The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Alone with Tess

Villette and the Ends of Interpretation

In this essay, I suggest that the central section of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – the creature’s description of his first experiences – echoes Hume’s and Bacon’s discussions of inductive reasoning Because the creature must learn the causes of phenomena the reader takes for granted, his story defamiliarizes both the reader’s world and the process of induction itself The creature’s tale thus functions as a travel narrative, and produces the cognitive estrangement associated with science fiction I then examine the prominence of inductive reasoning in the novel as a whole, and discuss Victor’s and the creature’s singular situations as resistant to inductive understanding I argue that Shelley uses various narrative techniques (such as embedded narratives and character doubling) to invite and frustrate readers’ attempts to use induction to solve the novel’s central moral questions The reader’s inability to form coherent inductive patterns in part accounts for the novel’s radical ambiguity Finally, I suggest some consequences for Frankenstein’s relation to the gothic: the novel departs from gothic conventions in its unusual use of the doppelganger, and its rhetorical goals in invoking induction

Frankenstein’s Singular Events: Inductive Reasoning, Narrative Technique, and Generic Classification

Romancing the Anthropocene: H. G. Wells and the Genre of the Future

This article argues that in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House there is a deep affiliation between the novel’s management of minor characters and its own mass of discarded and recycled papers--both of which are systems of fluctuating value and visibility. Drawing on Victorian paper and rag recycling practices as well as anthropological theory, I demonstrate how minor characters, including Krook, Nemo, and Jo, embody the dynamic energy of rubbish in their ability to return in newly transformed and figural positions after death. Bleak House thus organizes its character world around a threshold of visibility that, in turn, works to sustain the reader’s experience of surprise and suspense.

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

Alone with Tess

Villette and the Ends of Interpretation

Frankenstein’s Singular Events: Inductive Reasoning, Narrative Technique, and Generic Classification

Romancing the Anthropocene: H. G. Wells and the Genre of the Future

Paper Routes: Bleak House, Rubbish Theory, and the Character Economy of Realism

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