Kathy Mezei

I only used a couple of sections from this book, and that for their reported-speech content, which is only instrumentally related to their main project of feminist narratology/British women writers. So take what I have to say here with as many grains of salt as you have lying around. That said, I liked what Mezei does in her piece on Emma, Mrs. Dalloway, and Howards End, giving a more coherent and functional account of free indirect speech than that crazy old impressionist James Wood. Mezei calls FIS the "site for the textual battle between author, narrator and character-focalizer," which is a great narrative-derived schema to put up against Goffman's "author/animator/principal" deal, coming out of verbal pragmatics. Also, the idea of FIS as "intentional blending strategy" without necessarily any further goal stays with me and makes me think of that paper I wrote in third year about Madame Bovary and how Flaubert wrote Emma as a substitute for becoming her.

Good stuff! Hopefully it extends to the rest of the book. I can vouch for at least one of the other authors (Janet Giltrow) as a scholar and general human being.… (més)