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Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction PDF

201 Pages·2015·1.935 MB·English
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Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction By Ana-Karina Schneider Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction By Ana-Karina Schneider This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Ana-Karina Schneider All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7713-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7713-8 To M & M TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Acknowledgements ................................................................................. xxii Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 London, Time and the Times in English Fiction Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 18 Ian McEwan’s Atonement: A Case of Traumatic Authorship Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 36 Competing Narratives in Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 45 Julian Barnes’s Fiction: A History of Englishness in 10 ½ Pages Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 58 “Oh! It Is Only a Novel!”: Apologetic Reading, a Postmodern Avatar of the Enlightenment Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 77 How to Read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled Chapter Seven ............................................................................................ 87 “The Past Is a Foreign Country”: Regression, Dislocation and Chronotopical Fluidity in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 109 Clone Narratives and the Control of Discourse in Contemporary Fiction Chapter Nine ............................................................................................ 121 “Time to Call an End to Romance”: Anti-Romance in the Contemporary British Novel viii Table of Contents Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 143 On Musicality: John Banville’s The Sea and Beethoven’s “Meeresstille und Glückliche Fahrt” Conclusions ............................................................................................. 154 Notes ........................................................................................................ 158 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 166 Index ........................................................................................................ 178 PREFACE This collection of essays investigates the contemporary novel’s relation to its forerunners, the picaresques, romances and sentimental novels of the eighteenth century. Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne are therefore stable landmarks and reference points; Jane Austen is postulated as something of a turning point in the development of the genre; and of the contemporary practitioners, a handful recur from one chapter to the next, particularly Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Most of the novelists discussed here are British, but the works of Irish (Anne Enright, John Banville), Canadian (Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje) and American (Herman Melville, Stacey Richter) writers are also occasionally referred to in order to shed light on and broaden the picture of the current state of the genre, as are media and genres other than the novelistic. The chapters share an interest in the rhetoric of fiction— broadly understood as the way in which fictional works achieve their effects on readers, whether by directly addressing a hypothetical reader, using irony and parody, orchestrating competitions between divergent or intertwining narratives, inviting intertextual readings or openly taking issue with traditional conventions and the readers’ expectations. The book however does not aim to propose a consistent theory of the rhetoric of fiction; nor does it claim any generalisable validity for its findings. Rather, it consists of a series of readings that address various aspects of the novels they focus on, attempting to tease out the subtle means by which texts work on their readers. Moreover, there is no consistent use of rhetorical jargon, although some of the terminology does inevitably crop up whenever distinctions need to be drawn and the more technical aspects of novels are interrogated. Like Northrop Frye, Wayne C. Booth, R.S. Crane and other early rhetoricians, I think of rhetorical persuasion primarily in the sense of the stylistic devices and narrative strategies deployed by fiction writers to establish and control the relationship between their subject matters and/or characters and the reader. I am, in other words, interested in how specific novels achieve rhetorical effects by playing with the means and conventions made available to them by the genre. In his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, Frye is explicit about the relationship between style and persuasion: “Rhetoric has from the beginning meant two things:

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