Professor of Comparative Literature Peter J. Rabinowitz delivered a paper, "The Absence of Her Voice from that Concord," during a session on the "implied author" at the International Conference on Narrative in Birmingham, England, on June 5. The session, which grew out of debates about the implied author generated at the 2008 Narrative Conference, offered three significantly different perspectives on the validity of the concept, originally developed by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction.
Arguing against theory that's been cut off from pragmatic (including interpretive) concerns, Rabinowitz claimed that the familiar abstract critiques of the implied author are inconclusive. He went on to show how, despite its theoretical fuzziness, the concept remains useful for a wide variety of aesthetic inquiries about a wide range of artistic works, from Shostakovich's Song of the Forests to the Nancy Drew novels to Nabokov's Lolita.
Arguing against theory that's been cut off from pragmatic (including interpretive) concerns, Rabinowitz claimed that the familiar abstract critiques of the implied author are inconclusive. He went on to show how, despite its theoretical fuzziness, the concept remains useful for a wide variety of aesthetic inquiries about a wide range of artistic works, from Shostakovich's Song of the Forests to the Nancy Drew novels to Nabokov's Lolita.
