Reflecting creatively in 1967 on the production of his novel El señor presidente (1946), Miguel Ángel Asturias creates an imaginary scenario in which the dictator declares to Asturias that he, not the novelist, is the real author of the novel because “toda dictadura es siempre una novela” (“every dictatorship is always a novel”; 470). With this self-authorizing claim, the dictator wrests power from the author by declaring himself the supreme meaning-maker. While the dictator—or, more accurately, the dictatorship—trumps the novelist in Asturias’s text, a footnote in Junot Dı́az’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) expounds: “Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like” (97n11). Much as Asturias’s dictator sees the novelist as his competitor, Dı́az’s footnote recognizes the slippery similarities between dictators and writers: they are narrative makers and narrative controllers. Both the dictator and the novelist create metanarratives and produce meaning. They are fabulous inventors who can make the unbelievable believable. They both also control subjects and exercise their authority through words to dictate their subjects’ or characters’ actions and thoughts. Establishing a similitude between writers and dictators, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao grapples with how to circumnavigate authoritarianism—that is, the precarious link among authorship, authority, and authoritarianism. The novel plays on the tensions between the two definitions of dictate: on the one hand, to order or command authoritatively and absolutely and, on the other hand, to speak aloud words that are to be written down or transcribed. There are two types of competing dictators at the center of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: the political dictator (Rafael Trujillo) who rules over the subjects of his regime and the narrative dictator (Yunior) who retrospectively recounts the novel’s events. As the primary narrator and storyteller, Yunior loosely functions as a dictator in both senses because he controls and orders representation and

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

Dictating a Zafa: The Power of Narrative Form in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

........................................................................................................ii Dedication.....................................................................................................iii Acknowledgments ...........................................................................................iv Introduction: Vicar Victoria: Writing The Church Of England In Nineteenth Century Fiction.......................................................................1 Chapter I: Institutions and Individuals: George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life And The Humanity Of The Curate....................................22 Chapter II: Profession and Vocation: Margaret Oliphant On the Changing Character Of Called Clergy...................................................52 Chapter III: Church-Building and Church Buildings: Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain and The Tractarian Project........................................88 Coda: G. K. Chesterton And The Novel Clerical Detective.................................................................................126 Bibliography................................................................................................148 Vita..........................................................................................................166

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Vicar Victoria: Writing the Church of England in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

A man falling into dark water seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones; and Silas, by acting as if he believed in false hopes, warded off the moment of despair. --George Eliot, Silas Marner (47) The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/Is the wisdom of humility. --T. S. Eliot, "East Coker" (11.48-49) It is usually assumed that empathy--the ability to imagine oneself into the inner life of another--is a good thing (Prinz 211). Recent research links empathy with ethical consequences such as "altruism and prosocial behavior, moral development, interpersonal bonding, and improved intergroup relations" (Harrison 256). Empathy has become a ubiquitous concept in areas ranging from politics, law, and business ethics to medical care and education, to name just a few (Coplan 3). The benefits of empathy are presumed to be considerable and the lack of it is often deplored, sometimes being associated with psychopathy and criminality (Harrison 256). Several perspectives, including evolutionary ones, are based on the view that empathy is an evolved faculty, vital to humankind's cooperation and hence survival (Moore and Hallenbeck 471). In other words, empathy is thus often considered to be useful, indispensable, and even morally good. (1) The notion that the act of reading literature expands our empathy is a popular one. (2) The idea that reading develops our ability to shift perspectives, and that it enhances our understanding of unknown others, is often heard in academia as well as beyond. Martha Nussbaum believes that the empathy induced by reading literature can have an influence on a person's moral development and even prompt altruistic behavior in the real world, a contention she shares with many other philosophers and with (developmental) psychologists (Keen, "Novel Readers" 21). Recently, the psychologists David Kidd and Emanuele Castano published a conspicuous study in Science, submitting that reading (good) fiction improves empathy. Although the outcomes they reported were far from conclusive, the impact on the public debate was massive and bolstered the case for literature as a tool to improve our moral character. Even so, the idea that empathy, or what is referred to here as narrative empathy--that is, "the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another's situation and condition" (Keen, "Narrative Empathy")--has a civilizing effect on our behaviors and attitudes has been challenged within literary studies. That empathy somehow enters into the fictional experience may be a fairly uncontroversial idea. As Fritz Breithaupt puts it, "there would probably be no fiction if we did not have the ability to imagine how it feels to be another or to be in another's situation" (2); but empathy's role in prosocial behavior and altruism has been greatly debated. Although admitting empathy's essential role in reading, Suzanne Keen is critical of the altruism-empathy hypothesis as it relates to fiction. In her influential book Empathy and the Novel (2007), she questions "the contemporary truism that novel reading cultivates empathy that produces good citizens for the world" (xv). According to Keen, there is very little empirical evidence that suggests a clear causal relationship between novel-reading and altruism. In fact, Keen shows that readers empathize in unforeseen ways (Morgan 32) and that altruistic behavior after reading is quite unusual. (3) The recent anthology Rethinking Empathy through Literature (2014) follows up on some of the questions raised by Keen, addressing the increasing need to problematize the concept of empathy and confront the widespread idea that reading literature generates prosocial behaviour. (4) This discussion sets out to problematize the empathy-altruism hypothesis as it relates to literature--that is, the assumption that literature makes us better people--by examining a paradox engendered by empathy in the novel. …

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The Paradox of Narrative Empathy and the Form of the Novel, or What George Eliot Knew

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3248&context=etd

Novel multitudes: credit, capital, and collective subjects in the Victorian novel

From the perspective of a game theorist with a romantic nature, Michael Chwe explores the six novels of Jane Austen. Chwe argues that Austen was a pioneer in the understanding of strategic thinking that shapes individual choices, and hence individual behavior. The result is an original interpretation of Austen’s imagination whose unique critical way of thinking put her ahead of her time not only for English literature but for understanding the individual motives driving human interactions.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/chwe/austen/introduction.pdf

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

Citations

Dictating a Zafa: The Power of Narrative Form in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Vicar Victoria: Writing the Church of England in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

The Paradox of Narrative Empathy and the Form of the Novel, or What George Eliot Knew

Novel multitudes: credit, capital, and collective subjects in the Victorian novel

Jane Austen, Game Theorist

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