Consciousness Of Characters Research Articles

The Secret Perspective: Anamorphosis in Hamlet

Anamorphosis, or the secret perspective, was not so secret in William Shakespeare’s time. There is evidence throughout Hamlet, for example, of an anamorphic sensibility, noticeable most obviously in the form of the haunting “thing” that arrives on stage from outside the “living” world of the play, at an angle as it were, but also in the way the covert is centrally embedded in the play’s action and meaning – how much of the play remains distorted or hidden from both the characters in the play and from readers/audience beyond it, obliging them to “re-form” the world anew. In this article, I will explore anamorphosis in Hamlet in two separate but connected areas: (1) the Ghost as a “tangential clairvoyant” – Maurice Molhollo’s term in the context of Miguel Cervantes – which denotes a spectral figure that exposes what has been hidden from sight (though that object may have been visible (that is, “suspected”) all along and, in the added sense I am suggesting, sets in motion the main action of the play even though it is not a central actor itself), and (2) the secret perspective of intuited, repressed, verbal, or off-stage material beyond the immediate sight or consciousness of characters and readers/audience. In both cases – of the Ghost as tangential clairvoyant and of the wider intuited, repressed material in the play – anamorphosis in Hamlet involves a new perception of a previously distorted object or situation, which leads to two similar yet opposed responses: either one of complete surprise (“I would never have guessed”) or astonished confirmation (“I knew it all along”).

Zoë Wicomb’s Angels of History: Literary Historiography and Historical Materialism in Still Life

The creative and critical work of the South African-born, Scottish-resident writer and public intellectual Zoë Wicomb (b. 1948) has spanned the sociocultural epochs we now label "transitional," "post-transitional," and perhaps even "post-post-transitional" in South African literary historiography. Her work has repeatedly explored collective political inheritances refracted through the consciousness of characters who are writers (or writers manqué), from Frieda in the linked stories of her debut, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), to the academic Mercia Murray in October (2014), via the unnamed narrator-amanuensis of David's Story (2000) and several writer-characters in the stories collected in The One That Got Away (2008). Wicomb's fictions repeatedly cast projects of writing as problematically complicit acts of witnessing that require readers to consider what is occluded from foundational narratives—whether these be racial or ethnic, parochial or cosmopolitan, or even anti- or decolonial. The author's range of reference has always looked to the future and beyond the borders of South Africa, as much for the trajectories of her characters as for the intertextual allusions with which the works engage. Wicomb's most recent novel, Still Life (2020), revisits many of these preoccupations, although predictably with a twist.

Cutting, Reading, Re-Membering:Parade's End's Elliptical History …

This essay reads Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End materially, to claim that Ford's radically ‘modernist’ style worked to refigure history on the basis of the literary mark. Ford's innovative use of the material elements of writing allows his readers to approach history as materialistic historio graphy – a key idea for Paul de Man – that reads writing as marks and traces independent of fluctuating ideological abstractions. In Parade's End, Ford's narration avoids extra-textual context-building, instead sticking as tightly (and often bewilderingly) as possible to the interiority of a character's consciousness. Notably, this technique interacts with the material world in a similar way to de Man's approach to reading. This allows Ford to stage the ‘writing’ of history, where trace-chains are constantly refigured as material inscriptions, taken up and made sense of anew. The essay first interprets Ford's attitude to history as a creative act, ironised by his protagonist Tietjens’ belief in the certainty and self-evidence of unified historicism. It then describes the ‘elliptical’ structure of one of the novels’ key scenes, where Tietjens is forced to learn the unfinishable nature of history–especially via written forms (like the ellipsis itself) that do not speak. Finally, it directs its attention to the tetralogy's conclusion, ‘voiced’ by a mute narrator, that inscribes the potential for meaning to always remain in an unpredictable future. This ‘theotropic’ force cuts through Ford's novels, and in doing so gestures to the ellipsis from which all reading has, always-already, been re-membered.

Review

Review

The Multimodal Evocation of Minds in Audio Drama

This article discusses the construction of fictional minds in audio drama. Drawing upon social semiotics, cognitive narratology, and the narratology of audio drama, it starts from the premise that a character's consciousness in radio plays is shaped by the conventions, constraints, and affordances of the medium. This means that the semiotic modes of the radio play are exploited in a particular way to give listeners the impression that they are accessing a character's mind, e.g. through a voice's pitch or the verbal rendering of thoughts. In a dynamics of remediation, audio drama conventionally adopts narrative strategies associated with drama (e.g., soliloquy) as well as novelistic (e.g., thought report by a heterodiegetic narrator) and cinematic procedures (e.g., extradiegetic music as an accompaniment to characters' emotions) to evoke minds. Three adaptations will serve to illustrate this dynamics: Madame Bovary (PBS, 1986), Oeroeg (2009) and The Divine Comedy (BBC, 2014). By taking imported conventions into account alongside the audiophonic deployment of voice, music, sound, silence, and words, the article aims to further our understanding of minds in audio drama – which is relatively unknown territory in narratology – and contribute to the debate on fictional minds in cognitive and transmedial narratology.

Memory of the Present: Empathy and Identity in Young Adult Fiction

Recent studies in cognitive literary criticism have provided scholars of literature with new, stimulating approaches to literary texts and neuroscientists with new insights about human emotions, empathy, and memory through evidence from fiction. What have so far been largely neglected are the implications of cognitive criticism for the study of literature targeting a young audience, whose theory of mind and empathic skills are not yet fully developed. A cognitive approach to children's and young adult literature has to meet several challenges less relevant in general fiction. Firstly, how is a young fictional character's consciousness represented by an author whose cognitive and affective skills are ostensibly superior? Secondly, how do texts instruct their young readers to employ theory of mind in order to assess both the young protagonist's emotions and their understanding of other characters' emotions (higher-order mind-reading)? Thirdly, how can fiction support young people's development of their theory of mind? The paper will discuss these issues with a particular focus on memory and identity, expressed textually through tense and narrative perspective. Drawing on work by Lisa Zunshine (2006) and Blackey Vermeule (2010), the predominantly theoretical argument will be illustrated by a contemporary young adult novel, Slated (2012), by Teri Terry.

What is Cyber-Consciousness?: The Digital Mediation of Sincerity and Parody in Tao Lin’s Taipei

This article explores Tao Lin's Taipei as a quintessential example of the twenty-first century 'internet novel.' Engaging with the novel's reputation both as a 'modernist masterpiece' (Lytal 2013) and one that features seemingly postmodern 'self-parody' (Garner 2013), this reading of Taipei introduces the term 'cyber-consciousness' in order to suggest that this tension between modern sincerity and postmodern parody is productively interrogated by digitality in both character consciousness and narrative form. This composting of modern, postmodern and digital elements produces an avenue through which we might come to understand the post-postmodern internet novel.

Cuplul și avatarurile lui în proza scurtă a lui Gib Mihăescu. Erotismul - o manieră frustă de revelare a instinctului

Eroticism is a central theme embedded in the thinking, action and metamorphosis of the characters, it is the engine that brings cohesion into the unity of being, but it is also the destructive force that grinds and erodes the interiors of the characters or couples through jealousy, mistrust, negativity, pride and much more which converge to an individual's inability to rise from the fetal scenario network. In the relationship between the characters, love unfolds like in parallel mirrors, each reflects the other, a continuous check of the fidelity of the other marks the male model and motivates its choices, while the woman tends to release and confirms the infidelity scenarios just under the pressure of suspicion. Gib Mihăescu's couples do not contextualize in terms of compatibility / incompatibility, they are subject to the imperative of the conjuncture, they can not overcome the mixture of hallucinating hypotheses and erroneous conclusions. The world in which the character builds up leads to anxiety, installs it in the subconscious, and vices the perception of events. Behavioral deviations culminate in murder, as an obsessive solution to the torrent of acts that invade the character's consciousness, under the false impression of lucidity, with a discernment deeply affected by repression, isolation, and shifting failure to the other.

The Consciousness of Characters Shown in Lee Mun-yeol's ‘Our Distorted Hero’

The Consciousness of Characters Shown in Lee Mun-yeol's ‘Our Distorted Hero’

Dramatic and Narrative Techniques in the Novellas of Aphra Behn

The various ways in which Aphra Behn's prose works can be connected to her dramatic output have interested scholars of both Behn and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose fiction more generally in recent decades, in light of similarities in the staging of settings, thematic and characterization connections, and Behn's adaptation of dramatic scenes for her prose fiction. This article looks at three of her early novellas—“The Fair Jilt” (1688), “The History of the Nun” (1689) and “The Lucky Mistake” (1689)—and adds to existing scholarship by examining how Behn uses frame-breaking techniques and metalepses in a similar way to metatheatrical methods, blurring the lines between the world of the text and the world of the audience. The features that are examined include the prologue-like expositions (or pre-expositions) to her stories, described as such because of their philosophical preoccupations and lack of emphasis on traditional topics such as setting and character, as well as her employment of narrator comments, which, in Behn's hands, can act like asides in a play, focusing on character consciousness or providing narratorial commentary. This article also shows how mimetic techniques such as these are mixed with diegetic techniques such as focalization (narrative perspective) in order to demonstrate how Behn's novellas, like her plays, present plots driven by verbal artistry.

The development of free indirect constructions in Dutch novels

Abstract Why is the free indirect style such a useful narrative means to portray characters' minds in fictional texts? This article gives more insight into this phenomenon by analyzing texts from earlier times. Previous studies state that the free indirect style for the representation of thoughts emerged in Dutch literary prose in the 19th century. However, this article shows that the roots of this technique were already present in 17th century Dutch popular literature novels. The analysis of these novels provides us with more insight into this phenomenon. Before the emergence of free indirect style, the most common form for the representation of a character's consciousness was direct discourse. The suggestion that the character is ‘thinking out loud' makes this thought representation unnatural, as emotions and feelings are often pre-verbal and wordless. Free indirect style gives the narrator the possibility to formulate that which the character cannot put into words. The free indirect style allows the author to merge descriptions of events and actions with the character's inner life, feelings, questions and wishes without a change in the narrative style when it comes to personal pronouns and tense.

Fictional Consciousnesses: A Reader's Manual

Introduction In recent years, a surge of interest in what David Herman has called nexus of narrative and has swept through narratology and its related disciplines (Basic Elements of Narrative 137-60). Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine have published important monographs (respectively Fictional Minds and Why We Read Fiction), which Herman himself lists under heading of Issues of Consciousness Representation in entry Cognitive Narratology for de Gruyter Handbook of Narratology. On a broad understanding of word Herman's label is perfectly fitting. However, if we run a quick search for word representation in Palmer's and Zunshine's books, we find out that it is almost never used in tandem with What Palmer and Zunshine focus on is reader's attribution of mental states to characters; they do not seem to devote special attention to consciousness proper. To clarify, l would like to introduce David Chalmers's distinction between two concepts of mind. One may want to explore mind's role in influencing behavior, and admit existence of mental states only in so much as they can cause people's actions. Alternatively, one may focus on subjective quality of our experience. One who takes former approach is a devotee of functionalism, and his or her object of study is what Chalmers calls the psychological mind. The latter is interested in the conscious or, simply put, in consciousness or subjective experience (I will use these terms interchangeably). My feeling is that both Palmer and Zunshine devote most of their books to psychological mind (Palmer, in Fictional Minds 87-91, for instance, openly declares his allegiance to functionalism), leaving issue of fictional consciousnesses unsolved. In John Searle's words, consciousness is an inner, first-person, qualitative phenomenon; it refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become 'unconscious' (5). Philosophers of mind love to talk about zombies--beings identical to us from a functionalist viewpoint, but which (unlike us) have no subjective experience. Just as functionalism has led to important scientific discoveries, defining fictional characters in functionalist terms has yielded deep insights, well exemplified by Palmer's and Zunshine's books. And yet, it is important to remind ourselves that readers do not just attribute mental states to fictional characters--they attribute to them mental states with a qualitative aspect. In short, they attribute to them a consciousness. This is angle from which I will approach fictional characters in this article. Although I will not address issue of focalization directly, I intend my article to have a bearing on widespread belief that, in internal focalization, readers experience fictional world through consciousness of a character. I will argue that we should not view characters' consciousnesses as things in text. Readers can enact a fictional consciousness, they can perform it on basis of textual cues--but this phenomenon, which I will call consciousness-enactment, cannot be simply identified with internal focalization. Not all internally localized texts induce reader to enact character's consciousness. What does it mean that we should not view characters' consciousnesses as things in text? It means that a consciousness (be it fictional or not) cannot be represented--and this is my chief complaint against Herman's section heading (Issues of Consciousness Representation). Drawing on work of philosophers of enactivist stripe such as Kevin O'Regan, Alva Noe, and (in particular) Daniel D. Hutto, I would like to show that consciousness and subjective experience resist capture in representationalist terms. This will be my task in section I. …

Literature as a window to the mind

Proceeding from Roman Jakobson's suggestion that the analysis of literature should constitute a recognized branch of linguistics, this discussion shows how literature can shed light, not only on the features of language that contribute to aesthetic effects, but also on human mental processing, and specifically the nature of human consciousness. A fictional character's consciousness may be represented either directly or with mediation by an omniscient narrator. A character's conscious attention may be focused either on the immediate environment or on displaced experiences that are remembered or imagined. Literature illuminates the different qualities that characterize immediate and displaced consciousness. It also sheds light on the several varieties of conscious experience, which range from raw perceptions, emotions, and actions to preverbal and fully verbal structures. It is suggested finally that studying translations of literary works can be useful in highlighting the properties of preverbal organization.

What Objects Know: Circulation, Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives

Modern self-possessing subjects must learn how to alienate parts of themselves economically – their labour, ideas, recorded voices, photographed faces – without alienating themselves psychologically. Victorian it-narratives provide object lessons for such subjects: they tell the stories of their owners, suggesting that inalienability need only be imagined – in the shape of talking umbrellas, feathers, and needles – to be effective. Object narrators also enact a form of omniscience unavailable to human narrators. Rather than traversing the consciousness of characters, they more ‘realistically’ simply over-hear the innermost thoughts of their owners. They circulate among a much wider range of subjects than do the narrators of mainstream fiction. Royals, gypsies, aristocrats, thieves, actors, and shopkeepers are witnessed intimately and accurately by their possessions. Their circulation is comic: they knit the social world together in collecting the stories of their disparate owners. They suggest that the su...

The “Dog-Man”: Race, Sex, Species, and Lineage in Coetzee’s Disgrace

Research Article| December 01 2009 The “Dog-Man”: Race, Sex, Species, and Lineage in Coetzee’s Disgrace Deirdre Coleman Deirdre Coleman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2009) 55 (4): 597–617. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2009-1007 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Deirdre Coleman; The “Dog-Man”: Race, Sex, Species, and Lineage in Coetzee’s Disgrace. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2009; 55 (4): 597–617. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2009-1007 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Gold, Guilt and Scholarship Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl

Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (written in 1813, published 1814) is one of the more frequently interpreted German prose texts of the early nineteenth century. Dorte Brockhagen's Forschungsbericht lists twenty-one studies of the work for the period 1945-76 alone.' Since then, at least three new titles have appeared, all of considerable importance.2 Yet critical interest has centered upon a limited number of issues-the genre under which the tale is best classified (Marchen or Novelle?), the applicability to it of the descriptive categories romantic and realistic, and the interpretation of the symbolic significance of the shadow motif-to the relative neglect of other, equally significant questions. One such critical gap, to which the present paper addresses itself, is the examination of the scholarly idyll at the end of the tale in relation to the themes of knowledge and guilt. Several opinions have been advanced concerning Schlemihl's final situation. Benno von Wiese suggests that it reflects Chamisso's approval of self-denial and self-limitation in disinterested scholarly contemplation as the only satisfactory solution for one estranged from the unedifying world of society and money.3 But although von Wiese rightly states that the tale admits of no possible world but that of civil society,, he omits to discuss the nature of the relationship developed in the tale between this social world and the researcher Schlemihl. Martin Swales partly fills this lacuna by interpreting both Schlemihl's final condition and his original misdemeanor in economic terms. The sale for money of his own shadow makes him guilty of alienating and degrading to the status of an exchange commodity something that is at once personal and non-material.5 While this aspect of Swales' argument is persuasive, his account of Schlemihl's botanical activity-the painstaking collection and documentation of the details of nature-as a penance for his previous materialism does not do justice to the complexity and ambiguity of the ending. In a more recent discussion of the work, Colin Butler demonstrates with finesse that such an ambiguity exists, but evaluates it as a weakness. He expresses disapproval of the so-called happy end: as an illusory reconciliation made possible by the narrative convention of the Marchen form, it is evidence of the tale's moral indifference. Responsibility and guilt, elements of the central character's consciousness which should be the link

‘Represented perception’: A study in narrative style

Critics have long recognized a narrative technique variously called style indirect libre, erlebte Rede, or represented speech and thought, a technique which expresses a character's thoughts and speech in the authorial past tense and third person but also in the character's own emotive language. This style, an alternative to both direct and indirect discourse, is marked by specific linguistic features, both syntactic and semantic, and by formal cues in the narrative context. With this style, an author can directly represent, rather than present or report, consciousness with no implication of internal speech. This paper examines the use of a similar technique to express the lower levels of consciousness, namely, a character's perceptions of the external world. Termed ‘represented perception’, it proves to have many of the linguistic features of represented speech and thought and some peculiarly its own. It functions importantly in blending the external and internal worlds in a fictional text: the physical world, as expressed normally in authorial description, becomes sense perceptions in a character's consciousness. Represented perception also offers the only alternative to indirect report of a character's perceptions. As with represented speech and thought, an author can directly represent perceptions with no suggestion of internal speech. The paper concludes by recognizing represented perception and represented speech and thought as complementary parts of one coherent style. criticisms, suggestions and references.

Black Fiction by Roger Rosenblatt (review)

120Reviews would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passingfrom one hand to another, one mind to another ... it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish . . . . Only thus does writing master time, through mortality achieving a kind of immortality. As Eliot said, "Only through time time is conquered." University of RochesterDoris L. Eder Rosenblatt, Roger. Black Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974. 211 pp. Cloth: $10.00, The principal virtue of Rosenblatt's book is his ability to read closely. Both wellknown and less well-known texts benefit from a scrutiny that is original, deft, scholarly, and never dull. The author moves quickly between the worlds of the mundane and the metaphysical, his eye continually catching on significances. At the same time his knowledge—of the range of black literature, of the writer he is discussing, of the black experience —gives a broader perspective to his observations, permitting him to sound the common in the seemingly unique. His readings of both Go Tell It on the Mountain and Cane, for example, are illuminated by his awareness of biblical sources. And literary criticism is the richer for his readings of the Simple collections, and of dem, Another Country, If He Hollers Let Him Go, and Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man. It is in his atempt to establish a "theory of black fiction" where Rosenblatt is less convincing . The fate of a typical character illustrates what Rosenblatt terms the cyclical, rather than the chronological, nature of black fiction: Should he attempt to deny or break out of his category, there is resistance on the part of the categorizers, and usually the man becomes violent. If he becomes violent enough, he is considered to be brutal, and is responded to accordingly. In either case he completes a circular definition of someone else's manufacture. Not only does he lead a life of predetermined consequences, but he leads that life by progressing backward (p. 18). A cyclical theory assumes movement from a starting point back to the starting point, i.e., the book ends at its beginning, the black Ixion upon an endless wheel. This is a difficult theory to sustain, even for Native Son, which Rosenblatt describes as the "novel which illustrates the cyclical quality of black fiction most dramatically" (p. 19). Bigger Thomas, as he awaits death, has experienced a "piece of the white mountain"; he has learned to "see," which is central to the novel. His state of exaltation, so clearly portrayed in the last scene, is important. Or consider the protagonist in Invisible Man; though underground at the end of the novel, he is certainly not the naive neo-Booker T. Washington that he was at the beginning of the novel. John Grimes, by the end of Go Tell It on the Mountain, has achieved something, if only the undermining of his father's power. Studies in American Fiction121 What is needed here is a criticism that takes account of the ineluctable in the racial experience, and then goes on to consider the formal patterns resulting from this impasse. This Rosenblatt has attempted to do with his interpretation of tragedy as it relates to the black experience: "Here color . . . becomes fate. . . . The tension in the literature derives from the anticipation of a fall caused by the alignment of a personal disability [the character's color] with an external circumstance" (pp. 9-10). Rosenblatt's cyclical theory is supposed to describe the black fiction writer's formal working out of the tragic impasse. But he minimizes an important element—the impact of that ineluctability on the consciousness of characters: "The heroes and. heroines of the literature may have their personal contradictions, but these are usually subsumed in, and overwhelmed by, the enormous contradictions posed by the world outside" (p. 3). But certainly there is much internal struggle going on in certain black characters, as, for example, in Baldwin's John Grimes, even though...