SECOND PAPER

Subject : # 14213 Mètodes d’Estudi de Literatura Anglesa

Student´s name : Reiss, Julia

Title of the paper : Analysis of the use of time and space in Richard L. Pryll’s Hypertext “Lies”

Abstract :

Richard L. Pryll’s hypertext short story “Lies” has been analysed under the point of view of “Time” and “Space”, which in both cases I have found to be correlated with the leitmotif of journal writing. I have added a brief introduction into content and structure of the story, which is designed to help in understanding the basic concepts of this hypertext.

Auto-evaluation:

Brief and sound. Maybe not as detailed as the first attempt, but at least the right topic.

My three ideas about literary criticism applied to the story are:

1. Feminism: The story is narrated from a male first person narrator, who talks about sex and women all the time. Bell hooks and Maxine Hong Kingston would have torn it into pieces. It could e.g. be interpretated under the topic of the “male gaze”.

2. Structuralism: Pryll himself has stated that he wanted to stress structure before content. He makes use of the binary “truth”-“lies” structure and the nodes are in themselves structured in terms of parataxis, re-using words and phrases, etc. Moreover the notion of “lies”, establishing facts, where there are no facts, and meanings, where there are no meanings, ties in with the discussion about signifier and signified and would ultimately lean itself to a discussion of

3. Poststructuralism: and the question what happens if the signified disappears, leaving the signifier pitted like an apple or like a red-haired imaginary beauty named Gabriella.

Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Julia Reiss
jureiss@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press