Reading for the Plotter

Bibliographic Data

ID4271050
AuthorsWendy Veronica Xin (0000-0002-8288-6065, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume49
Issue1
Pages93-118
Publication date2018-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Literary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/nlh.2018.0004
OpenAlexW2800285590
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited11

For the "plotters" at the forefront of this article—literary characters whose plots spark narrative into being—the act of plotting constitutes an arduous effort to secure a better life, higher status, greater recognition, and a stable sense of identity. The promise of plotting is, for these knowing characters, a belief that their striving will finally pay off, the consoling yet often deluded faith that, by their schemes, their strategies, and their intrigues, they might one day be rewarded with the sense of assimilation or belonging for which they have so long and so laboriously struggled. In addition to serving a necessary narrative function, plotters alert us to a central paradox at the heart of novel form: while these figures rouse the novel's narratable contents into being, novels often secure their eventual closure by requiring the failure of precisely those plots and plotters on which they have previously relied. As such, the fictional representations of these social ambitions necessary for animating narrative beginnings often find themselves constrained by the discursive logic of narrative emplotment. Situated at the intersection of these contradictory impulses, the plotter emerges as the figure for the novel's incompatible aesthetic and epistemological claims, showing how a set of affective dilemmas—melancholy, ressentiment, social anxiety, resignation, and passing, among others—take shape in the novel as representational problems embedded in the relationship between literary character, plot, and narration

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Plot (graphics) · Plotter · Reading (process) · Set (abstract data type) · Sociology · Computer Science · History · Humor Studies and Applications · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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