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Stark Style Solidarity. Reader Identification and Emotional Immersion in Rebecca Brown’s Literary Minimalism
Author(s) -
Xhonneux Lies
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2011.01048.x
Subject(s) - solidarity , minimalism (technical communication) , lesbian , mainstream , literature , embodied cognition , foregrounding , laughter , aesthetics , neutrality , convention , sociology , art , philosophy , psychoanalysis , psychology , politics , law , epistemology , social science , statistics , mathematics , theology , political science
The work of the contemporary lesbian author Rebecca Brown (born 1956) can be read in the light of Richard Rorty’s claim that literature is the primary medium for an exploration and expansion of our notion of the human. Brown seizes upon the convention of literary minimalism to place lesbianism at the heart of a canon traditionally embodied by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Through typical minimalist methods pertaining to character and narrator, her writing arguably encourages the reader’s emotional immersion as well as a heightened reader identification. This makes her mainly lesbian protagonists vital actors in literature’s stimulation of empathy via role‐taking opportunities. Almost forcing readers into imaginatively identifying with frequently abjected “others” by means of minimal and consequential characterization, anti‐sentimentalism, and narratorial neutrality, Brown’s work strives to evoke solidarity in mainstream readers – they are pushed into seeing subjects who are as yet largely excluded from a general idea of “the human” as “one of us.”