Maybe I am just sensitive to it now, having digested Lisa Zunshine’s book (Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel) and Alan Palmer’s recent paper (“Social Minds“), but I am very aware of the way our narrator “reads” the manifestations of character and motivations and thoughts in the facial expressions and mannerisms [...]
Author Archives: Randy Fromm
Moments of Delight in At Swim-Two-Birds
27 March 2007 – 5:54 pm
He found it in the third wall he examined and it may be valuable to state–as an indication of the growing acuteness of his reasoning powers–that he neglected investigating one of the walls as a result of a deduction to the effect that the door of a room in the upper storey of a house [...]
Metaleptic Transgressions – Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds
24 March 2007 – 5:56 am
Where to start? One could start with a discussion of the paratextual trappings within which the story is wrapped: Dylan Thomas’ remark on the cover; the manuscript background, upside-down on the cover; the torn paper characters continuing the subtle signs of “inversion” in their surface; and just what is that big, fuzzy, black thing on [...]
Favorite Moments in To Kill a Mockingbird
2 January 2007 – 6:59 pm
The Power(s) of Paratexts in/on My Copy of To Kill Mockingbird Epigraph: “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once”—Charles Lamb. A delightfully humorous statement by itself, particularly if one has come to know contentious lawyers.
