“Still There”: (Dis)engaging with Dickens's Minor Characters

IF 0.3 2区 文学 0 LITERATURE
Kristen H. Starkowski
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

More can be done in minor character studies to account for the strong sense of being that emerges at the edges of the nineteenth-century novel. By pairing traditional readings of the minor character in narrative theory with sociologist Erving Goffman's writings on disengagement, this article offers a different perspective on the competition for narrative attention as we know it. For example, when disengagement is taken into account, Alex Woloch's losers in the competition for narrative attention become winners in the formulation of a fulfilling social life. Dickens's minor characters take part in central spaces while not being contained by them. Their distance from main scenes and settings, captured in passing by a gaze that has no interest in registering these elsewheres in any level of depth, has the effect of making minor characters appear strange, memorable, or other, even though their worlds are quite rich. But Dickens's minor characters define the ingenuity of counterintuition, pointing toward a suppressed energy that belies the flatness of a minor character. Drawn with care, these characters build alternative, codependent ways of surviving on the edges of the characterological field.
《依然在那里》:(Dis)与狄更斯的次要人物互动
在次要人物研究中,可以做更多的工作来解释19世纪小说边缘出现的强烈存在感。通过将叙事理论中对次要人物的传统解读与社会学家埃尔文·戈夫曼关于脱离的著作相结合,本文对我们所知的叙事注意力的竞争提供了一个不同的视角。例如,当考虑到脱离时,亚历克斯·沃洛克在叙事关注竞争中的失败者成为了充实社会生活的赢家。狄更斯笔下的次要人物在不被中心空间所包容的情况下参与其中。他们与主要场景和场景的距离,被一种对在任何深度上记录这些其他场景都不感兴趣的凝视所捕捉到,会让次要角色看起来奇怪、令人难忘或其他,尽管他们的世界相当丰富。但狄更斯笔下的次要人物定义了反直觉的独创性,指出了一种压抑的能量,掩盖了次要人物的平淡。这些人物精心绘制,在人物学领域的边缘建立了可供选择的、相互依赖的生存方式。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.40
自引率
0.00%
发文量
0
期刊介绍: Widely acknowledged as the leading journal in its field, Novel publishes essays concerned with the novel"s role in engaging and shaping the world. To promote critical discourse on the novel, the journal publishes significant work on fiction and related areas of research and theory. Recent issues on the early American novel, eighteenth-century fiction, and postcolonial modernisms carry on Novel"s long-standing interest in the Anglo-American tradition.
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