Text Centred Views on John Green's Novels

Student’s name:

Leah Molnar

Possible title 1 be creative and all-encompassing ensure that it includes the author title theorist and theory.
Gaps between our stars. An exploration of John Green’s novel The Fault in Our Stars with Pierre Machary’s theory of Gaps and Silences.

Text 1:

Green, J 2012, The Fault in our Stars, Dutton Books, England, London.

Possible text centred focus question –identify focus and proposed theorist and associated theory.

Using Pierre Machary’s theory of Gaps and silences, I wanted to thoroughly investigate this novel’s silenced characters. When comparing this novel to the movie’s make, many characters were ‘cut out’ or silenced. Was there any major reasoning behind this?

As well as this, I wanted to inquire if real-life sufferers of cancer are being silenced. Does this novel give an accurate representation of what it is like to suffer with a disease such as cancer? Although most of the major characters suffer from some type of terminal cancer, are their representations correct in the film?

Explanation of focus - outline reasons for selecting text, how you thought about the text in the context of a text centred reading, reasons for selecting chosen theory

I chose this text because I sincerely enjoyed the experience of reading it. Since the story explores the life of a female who suffers from cancer, the reader should believe that the given experiences of the cancer sufferers are somewhat relatable. They should be real or similar experiences to anyone who does suffer from the fatal disease. But if this is not the case and the novel depicts cancer sufferers as completely different, alienated human beings, then does this silence the voice of those who really do suffer from cancer? Although the story is fictional, could it give the wrong idea or view to those who do not personally suffer from the disease?    

Theoretical underpinnings - invoke chosen reader centred theorist and associated theories and several relevant quotes from the theorist that you would rely on if you ultimately to choose to use this reading

“Macherey’s enterprise, then, is to read for the incoherence which the text cannot but disclose, by dwelling upon the not-said of the text, upon the gaps and silences. There, he claims to find ‘the unconscious of the work’ (pp. 92, 94).4 In order to do so, Macherey deploys schemata of front and back, inside and out, bright side and dark: said and not-said is good; the conscious and unconscious of the text is brilliant.’  (Sinfield, A 2010, p. 1060)

“It is an oblique mode of celebration, and all the more persuasive for its obliquity. Pierre Macherey argues that gaps and silences in narrative structure-the sorts of indirection in which Hawthorne specializes-demarcate the limits of ideology. According to Macherey, they are symptoms of fissures in the culture, the contradictions that the system can neither absorb nor wholly exclude. His theory seems especially pertinent to classic American literature, which abounds in strategies of process through hiatus, and to Hawthorne's work in particular. It is pertinent first of all because it conspicuously does not apply to the narrative gap that precedes Hester's return. Hawthorne makes that silence reverberate with all the voices of cultural authority” (Bercovitch, S 1988, p. 11)

“What concerns us here is how history is silenced. Alchemists no more stand beside the goldsmiths of Chaucer's London (in the next street, as simply one more among the scores of London companies) than, in Chaucer's text, they stand for the goldsmith.” (Harwood, B 1987, p. 344) 

Associated theorist/s – rejected – theories, theorists and reasons for rejecting associated theory and theorist/s

I believe the exploration of Gaps and Silences with Pierre Machary is the best choice for my given issue. Semiotics works off symbols, which does not relate to the question being asked. Focalisation relates to the narrator of the novel, which again, does not relate to my question. Gaps and silences was the best choice of theory for the given question.

Criticisms of chosen theorist – quotes from the theorist’s critics arguing against the use of the theory (at least three)

“Significantly, Macherey tries to have it both ways; at some moments, the social text reveals its own gaps (p. 222: "the questioning of fiction is accomplished by the fiction itself") while, at other moments, only the act of criticism can produce knowledge of the limits and powers of the artwork.” (Polan, D 1979, pp 52-53)

“To know the text is not to listen to, and translate, a pre-existent discourse: it is to produce a new discourse which "makes speak" the text's silences. Such an operation, however, is not to be misconceived as the hermeneutical recovery of a sense or structure hidden in the work, a sense which it possesses but conceals; it is rather to establish a new knowledge discontinuous with the work itself, disjunct from it as science is disjunct from ideology.” (Eagleton, T 1975, p. 135)

"Hollowed" by the elusive presence of other works against which it constructs itself, turning around the absence of certain words to which it incessantly returns, the literary work consists not in the elaboration of a single meaning, but in the conflict and incompatibility of several meanings. That conflict, moreover, is precisely what binds the work to reality: ideology is present in the text in the form of its eloquent silences, its significant gaps and fissures. The distance which separates the work from its ideological matrix embodies itself in a certain "internal distance" which separates the work from itself.” (Eagleton, T 1975, p. 138)

Text/s or article/s to use to support this focus question

Sinfield, A 2010, ‘Reading Critical Practice and Macherey’, Textual Practice, pp. 1059-1072.
Bercovitch, S 1988, ‘Hawthorne's A-Morality of Compromise’, Representations, No. 24, Special Issue: America Reconstructed, 1840-1940 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 1-27.
Harwood, B 1987, ‘Chaucer and the Silence of History: Situating the Canon's Yeoman's Tale’, PMLA, Vol. 102 No. 3, May, pp. 338-350.