{"id":11327,"date":"2024-02-12T15:50:58","date_gmt":"2024-02-12T15:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/questions\/unit-7-db-perspectives-in-prose-exploring-point-of-view-pov-and-emotional-connection-to-literature\/"},"modified":"2024-02-12T15:50:58","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T15:50:58","slug":"unit-7-db-perspectives-in-prose-exploring-point-of-view-pov-and-emotional-connection-to-literature","status":"publish","type":"questions","link":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/questions\/unit-7-db-perspectives-in-prose-exploring-point-of-view-pov-and-emotional-connection-to-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Unit 7 DB: Perspectives in Prose: Exploring Point of View (POV) and Emotional Connection to Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"padding: 0px 0px 12px 60px; font-size: 14.08px; cursor: auto;\">\n<h3 style=\"margin-right: 3px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-weight: bold; font-size: 15.488001px; cursor: auto; color: rgb(66, 68, 90);\"><\/h3>\n<p><a style=\"margin: 0px 5px -1px 3px; font-size: 14.08px; cursor: auto;\" data-ally-upload-type=\"RichContent\" data-ally-external-id=\"content:_8617551_1\"><span style=\"margin: -1px; font-size: 14.08px; cursor: auto;\">Unit 7 DB: Perspectives in Prose: Exploring Point of View (POV) and Emotional Connection to Literature<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<div style=\"padding-left: 60px; cursor: auto;\">\n<div style=\"cursor: auto;\">\n<div style=\"cursor: auto;\">\n<div style=\"cursor: auto;\">\n<div style=\"font-size: 10pt; margin-bottom: 1em; cursor: auto;\">Point of view is a narrative lens through which readers experience the story.<\/div>\n<ul style=\"font-size: 13.333332px; margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; cursor: auto;\">\n<li style=\"font-size: 13.333332px; cursor: auto;\">Can you think of a specific example where a different point of view might have drastically altered the meaning or message of a story?<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-size: 13.333332px; cursor: auto;\">How does the author&#8217;s choice of perspective shape our emotional connection to the narrative?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in; font-size: medium; line-height: 13.2pt; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in -23.25pt 0.0001pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">Content area<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 7.5pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">Abstract<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in; font-size: medium; line-height: 28.8pt; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">This essay considers the role of Jamesian point of view in the cultural struggle waged during the interwar years to legitimate the novel as an art form. Starting with Percy Lubbock\u2019s famous formulation of point of view, it examines the different positions writers, critics, and other consecrating agents took with respect to it as point of view became the defining formal device of the modernist novel. This new perspective on point of view prompts us to reconsider its critical usefulness and sheds light on the role of realism in the critical naturalization of the novel as a world system.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 7.5pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">Full Text<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">&nbsp;Listen<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">Most critics would agree that the novel as we know it today owes much of its cultural prestige to Henry James. Some critics might follow the trail of the novel\u2019s cultural capital back to James\u2019s own works, especially his late novels, which are, if nothing else, the best examples we have of virtuoso novelization, of novels for novels\u2019 sake. Others might argue that the consolidation of the novel within the field of literary production was already inscribed in James\u2019s critical work, which, both in his stand-alone essays and in his prefaces to the New York Edition of his works, famously advanced an argument for considering the novel as a work of art as distinctive as music, painting, and architecture. Yet, without trying to minimize the force and efficacy of James\u2019s own writing in the construction of the novel as a symbolic repository for literary culture\u2019s standing in the world, it is also important to acknowledge the role played by editors, publishers, translators, reviewers, academics, biographers, and the reading public in creating the conditions that made possible the novel\u2019s dominant position in the cultural field. These \u201cconsecrating agents,\u201d as Pierre Bourdieu calls them, contributed to the production of the value of the novel and, crucially, to the production of the belief in its value, especially during the interwar years, a period whose cultural impulses are conventionally acknowledged to have been directed against the sort of realism James championed (229). The cultural logic of modernism is not the subject of this essay, but the pressure it exerts on the rather more circumscribed confines of novelistic style that directly concerns me here must be understood at the outset as being both constitutive and contextual. However, I want to focus instead on the immediate afterlives of one specific stylistic element in which James and those who followed him invested an inordinate amount of symbolic capital: point of view.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">The term is no longer much in use, having been supplanted among narratologists by the more technophilic but less evocative term&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">focalization<\/i>,<sup style=\"cursor: auto;\">1<\/sup>&nbsp;yet, for all the air of obsolescence that surrounds it, \u201cpoint of view\u201d provides a valuable perspective, a point of view, as it were, on the cultural status of the novel in the interwar years. The prestige of the novel, I will argue, was achieved by virtue of the varying positions different agents took with respect to point of view in the literary field. And there is perhaps no one more visibly responsible for the consecration of point of view as the defining characteristic of novelistic art during this period than Percy Lubbock, James\u2019s most able champion in the struggle for the novel\u2019s cultural legitimacy. In&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">The Craft of Fiction<\/i>&nbsp;(1921), as is well known, Lubbock attempts to give methodological shape to what he calls the \u201cshadowy and fantasmal form\u201d of the novel, that immaterial literary quality that distinguishes the novel-as-art from popular forms of fiction whose shape, presumably, can be readily grasped (1). Drawing extensively from the critical vocabulary James himself had developed in the prefaces, Lubbock constructs an argument that begins with a general claim about the \u201cdifferent substances\u201d that go into the making of the novel\u2014the \u201cvarious forms of narrative, the forms in which a story may be told\u201d (20)\u2014and advances progressively from considerations of the \u201csubject\u201d\u2014the craft of fiction begins with the \u201cnovelist\u2019s eye for a subject\u201d (23)\u2014to the various methods novelists employ to capture a \u201creflected picture of life\u201d (120). Across a series of extended, patient readings of canonical works by Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Thackeray, Lubbock makes two interrelated distinctions, familiar to readers of James\u2019s critical writings, in order to describe how novelists avail themselves of either \u201cscenic\u201d or \u201cpanoramic\u201d formal methods in order to \u201cshow\u201d rather than \u201ctell\u201d their \u201cmatter.\u201d These distinctions, however, are motivated by a single purpose: they are the means a novelist uses \u201cto dramatize the seeing eye\u201d (117). In his reading of James\u2019s&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">The Ambassadors<\/i>, Lubbock shows how the \u201cseeing eye\u201d does not in fact belong to Strether, its protagonist, nor yet to James, the author, but is rather dramatized as a problem in its own right since it is a novel whose narrative resolution is centered on an act of seeing that alters our sense of what it means to perceive. Lubbock does not put it this way, but it might be worth noting in passing that, like the Hans Holbein painting from which James borrows his title, the novel is an exercise in anamorphic perspective.&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">The Ambassadors<\/i>, Lubbock writes, \u201cis a story which is seen from one man\u2019s point of view, and yet a story in which that point of view is itself a matter for the reader to confront and to watch constructively\u201d (184). Lubbock\u2019s analysis of the craft of fiction culminates with a formulation of point of view: \u201cThe whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of point of view\u2014the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story\u201d (251).<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">Though not the first,<sup style=\"cursor: auto;\">2<\/sup>&nbsp;Lubbock\u2019s formalization of point of view was crucial in establishing the perspectival authority (or, rather, the authority of perspective) in Jamesian criticism. Writing in 1931 on James\u2019s prefaces, Leon Edel goes so far as to say that point of view is the compositional principle at the center of all of James\u2019s novels:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">The first stage in the construction of a novel, for James, was always the determination of the&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">point of view<\/i>. Who is to tell the story, or see it? From what angle is the subject to be approached? How are its \u201cvalues\u201d to be realized? In whose consciousness are we to follow the incidents? Who is to be the \u201ccenter\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">(71)<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">But, however indebted to James\u2019s own critical and novelistic practice, Lubbock\u2019s formulation had a much broader range of applicability, soon becoming something like a novelistic algorithm or shibboleth that both determined and identified point of view as&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">the<\/i>&nbsp;\u201cquestion\u201d of the novel. In criticism, point of view was soon incorporated into the New Critical armamentarium where it had a long and productive life in literary anthologies and teaching manuals (consider, for instance, its use in Wellek and Warren\u2019s&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">Theory of Literature<\/i>) before finding, in however refracted a form, a new home in narratology. Writing in 1955, Norman Friedman could confidently assert that point of view was \u201cbecoming one of the most useful critical distinctions available to the student of fiction today\u201d (1161).<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">The impact point of view had on novelistic practice during the interwar years is harder to gauge, in part because modernist novelists, with the possible exception of Virginia Woolf, who read and, at least initially, appreciated&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">The Craft of Fiction<\/i>,<sup style=\"cursor: auto;\">3<\/sup>&nbsp;were rather more reticent than James in reflecting upon their own practice. More important, modernist novels themselves can be said to be extensive experiments in point of view, which renders the \u201cquestion of point of view\u201d moot or at best rhetorical since it is understood to be constitutive of novelistic practice as such. Indeed, during the years between the wars point of view becomes a crucial \u201cstructuring structure\u201d in the literary field, Bourdieu\u2019s useful term for describing how practices and the perception of practices organize the struggle for legitimacy in a given cultural field. For Bourdieu, the struggle for cultural legitimacy has three stages: the position occupied by the literary field within the larger field of power over a given period of time, the structure of objective positions occupied by agents competing for legitimacy at any given moment, and the different producers\u2019 habitus, by which is meant an agent\u2019s practical dispositions in specific situations. From this perspective, James\u2019s efforts to legitimize the novel as an art form, together with Lubbock\u2019s attempts to elevate point of view as the&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">sine qua non<\/i>&nbsp;of novelistic art, form part of a larger struggle to consolidate the literary field as a field of power in the first decades of the twentieth century. The emergence of avant-garde art (<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">B\u00fcrger<\/i>), the advent of mechanical technologies of reproduction (Benjamin), the impingement of the accelerated, magnified, and fragmented experience of urban life on an increasingly taxed sensorium (Simmel)\u2014in short, the arrival of modernism proper after the First World War\u2014altered the objective positions of the different agents in the cultural field and pitted the literary field itself against competing cultural forms (cinema, genre fiction, glossy magazines, popular entertainment, etc.) that were beginning to make cultural gains against the once dominant novel.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">Bourdieu does not explicitly mention point of view in his analysis of the literary field, or at least not in the way James and Lubbock use the term\u2014that is, as a predominantly formal category\u2014but one can nevertheless argue that the stylistic signatures of most of the consecrated modernist authors still read today can be understood as resulting from the \u201cobjective positions\u201d taken by them with respect to point of view in the field of modernist literature. Proust\u2019s intermittently self-directed voice, Woolf\u2019s lyrical stream of consciousness, Joyce\u2019s prosaic stream of consciousness, Hemingway\u2019s telegraphic style, Dos Passos\u2019s roving camera eye, and Faulkner\u2019s multi-perspectival narratives (the list could go on) are all stylistic choices made within a rarefied cultural field in which point of view has accrued the required cultural capital to act as consecrating currency.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">But we can take full measure of the legitimating power of point of view by briefly considering its value to positions within the field that are not taken with the aim of legitimating the novel-as-art but rather of maximizing profit in a literary market that had global reach in the interwar years. Consider in this context the different points of view that characterize the popular forms of genre fiction: the panoptic gaze of detective fiction, the otherworldly perspective of ghost stories, the \u201cforeign\u201d or exotic locales of adventure fiction, Mars as a radically alien point of comparison in science fiction, the alterity of the colonial other in imperial romances. All these genres employ recognizable narrative models to focus attention on invisible, imagined, or distant worlds that are inaccessible to our perception but which nevertheless invite comparison to our everyday worlds. They are narrative forms, in other words, that are generically encoded to perform perspectival sleights-of-hand while remaining within the realm of realistic representation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">It is no doubt excessive to argue that the stylistic choices of the novel-as-art and the narrative stances of generic fiction owe their cultural legitimacy to Lubbock\u2019s formalization of point of view, yet it is important to note that Lubbock is taking a position within the same literary field, and at the same time, as the novelists who take positions within it. And they are all taking their positions with respect to, or as a function of, point of view within the larger field of cultural production. Each agent has a point of view about point of view and takes a position within the literary field accordingly. It is to this sense of \u201cpoint of view\u201d that Bourdieu refers when he discusses a writer\u2019s \u201chabitus,\u201d that is, the various dispositions that inform the taking of positions within the field. In his essay, \u201cFlaubert\u2019s Point of View,\u201d Bourdieu analyzes the ways in which Flaubert not only represents the field of literary production in his novel&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">Lost Illusions<\/i>, a novel whose subject is literary apprenticeship, but also in writing the fiction positions himself explicitly within it. For Bourdieu, Flaubert\u2019s point of view is equivalent to the positions he adopts within the space of possibilities available to him within the historically constructed field of power he inhabits. Flaubert, Bourdieu writes, \u201cput himself so to speak in the position of pushing to their highest intensity all the questions posed by and in the field\u201d (558). It is not a question of originality, genius, or inspiration: Flaubert\u2019s uniqueness rests on his ability, not always conscious, to confront and struggle with the different possible positions available to him and to thereby objectify his own position within the field.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">I have been arguing that point of view, as practiced by James and formalized by Lubbock and other consecrating agents, was objectified into a series of distinct positions within the literary field during the interwar period. These positions, following Bourdieu, can be described as points of view regarding point of view, or point of view\u2019s points of view, which we can now profitably equate with the novel as such during the period under discussion. But what are we to make of the dominant position point of view occupies in the modernist novel\u2019s field of production when we so strongly associate point of view with James as to treat it as a problem of realism? The question is of critical as well as literary historical interest. From the perspective of point of view, our tendency to view realism and modernism as across a chasm might need to be revised, or at least nuanced, to entertain the possibility of a more contingent history of struggle and appropriation in which literature is both the vehicle and result of social relations. The point is not of course to claim James for modernism, nor Woolf for realism, nor yet science fiction as high art, but rather to dispute the historical narrative of progress that subtends our attempts to periodize cultural production into discreet, internally coherent units that flow predictably along a course mapped by aesthetic advances within the horizon of national literary histories.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">We might consider the historical development of point of view as a series of local struggles for legitimacy within an ever expanding field of literary production whose reach during the interwar period had become global in scope. Pascale Casanova\u2019s&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">World Republic of Letters<\/i>&nbsp;offers a scalar realignment of literary history to describe position-taking in a world literary space in which the struggle for domination occurs both in the center and at the periphery of a global system whose field of power overlaps but does not coincide with dominant geopolitical configurations. In this context, point of view can be said to not only act as novelistic currency determining the position taken by specific novelists but also as a point of entry into the world literary space. Consider Machado de Assis\u2019s&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">Mem\u00f3rias p\u00f3stumas de Br\u00e1s Cubas<\/i>&nbsp;(translated as&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">Epitaph of a Small Winner<\/i>), a Brazilian novel written in 1880 whose narrator views his life from beyond the grave, an unusual point of view that simultaneously marks the novel as a work of art within the local literary field (it did not sell well) and lends it legitimacy in the world republic of letters, where it makes itself visible by rejecting predictable and conventional positions with respect to point of view. More generally, point of view is arguably what allows the novel to become a world system, not only in that to take a position within the field, to have a point of view within it, is to have something to say about point of view but also in that to do so is to already view the field as an expansive terrain.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">For James, point of view is an aesthetic principle as much as a cognitive or perceptual apparatus, allowing him in practice to lay claim to the novel\u2019s legitimacy within the literary field but also enabling him to elaborate his distinctive \u201cinternational\u201d theme as a problem of point of view. His preferred subject, an American in Europe, presents, if nothing else, a perceptual challenge since it demands as a condition of its dramatic possibilities that there be at least two different, incommensurate, and perhaps incompatible points of view for every situation, character, or event depicted. The conceptual limit of point of view (a point of view is by definition limited) has the paradoxical effect of broadening the scope of perception by virtue of its very limitations, which must henceforth be problematized, multiplied, inverted, refracted, mirrored, and so on, in order to be \u201cnarratable,\u201d to use D. A. Miller\u2019s term. The \u201cprose picture,\u201d James writes in \u201cThe Future of the Novel,\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">can never be at the end of its tether until it loses the sense of what it can do. It can do simply everything, and that is its strength and its life. Its plasticity, its elasticity are infinite; there is no colour, no extension it may not take from the nature of its subject or the temper of its craftsman.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">(<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">AC<\/i>&nbsp;246)<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">It does not in the least surprise, then, that in distilling the craft of fiction to the question of point of view Lubbock, a comparatist&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">avant la lettre<\/i>, should refer to Russian, French, and English novels indistinctly as though they all formed part of a single field. Point of view in James is what makes the novel a capacious \u201cinternational\u201d art form for which \u201canything goes.\u201d Point of view, moreover, is arguably what allows the novel to travel, its portability proving that national languages are to the novel what the book is to its \u201cfantasmal\u201d forms. The emergence of \u201cmagical realism\u201d in the latter half of the twentieth century shows that, when transplanted to regions of the world that had remained outside the literary field of power and trained on local realities, modernist experiments with point of view could both transform the way these regions perceived themselves and were perceived by the metropole (Paris in Casanova\u2019s scheme) and simultaneously globalize the scope of the literary field as a whole.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">From this perspective, Frederic Jameson\u2019s contention that point of view is an ideology of individualism is correct but misplaced. To be sure, the history of point of view, or, rather, the history of points of view about points of view, is also a history of a position taking, which is one way of describing politics. The semantic difference that obtains between Lubbock\u2019s (and James\u2019s) sense of point of view, which is eminently novelistic, and Bourdieu\u2019s, which is presumably applicable to any field of production, may be described as the difference between aesthetics and politics. The latter is perhaps more closely aligned to ideology than to habitus, even though in Bourdieu\u2019s account of the literary field it is not always easy to tell the difference between the two. To the extent that position-taking is an individual act, however conditioned by our beliefs, tastes, interests, and sundry other \u201cdispositions,\u201d it is also a \u201cpoint of view.\u201d That is, it is limited to our individual perceptions. To argue, as Jameson does, that point of view is a \u201claw\u201d or \u201cnorm\u201d more at home in creative writing classes than on the streets and \u201cerected as a hegemonic ideology under the authority of Henry James and by innumerable literary censors, who scan texts for its infringement, which they might as well have discovered on every other page of Tolstoy or Zola,\u201d then, is to forget, or occlude, the perspectival possibilities of multiple, diverse, and socially engaged representations offered by point of view in the \u201cplastic\u201d and \u201celastic\u201d discourse of the novel (164).<sup style=\"cursor: auto;\">4<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">Jameson\u2019s counterexample, in the long argument of which this point of view on point of view is merely an aside, is Zola, whose work, in a reversal of Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s polemical distinction between descriptive naturalism and narrative realism, Jameson valorizes precisely because it is descriptive, because, that is, it lacks a point of view. James, who knew Zola personally and followed, however briefly, the naturalist ethos,<sup style=\"cursor: auto;\">5<\/sup>&nbsp;would not have disagreed, at least initially, with Jameson\u2019s characterization: \u201cIt was the fortune, it was in a manner the doom, of Les Rougon-Macquart to deal with things almost always in gregarious form, to be a picture of&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">numbers<\/i>, of classes, crowds, confusions, movements, industries. . . . The individual life is, if not wholly absent, reflected in coarse and common, in generalised terms\u201d (877). Yet, to the extent that Zola, in his pseudo-scientific attempts to trace the effects of family heredity and social environment on individuals, focuses on what he repeatedly calls the \u201chuman animal,\u201d he is also providing a particular point of view on the reality of his day.<sup style=\"cursor: auto;\">6<\/sup>&nbsp;Naturalism is a plea made by means of the formidable representational resources of the realist novel to consider social agents that have been heretofore neglected by the novel: the working classes, the lumpenproletariat, and the various urban subcultures that are not normally visible to the novel\u2019s point of view. Indeed, James himself, in what can seem like an argument right out of Bourdieu, realizes that the most important aspect of Zola\u2019s art is not his depiction of the \u201ccoarse and common\u201d but rather the position he takes in the literary field with respect to them:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">We get it [fineness] in the very history of his effort, the image itself of his lifelong process, comparatively so personal, so spiritual even, and, through all its patience and pain, of a quality so much more distinguished than the qualities he succeeds in attributing to his figures even when he most aims at distinction.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">(<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">FW<\/i>&nbsp;878)&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">Zola\u2019s point of view, like James\u2019s, blurs the distinction we routinely make between a formal \u201cinside\u201d of the novel and a political \u201coutside,\u201d between an aesthetic point of view and an ideological one. Point of view is not necessarily unitary, stable, and totalizing. It can be multiple, variable, and incomplete. Like writing in general, point of view may well privilege the individual, but it is also capable of offering perspectival correctives that open up the space of representation to impersonal, collective, ghostly, inanimate, nonhuman, and otherworldly worlds. If nothing else, this is the lesson James imparts to his modernist heirs. As Lubbock renders it at the end of&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">The Craft of Fiction<\/i>, \u201c[The narrator] tells it as&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">he<\/i>&nbsp;sees it, in the first place; the reader faces the story-teller and listens, and the story may be told so vivaciously that the presence of the minstrel is forgotten, and the scene becomes visible, peopled with the characters of the tale\u201d (251).<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">Mario Ortiz-Robles<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">University of Wisconsin, Madison<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">notes<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">1. The term was first coined by G\u00e9rard Genette in 1972: \u201cTo avoid the too specifically visual connotations of&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">vision<\/i>,&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">field<\/i>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">point of view<\/i>, I will take up here the slightly more abstract term&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">focalization<\/i>&nbsp;. . .\u201d (189). Bal defines it thus: \u201cFocalization is . . . the relation between the vision and that which is \u2018seen,\u2019 perceived\u201d (100).<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">2. Writing in 1918, Beach claims that \u201c[t]here is no matter in which James has shown greater care for technique\u201d than in developing point of view (56).<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">3. Woolf\u2019s mention of Lubbock\u2019s book appears in her essay \u201cOn Re-Reading Novels,\u201d where she notes that it is \u201ca book which is likely to have much influence upon readers and may perhaps eventually reach the critics and writers\u201d (123).<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">4. In a separate set of comments on Henry James, Jameson introduces, via Bakhtin, the term \u201calien speech\u201d to describe \u201cthe secret presence of French within James\u2019s peculiar style\u201d (297). The \u201cinfiltration\u201d of a language by the syntax of another does not correspond to the formal aspects of point of view, but it does belong to the set of dispositions Bourdieu associates with a writer\u2019s habitus. Under this head, Jameson argues that James\u2019s psychic drive can be reduced to his \u201cvoyeurism,\u201d a term that extends across, but does not cover, the two senses of point of view I have been discussing. Point of view,&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">pace<\/i>&nbsp;Jameson, is not particularly ironic in this context, even as the oscillation between the two senses destabilizes a fixed perspective.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">5. McGurl calls James\u2019s&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">The Princess Casamassima<\/i>&nbsp;an \u201cexperiment in literary naturalism\u201d (80).<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">6. It is instructive in this context to reflect upon what Jameson calls James\u2019s \u201cfundamental historical achievement\u201d at the level of the sentence, the discovery of what he (Jameson) calls the \u201csub-conversation,\u201d the subtle and silent positionings that occur among interlocutors in any encounter; \u201cthe kind of strange circling with friendly or hostile others that more visibly characterizes animals\u2019 behavior with their own or other species, rather than what can be seen from the outside in the exchanges of human speakers\u201d (301). Whatever its connection with the animal perspective of naturalism proper, this discovery is also an elaboration of point of view.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><b style=\"cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">References<\/span><\/b><span style=\"cursor: auto;\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><i style=\"cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">AC\u2014The Art of Criticism<\/span><\/i><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">. Ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in 0in 12.75pt; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><i style=\"cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">FW<\/span><\/i><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">\u2014<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition<\/i>. New York: Library of America, 1984. Vol. 2 of&nbsp;<i style=\"cursor: auto;\">Literary Criticism<\/i>.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">Word count:&nbsp;<b style=\"cursor: auto;\">4041<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press Fall 2018<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in; font-size: medium; cursor: auto;\"><span style=\"cursor: auto;\">&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unit 7 DB: Perspectives in Prose: Exploring Point of View (POV) and Emotional Connection to Literature Point of view is a narrative lens through which readers experience the story. Can you think of a specific example where a different point of view might have drastically altered the meaning or message of a story? How does [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"disciplines":[14],"paper_types":[],"tagged":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/questions\/11327"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/questions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/questions"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/questions\/11327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=11327"},{"taxonomy":"paper_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/paper_types?post=11327"},{"taxonomy":"tagged","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tagged?post=11327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}