[Hardy-l] history and readers

[Rosemarie Morgan]

Kevin - I think every student would benefit from reading your 
mini-treatise.  Keith isn't the only one to encounter students for whom 
fictional characters *should* or *shouldn't* behave in a certain way. 
Although the case of the Chase scene, in all its complexity, is less often 
(in my experience) conjoined to personal bias or the "moral ought" partly 
because complexity and ambiguity remain, to this day, attached to issues of 
alleged rape. That of course, isn't the point; Brecht's "making strange" is 
more apt, perhaps. In a sense Hardy anticipated this principle not just in 
the Chase scene but in a variety of narratorial ways of exercising his 
reader with a multivalent text.

Cheers,
Rosemarie
_____________
  to allow the strange world of the text/history to have its own 
reality--even if such a reality remains fictional, since no moment can 
truly be recreated or communicated as it was. And it's all perceived 
through our own point of view. Agh.

>Kevin