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Character as a Vanishing Point in American Experimental Fiction

Character as a Vanishing Point in American Experimental Fiction Abstract My paper discusses the construction of character in some American experimental narratives within the optical paradigm of the vanishing point. In a first part the investment of the pictorial notion of the vanishing point in Faulkner’s Light in August will be discussed as an instance of the occasional confrontation in Modernist fiction of the limits of literary representation, even if the pictorial category is adapted (and so limited) to the specific issue of biracial identity. In a second part, William Gass’s short story “Mrs. Mean” and Paul Auster’s The Locked Room will be examined as instances of a sustained critical recasting of the very concept of character. The trope of the vanishing point is consciously deployed in both texts to reinvent fictional character within the challenging scope of borderlines between presence and absence, the life-like (mimetic) and the purely verbal. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American, British and Canadian Studies Journal de Gruyter

Character as a Vanishing Point in American Experimental Fiction

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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by the
ISSN
1841-964X
DOI
10.2478/abcsj-2013-0004
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Abstract My paper discusses the construction of character in some American experimental narratives within the optical paradigm of the vanishing point. In a first part the investment of the pictorial notion of the vanishing point in Faulkner’s Light in August will be discussed as an instance of the occasional confrontation in Modernist fiction of the limits of literary representation, even if the pictorial category is adapted (and so limited) to the specific issue of biracial identity. In a second part, William Gass’s short story “Mrs. Mean” and Paul Auster’s The Locked Room will be examined as instances of a sustained critical recasting of the very concept of character. The trope of the vanishing point is consciously deployed in both texts to reinvent fictional character within the challenging scope of borderlines between presence and absence, the life-like (mimetic) and the purely verbal.

Journal

American, British and Canadian Studies Journal – de Gruyter

Published: Dec 1, 2012

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