The Nature of Literary Being
archived
Are characters in novels more than verbal representations of individuals or collective subjects?
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Curator
Journal Article
Understanding the important role of character in George Eliot’s realist aesthetic entails close attention to the way she engages with the physical and mathematical sciences.
Essay
Through his use of the third person, and other narrative strategies of subjective displacement, J.M. Coetzee poses a challenge to the idea of supposedly stable “centres of consciousness," not least, the author’s centre of consciousness.
Essay
“Embodiment” surely does take place. But we still have everything to learn about how and why.
Essay
If ephemeral genres of fiction erupted in opposition to the novel even before the novel had fully got under way, what inclination in the imagination or mind of the public made their anarchy and singularity so interesting?
Essay
For most of its short generic life, the novel has depended on marriage and childbirth as signs of sexual relationship, and has had a difficulty representing sexual life beyond marriage and childbirth without the assistance of figurative language. How do novels, especially those of D.H. Lawrence, represent sex?
Essay
I find myself here in the rather awkward position of speaking from two different perspectives, one, that of the novelist, the other, that of the critic. For a long time I have argued against this notion of two perspectives, considering them simply different modulations, or entonaciones, as Borges would call them, of my writing. Yet I find myself caught in my own trap.
Essay
Why write a dialogue? The ideas that follow grew out of conversations between the two of us, and although they might someday find their way into a journal article or a book chapter, it seemed worthwhile to acknowledge them for what they are now: speculative and provisional, germinal, we hope, in both senses of that word.