МІНІСТЕРСТВО ОСВІТИ І НАУКИ УКРАЇНИ

КИЇВСЬКИЙ НАЦІОНАЛЬНИЙ ЛІНГВІСТИЧНИЙ УНІВЕРСИТЕТ

Кафедра теорії та історії світової літератури імені професора

В. І. Фесенко

САМОСТІЙНА РОБОТА

Аналіз твору “The Masque of the Red Death”

Студента 5 курсу, групи ММЛІ 01-18

напряму підготовки:
філологія (іспанська мова та
література)
Пархоменка Івана
Викладач: завідувач кафедри,
докт.філол.наук, професор
Шимчишин М.М.
Національна шкала________________
Кількість балів_____Оцінка ЄКТС___

м. Київ – 2019 рік

 Some major concepts of reader-response criticism, as discussed by
Ross Murfin in The Scarlet Letter: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, are
these: (1) reading is a temporal process in which the reader lives through the
experience of the text and (2) the experience that the reader undergoes may mirror
the subject of the story. One reader's experience of "The Masque of the Red Death"
by Edgar Allan Poe can exemplify these two concepts.
In one sense, the temporal process of experiencing this story is like that
experienced in reading any story. There is nothing remarkable about the fact that
we are in suspense throughout the story, led through the action, ignorant as the
characters are of the outcome. We experience what happens to the revelers in
Prince Prospero's palace just as they experience it. We know of the threat of the
Red Death--as they know it, from the very beginning; we are led through the
palace, gaudy room by fantastic turning, as if we were there; we see the masked
figure and are no more cognizant of what is behind the mask than the story's
characters are.
Yet the extent to which our temporal process is reflected by the story and
that our actions in reading it are related to the subject of the story goes even
deeper. Certain oddities and gaps in the text bring our reading process closer to the
center of the story. First are some puzzling incongruities, like that Prince Prospero
is "sagacious" but abandons his dominions when they were "half-depopulated,"
hardly sagacious in the ordinary sense of the term as it might be used for a ruler.
Another is the strange recurrence of the tolling of the ebony clock--a tolling which
we hear at regular intervals just as the people in the castle do. It tolls for us as well
as for them. Another is the peculiar, almost surrealistic description of the disease,
the palace, and the duke. In many ways, the duke and his palace remind a reader of
Poe and his own literary artistry. Like Poe's, the duke's "plans were bold and fiery,
and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre." Like Poe, "there were some who
thought [the duke] mad." The duke delights in the bizarre, the gorgeous. In the
duke's artistic palace, as in Poe's stories, there is a "sharp turn at every twenty or
thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect." Indeed, it is possible to equate the
experience of reading Poe's story to the characters' following the twists and turns
of the barbaric splendors of the duke's palace. We, too, are caught up in the
intricate work of art and shut out the world outside.
But the world intrudes on the palace – as it does upon us. Neither the palace
nor the artistry of the story prevails against it. The most striking parallel between
the progress of the story in itself and our progress as readers is in the prominent
warning given at the end of the first paragraph: "The whole seizure, progress, and
termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour." One of Poe's best-
known statements about short stories from "The Philosophy of Composition"
concerns length--the work should be no longer than what could be read in a single
sitting, in order that a unity of impression could be achieved: "If two sittings be
required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once
destroyed." Poe was well aware of the reader's experience – away from the affairs
of the world and the importance of time in that experience. In "The Masque of the
Red Death," the reader's experience of being caught up in the artistry of the story is
disrupted as the characters' sense of protection from the Red Death is shattered--by
the revelation of what is behind the Red Death mask. Nothing is behind there. That
is the crucial gap in the story, the place where a reader must supply her own
meaning. Had Poe indicated, as this reader expected, that the mask was no mask
and behind it were the signs of the disease just as were apparent on the mask itself,
the intricate artistry of the reader's escape in the story-palace created by Poe
would continue. But the reader is brought up short by the gap, forced out of the
story, just as the characters must recognize that what they believed they had shut
out, the Red Death, was, in fact, in their midst. By identification, as we actively
seek our own meaning for what is behind the mask, what we find is guided to some
extent by what the characters find--Red Death. Not only does the ebony clock toll
for us, but the Red Death disrupts our revelry in the barbaric splendor of the
story/palace.
 Works Cited

Murfin, Ross C. "What is Reader-Response Criticism?" The Scarlet Letter,

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Case
Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. Boston: Bedford,
1991. 252-260. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Masque of the Red Death." The American Tradition in
Literature. Ed. George
Perkins and Barbara Perkins. 9th ed. vol. 1. New York: McGraw,
1998. 1281--1285. 2 vols. Print.