القارئ و الروائية المعاصرة

**ألطاف محمد** · 16/Nov/2010, 08:04 PM

اسم الرسالة: القارئ و الروائية المعاصرة
الباحث: د / بدر احمد السعيدي*الدرجة العلمية: دكتوراه* الجامعة: جامعة صنعاء- كلية الآداب والعلوم الإنسانية- قسم اللغة الإنجليزية
بلد الدراسة: اليمن*لغة الدراسة: الإنجليزية*تاريخ الإقرار: 2010
نوع الدراسة: رسالة جامعية

SUMMARY
Writers can share their ideas and visions with their readers through literature; and through literature also, readers can interact with and respond to their authors; that is, they constitute the written texts as particular kinds of communication. Nowadays this relationship is not as intimate as it was before; there is a lack of communication between them due to three main factors, first, the nature of the novel itself (modernist, postmodernist and contemporary); second, the further conditions imposed by the modernist and postmodernist critical schools on analyzing and interpreting literature; and, third, the nature of the contemporary life and its increasing pressure and influence on both writing and reading novels.
This research is an attempt to come to better understanding of the nature of the relationship between the novelist and the reader, the changes it has always been witnessing throughout the different literary periods, and the factors that lead to the lack of communication between them. The three main chapters (second, third and fourth) successively deal with the above-mentioned factors, while the first gives a brief historical survey of the classical novel, and the fifth and last chapter discusses the concluding observations of the whole research. Here is a brief presentation of each chapter.
The first chapter follows the evolution of the English novel since its establishment as a new literary genre in the eighteenth century, up to the near end of the nineteenth, and is divided into three stages: the establishing, the romantic and the Victorian. The main styles, techniques, manners and characteristics of the classical novel are, in general, the domination of the authorial discourse, free indirect speech and subtle interplay between the character's voice and the authority of the narrator; full description and exposition; and multiplotting featuring several central characters. It is formed within a fixed social frame: stability, social and moral compact that links individual and social life. The wide-spread and the broad readership of the classical novel are certainly due to the ordinary and orderly structure of this novel that tells stories of different kinds; it always tries to meet the different desires and interests of its readers; impulse to describe the everyday world the reader could recognize; expressions of emotion: love, humor, suspense; melodrama, suffering; moral sincerity and respectability; and it mostly employs certain manners, styles, techniques, tactics and devices that an ordinary reader can follow and understand their significances.
The second chapter deals with English novel of the modern, postmodern and contemporary periods. The Modern Period is divided into two equal eras. Novelists of the first era are partly traditionalist, for they continue to write novels dealing with political, social and moral issues of the time, as their forerunners, and to employ some of their techniques and styles. They are partly modernist for introducing some new techniques as self-conscious, implied narrator and fragmented styles, in response to the new conditions of the time. This era is, in fact, the bridge over which the novel had passed from pre-modernism to modernism and, then, to postmodernism.
The second, or the inter-War years, is a nightmare era and produces a nightmare literature; and the writer is inescapably inside this nightmare. The novelty in writing novels increasingly comes from a 'diagnostic' or 'psychological' response to the strangeness, terrors and irrationality of the historical world; questions, self-contradictions, and abbreviated sentences interrupted by pauses; the fragmented, disjointed language; rapid cuts from scene to scene; feminine prose, unpunctuated, moving from point to point without formal obstructions; there is no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted sense; there is no situation, no set scene, nothing happens; all these imitate some of the styles, rhythms and hesitations of thought which, in turn, strongly communicate the stresses of the Wars and their pressures within the minds of the individuals.
A distinctive modern novel is marked not just by modern themes and new techniques, but by a firm break with past conventions of narrative and literary morality, authorship and readership. Modernist novelists are accused of being brutal, anti-humane, anti-liberal, anti-democracy'. They deepen the gulf between art and people by encouraging the fetishism (solemn, hollowness) of art and the snobbery (arrogance) of an elite.
Postmodern or post-Second-World-War period marks a return to older concepts of fiction, to realism, materialism, empiricism, linearity, against which modern movement had been in revolt. It increasingly tries to reflect two things: a desire to reconstruct the novel as a form of humane liberalism; and a need to face the troubles of the age. It moves in many directions, but no one movement, no single style or manner dominate. It accepts several modernist concepts, especially stream of consciousness and internal monologue techniques, but rejects its pessimistic and tragic elements. It uses many tactics, styles, manners, forms and techniques, such as: amalgamation of new and traditional tactics, defamiliarization and indirectness, making cuts in pages; novel-in-a-box is made up of loose-leaf sheets; gaps, interruptions, cuts or spaces penetrate the narrative; magic realism, episodes of magic, telepathy, fantasy, fable; flashbacks and flashes forward, etc.
Contemporary novel accepts almost all the characteristics of the postmodernist novel and develops others. It is characterized by prevalence of styles without centers, sense of history without depth, awareness of endless relativity and uncertainty. So it disappoints the expectations of its reader who wants it to be a kind of prophesy, a prefiguration, an instrument of discovery, and to capture what seems to mark the end-of-a-century and the beginning of another such as weakness of hopes, depth of our unease, political uncertainty, intensity of our nostalgia, even for the worst, etc. It has no social or reportorial excitement, no strong voice, no moral force, and no deep themes. So the novel is no longer a central form of expression because it begins to dispense with the familiar realism, and is filled with strangeness and self-consciousness, impressionism, prophecies of the shapes of things to come; there is a lack of intention and strictness; there is a disintegration of writing and random influences coming in from everywhere. For all this the novel has a corrupted response… and its readership diminishes.
The hypertextual literature and multiculturalism are important features of the contemporary period; the first is a disconnected flow of images; a multi-sequential or pluridimensional and delinearized text; a kind of intertextuality. Reader is at the centre of the process, the producer of the text; So an almost never-ending variety of readings is possible. The second is resulted from the interaction of English fiction with many other fictions of other nations, told in the same language but from different sense of myth and history. This creates an international fictional voice that is larger than any individual culture.
The third chapter deals with the additional conditions imposed by postmodernist criticisms on reading, analyzing and interpreting literature; it deals with these conditions through the discussion of the different critical theories, especially the postmodernist, whose direct object is not finding meaning(s), but discovering how the different elements and structures of a literary text work and in which way(s) they are employed and related to each other in order to generate a particular meaning. They regards a piece of literature as an art object with an existence of its own, independent of its author, its readers, the historical time it depicts or in which it is written. Believing that 'there is nothing outside the text', they concentrate on studying the text from within, resisting the different external elements or influences that may impose restrictions and limitations on the text and deprive it from its interaction with other literary texts and with language itself, and, then, mutilate its meanings. So our problem is not with these new approaches (the additional conditions), but with the possibility of being applied on modernist, postmodernist and contemporary novels.
The fourth chapter deals with the environment and the surrounding circumstances of the contemporary life and their great and deep influences on both the novelist and the reader. This is because a person is the child of his/her environment within which s/he has grown up and is living. And as the contemporary life is very hard, complicated and troublesome; so accordingly is the contemporary person; s/he is complicated, frustrated, fragmented, disappointed, unstable, … person. She often feels as being an alien and strange person who is always wandering, asking himself, 'Who am I?
Writing and reading novels are deeply and widely influenced by the stresses of the conditions of the contemporary life, and by the competition of modern elements as Mass Media. That is, novel is no longer an important means for education, communication and entertainment as it was; it becomes the least appreciated medium, where only few people may find time for, and interest in, reading novels.
The fifth and final chapter deals with the concluding observations of the whole research. So it is well observed that the classical novels admired for their literary quality are also fairly widely read; but the widely admired novels of the twentieth century are the largely ignored by the reading public. This is because this novel is a form no longer carries conviction or aims at the real difficulties.
It is well observed that writers and readers use the written texts as means for communication. When these participants belong to the same culture, this process may success, as we have seen. But when these participants belong to different cultures, this question quickly comes to the forefront: can a reader fully understand a different cultural reality being communicated in the text?
This chapter also presents a number of skills that may, if obtained, enable the reader to come to better understanding of the novels, and to apply the critical approaches. It also mentions some suggestions that may narrow the gap between the writers and the readers and may lead to better communication and understanding between them.

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