What’s in a voice? Quantifying the Narrating Instance in Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2023-45.1.08Abstract
This paper aims at reconsidering aspects raised by criticism of Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room (2018). While almost universally praised for its contents, the novel has been met with a more diverse response as far as its stylistic and narrative structures are concerned. By adopting a double methodology, grounded in traditional close reading and quantitative tools derived from corpus stylistics, this analysis addresses the issue of voice and perspective in Kushner’s novel in order to show how ultimately traditional their use is. These findings thus clash with previous views on The Mars Room, and they confirm the more aprioristically identifiable impact certain narratological features (such as focalization) tend to have on style when compared to broader notions like that of voice, which intrinsically involves a broader ‘field of action’ and is thus more problematic when it comes to quantification.
Downloads
References
Aczel, Richard. 1998. “Hearing Voices in Narrative Fiction.” New Literary History, 29.3, 467-500.
Allardice, Lisa. 2018. “The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner Review. What it Means to be Poor and Female in America.” The Guardian, June 20. [Accessed November 5, 2021].
Anderson, Linda. 2001. Autobiography. London: Routledge.
Anthony, Laurence. 2019. AntConc (version 3.5.8). Computer software.
Cooke, Matthew, dir. 2018. Survivors’ Guide to Prison. Saturday Entertainment.
Deutsch, Abigail. 2018. “Fiction in Review: The Mars Room.” The Yale Review, 106.3.
Doyle, Rob. 2018. “The Mars Room: ‘One of the Greatest Novels I have Read in Years’.” The Irish Times, July 9. [Accessed November 5, 2021].
DuVernay, Ava, dir. 2016. 13th. Kandoo Films.
Freddi, Maria. 2014. Linguistica dei corpora. Roma: Carocci.
Genette, Gerard. 1980. Narrative Discourse. An Essay on Method. Trans. by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Howell, Sonia, Margaret Kelleher et al. 2014. “A Digital Humanities Approach to Narrative Voice in The Secret Scripture: Proposing a New Research Method.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8.2. [Accessed November 5, 2021].
Ives, Lucy. 2019. “Orphans of Dickens.” The Baffler 44, 24-34.
Kushner, Rachel. The Mars Room. London: Jonathan Cape, 2018.
McIntyre, Dan and Brian Walker. 2019. Corpus Stylistics. Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Phelan, James and Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds. 2005. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Politics and Prose. 2018. Youtube. [Accessed February 25, 2021].
Prince, Gerald. 1988. A Dictionary of Narratology. Aldershot: Scolar Press.
Rayson, Paul. 2018. Wmatrix (version 4). Textual Analysis Software.
Salgaro, Massimo. 2018. “The Digital Humanities as a Toolkit for Literary Theory. Three Case Studies of the Operationalization of the Concepts of ‘Late Style,’ ‘Authorship Attribution,’ and ‘Literary Movement’.” Iperstoria. Journal of American and English Studies 12, 50-60.
Schöch, Christof, Schlör, D., Popp, S., Brunner, A., Henny, U., Calvo Tello, J. 2016. “Straight Talk! Automatic Recognition of Direct Speech in Nineteenth-Century French Novels.” Digital Humanities 2016: Conference Abstracts. Kraków: Jagiellonian University & Pedagogical University, 346-353.
Shen, Dan. 2005. “What Narratology and Stylistics Can Do for Each Other.” In Phelan and Rabinowitz, 2005, 136-149.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.
Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.
Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.
Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:
- That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
- That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.
Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.
