The Novel: A Survival Skill by Tim Parks
Requirements: Any PDF Reader, 579kb
Overview: The Novel: a survival skill offers a completely new account of the relationship between writer, text, and reader. Drawing on ideas from systemic psychology and positioning theory, Parks suggests that both the content and style of a novelist’s work, the kind of stories told and the way in which they are told, form part of a more general strategy of survival that the novelist has developed in response to tensions within his or her family of origin. The reader reacts to these in very much the way he or she would react to the same communicative strategy in a real life encounter, different readers responding differently depending on their own backgrounds and habits of communication.
Powerful chapters on Joyce, Hardy, Lawrence and Dickens considering the different value structures that can dominate in any close human grouping —good/evil, independence/dependence, success/failure, belonging/exclusion—, and carefully demonstrate how these authors place themselves in relation to these values and how this positioning is manifest in their writing.
Radically undermining traditional lit-crit criteria and deconstructing the pieties with which the novel is usually defended, Parks gives a novelist’s insider account of what may best understood as the biography of the act of writing itself and its relation to the lives with which it is entwined.
Genre: Non Fiction, General
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