Provocative and unforgettable: Peter Carey's short fiction – A Cognitive Approach

Abstract

The article sets out to prove that the haunting effect of Peter Carey's remarkable short fiction is largely due to his masterful manipulation of cognitive schemata the reader is invited to employ to make sense of the action. This paper investigates Carey's use of metalepsis (i.e., the transgression of the borderline between the text world and the actual world), which incriminates the reader in the cultural critique voiced in the story; it also examines the disturbing ambiguity as to whether the narrative is situated in fictional reality or in the dream world of a character and the sustained oscillation between realistic and fantastic scripts; and it analyses the startling reversal of the wonted relationship of figure and ground in Carey's stories and the blending of provocative but disparate images which cannot be harmonised into a unified cognitive schema and thus resist closure. These features, it is argued, destabilise our reliance on the most familiar and basic laws of the acutal world, create existential anxiety and make the stories persistently reverberate in the reader's mind.

Mutinous Fiction: Narrative and Illustrative Metalepsis in Three Postmodern Picturebooks

“…Indeed, Genette (1980) writes that the ''most troubling thing about metalepsis'' is the hypothesis ''that the narrator and his narratees-you and I-perhaps belong to some narrative'' (p. 236). Rubik (2005) also notes how metalepsis can undercut ''the recipient readers' existential security'' (p. 172).…”

“…Magarete Rubik (2005) uses the term ''metaleptic pop'' to describe ''a radical transgression of the narrative hierarchies between the levels of author and reader, narrator, and fictional characters, when the text world suddenly invades the actual world of the reader'' (p. 172). In each picturebook, characters serve as ''agents or 'carriers' of metalepsis, disturbers of the ontological hierarchy of levels'' (McHale, 1987, p. 121).…”

Teacher expectations and student literacy engagement and achievement

“…Each time the text refers to the characters Bob and Min together, Bob ‘whispers’ to readers, ‘aka B. F. F.’ Ezra directed me to type Bob's aside comments in a smaller size typeface to communicate the volume of the whispering remarks. Bob's explicit verbal address undermines “readers' securely detached position” (Rubik, , p. 172) and implicates them in the storytelling world.…”

The Metafictive Nature of Postmodern Picturebooks

“…Metalepsis, a narrative device that obscures or collapses the boundaries between reality and fiction, blurs the “sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells” (Genette, , p. 236). Ella's direct address to “the reader as reader” (Stonehill, , p. 21) is another example of a metaleptic pop, a “transgression of the narrative hierarchies between the levels of author and reader, narrator, and fictional characters, when the text world suddenly invades the actual world of the reader” (Rubik, , p. 172).…”