earticle

영어

Since Wayne Booth created the concept of “implied author” in his book entitled The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), the narrative term of “unreliable narrator” has been renowned in reading fiction, along with the return of the author repressed by Modernist’s aesthetic. The implied author is the literary version of the real author in the text as the result of reader’s inference, and is rooted in the postmodern epistemology regarding language as rhetoric. When Booth coined that terminology, the implied author indicated the norms for reading a text in which the voice of the author and that of the (character) narrator diverge and converge in a “dual focalization” or even in triple voices. However, after 30 years of cultural studies and political corrections, when the expression “implied author” has returned in line with the return of ethics as well as of aesthetics, such as is seen these days, the term needs to be revised and redefined. Some argue for including the cultural and historical background of the reader, but others argue against the necessity of that term, implied author itself. This paper introduces several scholars’s controversial discussions to reveal the reason that we need that term. Without the implied author we can hardly enjoy the intricate narrative strategy of Nabokov’s Lolita. Representing how an unreliable narration can be ethical by means of the artistic sublimation, Lolita displays a fine example to indicate the position where an implied author can be located in metafiction. In conclusion, an implied author does not disappear, nor does it need the cultural context of a reader. It is strictly inferred in the text itself through the reading process by the authorial “rereader,” and needs to be relocated in accordance with the paradigm shift of literary form.