ANALYSIS

In this extract of "Nice Work" by David Lodge, the reader meets the introduction of  the character of Robyn Penrose, a temporary lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge.

Immediately he can understand Robyn's personality and her points of view about character and the novel.

 At fist she seems a bleak and inhuman because she has strong ideals and makes strong points about what she explains to the students. Starting from her ideas about the word "character, she thinks it is an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism. She also explains  the relationship between the classic novel and capitalism. all of the previous ideas are part of a lecture she holds at university for her students at the beginning of a term.

1. The rise of the novel in the eighteenth century coincided with the rise of capitalism

2. The triumph of the novel of the novel over all other literary genres in the nineteenth century coincided with the triumph of capitalism;

3. The modernist and postmodernist deconstruction of the classic novel in the twentieth century has coincided with the terminal crisis of capitalism.

The assertions are due to a Protestant ethic and to the idea that to fulfil yourself you have to seek happiness and fortune in competition. So the novel, in Robyn's opinion, is considered as commodity and novelist as a sort of capitalist of the imagination (novelist invents a product which consumers didn't know they wanted until it is made available).

Another concept that connects capitalism and the classic novel is both are founded by the "self"; there are only arguments about power, sex, family, science, religion and  poetry. For these reasons all classic novels are always wrote with citations and allusions of other texts. However, in Robyn's opinion "you are what speaks you", and this assertion is the base of her philosophy, which she call "semiotic materialism".

After that it is clarified that Robyn isn't so bleak and inhuman, as seems at the beginning, but she seems to have ordinary human feelings, ambitions, desires, to suffer anxieties, frustrations, fears and to have a natural inclination to try and make it a  better place