Character as a Vanishing Point in American Experimental Fiction

• Authors: Salwa Karoui-Elounelli
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

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.

Keywords

EN

Modernism; Postmodernism; characterization and character in fiction; pictorial language; vanishing point; literary representation; William Faulkner; Paul Auster; William Gass

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: American, British and Canadian Studies Journal
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 19
• Pages: 56-76

Dates

published

2012-12-01

online

2013-05-01

Contributors

author

Salwa Karoui-Elounelli

• University of Sousse

References

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• Faulkner, William. Light in August [1932]. Middlesex & New York: Penguin Books in association with Chatto & Windus, 1983.
• Gass, William. “Mrs. Mean.” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and OtherStories. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. 80-119.
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• Schwerdtfeger, Barbara. Ethics in Postmodern Fiction. Donald Barthelme andWilliam Gass. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2005.
• Sorensen, Roy. “The Vanishing Point: A Model of the Self as Absence.” TheMonist 90, n°3 (2007): 432- 456.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969.[WoS]

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/abcsj-2013-0004