MASTERS
School of English
Student No: 9910994F / Literary criticism on the short fiction of Raymond Carver investigates frequently the
narrative omissions whereby Carver renders the plight of middle and lower class
America. Neither exclusively formal nor exclusively thematic critiques of Carver’s short
stories explicate adequately the purposes and effects of these narrative omissions. This
study, which is framed by Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theories of ‘negation and
‘negativity’, and Michael Fried’s notion of aesthetic ‘absorption’, provides a formal and
thematic reading of eight of Carver’s stories. This study argues that the reader’s
investments in these omissions generate various indices of sympathetic identification. In
tandem with such an inquiry, this study also examines the apparent antagonism between
the realist and postmodernist strains discernible across Carver’s narratives. This
antagonism is caused by Carver’s omissions, which simultaneously create the illusion of
mimetic transparency and negate this transparency. The omissions that operate across
Carver’s stories make the reader conscious not only of how he or she interprets the
author’s words, but also how he or she interprets the world. Carver’s neo-realism, this
study proposes, therefore has a far greater potential for social realism than traditional
modes of realist representation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/1588 |
| Date | 02 November 2006 |
| Creators | Thomas, Victoria Elizabeth Buchanan |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 6605382 bytes, 226960 bytes, 351960 bytes, 20237 bytes, 12159 bytes, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf |
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