テクストの「はぐらかし」に抵抗するとき : ゴードン・リッシュ著「はぐらかし」の反理論性を読む

概要

論文の詳細を見る
A postmodernist Gordon Lish published a short-short novel "The Merry Chase" in 1985. The text is characterized by complaints from the narrator "I," who complains to "you" from beginning to end. For a reader to understand the complaints, he or she must first understand what the antecedents of the pronouns are, and then determine the meaning of the complaints. However, the reader will not find the referents of the pronouns in the text. Still, Jack Derrida's language-related thoery helps the reader to understand the complaints. The theory can explain that it is a complaint of the text whose meaning is determined and thus, as scholars point out, "The Merry Chase" is a work of metafiction which shows that there is no meaning in a text. However, when a reader does read in fact "The Merry Chase" with Derrida's theory in mind, he or she faces sentences which states that the text itself wants the reader to find "the unvarnished truth" ("The Merry Chase," 50) in the text. The best explanation for this fact can be found in Walter Benn Michaels' discussion of the interpretation of literary texts. According to his explanation, when a reader reads a text, he or she regards each of the words not as just a shape but as something that has a meaning. It leads the reader to imagine the subject behind the signifiers - the one who wrote them - and to try to accept the message from that subject. It is natural as a reader's response to a text even if he or she admits that Derrida's theory related to language is true. Thus, a reader can explain the meaning of a literary text through Derrida's theory, although such an explanation is contradictory to his theory. This view leads us to the interpretation that "The Merry Chase" is metafiction which embodies not Derrida's theory but a reader's natural response to a literary text-reading a text and trying to determine its meaning - and the natural demands that the text makes of the reader.
大阪産業大学の論文

テクストの「はぐらかし」に抵抗するとき : ゴードン・リッシュ著「はぐらかし」の反理論性を読む

スポンサーリンク

概要

著者

関連論文

スポンサーリンク