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.
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.
reader creates “supplementary meaning” to the text by unconsciously setting up tension, also called binary opposition. Culler describes this process in his statement “The process of thematic interpretation requires us to move from facts towards values, so we can develop each thematic complex, retaining the opposition between them” (294). Though supplementary meaning created within the text can take many forms, within V...
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.
Guerin, Wilford L. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1979.
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.”
In a novel where everything is turned upside down and every character plays a role they probably shouldn’t, Nelly Dean’s role is the most ambiguous. As both Lockwood’s and the reader’s narrator, Nelly plays the role of the storyteller. Yet at the same time, Nelly is also a character in the story that she tells, occupying a vast array of roles. As a character within her own tale, Nelly attempts to manipulate the actions of her fellow characters. The best way for the reader to understand both Nelly’s role in the novel and her manipulative actions is to see Nelly as being representative of the author. Authors occupy roles that are similarly as ambiguous as Nelly’s role, acting as both writers of and characters in their own stories, often unwittingly writing aspects of themselves into a large variety of roles within their own novels. Furthermore, Nelly’s manipulative actions and biases are analogous to an author’s exertions to move the narrative in accordance with her artistic vision. The multiplicity and ambiguity of Nelly’s roles as well as Nelly’s clearly manipulative maneuvers to alter the plot ultimately implicate Nelly in the meta-fictional role of representing the author.
Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford, 2011. Print.
“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...
L’Engle, L'Engle. “Focus On The Story, Not Readers…” Writer Apr 2010: p. 24-25. MAS Ultra-School Edition. EBSCOhost. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.
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
As the game structure of the text’s second-person narration has already been parodied in the metafictional mode, this passage’s commentary on the second-person address is an explicit second-order commentary in the meta-metafictional mode. The sly reference to the “hypocrite I” as the “brother and double” of the “general male you” lends a heavy note of irony to this passage, as it distances itself from the text’s prior use of second-person narration to refer to the male Reader. The second-degree commentary of this passage implies that the male Reader—the “general male you”—is but another aspect of the secretive “I”, the omniscient yet personally invested narrator (or implied author) of the novel (Calvino, Traveller 141).
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.
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...
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