IPP MC: Klaus Brax: “Out of what shadows does she come?”: Neo-Victorian Novel and the Ethics of Incomplete Characterization

Modern theories of fictional characters as a starting point, this masterclass concentrates on exploring the question of ambiguous or incomplete character description and its possible rhetorical functions in fictional narratives and, more specifically, in certain neo-Victorian novels. The class is divided into two sections. The first section will comprise a formal lecture on the ethics of characterization in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969).  The second section is a collaborative workshop devoted to the application of theoretical insights introduced in the first section, i.e. cognitive and ethical narratology and Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics, into a reading of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996).

In addition to having read the novels mentioned above, participants might, by way of preparation, familiarize themselves with James Phelan’s analysis of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative (p. 83-106, https://ohiostatepress.org/books/Complete%20PDFs/Phelan%20Reading/Phelan%20Reading.htm) and with the modern theoretical views on character in The Living Handbook of Narratology (http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/character).

//Prof. Dr. Klaus Brax (Uni Helsinki)