Abstract: Female bodies in Robert des noms propres serve as metaphors for the artistic tension between the fictional and the real and the reading experience that it informs. As such, they are loci of both pleasure and frustration. When a character bearing the author's name confronts Plectrude who kills her, the protagonist's relationship with her creator is called into question. If the author figure is dead, Plectrude's experience of enjoyment should no longer depend on her. It follows that readers of Robert des noms propres are forced to reconsider their experience of the text itself and therefore their own relationship with the author.
Jennifer R. Perlmutter (Wed,) studied this question.