This paper takes narrative ethics as the approach to analyze ethical dimensions of the tensions between self-narrative and other-narrative in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, and indicates that self-narrative represents the protagonist’s appeal of identity construction, other-narrative symbolizes external forces deconstructing his identity, and narrative reconciliation between self-narrative and other-narrative represents possibilities of his identity construction. Representational ethics shows that Herzog’s self-narrative attempts to construct identity through fictionalizing ideal self at the expense of real self, then to consolidate new identities by assimilating the absolute other. However, narrational ethics suggests that other-narrative represents the absolute other’s deconstruction of new identities constructed by Herzog’s subjective intention, and puts all new constructed identities into suspension. Identity reconstruction can be possible only when Herzog faces the gap between real self and ideal self, confronts existence of the absolute other, responds to its ethical call, and actualizes reconciliation between self-narrative and other narrative. Besides, hermeneutic ethics indicates that the reader also has a role to play in Herzog’s process of identity construction due to tensions between self-narrative and other-narrative, which bestows the reader with constantly switched ethical positions and distances from the text, thus makes the reader’s responsibility towards the text an infinite movement.
This paper aims to compare the different applications of colors in narrative in two modern short stories, James Joyce’s Araby and Virginia Woolf’s Kew Garden. It has been found that two different roles of colors are presented—colors function as narrative elements and self-expressive elements. Colors and lights in Araby are subjected to narration while colors and lights in Kew Garden stand out of events and are independent from narration. It seems that Joyce employs colors and lights as symbols to implicate what he tried to express, while Woolf frees colors and lights by treating them as subjectivity. The comparison between the usages of colors in those two short stories has been conducted through two parts, colors to feel vs. colors to view, and colors with symbolic meaning and colors with natural/ordinary meaning.
This paper is going to explore Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Wolfgang Iser's theories upon the question, death of the author, from three aspects comparatively: What is the connotation of the author in their understandings respectively? Why is death of the author necessary in modern or postmodern period? What will take the author's position after its death? Through detailed analysis and comparison of their texts and propositions, this paper attempts to indicate that Barthes advocates that textual meaning is within text itself, dispels author's conclusiveness on meaning of a text, and suggests the openness and multiplicity of textual meaning. By reexamining the writing subject and redefining the function of author, Foucault indicates that the concept "author" is a function of discourse. He degrades author's crucial significance in the process of textual interpretation, but keeps author as an existential mode of discourse. Wolfgang Iser states that the meaning of a text generates from the reading process, a dialogue between the text and its reader. Once a literary text is finished, it remains quite and full of potentialities, waiting for reader to unfold itself, waiting to realize itself in reading process.
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