Here’s a little squib of pedagogical mechanism from

by Zlatko Waterman

Posted to Utterances on 2004-06-17 16:23:00

Parent message is 663503
a textbook that might be helpful, e_dog. It treats the novel as it emerged from the epic and romance. Everyone has his or her favorite example of “the first novel,” Here the examples chosen are from Defoe.

(link)

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/novel.html


“Don Quixote”, though a picaresque, is a popular nominee also.

The novel obviously partakes of some of the characteristics of tragedy included in Aristotle’s “Poetics”, e.g., plot.

But how can many contemporary works in the genre be fitted to traditional patterns? “Metafiction”, so called, doesn’t exactly feature much that Dickens would recognize as the novel. “Time’s Arrow” by Martin Amis is a good example.

(link)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction

Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” features a character, a “real” person, not simply a narrative voice, but an actor in the plot, called “Paul Auster.” When Auster appears as a character, some of the central characters up to that point in the novel begin to fade– the central mystery figure, “Stillman”, for example.

One thing Dickens might recognize in Auster’s novel are the symbolic names– like “Stillman.”


–Zlatko