Angelica Brandalise

Analysis of Nice Work

We are going to analyse this text because it provides a postmodern interpretation of the study of the novel. Nice Work is a parody of Chrales Dickens’ Hard Times, where is analysed utilatarism idea through the fiction. The reader can notice that this extract belongs to the novel “Nice Work” by David Lodge, written in 1988.

The extract belongs to the second chapter and has the purpose to introduce the female character; we will now see how her characterization is developed. There is a third person omniscient narrator who tells the reader that he is going to meet a new character. The fist information is given to us is that the narrator is going to introduce the new character who is very different from Vic. Therefore, Robyn is introduced as the opposite of Vic.

The second element is that she doesn’t believe in the concept of character, and the third element is that she very often says “that is to say”, the reader assumes that she is a teacher, which means she always says that sentence as like explaining something and giving examples.

She’s a temporary teacher of literature. She doesn’t have a female name, but this name also reminds us Robin Hood, the man who fought the rich to help the poor, for this reason she may be an idealist. Instead her surname, Penrose, is more female than her name, this may alert the reader that she has been able to integrate male and female features.

There is no reference about her physical appearance. She tells the reader that the rise of the novel in the 18th century coincided with the rise of capitalism.

Capitalism and novel are originated by individualism: the idea of someone who is able to rule his life in competition with others seeking fortune and happiness, capitalists in farms and novelists with a narrator. Indeed, heroes and heroines have always to win a fight, so “the novelist is a capitalist of imagination”.

The most important element of the extract is the development of novel, which coincides with capitalism evolution, to support her thesis she gives some examples: Defoe, Richardosn.

Robyn have a vision which depends on what she had read, so it is a postmodern idea. 

“There is not a such thing as  the self”: she doesn’t believe in the concept of identity, which was on the basis of traditional novel and capitalism. There isn’t a ”unique soul” in the novel or in the capitalism, “esiste solo una posizione soggetta in un’infinita rete di discorsi, discorsi di sesso, potere, famiglia, scienza, religione”. The web of speeches which characterized the society is not determined by me, so I can’t completely build my own identity, because those “speeches” existed before me and influence me: everything depends on the world where I live and its ideas.

For this reason she rejects the idea of author, because no one originates nothing. Thus every text is a product of many texts who creates a web of signs: “every text is a product of intertextuality”. 

“Not you are what you read” but “you are what you speak” or rather “you are what speaks you”: the others understand something we don’t know when I speak, because we are product of our unconscious, therefore humans beings are insecure.