The extract is taken from the chapter II of “Nice Work”. Nice Work is an English novel written by David Lodge in 1988. The book describes encounters between Robyn Penrose, a a feminist who works at the University of Rummidge as a temporary teacher specialised in courses on the Industrial Novel and Women’s Writing and Vic, a Managing Director of an engineering firm. The relationship that develops between the unlikely pair reveals the weaknesses in each character. Robyn's academic position is precarious. Vic has to deal with industrial politics at his firm. Robyn acquires insight into the pragmatic ethos whose encroachment on university culture she resents and Vic learns to appreciate the symbolic or semiotic dimension of his environment and discovers romanticism. The story is set in the fictional city of Rummidge. The plot is a parody of the novel “Hard Times” written by Charles Dickens. The story is told in the third person by an intrusive narrator (indeed, there are different elements in the text, like comments or clarification, which make the reader understand the presence of the narrator). The novel begin with an introduction of Victor Wilcox and his family.

In the first few lines of the chapter II the narrator gives to the reader some information about the setting of the novel. After that there is the introduction of a new “very different” character: Robyn Penrose a “temporary lecturer in English literature at the University of Rummidge”. The name “Robin” is a male name and “Penrose” can be interpreted like if it is composed by two words: “pen”, which could be an allusion to Robin’s work at the university and ”rose”, which is a flower and could be related to Robin’s female features (beautiful, sweet) but also dangerous because of its thorns. Roobyn’s thinking is influenced by capitalism and by different writers. She believes that there is a close relation between capitalism and novel (“ the rise of the novel in the eighteencentury coincided with the rise of capitalism.

In the second paragraph the narrator specify why for Robin there is this close relationship: both of them (novel and capitalism) are expression of “ a secularized Protestant ethic”. The novelist is a capitalist of the imagination. After that the narrator quote the two major English novelist to convey better his idea.

The third paragraph continues to explicate Robin’s view on this question; she thinks that “there is only a subject position in an infinite web discourses". The narrator explains Robin’s philosophy, which she would call “ semiotic materialism”. The reader gets lot o f information about Robyn; she is a liberal, independent woman and a feminist. She believes that a sign can exist due to its relationship to other signs (“every text is a product of intersexuality, a tissue if allusions to and citations of other texts). The narrator conclude this part of the second chapter saying that she is a character, not very different from Vic Wilcox.