The text is an extract from “Nice Work”, a David Lodge’s novel published in 1988.

All this part deal with the characterization of Robyn Penrose, a temporary lecturer, but it become a pretext to expand the narrator’s  post modernism ideas.

Robyn doesn’t believe in the concept of “character”, because, according to her, it is only a bourgeois myth created by the capitalism.

After that the novelist explain Robyn’s way of thinking introducing a reflection on the link between novel and capitalism: novel is linked to the capitalism, and de postmodernism deconstruction of classic novel has coincided with the terminal crisis of capitalism.

The first part of the second paragraph explain why classic novel should have collaborated with the spirit of capitalism.

 Then, Lodge defines the novelist as a “capitalist of the imagination” and supports this idea with the same concept Steve Jobs will use in his speech: the novelist invents a product which consumer didn’t know they wanted until it is made available. Lodge introduces two examples of this concept: Daniel Defoe, he was a merchant, and Samuel Richardson, he was a printer. In conclusion of this paragraph the writer communicate the thesis: the novel was the first mass-produced cultural artefact.

The third paragraph concerns with the reflection on “selves”.  Post – modern identity is the coexistence of multiple “selves”, subjected by the language: “you are what speaks you”. Because of this new conception of “self”, we can’t have a literature created ab nihilo, bur only the product of intertestuality.