Theo Dhaen

Text to Reader seeks to find a critical approach that links a novel’s form to its socio-cultural context. Combining elements from Iser’s reception aesthetics, speech act theory, and Goffman’s frame analysis, this book starts from the assumption that a reader has certain conventional expectations with regard to a novel, and then goes on to examine how violations of these expectations rule the reader’s relationship to the novel. The theory sketched in the first chapter is then, in four subsequent chapters, applied to The French Lieutenant’s Woman by the English author John Fowles, Letters by the American John Barth, Libro de Manuel by the Argentinean Julio Cortázar, and De Kapellekensbaan by the Flemish novelist Louis-Paul Boon. The particular form each of these novels takes is analyzed as correlative to that novel’s communicative function. This book will be of interest to comparatists, students of English and American literature, and the literatures of Latin-America and the Low Countries.

A Communicative Approach to Fowles, Barth, Cortazar, and Boon

Text to Reader

Helmut Lethen

Rainer Grübel

This work is a critical evaluation of the concepts of convention and innovation as applied in the study of changing literary values, hierarchies and canons. Two approaches are analyzed: (1) the linking of convention and the subject's awareness of convention, and (2) systems theory. The merits of both approaches are discussed and an attempt is made to combine them and to regard systems of literary communication primarily as systems of conventions. Specific cases of changing conventions and innovation are illustrated with examples from the field of versification (Rimbaud), reception studies (Puskin, Goethe, George Eliot), the dichotomy of forgetting/remembering (Nietzsche, Proust), avant-garde, the American dream, and popular genres assimilated in Postmodernism.

Theo Dhaen

Books

Your next favorite book is out there

Theo Dhaen

Books

Your next favorite book is out there

Theo Dhaen