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Lecture notes: Reorienting the Novel
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Reorienting the NovelLecture One
First formative essay due: Monday Week 8 (1500 words) – BLOCK ONE
Summative essay due week 17: BLOCK ONE AND BLOCK TWO (20%) (2000 words)
Formative Essay due Week 23 (1500 words) BLOCK THREE
Summer exam 2 hours (80%)
Ian Watt’s Argument
‘Formal Realism’ – both form and content, everyday life written in life-like manner
In response to philosophical realism and rise of middle classes (context)
Presents (opening chapter)
-Looking at the present day but also reflecting the excitement of a fifth birthday, when gaining
presents
-Follows the typical thought pattern of a young boy – curious and inquisitive of who they are
and where they come from
-The ‘hmmm’ of ‘Ma’ degrades the excitement of Jack to elude to the fact she is detached whilst
attached as an adult
,-ab ovo – from the egg
-in media res – in the middle of things (action)
Extract (Page 3)
Opening on Jack’s fifth birthday:
-Shows the potential level of intelligence of the five year
-Reader has to reduce themselves to Jack’s age immediately so shows how the reader/audience
grows with Jack throughout the novel; the reader’s understanding of what is happening follows
with Jack’s understanding and development throughout the novel
-emotional development
-Jack personifies and capitalise objects within the room; he befriends them as he knows no one
else except his mother and the TV which are his forms of education within the Room
-Shows the breakdown of age; dialogue – list form of ages counting backwards, and numeracy
skills
-Identifies what Jack is advanced in and lacking in
-Fifth birthday acts as a form of excitement
-Breakdown of a transitionary life moment
-Anticipation – the idea of ‘presents’ in the form of gifts and in the form of the present day
Achieving verisimilitude:
---- the appearance of being true or real ----
-TV and ‘Ma’ act as his teachers
-The use of childish vocabulary; empathise with the limited perspective
-Acts as true to the character; identifying with his reality not actual reality, but it is the only reality
he and the reader knows
LECTURE AND SEMINAR 2
Lecture
-Explore Jstor – access through RHUL library, databases, Jstor
-Room (film) Lenny Abrahamson (2015) – the film cuts all the critic of media and etc. Focuses
on the sexual abuse and the mother daughter relationship
-Film has a much more optimistic tone than the novel
-The filmmakers; Emma wanting the film to be more hopeful than the novel was
-The film also can’t stick towards Jack’s point of view
-Preserving Jack’s POV but not turning the film into magical realism
-Ma’s story as well as Jack’s story
Jack as a narrator;
-Has a very limited point of view
-Interesting angle of the world
-Whose story is it?
-What is the story about?
-Our age gives us an understanding of the world
,-It’s a story about how awful the modern world is
-Consumerism; the medicalisation of experiences
Common assumptions;
-That the chief distinction between types of narrator is the distinction between first and third
person (an ‘I’ narrator, or a ‘he’ narrator)
-That an individual reader is directly communing with the author when reading his or her book.
-Critics POV – Wayne C Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction
-Undramatized: not someone actually in the novel, for example third person narrative
-Dramatized; Booth breaks down narrators into different types; self-conscious and unreliable
narrators. First person and gives themselves a conscious identity
There are varying degrees and types of distance (time, space, sympathy) between narrator and
characters
-Variations of distance;
narrator more or less distant from implied author
more or less distant from the characters (the distance may be a moral one)
more or less distant from the reader’s own norms
implied author may be more or less distant from the reader
implied author may be more or less distant from the characters
Privilege – narrators might be privileged with an inside view of the characters, one to
which other characters in the novel will not have access. The degree and type of this
privilege may vary.
Narrator of Room;
-Is first person
-Dramatized
-Inside the story
-Seems to be narrating during the events, so the story events seem to be unfolding in the present
of the narration
-he does not understand what is happening most of the time
-How well does he understand other people?
-How closely do his values and views accord with those of the reader?
-does that make him unreliable? Yes – to an extent, it leaves an inaccurate narration, yet as the
whole novel is narrated by Jack, he is not unreliable entirely – his characterisation limits him
-The significance of Officer Oh within the novel, show how Jack is gullible and still naïve as a
five-year-old boy. She acts as a encouragement and narrator to him, in order to withdraw Jack’s
story. They are dependent on it, and thus Officer Oh draws upon the relationship of Jack and
Ma
-The nurses use of storytelling; Noreen puts on a special voice, imitates the lack of reality of a
story, allows him to detach himself from the feelings that he has experienced throughout his
time in Room
-The story of Alice and Wonderland; a story outside his experience – encourages to identify
himself with the hero of the story – they help him to become this active participant within his
own story within the novel. He takes charge of his life and the ending of his story
, Seminar
What are the implications of grounding the novel exclusively from Jack’s first-person point-of-
view?
What insights does this perspective provide us with? What are some of the limits we are
presented with?
-Shows the normality to single perspective; to what has been horrendous for the reader and for
Ma
You have to follow the perspective of a narrator of a young age, therefore there may be
exaggerations and lies. Some things may be figures of the imagination as they are from a child.
Additionally, we are reading a child’s voice which isn’t always necessarily the easiest or most
accurate.
-Almost as if he is lying yet it’s not in a way to be deceitful; Ma lying with good intention
-Normalises his experience of life so far to the point the reader also accepts it
It provides us with an insight into the innocence of children. How they are naïve gullible, they
can’t fully understand reality and the truth.
We are presented with a limited scope and a fragmented narration. Jack jots about reflecting a
childlike brain and thought process, one that lacks the cohesion seen in adults narrating.
How are different forms of motherhood expressed and depicted in Room?
‘Ma’ is depicted as a trying mother, that is desperate to protect her child. The use of ‘Room’
allows the reader to see the breakdown of motherhood, and how much of influence ‘Ma’ is to
Jack.
How do you interpret the ending of the novel?
The ending of the novel is extremely moving, as ‘Ma’s’ breakdown only occurs once she has left
‘Room’, hence the goodbye to ‘Room’ is a moment of finalisation, and moving on. It was the
final closure that ‘Ma’ needed, and without Jack she wouldn’t know that. For Jack saying
goodbye to ‘Room’ is the beginning of a life of reality, getting rid of his childhood up to now,
which had been a complete figure of falseness.
What information is revealed/withheld in the passage?
-The breakdown of the triangle of relationships
-Jack doesn’t consider Ma’s history or past at all – rejects it later in the novel as well
-His trust is tested; learning how to trust strangers and identify what is family, friends, and who is
safe and not
-The difficultly of two grandfathers
-Grandmother; initially rocky relationship
Ma’s past and her family;
-Jack doesn’t know they exist; how he’s been protected as a child
-Shows the different significances of time
Old Nick’s living conditions;
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