David Lodge "Nice Work"

Starting from the beginning of the description the writer gives general information about Ms. Penrose job and workplace, but the intelligent reader easily understands that what David Lodges wants to describe is not Ms. Penrose's life but her thoughts. As matter of fact her job (a Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at university) is named to introduce a theme that characterizes Ms. Penrose's personality and that guides her life: the contempt for capitalism and all its products (for instance the classic novel and the figure of the character) because of her postmodern visionof life.

 In the first and in the second paragraph , we find a description of the relation between the development of novels and the development of Capitalism. In Robyn's opinion Capitalism and the novels have common aspects and their evolution wassimilar. The relation is well expressed: "The novelist is a capitalist of the imagination" and the novel is "the first mass-produced artefact". As well as capitalists, novelists create a new product taking the same risks of investors and they promote their product in competition with others. So the novelist is compared to a capitalist giving the consumers what they didn't know to want until the manufacturer produced something new.Robyn thinks there is no longer a centre or a unique soul but everything has got a subject position and so is it with the individual .

For the same reason no author exist as an original one, a creator of a text out of nothing : each text is the product of intertextuality and may be a probable inspiration from other texts. The only way to produce  "selves" is through language and so according to Postmodernism people create their selves in language. postmodernism is based on such ideas.

For the first time, in the fourth paragraph,the novelist concretely introduces Robyn Pennrose. She is a teacher. THe paragraph describes her waking up on a January Morning. She wakes up at 7:30 with thering   her alarm clock and she calms her anxiety for the so many commitments with yoga exercises. The novelist reveals some aspects of her personality through  her actions: she is rational and self confident. In the last paragraph the novelist introduces another character:  Charles, but he doesn't immediately talk about him because he interrupts the presentation.