Confession and Complicity in Narrative

Erscheinungsjahr 2003
ISBN: 978-0-521-34191-2
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 160 Seiten, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 341 g

What is the precise relationship between the writer of a text and the reader? Recent contributions to reader-response theory have suggested that the reader is relatively passive. Professor Foster argues that the relationship is more complex than that: readers enter into complicity with writers and create the illusion of the writer's mastery over meaning in order to imagine themselves as masters and become writers in their own place. This dynamic model of the reading process is revealed most tellingly in 'confessional' narratives and so Professor Foster explores the complex patterns of the reader/writer symbiosis in texts by Augustine, Kierkegaard, Henry James, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Beckett. What emerges is a new theory of reading literature: the engagement between writer and reader as a struggle for power in which the reader is actively complicit and self-conscious in his or her interpretations.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Foster, Dennis A.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; 1. The confessional turn; 2. Three exemplary readings; 3. The embroidered sin: confessional evasion in The Scarlet Letter; 4. Love's androgynous advocates: design and desire in Absalom, Absalom!; 5. All here is sin: the obligation in The Unnamable; 6. Conclusion: the web; Notes; Index.