From Structuralism to Dialogics: David Lodge

Abstract

David Lodge has probably done as much as any British writer to bring continental theory to the attention of a non-specialist audience. Many students would sample the writings of key thinkers in the field for the first time in his two major anthologies, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (1972) and Modern Criticism and Theory (1988). Many would also have been given their first sense of how theoretical ideas might translate into critical practice by Lodge’s scrupulously accessible deployment of ideas from Shklovsky, Jakobson, Bakhtin and others in his critical writings on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American fiction. Of course there will be thousands of general readers whose education in ‘post-structuralism’ has been gleaned not from the pages of S/Z or Of Grammatology, but from the lectures, conference papers and shop-talk of Professor Morris Zapp, Dr Robyn Penrose and the other garrulous critical theorists of Lodge’s campus fiction. Over the course of his career, Lodge has proved himself the most conspicuously ‘ambidextrous’ of the contemporary generation of novelist-critics. In what looks like a calculated reproach to the traditional division of labour between authors and critics, his major campus fictions, Changing Places (1975), How Far Can You Go? (1980), Small World (1984), Nice Work (1988), were produced in systematic alternation with his works of theoretical criticism, The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), Working with Structuralism (1981), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (1988), After Bakhtin (1990).KeywordsSmall WorldCritical TheoryCreative WriterCritical PracticeExotic DancerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.