Academic Journal
Merging the Human and the Nonhuman: The Object Narrator in The Adventures of a Black Coat
| العنوان: | Merging the Human and the Nonhuman: The Object Narrator in The Adventures of a Black Coat |
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| المؤلفون: | Dragos Ivana |
| المصدر: | Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, Vol 7, Iss 1, Pp 148-159 (2021) |
| بيانات النشر: | Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca |
| سنة النشر: | 2021 |
| المجموعة: | Directory of Open Access Journals: DOAJ Articles |
| مصطلحات موضوعية: | object narrative, epistemological problems, material culture, commodity fetishism, satire, Literature (General), PN1-6790 |
| الوصف: | Rooted in the tradition of eighteenth-century circulation novels recounted by an object narrator, The Adventures of a Black Coat (1760) epitomizes the features of this experimental novelistic subgenre by foregrounding a coat which, acting as a homodiegetic narrator, lambastes the world of commodities prompted by the rise of early capitalism. As an object endowed with moral conscience, the coat epistemologically proves to be a reliable narrator that is able to render authentic experience and feelings by getting empirically involved in the world it describes. Worn by a few owners, the coat becomes a sharp observer of society and, most importantly, it foreshadows what Karl Marx has termed “commodity fetishism.” According to Marx, commodities and humans become part of a process that is economically endorsed by exchange. Read in this light, I argue that the text reveals the Marxist process of reification whereby social relations between humans turn into social relations between things. Despite being an object narrator, the coat fulfils a typically eighteenth-century pedagogical function, in that it warns the reader against the degrading morals of a society addicted to material culture. |
| نوع الوثيقة: | article in journal/newspaper |
| اللغة: | English Romanian; Moldavian; Moldovan |
| تدمد: | 2457-8827 |
| Relation: | https://www.metacriticjournal.com/article/186/merging-the-human-and-the-nonhuman-the-object-narrator-in-the-adventures-of-a-black-coat; https://doaj.org/toc/2457-8827; https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2021.11.09; https://doaj.org/article/03d89f89c5ec422681b34c652b88cf7f |
| DOI: | 10.24193/mjcst.2021.11.09 |
| الاتاحة: | https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2021.11.09 https://doaj.org/article/03d89f89c5ec422681b34c652b88cf7f |
| رقم الانضمام: | edsbas.3E5A4FC3 |
| قاعدة البيانات: | BASE |
| تدمد: | 24578827 |
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| DOI: | 10.24193/mjcst.2021.11.09 |