Reader response and reader reception theories of the twentieth-century have left one area of research curiously unexamined—readers. From the Russian Formalists (Victor Shklovksy), to the Constance school (Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser), to the poststructuralists (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida), the focus of theorists has always been on texts and the characteristics that define their literariness. Readers—in actuality, a multitude of real individuals with various aptitudes, experiences and tastes—have been abstracted into “the reader,” a hypothetical everyman. As such, a vast section on the spectrum of possible reader responses, which may include interest, intrigue and enjoyment, but also frustration, boredom and annoyance, has been regretfully ignored in the discipline of literary studies. Texts that present readers with difficulties—either linguistic or logical—highlight especially well the wide array of possible reader responses, for experimental art (whether visual or written) sets out to defy expectations, aiming precisely to incite controversy and divide opinions. This dissertation therefore takes up works published in the late 1960s and early 1970s that are known for their difficult, experimental styles and studies how readers respond to them, taking particular interest in the cognitive processes that are involved in the act of reading. Under the lens are Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela and Macedonio iii Fernández’s El Museo de la novela de la Eterna . To consider the impact of readers’ expectations surrounding genre, responses to Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie, a text of theory that employs similar formal games, are also compared. Numerous advances in the cognitive sciences over the past two decades have granted previously unfathomable insights into the functioning of the human brain where language and reading are concerned. The purpose of this thesis is twofold: 1) to promote a new framework for the study of reader response that is informed by the cognitive sciences; and 2) to acknowledge that texts elicit various responses from readers and thus argue that cognitive factors such as attention, long-term and working memory and emotions, as well as readers’ expectations of coherency, shape these responses.

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Understanding Difficulty: Reader Response and Cognition Across Genres

Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth

Although narrative self-consciousness is by no means specific to the contemporary period, the particularly rampant metafictional self-reflexivity demonstrated in Lost in the Funhouse has often been touted as one of the principal traits of postmodern fiction. As Linda Hutcheon says, "What we tend to call postmodernism in literature today is usually characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality" ("Historiographic" 3). Postmodern fiction, then, often exhibits a metafictional quality. Metafiction is typically defined as "fiction about fiction--that is, fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity" (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 11). In other words, metafiction focuses as much if not more on its own processes of creation as on a "story" in the usual sense. John Barth, widely considered to be the preeminent American metafictionist, directly confronts issues of selfhood and authorship in his Lost in the Funhouse series. [1] However, instead of challenging the primacy of authorship, Barth's metafictional experiments serve to cement the author into a position of authority over the text. Linda A. Westervelt writes: "John Barth ... takes the inner division that results from self-consciousness and, by metaphoric extension, makes it a resource--namely, the subject of his fiction" (42). Many of Barth's works not only employ but also thematize the complications arising from an increasingly intrusive narrative self-consciousness that arises, according to Jerome Klinkowitz, from Barth's sense that his era ad rejected the Cartesian definition of ego so central to traditional novelistic design. A hero could no longer speak with confidence and coherence and so define himself, since under contemporary philosophical pressure the old cogito, ergo sum had become a farcically painful lie. (408) Although Barth's heroes are unable to define themselves through their narratives, they experience an almost desperate need to continue the attempt. The result is that most of the stories in the series depict narrators as authors so aware of themselves and so concerned with the effect of this awareness on their waning creative powers that they cannot avoid continually inserting their presence into the stories they narrate. Their overt authorial presence threatens to derail the narratives, making them unable to come to a fruitful end. Instead, they twist and turn on themselves, leaving the reader with the difficult and perhaps impossible task of sorting out product from process, story from narration. Because of the intricacy of these stories, much of the critical discussion surrounding Lost in the Funhouse has focused on the increased burden of interpretation that metafiction forces on the reader. The argument has often been made that the intricacy of the text, coupled with the apparent failure of the narrator to control and shape the story, forces the reader to construct a meaning for the text and thereby to participate in the construction of the work itself. In the face of postmodern indeterminacy, interpretive authority no longer resides with authors, and singularity of meaning no longer exists. As Deborah A. Woolley puts it, criticism about metafiction substitutes a heroics of text and language for the older heroics of creative genius and imagination. The text ... accepts the existentialist challenge to confront the lack of a center at the heart of language and to dwell in that void. (460) Many critics have pointed out that Lost in the Funhouse invites such an interpretation by repeatedly suggesting that traditional narrative forms and the authors who construct them have lost their power to find or depict a coherent meaning. However, what is often overlooked is metafiction's inherent and inevitable preoccupation with the creative power of the author. At the same time that they lament the diminished capacity of the narrator to construct a proper story, the self-conscious moments in Lost in the Funhouse point necessarily to the existence of a creator, of an author. …

Done with Mirrors: Restoring the Authority Lost in John Barth’s Funhouse

Lost in the Funhouse is a book in which language and literature are explicitly discussed. Many critics have thoroughly examined it on those grounds, but they have failed to attend to the underlying themes in the book. Like Barth's early novels, Sartrean ideas about consciousness are the theme of Lost in the Funhouse. It considers the nothingness of consciousness, as well as the resulting impossibility of being sincere or explaining an act. It explores the concepts of facticity and transcendence, existence and essence, as well as ego and spontaneity. Without having those concepts in mind, I believe one misses much in a reading of this book.

“First Person Anonymous”: Sartrean Ideas of Consciousness in Earth's Lost in the Funhouse

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/827859.pdf

Restoring the Authority Lost in John Barth's Funhouse

There's no point in going farther; this isn't getting anybody anywhere; they haven't even come to the funhouse yet. Ambrose is off the track, in some new or old part of the place that's not supposed to be used; he strayed into it by some onein-a-million chance, like the time the roller-coaster car left the tracks in the nineteen-teens against all the laws of physics and sailed over the boardwalk in the dark. And they can't locate him because they don't know where to look. Even the designer and operator have forgotten this other part, that winds around on itself like a whelk shell. That winds around the right part like the snakes on Mercury's caduceus. . . .'

Carolyn Norman Slaughter

Papers

Who Gets Lost in the Funhouse