Tristram Shandy General

Question 1

What is Sterne doing?

Answer 1

• challenging our presuppositions to literature

Question 2

What effect does the mise-en-page have?

Answer 2

• requires us to reconfigure our interaction with the text

Question 3

Where does the preface come in the text and what effect does that have?

Answer 3

• upsets the organisational structure of the novel form

- demonstrates how we endow arbitrary literary structures with significant value by destabilising its purpose

Question 4

What mis-en-page feature is referred to as an ‘inflated full stop’?

Answer 4

• the black pages

Question 5

How does Neisser say we create a mental image of the text?

Answer 5

• through expectations based on probabilities

Question 6

How do we expect to be able to read a book?

Answer 6

we expect to be able to achieve a co-ordinated relationship between the author’s word choice and our individual response to this and adopt our own pace

Question 7

in ‘Story and Discourse’, what does Chatman say about readers filling the gaps of narrative?

Answer 7

explains that readers have to fill in the gaps of what is unmentioned but this is disturbed when the implied events are not logical and do not comply with our concept of the physical world

Question 8

With the emergence of silent reading, what happened?

Answer 8

the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words

Question 9

Why might we call the text a ‘comedy skirting tragedy’?

Answer 9

• it was “written under the greatest heaviness of heart” in a period just after his mother and uncle died

Question 10

How might we connect Sterne’s treatment of the reader to ‘The Literary Saturnalian Tradition’?

Answer 10

• constantly invokes boundaries and transgresses them - constantly drawing the reader in and out of the conversation of the narrative (constantly alienating and embracing)

Question 11

What did the landscape of the novel look like in the mid-18th century?

Answer 11

(Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson)
- pursuing realism so effectively that the fictional lives resembled intimate biographies or autobiographies
convincing empirical detail and social topicalities

• alongside realism were the ‘romances’
• locations were exotic and the adventures melodramatic
• empirical plausibility mattered less than escapism and excitement
  (included the Gothic genre - Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe)
• another reaction against realism was satire and comedy
  (Gulliver’s Travels, Shamela, Joseph Andrews)

Question 12

How might Pamela have influenced TS?

Answer 12

• developing the technique of ‘writing to the moment’ may have influenced the detailed rendering of mercurially swift thought-processes which we find in Tristram Shandy

Question 13

What is the largest irony of TS and its relationship to realism?

Answer 13

• it comes across as much more realistic than the Realist novels it aims to dissect and critique, because it becomes the closest portrayal of reality that a writer can achieve - chaotic, tortuous, confusing and arbitrary

Question 14

Who coined the concept of ‘multimodality’?

Answer 14

Gunter Kress

Question 15

What was the relationship of TS to satire?

Answer 15

• redeployed the influence of satire of Swift and Pope for a literary culture that matured as the novel developed

Question 16

What demonstrates that TS was ahead of its time?

Answer 16

• Russian critics such as Viktor Shlovsky reflected on how Sterne had dismantled the enabling forms of 19th century realism
• he was praised by Virginia Woolf eg. Sentimental Journey - for the stream of consciousness aspect

Question 17

What demonstrates that TS was also looking backwards?

Answer 17

• he interrogated fictional realism as a result of his immersion in pre-novelistic satire that was formally disrupted with the development of the novel

Question 18

How does the name TS compare with Smollett’s Roderick Random?

Answer 18

• both share the almost romantic given name and then undercut with commonplace name (for comic/ satirical effect)

Question 19

How does Sterne undercut the romantic aspects of the text?

Answer 19

• comedy of his commonplace name - not the one his father decided, nor a ‘sir’
• has ‘opinions’ not ‘adventures’

Question 20

What contextual developments were occurring that gave rise to experimentation?

Answer 20

• awareness of reigning conventions
• growing staleness
• shaped the sometimes anxious and defensive experimentalism of novels during these years

Question 21

Which books published also had a self-conscious narrator and was a work of experimental literature?

Answer 21

• Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry (1754)
• allegory, satirical
• similiar aspects of digression and wider reflections on religion
• recast the author-reader relationship

Charlotte Summers (1749)

• sometimes attributed to Sarah Fielding
• novel of manners (along with Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, North and South, Wives and Daughters, Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner)

Question 22

1692-1693: Charles Gildon’s The Post-Boy Robb’d of His Mail - who was Gildon and what relevance does this book have?

Answer 22

• better known hack of Grub Street
• Hunter: criticised that he had talent, but did not have a focused idea of where “novelty and innovation might lead”
• one of the first novels to employ the club device (pretense that it was written by more than one author)

Question 23

What did Samuel Johnson say of TS?

Answer 23

“The merely odd does not last. Tristram Shandy did not last.”

Question 24

What can we trace the typographic experimentation to in 1918?

Answer 24

Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire (1918)

Question 25

Who adapted the text into a graphic novel?

Answer 25

• Martin Rowson (1996)

Question 26

In which other text was there a growing relationship with the reader?

Answer 26

• Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
• starting with conception
• enables a sub-plot of friendship with the reader to emerge

Question 27

What does Fanning say about Sterne’s attitude to print culture?

Answer 27

• says he had a “philosophical conception of the existential implications of printed expression for notions of individuality and originality”
  ie. he understood and had ideas around the implications of print culture for notions of individuality and originality

Question 28

How does printed culture operate between reader and author?

Answer 28

• becomes a place in which the author and reader interact

Question 29

How did Sterne honour his readers’ and critics’ opinions?

Answer 29

• welcomed both positive and negative attention
• listened to his critics and modified the text (it was suggested that he be less bawdy and so he focused more on the character of uncle Toby)

Question 30

How did Sterne engage in a discourse of publicity?

Answer 30

• decried his loss of money when popular reception faltered

- embraced his celebrity and continued to blur his literary persona with his position as author

Question 31

How did copyright aid the idea of literary originality?

Answer 31

• copyright debates played a role in creating the romantic idea that the author becomes known through his work
• focus on romantic idea instead as opposed to neoclassical imitation

Question 32

Why does Viktor Shlovsky give TS such high praise?

Answer 32

• believes the function of art is to ‘defamiliarise’ the world
• surprise the reader with the fresh apprehension of experience

Question 33

How does Anderson summarise Sterne’s handling of the reader?

Answer 33

• creates a character who has a way of looking at our relationship in a way that hasn’t occurred to us
• demonstrates that his approach to this experience is freer that our own and thus makes us question our perception and imagination

Question 34

Sterne clearly challenges narrative form - what does this highlight?

Answer 34

• that we hold allegiance to pretension because we ally ourselves to convenient artifice instead of inconvenient reality

Question 35

How did F.R Leavis react to TS?

Answer 35

called it “irresponsible (and nasty) trifling” especially in response to the use of double entendre
- confidently dismisses it from the great tradition of the English novel

Question 36

How does Locke summarise the mistake of mental associations?

Answer 36

“ideas that in themselves are not at all of kin, come to be so united in some men’s minds that it is very hard to separate them”

Question 37

What does Wimsatt say about the status of the reader?

Answer 37

“the actual reader of a poem is something like a reader over reader’s shoulder; he reads through . . . the person to whom the full tone of the poem is addressed in the fictional situation”

Question 38

What does Alberto Manguel in his 1996 book:’A History of Reading’ say?

Answer 38

“with silent reading the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words”

Question 39

What does the impact of internal reading have?

Answer 39

• means that reading becomes part of the interior world
• things that were potentially awkward or heretical etc. were now able to be interrogated and curiosity could be followed
• drew attention to the mental operations of the reader
• texts also existed in a different realm of time - could be read a lot faster, time could be taken away from the text for contemplation - more control over the reading (CF: Cassandra, Florence Nightingale - “what is it to be read aloud to? the most miserable exercise of the human intellect”)

Question 40

What does Neisser say about how the reader resolves the ambiguities around acoustic signals?

Answer 40

Ulric Neisser ‘Cognitive Psychology’ - the listener resolves the ambiguities of the acoustic signal by making use of his own knowledge of the various linguistic and contextual constraints

Question 41

What does Neisser’s 1981 term “repisodic” memory mean?

Answer 41

• idea that memory is reconstructed instead of existing as a snapshot of the moment itself

Question 42

How does the serialisation of the text have an impact for readers’ today?

Answer 42

• creates a different temporal experience of the text ie. different experience reading it as a novel at once than as a serial publication

Question 43

Where can the influence of Richardson be seen?

Answer 43

• mockery of the writing to the moment

Question 44

What does Roman Ingarden call the process of reading a text?

Answer 44

‘realisation’

ie. REAding, REAlisation

Question 45

According to Roman Ingarden, what happens in ‘realisation’?

Answer 45

• literary work has two poles - artistic (created by author) and aesthetic (realisation accomplished by the reader) - the literary work cannot be completely identical with the text OR with the realisation of the text (must lie inbetween)

Question 46

What does Iser say about the role of the author in a text?

Answer 46

• reader has to limit the bounds of the reader’s imagination, while also endowing it with far greater significance than it would achieve on its own

Question 47

In relation to works of ‘easy transformation’ that work on the effect of smoothness and the contrivance of appearing civilised - how does TS compare?

Answer 47

• exposes that contrivance of appearing civilised
• strives towards greater realism - same vein of exposure as ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ by Swift, although Stenre delights in the revelation where Strephon does not
• message differs from saying that we should accept the illusion and ignore the reality to that we should discard the illusion and embrace the reality

Question 48

How does Defoe’s ‘Moll Flanders’ of 1722 begin to expose the contrivance of narrative construction?

Answer 48

• in the preface it is suggested that there is an editor who has cut down the story for appropriate reading, implication that what we are reading is not complete and is seen through a lens

Question 49

What works of Rousseau indicate that he foregrounded subjectivity as a site of reality?

Answer 49

• Confessions (beginnings of autobiography)

- Reveries of a Solitary Walker

Question 50

What are the two main theories of humour?

Answer 50

1. superiority (immune from folly of others)

2. incongruity (customary associations are disputed and we delight in disorderliness)

Question 51

What does Susan Purdie reflect about the totality of jokes? And in which book of hers?

Answer 51

“…totality is produced in the moment of the exchange, between the Teller and Audience” - Susan Purdie, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse

Question 52

In what essay did Locke say “I shall be pardoned for calling it by so harsh a name as Madness”?

Answer 52

Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ‘Of the Association of Ideas’

Question 53

Why does Locke prioritise judgement over wit?

Answer 53

• wit is the secondary faculty because judgement splits things apart whereas in reconnecting ideas there can be mistakes and arbitrary connections

Question 54

How does Sterne play with what Rousseau says seriously in his confessions?

Answer 54

“I am like no one else in the whole world” - Rousseau, Confessions c. 1766
- TS plays with our idea of individuality, whether we are able to have an individual response or if literature is inherently an impersonal activity

Question 55

Why does Locke urge us to be more clear and solid in our meanings?

Answer 55

• we all suppose that our words actually refer to things out there, but we talk of only what is in our own minds

Question 56

How did Hagstrum define ekphrasis?

Answer 56

• Jean Hagstrum, defined it as a description which gives a “voice and language to the otherwise mute art object.”3

Question 57

What is Descartes Perception of Sense theory?

Answer 57

• reality as we know it is constructed by the senses