Activity

Might 'stupid' reflect a slight asperity or distance on the part of the author? Or does the word belong wholly to the character, with the author, in a rush of sympathy, having 'handed' it, as it were, to the tearful fellow?

A novelist's omniscience soon enough becomes a kind of secret sharing; this is called free indirect style, a term novelists have lots of different nicknames for--'close third person', or 'going into character'.

the interface between critical discourse and the heteroglossic "sublime" otherness of the novels

Life Before Theory (or the Time of Tweed). Roughly 1930-1975. The scholar's life was predominantly male and upper-class (less so from the middle-sixties on). [...] Ideologically, the dominant was New Criticism and its modernist cult of the aesthetic. Literature as religion. There was also, signific…