Reading between the lines: character spaces

A project about the spaces that exist between literary characters, and a suggested method for their analysis. Drawing on the work of Wolfgang Iser and extending upon it, this project combines a literary fiction novel written from multiple perspectives with an exegetical enquiry about how Iser’s notion of spaces between sentences may be modified to analyse, and therefore write more effectively and successfully, the spaces between literary characters. Iser’s modified theories have been used to analyse Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The emphasis of the creative and theoretical work is to develop an understanding about how spaces between characters and the “affect” implicit within them may be consciously created and used by writers. This project aims to deliver to writers a model that may be used to “compose” spaces, and “compose” the sequencing of spaces.