Strange narrators in contemporary fiction : explorations in readers' engagement with characters
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Strange narrators in contemporary fiction : explorations in readers' engagement with characters
（Frontiers of narrative）
University of Nebraska Press, c2016
- : hbk
Available at / 1 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-262) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
A storyteller's craft can often be judged by how convincingly the narrative captures the identity and personality of its characters. In this book, the characters who take center stage are "strange" first-person narrators: they are fascinating because of how they are at odds with what the reader would wish or expect to hear-while remaining reassuringly familiar in voice, interactions, and conversations. Combining literary analysis with research in cognitive and social psychology, Marco Caracciolo focuses on readers' encounters with the "strange" narrators of ten contemporary novels, including Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Caracciolo explores readers' responses to narrators who suffer from neurocognitive or developmental disorders, who are mentally disturbed due to multiple personality disorder or psychopathy, whose consciousness is split between two parallel dimensions or is disembodied, who are animals, or who lose their sanity.
A foray into current work on reception, reader-response, cognitive literary study, and narratology, Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction illustrates why any encounter with a fictional text is a complex negotiation of interlaced feelings, thoughts, experiences, and interpretations.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Spiders on Drugs: A Prologue
Introduction: Minding Characters
1. Patterns of Cognitive Dissonance
2. Two Child Narrators
3. Madness between Violence and Insight
4. A Strange Mood
5. Tales of Rats and Pigs
6. Obsessive Narrators, Unstable Knowledge
Coda: Uses of the Character-Centered Illusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
