Effects of Garden-pathing in Martin Amis's novels Time's Arrow and Night Train
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.200011221Keywords:
Martin Amis, Time's Arrow, Garden path phenomenon, Cognitive narratology, Reader reception, AI Theory, Contemporary British LiteratureAbstract
Critics often describe the novels of British writer Martin Amis as prankish artefacts that neglect story and plot for a highly misleading set of postmodern pyrotechnics. In this article I attempt to explore a literary phenomenon that is often paraphrased as "teasing the reader", arguing that one of the chief glories of Amis's prose lies quite paradoxically, in the ambiguous narrative structures and in the ways readers are "led up a garden path" in the course of his fictional worlds. Drawing on a selection of recent criticism from Artificial Intelligence (Minsky), cognitive narratology (Jahn) and general reader reception theory, I will analyse Amis's novels Time's Arrow and Night Trains and propose that the narrative traps employed are highly functional. Rather than just Hanoi readers, they actually lead "somewhere", producing various aesthetical effects and ultimately turning the novels into what Roland Barthes has termed "writerly" texts.
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