Agency Of Readers Research Articles

Reading race in Small Island: discourse deviation, schemata and the textual encounter

This article uses the work of Cook and Semino on discourse deviation to investigate the schemata — the existing cognitive frameworks — that readers bring to their encounters with texts. It aims to challenge the tendency within some strands of discourse analysis and literary theory to ignore empirical readers and to focus on the effects of texts on readers while neglecting the role played by readerly agency. The analysis centres on a discussion between Liverpool residents with various levels of involvement in Small Island Read 2007: a project encouraging residents of the city to read Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island as part of the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the passing of the Slave Trade Abolition Bill. In this discussion, hedging around lexical items connected to ethnicity and slavery suggests that these readers came to Small Island with a marked reluctance to discuss these topics. When coupled with corroborating data from online questionnaire responses on the topic of ethnicity, this finding is a significant one for understanding the effect of Small Island on its readers, as it offers a degree of contextualization missing from extant claims that readers have been transformed in some way by the novel, and brings empirical depth to discussions which have so far been predominantly theoretical. As an exploratory study, the analysis also offers a model for other investigations into the effects of reading which, I argue, would be enhanced by considering what readers bring to — as well as take from — their textual encounters.

New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. * Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (eds).

New Media Poetics is an interesting volume for readers who are studying digital writing, reading, hypertext, poetry on the web, and new media art. Although there are a number of well-written and researched chapters in this book, there are also a number of dubious chapters that read as marketing pieces for the authors’ various new media projects. There are multiple perspectives in this anthology and some provide more valuable insight while others offer a subjective point of view quite distant from a well-researched and objective academic study. Overall, the good chapters within this book make it a worthwhile read for students and researchers interested in the subject of new media poetics. New media poetics, as defined by Adalaide Morris in the opening chapter, ‘includes a wide variety of configurations of language, image, and sound produced, distributed, archived, accessed, and/or assimilated on computers’ (p. 7). The discussions within this book therefore extend beyond the hypertext theorizing of the late 1990s; Morris contrasts digital poetry with the hypertext narrative that normally depends on lexia or blocks of semi-autonomous text joined by links into various configurations. The digital poem is also contrasted with computer games and interactive fiction in that it does not usually depend on a combination of rules, a simulated game world, or traditions of game playing. Although these contrasts are important for defining new media, some may appear a bit forced; for example, when contrasting the digital poem with the print poem Morris states that ‘unlike traditional print poetry, finally, new media poems are not often lineated or rhymed, do not necessarily maintain stable or consistent configurations, and seem by nature to bend—if not break—the founding constraints of the lyric as violently as hypermedia, computer games, and interactive fiction bend or break the constraints of narrative’ (p. 7). One might wonder if many works of new media poetry are created only to reflect on the medium (or how it differs from its predecessors) and, in this respect, will only be one subset of a passing phase in discussions of poetry. In other words, at this point in time digital and online media are still relatively new, although we can see signs of new media becoming more ubiquitous and therefore less foregrounded in the attention of writers working with digital media. As digital media incorporate even more seamlessly into our everyday interaction with the world this fetishizing of the medium and contrasting of its conventions with print may subside. There are acknowledgements of this coming of age in our relation to the digital medium even within this anthology: in Morris’ chapter—‘If early hypertext theory overestimated the electronic reader's agency, it underplayed the complexity, energy, and undecidability of print’ (p. 13)— and in Katherine Hayles’ assertion that ‘it would be more accurate to call a digital text a process rather than an object, an attribute I highlight by referring to the time of performance for an electronic text versus the time of production for print’ (p. 185, emphasis in original). This movement to study texts as a ‘performance’, whether digital or print, has also been occurring in book history and print culture studies in general that look at the processes surrounding the production of texts rather than just their archived state on the page. In other words, the movement to focus on the materiality of the text has also helped us to reflect on the processes surrounding the material production of print texts. Morris also points to the distinction between first-generation and second-generation electronic literature and the different critical approaches used when encountering these different time-periods of theorizing on digital literature—critics initially used terms from analyses of narrative classics but then moved from narrative to poetic models by using strategies developed to read the texts of avant-garde or experimentalist poets. This shift from analyses to strategies also highlights the shift from seeing a digital text as a product to seeing it as a process—‘an ongoing, elastic, capacious process rather than a taxonomically precise product: as benefits the processual or process-driven nature of computers’ (p. 7). Part of what this anthology hopes to do, it seems, is to draw a distinction between the hypertext poetry and theorizing of the 1990s and the poetry made post-1995 with DHTML, JavaScript, Java, QuickTime, Macromedia Flash, Shockwave, and other programs that ‘go beyond the plot-driven verbal lexia of Storyspace’ (p. 14).

Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions by Arnold E. Davidson , Priscilla L. Walton , Jennifer Andrews (review)

MLR, 100.4, 2005 1105 the ascendancy of the former (from 1935 onwards) goes the diminution of the latter: 'The interest in right naming rises in step with Pound's need for dogmatic authority; and the interest in ideogrammic writing fails likewise' (p. 120). The formeris linked to the fetishized awe that, paradoxically, Pound associated with money understood as a repository of value in itself and hence a principal source of social and political corrup? tion. Here, then, precision and a care fordiscrimination lead not to clarity of exchange and understanding but to monotheistic dogma. By contrast, Wendy Stallord Flory attends to the Pisan experience of Confucianism and the analogies Pound drew with Catholicism. Taking her new material from Pound's two-page commentary on Confucius , written forFather Vath, the Catholic chaplain at Pisa, and fromthe marginalia in his copy of the Catholic Prayer Book for the Army and Navy, Flory argues that Pisa produced a new version of Confucius which did not embrace authoritarianism but was more concerned with the enlightenment and development of the self amidst painful and inhospitable circumstances. The unspoken debate is complicated further by Ronald Bush, who also draws upon new material?the Chinese characters that Pound inscribed onto his typescript of the Pisan Cantos but which were omitted from the published text. They were taken mainly from the Analects with 'a fair smattering from Mencius and a surprising few from The Great Digest' (pp. 164-65). For Bush, this selection identifies an important shift in Pound's thinking, detectable at Pisa rather than the later period at St Elizabeth's: an acknowledgement of 'heterogeneity and modesty', a pluralism of perspective, 'variegated moods and voices' (p. 168) which provided a powerful source of comfort. These three essays resurrect in fresh form the familiar schisms?authoritarianism and enlightenment, singularity and diversity, dogmatism and dialogue. We do not need to slip into the illusory consolation of contradictory affiliations: we need still to ask about the how of those affiliations. University of Keele Ian F. A. Bell Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions. By Arnold E. Davidson, Priscilla L. Walton, and Jennifer Andrews. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2003. ix + 223pp. $35; ?22.50. ISBNo8020 -4134-5. 'Tragedy is mytopic. Comedy is my strategy.' Thus Thomas King sums up his central themes and narrative methods. Since the early 1990s, King's prolific output in litera? ture, criticism, radio, and filmhas made him widely known to Native and non-Native audiences, in Canada and the United States, in academia, and among general readers. While his work has received considerable scholarly attention in literaryjournals and anthologies, Border Crossings is the firstbook-length study devoted to it. Like all non-Native scholars who engage with Native writing, Davidson, Walton, and Andrews findthemselves in an awkward political position. They claim in their in? troduction that, as non-Native scholars, they are 'speaking about', not 'speaking for', this most popular and versatile Native author. The categorical distinction between 'speaking about' and 'speaking for' can only be sustained, however, by pretending that texts speak for themselves. To claim that one speaks about rather than for an author, one must overlook the fact that reading is itself an act of agency, and discount the idea that the meanings one 'finds' in a text depend on the knowledge, cultural background, social attitudes, and linguistic competences that one brings to that text. Davidson, Walton, and Andrews elicit meaning from King's written and visual texts not only by paying close attention to what King has produced, but also by contextu? alizing his work theoretically and discursively. Without such acts of readerly agency, no6 Reviews literary critics have no basis for claiming they are making an original contribution to knowledge and understanding of an author's work. Davidson, Walton, and Andrews are thus caught in a double bind: they are obliged to claim, on the one hand, that they offeroriginal readings of King's work, while on the other hand maintaining that King's writing speaks for itself. What kinds of reading strategies do Davidson, Walton, and Andrews adopt, and what new insights into King's work do they provide? On these questions...

Creative Accounting: Role-Playing Games, Possible-World Theory, and the Agency of Imagination

Role-playing games have many qualities of narrative (character, plot, setting), yet they have received virtually no attention from narratologists. This essay discusses the way that role-playing games construct narrative worlds and compares that to recent theories of fiction based on possible-world models. In both, emphasis is placed on the objects that make up this world. In role-playing games and recent theories of fictional world, this essay argues, emphasis on objects makes possible intertextual comparisons, which in turn help to define and rejuvenate the agency of readers and critics against the backdrop of challenges to that agency by market culture and structuralist literary theory.

The Author as Privileged Authority in Unamuno's "Don Sandalio"

In his search for self-creation, Unamuno privileges himself as author over readers in the enigmatie work La novela de don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez. Despite lis stated intention of furthering reader agency in ah of his writings, in Don Sandalio he inserts himself both directly and subtly between the text and the readers, controlling the reader's interpretation of the text and establishing himself as the ultimate arbiter of meaning.

Claiming the Treasures: Patricia MacLachlan's Organic Postmodernism

Claiming the Treasures:Patricia MacLachlan's Organic Postmodernism Roberta Seelinger Trites (bio) Patricia MacLachlan's novels display a variety of postmodern characteristics which appear to stem naturally from the topics about which she writes.1 She seems especially interested in how individuals come to perceive themselves as "subjects," that is, as the actors of their own agency. Her novels define subject-formation—the creation of "subjectivity"—as a matter of process: individuals continually (re)shape themselves and are (re)shaped as a result of interactions with other people.2 Moreover, MacLachlan employs paradox, metafictionality, and intertextuality to encode her texts with premises that assume the reader's agency. Finally, MacLachlan affirms the process of subjectivity by using narrative structures that parallel her thematic interest in the life cycle. Especially prominent in Arthur, for the Very First Time, Unclaimed Treasures, and Journey, these postmodern traits inform MacLachlan's texts in particularly interesting ways. From the start of her career in publishing for children, MacLachlan has been subtly incorporating the tendencies of postmodernism into her stories. Even her first novel, Arthur, for the Very First Time, displays several postmodern characteristics. Most noticeable is the book's focus on the subject-creation of the protagonist, Arthur. He is a ten-year-old boy whose mother is going to have a baby. His parents send him to spend the summer at his Great-Aunt Elda and Great-Uncle Wrisby's farm, and while he is there, he explores his own identity. Arthur has long perceived himself only in the "object" position, as the recipient of other people's agency: "For Arthur, everything happened one way or another, either the way it should or the way it shouldn't with no help on his part" (64). Arthur's playmate, Moira, reinforces his passive self-perception by refusing to call him anything but "Mouse" because she doesn't think he takes action or "really see[s] what's going on around" him (38, 53). The motif of "seeing" things that runs through the book demonstrates one way that Arthur learns to take agency in his life. His Uncle Wrisby sometimes looks through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars because that way "you see just as well. . . . Sometimes better" (15). Arthur experiments with the binoculars and eventually begins to internalize the alternating perspectives of seeing things as either closer or farther away. Once, "his binocular eyes turned inward on himself: a small boy, sitting on a hay mound with a russet chicken" (30). Later, he recognizes his parents' sending him away as a way of "getting close . . . but only so close," like looking through "the far away end" of the binoculars (54). Another time he "lets his eyes unfocus" to gain a new perspective on his uncle's garden (61). The binoculars provide the boy with a metaphorical way for putting himself both in the subject and the object position; when he recognizes that he has the ability to put his vision of himself into a wider perspective, he is acting as the subject of the action of gazing and as the object of that gaze. The idea of perspective also ties closely to the book's formulation of art as a means for the individual's creation of self. Aunt Elda reads Randall Jarrell's poem "The Mockingbird" to Arthur. He is fascinated by the dual vision of the poem: "Look one way and the sun is going down, / Look the other and the moon is rising" (qtd. 22). The poem describes how the mockingbird imitates everything around him so well that it ultimately becomes impossible to distinguish the mockingbird from the world. Arthur intuits the meaning of the poem: looked at one way the bird is imitating the natural world in the creation of art; looked at another way, the bird's art is the natural world. From one perspective, the bird is a creating subject; from another, since his song is indistinguishable from his identity, he is himself the object of his own creation. Having made this connection, Arthur turns to the creation of music. He buys a recorder, and when he shows Moira, she comments, "Why, Mouse. . . . You are really doing...