Week 7

Question 1

Atwood: “The Sin Eater”

Answer 1

Atwood’s interest in female protagonists and gender issues

Canadian setting?

madness sanity

literary gothic motifs

sarcasm

1960s: general interest in psychology / importance of anti-psychiatry movement:

R. D. Laing = a highly influential Scottish psychiatrist and author of studies such as The Divided Self (1960), which challenged the core values of a practice of psychiatry that considered mental illness mainly as a biological phenomenon without regard for social, intellectual and cultural dimensions.

Question 2

Recent approaches to short story reception

Answer 2

shift of focus: from constituent textual elements to the question of how short stories are read and processed

Interdisciplinary, cognitive approaches to the short story promise new insights into reading-processes in general – e.g. how readers make sense of incoherent plots or how intra-, inter- and extra-textual frames and schemata govern our reading – but also into the characteristics of short story comprehension in particular.

Scholars working in this field claim that short stories are marked by a higher degree of indeterminacy, hence a higher degree of reader participation is needed.

II. Renate Brosch, Short Story. Textsorte und Leseerfahrung, Trier: wvt, 2007

Brosch’s book-length study is based on reception theory in combination with recent orientations in narratology towards cognitive science.

The short story promotes an aesthetic experience that involves a degree of reader participation not frequently found in other narrative texts.

The main thesis of the book is that the reading of short stories involves two apparently opposite but in effect complementary mental activities: visualization and projection.

Visualization refers to visual images created in the mind of the reader in processing the literary text.

Projection = the extension of meaning beyond the frame of the text which takes place in the reader’s attempt to come to terms with indeterminacy.