Books, libraries and beige

Abstract

This bachelor thesis explores how librarians are portrayed in fiction literature. The aim is to see how the librarian and their work tasks are described. Our material consists of 12 fiction novels from the years 2000 to 2012 (with an exception of a book from 1998). We have used discourse analysis in order to examine the picture of the librarian. We have used three major questions: How is the librarian portrayed in our selected fiction literature from year 2000 until today (the beginning of 2013)? How are the librarians profession portrayed in our selected fiction literature? Does our selection of the fiction literature give a positive or negative image of the librarianand how can that affect the view of the profession? Our analysis resulted in the discourses the librarian and literature and the librarian and the library. Our study concludes the stereotype image of the librarian as an elderly, angry woman with her hair in a bun is slowly changing in our material. The librarian is still described as a person who lends out and retrieves books, but there are also descriptions of tasks like helping the users with Internet and relative research. The characters use both negative and positive words when they describe their profession. The librarian is strongly connected to the physical library