![]() To ascribe any of Humbert’s vile ideas to the novel’s real author amounts to slander or defamation and gives aid and intellectual cover to censorship efforts. We have already mentioned Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita and its horrible narrator Humbert Humbert. ![]() These novice readers severely underestimate the creativity of writers, who often invent unreliable or even evil narrators. This is almost always a grand interpretive mistake, leading to judgmental essays with non-academic tones. Second, students are occasionally tempted to draw moral or moralistic conclusions about an author based on the ideas or behaviors of a narrator. Narrative Theory encourages close reading by insisting on division between author’s biography and analysis of implied author or narrator. While New Criticism eventually gave way to Feminism, Structuralism, Deconstruction theory, Reader-Response, and other movements in literary criticism, the practice of close reading remains essential to essay writing at the collegiate level. Eliot, insisted that close textual analysis is the key to making successful interpretive claims. Rowling’s controversial tweets and blog posts in the previous chapter, the relative importance of the author in shaping our understanding of a text is a matter of some debate and has been a salient point of contention among scholars since the rise of New Criticism in the 1940s. First, insisting on division between real author, implied author, and narrator avoids the authorial or intentional fallacy-the notion that an author’s intentions should limit or control the ways a text is interpreted-which can severely restrict the creativity of student essays. What is gained by adopting this onion-like, semiotic model of storytelling? Why bother distinguishing implied authors from real or from narrators? This is the most jargon-heavy section of our textbook, but narrative theory provides a few key benefits to students studying fiction. Similarly, every narrative has an implied reader, which is the ideal reader addressed by narrative discourse. 2 Every narrative has an implied author, even if it does not have a real author (e.g., a computer-generated text) or it has many of them (e.g., collaborative fiction). It is simply the organizing principle of discourse, which includes the narrator and the other aspects of the narration. The implied author does not tell anything it does not have a voice. It is important in this sense to distinguish the implied author from the narrator of the story. ![]() The ‘implied author’ 1 is implied because it does not have an explicit or independent reality, as the real author does, but must be reconstructed by the reader from the narrative itself. Narrative discourse is the communication between the implied author and the implied reader of a narrative (see #Fig. ![]() Narration is part of discourse, which constitutes the second level in our semiotic model of narrative. This is what we call narration, a communicative act that does not happen in the storyworld or at the level of the story. But the storyworld only comes to exist because someone (a narrator) tells a story to someone else (a narratee). So far, we have analyzed the main constituents of the story, or, as we have called them, the existents of the storyworld: events, environments, and characters.
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