ABSTRACT

On 7 January 2018, Francine Prose posted a message in which she urged her Facebook followers to compare what she saw as the alarming similarities between Sadia Shepard’s New Yorker fiction “Foreign Returned” (2017) and the earlier New Yorker story “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” (1963) by Mavis Gallant. In doing so, Prose set off a critical controversy over the issues of intertextual borrowing. This paper seeks to create a framework for understanding this controversy. When reading a short story, the reader’s interpretive default assumptions are those of fictional world discreteness and textual self-sufficiency. Fictional world discreteness refers to the idea that the reader’s default experience of reading implies an unmediated immersion within a single fictional world. Textual self-sufficiency refers to the idea that in order to understand a literary text, it is necessary to read only that text. In this way, uncanny resemblances – surprising reconfigurations in a target text of a meaningful element of the source text – are marked, indicating the suspension of both fictional world discreteness and textual self-sufficiency.

摘要

2018 年 1 月 7 日，弗朗辛·普罗斯 (Francine Prose) 发布了一条消息，敦促她的 Facebook 粉丝比较她认为萨迪亚·谢泼德 (Sadia Shepard) 的小说《纽约客》(2017) 与早期《纽约客》之间惊人的相似之处Mavis Gallant 的故事“沿街行驶的冰车”（1963 年）。在这样做的过程中，散文引发了关于互文借用问题的批判性争论。本文试图创建一个框架来理解这一争议。阅读短篇小说时，读者的解释默认假设是虚构世界的离散性和文本自给自足。虚构世界的离散性指的是读者默认的阅读体验意味着不经中介地沉浸在一个单一的虚构世界中。文本自给自足是指为了理解文学文本，只需要阅读该文本的想法。通过这种方式，不可思议的相似之处——源文本中有意义的元素在目标文本中令人惊讶的重新配置——被标记出来，