Editions Rodopi BV is pleased to announce the following new publication(s)
in Comparative Studies:
* Ralf Hertel:
Making Sense. Sense Perception in the British Novel of the 1980s and 1990s.
Amsterdam/New York, NY 2005. 243 pp. (Internationale Forschungen zur
Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 81)
ISBN: 90-420-1864-x € 50.-/US-$ 67.-
http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=IFAVL+81
Fiction is fascinating. All it provides us with is black letters on white
pages, yet while we read we do not have the impression that we are merely
perceiving abstract characters. Instead, we see the protagonists before our
inner eye and hear their voices. Descriptions of sumptuous meals make our
mouths water, we feel physically repelled by depictions of violence or are
aroused by the erotic details of sexual conquests. We submerge ourselves in
the fictional world that no longer stays on the paper but comes to life in
our imagination. Reading turns into an out-of-the-body experience or,
rather, an in-another-body experience, for we perceive the portrayed world
not only through the protagonist's eyes but also through his ears, nose,
tongue, and skin. In other words, we move through the literary text as if
through a virtual reality.
How does literature achieve this trick? How does it turn mere letters into
vividly experienced worlds? This study argues that techniques of sensuous
writing contribute decisively to bringing the text to life in the reader's
imagination. In detailed interpretations of British novels of the 1980s and
1990s by writers such as John Berger, John Banville, Salman Rushdie,
Jeanette Winterson, or J. M. Coetzee, it uncovers literary strategies for
turning the sensuous experience into words and for conveying it to the
reader, demonstrating how we make sense in, and of, literature.
Both readers interested in the contemporary novel and in the sensuousness of
the reading experience will profit from this innovative study that not only
analyses the interest of contemporary authors in the senses but also
pin-points literary entry points for the sensuous force of reading.
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