Audience positioning
How texts manipulate reader/audience perspective, alignment, and response through narrative techniques, rhetoric, characterisation, and other devices. Positioning affects whose side audiences take.
Real World
In Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, the reader is positioned to trust Amy's diary entries entirely — then retrospectively repositioned as a dupe when her narration is revealed as fabricated, demonstrating how first-person narration controls audience sympathy.
Exam Focus
Name the specific technique positioning the audience (e.g. focalisation, direct address, withheld information) and explain the intended emotional effect on the reader.
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