| Popis: |
This chapter discusses two very different forms of omniscience, and Wayne Booth famously described and deconstructed them in A Rhetoric of Fiction. The Victorian novel is, at a certain point, annexed to a structuralist idea of French realism, which is imagined as free of intrusive narration. These combined critical moves regularize the Victorian novel into something less interesting and less problematic than what it had been for previous generations of more skeptical critics, or critics for whom that novel was not yet great. The chapter also explains that the pleasure of the text is also the pleasure of consenting to not knowing, to knowing that one does not know and having that be a condition of being in the world. Readers do not identify with characters because they are like people, but because readers are like characters, relying on forms of omniscience to keep narrating various aspects of reality for them. Omniscience hangs around as an omnipresent narrative and epistemological form. Disembodied but not disempowered, dismembered but not defunctioned. |
