4. I believe that world
literature has it in its
power to help
mankind, in these its
troubled hours, to see
itself as it really is . . .
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
5.
6. Jamaica Kincaid
• In the world of literature that I grew up in, there
was only one literature—that of the people of
England. As far as I was allowed to know, a
literature belonging to other people did not
exist. I grew up in a small patch of what was
then the British Empire, an island in the West
Indies. To me (and to all the people like me)
England and its people and what happened in
that place to those people were real and
everything else mattered only to the degree that
England and its people were affected.
8. Jamaica Kincaid
• What good would it have done me to know of
the world, the larger world, the world beyond
England and its people, the world of other
people both different from me and the same? I
can only speculate that such exposure to other
people and other cultures might have made me
a different person. To have learned that the
place where I originated was of some value—
human value—would have nourished that
delicate thing inside of me, my sense of being.
12. Gerard Genette: terminology for point of view
is confusing
◦ Who is the character whose point of view orients
the narrative perspective?
◦ Who is the narrator?
Instead, we should ask “Who sees?”and “Who
speaks?”
13. The reader watches with the character’s eyes
and is thus inclined to accept the vision
presented by the character.
Readers are subjected to the ideology of the
text through focalization. They take on the
attitudes of the character “who sees.” They
need to know this and, when necessary, resist
or as bell hooks and Ruth Vinz suggest “talk
back.”
