Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Intertexts of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

This study investigates the intertextual use of the fairy tale in postmodern fiction. I contend that the fairy tale, whether Grimm, Andersen or Perrault, is an important intertext in many texts considered canonical postmodernist fiction, especially Midnight's Children, Waterland and Nights at the Circus. I demonstrate that the fairy tale is used in novels to raise concerns that Hutcheon and McHale characterise as postmodern: questions about reality and representation, how language affects the way humans perceive the world, and the necessity of storytelling.The study first addresses issues of intertextuality, examining re-tellings of "Bluebeard" specifically. Drawing upon the theories of Genette and Bakhtin, chapter one defines eight elements of intertextuality. John Fowles' The Collector & A.S. Byatt's Babel Tower are closely examined here, as is Margaret Atwood's "Bluebeard's Egg" and Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard.Chapter two highlights that fairy tale intertexts can create magic realism. A close reading of Kate Atkinson's Human Croquet leads to a discussion of the formal features of magic realism, informed by definitions of that genre from Chanady and Faris.Magic realism is also a theme in chapter three, where the concept of the storyteller is explained. This chapter examines fictions which depict oral narration, including Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Atkinson's Emotionally Weird and notes the storyteller in these texts' similarity to the archetypal storyteller of the Arabian Nights, Scheherazade. Chapter four explains why the process of storytelling is depicted, and highlights the metafictive effects raised by this feature. The final chapter examines how fairy tale revisions can be subversive by looking at how Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad critiques the "classic fairy tale" exemplified by Disney. The conclusion looks at how fairy tale film can be analysed in the same way that I have examined the novel, by briefly studying Shrek and its sequel, and Tim Burton's Big Fish.Informed throughout by contemporary criticism of the fairy tale by Jack Zipes and Marina Warner, this study isolates the different ways fairy tale intertexts are used, and suggests reasons why they are important.

The intertextual use of the fairy tale in postmodern fiction

Any representation of a fictional document implies interpretative acts. This is also true of the kind of representation found in classification or indexing systems. Consequently, to get inspiration for a precise and adequate indexing, it might be a good idea to look for theories and methods which are designed for the purpose of analyzing and interpreting literary texts. The intention of the author is to make some considerations of the nature of fiction in relation to classification and indexing systems, in order to propose a few improvements

The nature of fiction and its significance for classification and indexing

JANE EYRE IS A NOVEL INTENSELY CONCERNED with reading and being read. It is a text fixated on acts of literacy and states of legibility, and it produces reading as a compelling, multivalent locus for narrative pleasures and for the articulation of desire. Jane Eyre grants the greatest possible significance to every form of literacy, frequently structuring its articulations of the erotic through reading: reading books or watching others read them, successfully (or unsuccessfully) reading the faces and heads of others, and controlling or failing to command one's legibility. These many crucial literacies do not originate from a chance narrative enthusiasm, but are centrally linked to the novel's equally intense interest in the classificatory arrangements of phrenological systems. Phrenology, that famous nineteenth-century pseudo-science of reading, enables the production of the novel's multiple erotic strands, structuring not only a considerable portion of the heterosexual romance plot(s), but articulating and enabling the novel's female homoerotic dynamics, as well.

Reading a head: jane eyre, phrenology, and the homoerotics of legibility

For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the "first modem novel." Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which "great books" like Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette's La princesse de Clives (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia.' The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism's quest for the "first modem novel" has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modem one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an "aleph": an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all at-

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

Intertexts of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

The intertextual use of the fairy tale in postmodern fiction

The nature of fiction and its significance for classification and indexing

Reading a head: jane eyre, phrenology, and the homoerotics of legibility

When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes's Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish Orientalism