![Family Crises in Confession, Fragility and the Indelible
Subject in Great House](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2017_42782.jpg)
Family Crises in Confession, Fragility and the Indelible Subject in Great House
This paper discusses the indelible role of the subject in confessional fiction, by looking at Nicole Krauss’s novel Great House (2010). I argue that there is an inter-subjective immersion in Great House, depicted through fictional confessions in front of another, that builds a different narrative architecture, which differs from the stream of consciousness novel and the self-conscious novel. Moreover, I look at the rehabilitation of the subject, not in isolation, but in the context of interaction and indebtedness in-between subjects, a process which portrays a novel of exposure and fragility, where the subject is always at risk in the encompassed family space it inhabits. In the end, I show how the asymmetrical relationships from a shared life and the string of confessions attest a re-humanizing of the subject in Great House, while also indicating a reconfiguration of the view of the reader, as the novel demands from her new forms of attention and affective reading, rather than interpretation.
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