Corrected version

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS - from NICE WORK - Robyn's characterisation

In the present text I am going to analyse an extract taken from David Lodge’s novel “Nice Work”, which represents the postmodern interpretation of Hard Times.

The text has different levels of comprehension: apparently the omniscient narrator tells about Robyn, a temporary English lecturer at the University of Rummidge (a fictional place), but actually her lecture conveys a message about literature and communication.

The passage starts with the introduction of Robyn: the narrator characterises her by contrast with Vic Wilcox (“let us leave Vic Wilcox... ...to meet a very different character”). First of all, the narrator tells Robyn doesn’t believe in the concept of character, since to her it is a “bourgeois myth”, “an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism”. The rise of capitalism coincided with the rise of the novel, while its crisis in the 20^th century also  coincides with the deconstruction of both capitalism and the novel.

In the second paragraph Robyn supports her thesis: literature is a product of a secularized Protestant ethic because it conveys the idea that human beings have the ability to control their actions and to compete with other selves (competition is at the basis of capitalism). It follows that the novelist is compared to “a capitalist of the imagination”, one who transforms a form of art in a form of mass production ready to fight inside a competitive system.
During her lecture, Robyn provides examples of novelists who made literature a mass-produced cultural artefact: Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson.

In the third paragraph the narrator provides information about her education and cultural background; she read people like Jacques Derrida who contributed to her Weltamschaung.  Jacques Derrida's words “il n’y a pas de hors-text” are fundamental. There are no origins:  there is only production. Every text is a product of intertextuality and people produce their ‘selves’ in language. Individuals are what speaks them, not what they speak are the fundamental ideas of “semiotic materialism”. It is a philosophy which adopts the laws of semiotic to analyse reality. Such philosophical thought implies that one's communication effort could be interpreted in different way.

The idea of interpretation is therefore one of the main topics of Postmodernism, a movement which could be considered the result of the changes which took place in the 20^th century: there are nolonger defined truths. Everything is relative (as is Robyn’s job temporary, and therefore unstable indeed).

The text also adopts a typical literary technique of Postmodernism, “metanarrative”.

The last lines of the passage describe Robyn as a feminist but also “a dreamer”: she is aware that she is part of an imperfect world, but she pursuesin the effort  to make it a better place. The character’s introduction has a cyclical pattern: the reference to Vic Wilcox recalls the beginning of the extract.

After reading the characterisation, the reader has not made up an idea about Robyn only from the narrator's direct words, but also from the use the narrator did of such words; he reports her reflections in a logical way,  providing argumentations which help to portray her as a smart and clever woman.  Additional information is given by the choice of the name “Robyn Penrose”: while the name reminds of Robin Hood, a male character who fights for his generous visions of the world, the surname recalls femininity and sensivity.