B.S. Johnson: a topological approach

c i n d e r, 2018

In the realms of literature and creative writing, there is a unique legitimacy conferred upon works which are seen as 'authentic'. This results in a hierarchical organisation of styles and genres which exists external and prior to any individual text. This paper explores the claim to authenticity of 'realist' literary fiction in Australia and attempts to challenge that hierarchy from the perspective of Nietzsche's work on the concept of the mask. Central to this argument is an analysis of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle and its awareness of the relationship between truth and illusion. BIOGRA PHICAL NOTE Kieran Stevenson is an award-winning Melbourne-based writer of novels and short fiction. His research is focused on the boundaries of genre and the literary in the novel form. K EYWORDS Mask-Authenticity-Realism-Genre-Vonnegut-Fiction c i n d e r S tev e n s on (U n) m as k i n g R ea l i ty 2 '[...] like most sci-fi, the book will disappoint any reader who insists on the evolving, three dimensional characters of the realist novel.'

English Literary Renaissance, 1993

ellfire has cooled over the last few centuries, yet the netherworld, rich in gold and history, is too valuable to give up if only because the notion of a buried anticosmos is so compelling. Hell can even serve certain forms of subversive carnival humor, if its depths house those once on the heights. And since carnival reversal usually takes place on holidays, since Saturnalia revives the lazy age of gold, the overworked living can impel it along by in turn imagining kings and celebrities working at something useful-if not in this world, then in the next. Not surprisingly, then, one satisfying if minor tradition envisions deceased magnates earning their bread by the sweat of what's left of their brows; the forced labor takes place in the world's lower bodily stratum, if I may transfer Bakhtin's phrase from the human person to the earth, although on occasion it does so with hints of what lies beneath that stratum, the boneheap below ordinary sex and scatology. 1 This rough justice for rulers shows best in Franqois Rabelais's Pantugruel, when the giant's trickster servant Panurge restores his decapitated friend Epistemon by anointing the patient's neck with excrement and wrapping his codpiece three times around the wound. Panurge is an appropriate reviver, for one of his role-models is Hermes, the trickster psychopomp with a medicinal s t a g and the cure itself is I. On Rabelaisian carnival see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), despite his polarized view of "popular" and "official." Samuel Kinser, Rabelois's Carnival: Texr, Conrexr, Meratext (Berkeley, I 990), offers a less binary approach. Valuable on the abyss below "materialism" is James Hillman. The Dream and the Underworld (New York, 1979), especially pp. 39 and 183-85 on scatology, 138 on work, and 175-80 on revelry. Saturnalia is not revolution, but on the overlap offestive and utopian reversal see Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Chicago, 1970). Anne Lake Prescott 24s homeopathic, for whatever the infertility of its own bottom, Hell has an ancient kinship with shit.2 None the worse except for a dry cough in his upper passageway, Epistemon agrees to join his friends for dinner and describe what he saw while dead. What he has witnessed is, at least in good part, an exaggeration of a scene in Lucian's cheerfully cynical Menippos. After some preposterous necromancy, it will be recalled, Menippos journeys to Hades disguised as a combination of Ulysses, Orpheus, and Hercules. There he finds a crowd of skeletons made equal by losing their costumes of flesh, but there too is a satirically upside-down society in which the great sell salt, for instance, or teach the alphabet; Philip mends sandals, while Xerxes, Darius, and Polycrates beg. Rabelais names many more names, and classical figures now rub elbows with those from later history and romance. Epistemon is thus only the most entertaining in a long line of the dead or nearly dead with news about the other world, but whatever his possible models among the Italians, Rabelais seems to have been the first in France to put together Menippos and accounts by the resurrected, eliminating the tortures found in most medieval visions ofHell and turning Lucian's amoral skepticism into comic quasi-apocalyptic reversal.3 To see how others twisted his revisionary homage to Lucian without quite destroying it is an exercise in what I would call intertextual topology. How much can one displace a commonplace, reform a topos, without quite destroying its identity? What new purposes can 2. Panfagruel 30, in Oeuvres complifes, ed. Pierre Jourda (Paris, 1962). 2 vols. For the short I 532 version see the edition by V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva, 1946), ch. 20. Most now think the scene a parody of popular texts like Le calendrier des bergers and Les quatrefils Aymon, not a blasphemy.

2012

It is an accepted proposition that literary texts differ greatly in their degree of stylistic interest. In their landmark study, Style in Fiction (1981/2007), Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short attempt to account for this phenomenon by putting forward the concept of the relative transparency or opacity of the literary text, by means of an approach that utilizes the ideational metafunction. In this way, Leech and Short attempt to deal with the fact that literary texts contain “many degrees of translucency of style”. In my opinion, however, this concept is insufficiently flexible to handle the full range of stylistic markedness in literary language. As an alternative, I draw on the concept of the three levels of style identified in the tradition of classical rhetoric—the simple, the middle and the grand style. Building on this foundation, I approach the issue of stylistic markedness through the interpersonal metafunction, outlining a model of style that utilizes four separate levels, with ...

Language, 1998

This thesis is concerned with the novel, and specifically with how the novel is recognisable as a certain kind of meaning-the kind of meaning known to literary theorists as genre. To say that genre is a kind of meaning is to infer that it shapes linguistic meaning in the broad sense that I have given thus far, for genre can indeed be said to both enhance and constrain meaning in these terms (Frow Genre 10). Thus a statement in a novel, although it will have the same linguistic value that it possesses in ordinary usage, will have the additional meaning described by the term "fiction"; and this additional meaning value will both limit and direct the inferences that follow from the utterance. Situation-as an integral relation of space and time-is important because such enhancements will include presumptions founded on conventions not ordinarily required for everyday speech and writing where the utterance is unmediated and the speakers are phenomenally known or knowable. These conventions will position the utterance as deriving from a character in the novel, or the narrator, rather than the author of the work overall. Such distinctions are primarily spatiotemporal: although the coherence of the novel's statements will be critically attributable to the writer, these are mediated through different "persons"-they come to us via the fictive speakers of the novel. The four key metaphors identified in the title to this thesis are the kinds of meaning that are mediated in the novel to create this effect, which is the sense of a space and time that is other than the conditions in which the novel was written. Mediation of these terms occurs in a variety of genres but it is in particular the novel which achieves this effect through the elaboration and transformation of ordinary styles of speech. Indeed, the construction of fictive eventfulness is possible because all meaning is metaphoric when added to the world through speech; for speech represents a likeness to the phenomenal aspect without being the same as that aspect: meaning is not material, in other words, but a conceptual aspect correlating to the phenomenal. This realisation underpins post-Saussurean semiologie and post-Peircean semiotics; 1 but in this thesis

Literature and Sensation, 2009

English Language Notes

In t r o d u c t i o n : C o n t i n u i t y in L i t e r a r y F o r m a n d H i s t o r y W i l l i a m K u s k i n L iterature is a synthetic art. In this, it stands som ewhat at odds w ith academic organization overall, which seeks to discipline such synthesis, to parse knowledge and codify human expression according to gram matical law, to invest authority discretely and in doing so set the boundary lines of taste and import. Such an agon is par ticularly clear in the grow ing body of scholarship on cartoons, comics, and graphic novels. For the critical response to this material has been to isolate it, to delim it its parameters through a series o f definitions, a list of noteworthy texts, and a lexicon of terms. Graphia: Literary Criticism and the Graphic Novel argues otherwise. Graphic stories highlight the synthetic nature o f literary production. In doing so, their poetics bring the com plex interplay o f material and rhetorical form s that define the literary object into great focus, and thus reinvigorate the current discussion of literary method by recalling the essentially interdiscipli nary nature o f literary analysis.1 Graphia contextualizes comics and graphic novels w ithin the medium o f the literary book in order to demonstrate their inherent difference, and thus decontextualize literature overall. The current critical work on comics and graphic novels coalesces around three main claims: that the artform originates in the early nineteenth century, that it is best read structurally, and that it constitutes a new medium. In each case, these claims center around the concepts o f rupture and rebirth.2 For example, though there has been some debate as to the founda tional roles of W illiam Hogarth (1697-1764) and Richard Felton Outcault (1863-1928), comics criticism currently recognizes RodolpheTöpffer (1799-1846), a Genovese schoolmaster and university lecturer w ho wrote seven complete illustrated books, as "re inve ntin g" Hogarth's tableaus in term s of sequential narrative, and thus as the father of the graphic novel.3 This history parallels the second m ajor theme, term inology, which begins w ith W ill Eisner's 1978 publication o f A Contract with God and his subsequent popularization of the term graphic novel.1 1 Alm ost every m onograph on comics has sought to define this term and w ith it a tax onom y fo r reading.6 Though differing in detail, these taxonom ies assert the reader's im ag inative involvem ent in a structural relationship between the individual panel and the sequencing o f such panels as they constitute the strip, pamphlet, book, and album. Essentially, then, these first tw o points, the story o f origins and the story o f the panels, grap ple w ith the same problem-how to understand fragm entation and continuity w ithin tim e

Interface derives from a colloquium held in 2009 and originally published in 2010 by Mohr Siebeck in WUNT. Other than a list of corrections at the end, this edition does not appear to have updated the previous version. (The principle difference appears to be the cheaper price that comes with being softcover.) The volume comprises twenty-two essays grouped into four parts, with an author list and source, name, and subject indices.