书信与当代小说:伊恩·麦克尤恩《儿童法案》中的物质性与隐喻

IF 0.3 2区 文学 0 LITERATURE NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION Pub Date : 2020-11-01 DOI:10.1215/00295132-8624570
K. Wilkinson
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引用次数: 0

摘要

今天的日常交流主要是数字化的,但当代小说仍然对纸质信件感兴趣。为什么?写在纸上的信件为21世纪的小说提供了什么?本文以伊恩·麦克尤恩的《儿童法案》为例,探讨了材料信作为隐喻的当代价值。麦克尤恩的小说将宗教和世俗法律之间的冲突戏剧化,这是让-弗朗索瓦·利奥塔在《分歧》中所指出的那种争端的一个例子:这种争端是无法解决的,因为规范它的过程无法记录一方所遭受的错误。在不同的模式中,这两个文本考虑了棘手的冲突及其监管的伦理问题,本文通过利奥塔的差异动态与信件动态之间的暗示性对应关系来分析其运作。本文认为,这些对应关系源于字母的物质特性,而物质特性是其隐喻功能的基础。信件延迟的时间结构,以及延迟产生的沉默和不稳定,尤其与差异的运作有着富有成效的密切关系。这些对应关系有助于描述《儿童法案》的冲突,并更普遍地揭示信件作为隐喻的价值。本案例研究展示了一个将信件作为隐喻资源的例子,其可能性与数字通信的可能性不同,其灵活性和细微差别有助于解释当代小说对信件的持续兴趣。
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Letters and the Contemporary Novel: Materiality and Metaphor in Ian McEwan's The Children Act
Daily communication today is predominantly digital, but contemporary novels continue to be interested in paper letters. Why? What do letters, written on paper, offer to the novel in the twenty-first century? This essay explores the material letter's contemporary value as metaphor, reading as a case study Ian McEwan's The Children Act. McEwan's novel dramatizes a conflict between religion and the secular law, which is an example of the type of dispute that Jean-François Lyotard identifies in The Differend: a dispute that is unresolvable because the process for regulating it is unable to register the wrong that one side suffers. In their different modes, these two texts consider intractable conflict and the ethics of its regulation, the workings of which are analyzed here through the suggestive correspondences between the dynamics of Lyotard's differend and those of letters. These correspondences derive, this essay argues, from the letter's material properties, which underlie its ability to function as metaphor. The letter's temporal structure of delay and the silences and instability that delay produces, in particular, have productive affinities with the workings of the differend. These correspondences help to delineate the conflicts of The Children Act and to reveal the value of the letter as metaphor more generally. This case study presents an example of the letter as a metaphorical resource, whose possibilities are distinct from those of digital communications and whose flexibility and nuance help to account for contemporary novels' continued interest in the letter.
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来源期刊
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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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