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

The text is built on different levels: the first one is David Lodge’s novel, the second is the narration of the story, where the omniscient narrator tells the reader about Robyn, a temporary English lecturer at the University of Rummidge, and the last one is the one of Robyn’s lecture where she conveys an important message about literature and communication.

The passage starts with the introduction of Robyn: the narrator characterizes 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 in the 18th century coincided with the rise of the novel, as well as their triumph in the 19th century and their crisis in the 20th century.
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.
In the third paragraph the narrator provides information about her education and cultural background; she read famous people like Jacques Derrida and in saying so the narrator makes irony about her.  Jacques Derrida's words “il n’y a pas de hors-text” are fundamental: there is nothing outside the text and that implies that there are no origins but there is only production. Every text is a product of intertextuality and people produce their ‘selves’ in language. According to Robyn people are what speaks them, not what they speak or what they eat. That are the fundamental ideas of her philosophy: the “semiotic materialism”, a philosophy which adopts the laws of semiotic to analyze 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 20th century: there are no longer defined truths. Everything is relative.
The extract ends with reference to its beginning: the woman belongs to a very different social species, from Vic Wilcox. The text has therefore a circular structure.
After reading the characterization, the intelligent reader understands that Robyn is smart and clever woman, indeed her reflection, reported by the narrator, are logical and well argued. Additional information about the character 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 sensibility.