Author(ity) figures : anxieties of authorship, freedom, and control

Abstract

What is the nature of the narrative act? Is the author a god? A pawn? In the fictive realm, who can wield creative and authorial control? The author? The characters? The reader? All of them? In five novels--John Fowles's THE French Lieutenant's Woman and Martin Amis's Other People, Money, London Fields, and The Information, these issues are addressed--implicitly arid explicitly--by the author-figures and author-doubles that inhabit and interact within them. Far from defining an airtight vision of authorship, Fowles's and Amis's author-figures expose the anxieties inherent in the narrative act, as well as its complicated links to the paradoxes of control and powerlessness, and of death and life. Gone is the Author-God of the Victorian novel. What we seem to be left with is a modulation of this authorial divinity--as the narrator of The French Lieutenant's Woman says--in "the new theological image," where freedom and control are as terrifying as they are essential. This thesis will examine the tensions and contradictions with which these novels characterize the writing act and will incorporate critical texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault to help frame the possible origins of these author-anxieties.

Notes

This item is only available in print in the UCF Libraries. If this is your thesis or dissertation, you can help us make it available online for use by researchers around the world by STARS for more information.

Thesis Completion

2001

Semester

Spring

Advisor

Campbell, James

Degree

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

English

Degree Program

English

Subjects

Arts and Sciences -- Dissertations, Academic;Dissertations, Academic -- Arts and Sciences;Amis, Martin -- Criticism and interpretation;Fiction -- Authorship;Fowles, John -- 1926- -- Criticism and interpretation

Format

Print

Identifier

DP0021686

Language

English

Access Status

Open Access

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Document Type

Honors in the Major Thesis

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS