Familiarize The Defamiliarized

In American popular culture, the cannibalism, both as event and as metaphor, which should be a commonplace of genre fiction, as well as of wider texts employing the rhetoric of the gothic for effect, comes as no surprise. In other words, cannibal fiction, as a genre, provides a different lens through which to view United States culture and history. Among the cannibal fiction in America, what these cannibals have in common is that they are mostly portrayed as monsters. In horror novels, the cannibal is nothing but a bloodthirsty killer (for example, the vicious cannibal witch around the17-the 18 century, and cannibal aboriginal in the 19 century). Opposing the monster, there is always a hero or even a group of heroes who, at the end, will succeed in annihilating the fiend and saving humanity. An explicit separation exists between cannibals and humans:"they"are not like"us". The reader will identify with the human hero and feel completely detached from the monster with its horrific characteristics.The"Hannibal Saga"by Thomas Harris (born April, 11 1940) is the one that absolute cannot be treated slightly. In fact, it is a tetralogy including Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006), by which Harris, in flashback, took nearly 25 years to tell the life-stories about Hannibal"the Cannibal"Lecter. And with the successful creation of iconic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in this saga, Harris has been awarded the 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association (HWA).What the present thesis intends is, through the analysis of the three postmodern narrative techniques displayed in"Saga,"to prove that"Hannibal Saga"has achieved a successful transformation for the mainstream cannibal fictions, that is, from the defamiliarized to the familiar.Apart from introduction and conclusion, the main body of the present thesis contains three chapters. Chapter two sets out to review the history of cannibal fictions in America to present the historical trends of the genre. It also provides background information of the paper, including a brief biographical survey of Thomas Harris and his works, and the purpose and significance of the present study. Chapter three is devoted to the study of focalization, the most frequently discussed technique in narrative theory, and Harris's combination of the zero focalization with the internal focalization in"Saga". Chapter four is given to the discussion of characterization, which is drawing more and more attention from writers and critics, and how Harris subverts the traditionally flat cannibal and creates a heroic villain Hannibal Lecter with both monster and human inside. Finally, Chapter Five is the analysis of the narrative technique of open-ending, which is always regarded as the most controversial part of"Saga".