Trajectories of Aristotelian and Nietzschean narratives
Résumé
I will analyze the relationship between Bourdieu's critical sociology on one side and “reader-response theory” on the other one, with the aim of deducing some elements for further research. The starting point will be the distinction between “popular novel” and “problematic novel” contained in Umberto Eco's book Il Superuomo di massa published in 1978: according to the Italian author, in the first type of narrative “there will be a struggle of good against evil that will always resolve in favor of the good”, while the second type “on the contrary offers ambiguous purposes”. I will explore the relationship between two subfields of the “literary field” that will be defined as “popular” or “problematic” on one side, and the compositional characteristics of the “Aristotelian” (based on the strength of the mythos) and “Nietzschean” (pervaded by a radical negativity) narratives in the other one. The goal will consist to show how a certain type of narrative would “choose” its own “implied reader”, by means of eliciting some “literary effects” as melancholy or catharsis: the presence or absence of certain compositional elements in the text would arouse the attention of a certain category of readers rather than another.