The twentieth-century novel and rereading

In contrast to the post-structuralist approach of Calinescu's Rereading, "The Twentieth-Century Novel and Rereading" examines the surprising silence of Reader-Response theory surrounding the question of rereading, and culls the only two substantive clusters of critical commentary to be found on this topic from the writings of Iser, Fish, Culler, Stierle and Riffaterre. The first centers around when the rereading moment is held to occur, and adduces Frank's concept of spatial form to probe the possible equivalences of retroactive restructuring and rereading, and of rereading and interpretation. The second group of commentary relegates aesthetic actualization to the second reading alone, problematically designating the initial perusal as "mimetic.".;Citing Modernist narrative's tendency to present various versions of character, theme and/or event, thus relying in part on structural redundancy to generate aesthetic autonomy, the dissertation demonstrates how this compositional design creates a sense of first-time rereading which deceptively reinforces the concept of Modernist signification as text-centered. Woolf's Orlando, Baroja's El arbol de la ciencia, Gide's Les faux-monnayeurs and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! illustrate this "repetition as rereading" phenomenon. The study then turns to one type of Postmodernist novel, the "schizoid" or multiple narrative, which has no fixed sequence and is never read in the same way twice. The physical requirements these novels exact of a continual manual flipping to dispersed portions of text, in addition to their fluid spatiality, produce the impression of an intangibility to their literary meaning, as evinced in Nabokov's Pale Fire and Cortazar's Rayuela, in contrast to Beckett's Mercier et Camier and Joyce's "Sirens" section in Ulysses. This feature of Postmodernist textuality is also in evidence regarding the ephemeral quality of the computer novel's "hypertext.".;The dissertation ends with an Afterword on Calinescu's Rereading.;An examination of textual infinity follows as its appears in Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths." A survey of Barthes, Chambers, Ingarden, Lodge and Stierle establishes the consensus that rereading has special relevance to the study of "modern" literature, and sets up the attempt to apply the heuristic insights of response theory to the Modernist and Postmodernist novel.