But more recent, if you don't mind getting a bit theoretical, a more recent notion of the novel, or any text, is it's a cluster of words. Just a word about the word hero, or protagonist, or character: they, of course, go all the way back to Aristotle, in The Poetics, who talks about character, plot, and so forth. The famous opening line of the novel, as you all know, is, "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." First, the novel itself two, the life of Charles Dickens and three, the reader as the hero of his own life. So, I would like to consider the opening line, which I'd like to consider in three contexts. As a matter of fact, the very first year I came, I gave a weekend talk on David Copperfield and was sort of looking forward to doing David Copperfield again this summer, but of course, that's not to be. Hello, I'm Gerhard Joseph, I'm a retiree from the City University of New York, and I've been coming to the Dickens Project and the Dickens Universe since the early Eighties. Gerhard Joseph, Professor Emeritus of the City University of New York, asserts that by viewing David Copperfield within the context of the novel, Charles Dickens's life, and within the reader's own life, David Copperfield must, indeed, the hero of his own life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |