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ACL1001: Reading Contemporary Fiction

ACL1001: Reading Contemporary Fiction. Lecture 2: Reading Contemporary Fiction. Peter Carey on the Writing Process.

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ACL1001: Reading Contemporary Fiction

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  1. ACL1001: Reading Contemporary Fiction Lecture 2: Reading Contemporary Fiction

  2. Peter Carey on the Writing Process • You need to understand that the business of writing is the business of continually failing, and it will be that all of your life, and when you’re young you’re going to fail more often, and that’s hard to live with. But, you know, my unpublished books were really how I learned to write. And each one got better, and I knew that it was a lot better… the other thing that’s really helpful is to have someone who can read your work both critically and supportively (O’Reilly, 2002, p. 166).

  3. Culturally Activated Readers • ‘Meaning is a transitive phenomenon. It is not a thing that texts can have, but is something that can only be produced, and always differently, within the reading formations that regulate the encounters between texts and readers’ (Bennett, 1994, p. 211).

  4. Definitions • Material: worldly • Social: society • Ideological: deriving from ideology – set of ideas • Institutional: any organised element of society (Williams, 1976)

  5. F.R. Leavis • Cambridge Professor in 1920s • Moral transcendence • New Criticism

  6. What is Theory? • Culler defines ‘theory’ in four ways:Theory is interdisciplinary Theory is analytical and speculative Theory is a critique of common sense, of concepts taken as naturalTheory is reflexive (1997: 14-15)

  7. New Criticism • ‘Good literature is of timeless significance; it somehow transcends the limitations and peculiarities of the age it was written in, and thereby speaks to what is constant in human nature’ • ‘The literary text contains its own meaning within itself. It doesn’t require any elaborate process of placing it within a context’ (Barry, p. 17)

  8. Jonathan Culler • What is literature? • Language • Aesthetics • Intertextuality • Social and Political Function

  9. Fiction • not fact, • made up, • untrue, • imagined, • invented

  10. Contemporary Fiction • Literatures that challenge the traditional English canon • Literatures that explore questions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality • Literatures that are heterogenous • Literatures that provide a space for dissident and dissonant voices • Literatures that need to be read in their cultural contexts (Morrison, 2003)

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