Abstract

Textualizing processes of both the ethics and politics of memory – whether achieved by the means of the word, i.e. the book, or of the image, i.e. TV, radio, cinema – are of utmost interest in an age of mediated and mediating mass culture, as it comes off the pages of David Lodge’s novels. Many of the later novels written by David Lodge focus, at least at the level of content, on the media with all its aspects and under all its known forms. The present paper intends to investigate the way in which the reader is allowed (or not) to infer the reading keys by letting themselves caught in the mediated and mediating writing games. At the level of form, the covers of David Lodge’s novels, although released by different publishing houses, enclose all sorts of intriguing reviews and images, genuine understatements that function more like pretexts than pre/post-faces, thus managing to lure and entice the reader (not without unveiling at least a small part of the novel’s theme) who peeps into and infers (the visual pretext/ the image or the textual pretext/ the word) that which is hidden in between the covers of the book