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“Ways of worldmaking”: A study of narrative transmission in Henry James's The Aspern Papers
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“Ways of worldmaking”: A study of narrative transmission in Henry James's The Aspern Papers

J. De Reuck
Journal of Literary Studies, Vol.9(3-4), pp.355-370
1993
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Abstract

In this paper I argue that an understanding of modality ‐ especially when deployed in so‐called unreliable homodiegetic narration ‐ essentially requires an understanding of the referential functions of language. These functions, often performed by ¡mplicatures and, in Goodman's terms, “exemplifications”, create the “worlds” whose cognisability becomes a presupposition upon which our grasp of the relevant modality is predicated. James's novella, The Aspern Papers, offers a complex form of such a narrative transmission; one that would remain, I argue, only partially recoverable without the deployment of the text immanent postulates proffered by my theoretical exposition of the ironic modalities of unreliable homodiegetic narrative.

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