Abstract
The goal of the book is to demonstrate the usefulness of reading microsocially. Investigating reader—text relations while analyzing intimacies between characters, given those reader–text relations, Maya Higashi Wakana focuses on the microsocial to elaborate on a heretofore-overlooked aspect of fictional meaning making, simultaneously offering new vocabulary with which to discuss what readers often comprehend only intuitively or miss altogether because of the obscuring familiarity. Being able to recognize the defining power of what microsociologist Erving Goffman calls “deference” gestures, for example, contributes significantly to what can be perceived in literary reproductions of such forces exerting their inexorable influence on individuals, including on readers. Wakana’s microsocial critical methodology and the thematic content of the book, the topics of this introductory chapter, are intertwined.
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Notes
- 1.
Suzanne Keen (2007) describes Octavia Butler talking about her unpublished short story “Child Finder.” In it, telepaths are in constant conflict with one another because of their ability to intimately understand everything that is happening in the minds of everyone present (151).
- 2.
Sociologist Mary F. Rogers (1980) writes that interactions reflect macrosocial power relations when the “routinised behaviour of everyday life corresponds to and reflects the broader social patterns which intermesh to constitute a social structure” (102) and Spencer E. Cahill (1998) observes that social statuses are “transformed into situated advantages and disadvantages in the interactional production of persons” (145).
- 3.
Benjamin Wadsworth (1712) succinctly proclaims that Christianity “does not dissolve or destroy … the Relation between Husbands and Wives, Parents and Children, Masters and Servants, Rulers and Subjects” (3; emphasis in original). The idea expressed is Christianity’s refusal to disrupt, let alone question, real-world hierarchical relationships. Indeed, encouraging them seems to be its very goal.
- 4.
Melissa Raines (2008) claims the “near-physical, rhythmic effect [of Eliot’s words and punctuations] upon the reader must not be ignored” (45), while Joshua D. Esty (1996) asserts, “The language of flows and currents dominates the novel’s representation of desire” to become “quite literal when Maggie and Stephen drift downstream” (153).
- 5.
The outcome of the complex series of mental gestures likely coincides with what Kay Young (2010) describes as “a minded world brought to consciousness through our reading minds” (5).
- 6.
Kenneth Burke (1968) discusses “the summarizing object” in the real world being “paired with the summarizing word”: “Such shortcuts give us ‘universals,’ such as ‘man,’ ‘dog,’ and ‘tree’ in general, without reference to any particular man, dog, or tree” (372).
- 7.
- 8.
Patrick Colm Hogan (2011) claims that structures of stories are “fundamentally shaped and oriented by our emotion systems” (1). I in effect demonstrate the reverse, which is that our emotion systems are fundamentally informed by story structures, as Hogan himself suggests in the afterword of his book: “But if stories and emotions are so closely interrelated, … do emotion processes only affect stories, or can stories affect emotion processes as well?” (237).
- 9.
Sociologist John H. Gagnon (2004) uses the example of the first-person narrator of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman to explain what having a literary mind means, and I quote from Fowles’s (1969) novel: “[W]e are all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves” (339). Fowles’s narrator claims that his scripted imaginings semi-define his future words and deeds, though this same narrator later writes multiple conclusions for the heroine of his novel, Sarah Woodruff. Fowles’s narrator reminds us of what we do in our lives, as does Gagnon (2004) , when he claims that his more recent personal history cannot be put into narrative form, because “the events are only events, not yet stories” (21).
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Wakana, M.H. (2018). Introduction: The Reader and Varieties of Intimacies. In: Performing Intimacies with Hawthorne, Austen, Wharton, and George Eliot. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93991-9_1
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