrative voice the relationship of intended reader to the narrator dismisses interpretation of designed moral of the real reader.
New Criticism attempts to extricate the work of the author from matters extraneous to the text. The psychology and biography of the author should no longer be the lense through which the text is viewed, but rather a work of literary art should be “regarded as autonomous, and so should not be judged by reference to considerations beyond itself”(Hawkes, pp. 150-151). Though this new movement in critical literary theory is effective in allowing a text to create its own context for a message, it inherently removes much of the meaning attributed to the work due to historical context. Historical context serves as more than just backdrop to a novel. The interplay between the various ideas and discourses popular at any given time inarguably affect
“In my estimation a good book first must contain little or no trace of the author unless the author himself is a character. That is, when I read the book I should not feel that someone is telling me the story but t...
Of the many literary conventions used to describe JM Coetzee's Foe, one of the more commonly written about is metafiction. Since about 1970, the term metafiction has been used widely to discuss works of post-modern fiction and has been the source of heated debate on whether its employ marks the death or the rebirth of the novel. A dominant theme in post-modern fiction, the term "metafiction" has been defined by literary critics in multiple ways. John Barth offers perhaps the most simplified definition: metafiction is "a novel that imitates a novel rather than the real world." Patricia Waugh extends our understanding to add that it is "fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to itself as an artifact to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality." According to these definitions, metafiction concerns itself not with the creation of a new narra...
It may be time to consider a literary work not as a predetermined product cast in a deterministic mold, but as a dynamic system that transcends the prevailing assumptions that are supposed to define its identity. The formal definitions can be just external to the composition of the text since we cannot expect the reader to know exactly what the author intended to write without falling into the trap of intentional fallacy.