This paper sets out to demonstrate, by way of structural analysis, why the ostensible digressions ("heterodiegetic analepses", so termed by the French structuralist literary theorist Gerard Genette) in Willa Cather’s novel My Antonia are actually not irrelevant ramifications but in- tegral parts of a unified artistic work in its congregated effort to develop the theme of time.
This paper endeavors to demonstrate the similarity between Chapter 42 of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady and Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge" through a textual analysis based on the “dialogue" theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian critic. The scrutiny reveals how different points of view interact with one another to give rise to deeper levels of meaning.
