The Rhetoric of Narrative, Character and Subjectivity in Dickens

My graduate work centres on the rhetoric of narrative techniques, principally those that inscribe subjectivity and the self, in the fiction and particularly the short fiction and literary journalism of Charles Dickens and two Hungarian novelists and liter ary journalists who claimed to have been influenced by him, Kálmán Mikszáth and Gyula Krúdy. I am planning to trace similar and different uses of strategies that I find to be fundamentally akin, particularly the construction of communal subjects as rhetor ical devices, endowed with a plural but not necessarily pluralist perspective. The rhetorical and reading-oriented cognitive branches of narrative theory and their ways of analysing the representation of fictional mental activity, consciousness and subje ctivity serve as the basis of enquiry into the narration of characters and the establishment of their identities, personal and communal. This involves the analysis of characteristics of narrative form in Dickens that would gain prominence and redefinition of roles in Modernist fiction, such as the handling of focalisation or free indirect discourse. A grant to the University of Oslo would enable me to research further into recent work on narrative theory and into Dickens criticism and scholarship. I woul d also like to investigate in current discussions of postmodern and contemporary British (and possibly American) fiction with social, political or historical subject matter, an awareness of possible links between its subject matter; along with some repres entational techniques or conventions; and those that Dickensian works employ. I hope that I could benefit from my research stay also by making it feed into my graduate teaching in the genres of modern English literature, and that I could make the most of it in carrying on with my interests in Hungarian responses to literature written in English with a broadened outlook and in a spirit that is informed by the encounter with another culture?s history of reception.