Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

How to Do Things With Words

Discourse in the Novel

Ethnic Groups in Conflict

A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, bell hook's new book Feminist Theory: from margin to center argues that the contemporary feminist movement must establish a new direction for the 1980s. Continuing the debates surrounding her controversial first book, Ain't I A Woman, bell hooks suggests that feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movem A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, bell hook's new book Feminist Theory: from margin to center argues that the contemporary feminist movement must establish a new direction for the 1980s. Continuing the debates surrounding her controversial first book, Ain't I A Woman, bell hooks suggests that feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movement against sexist oppression because the very foundation of women's liberation has, until now, not accounted for the complexity and diversity of female experience.

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Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

As Brian Richardson's frequent objections to previous narrative theory indicate (see, for example, his comments on Gerard Genette's approach to temporality), he grounds his efforts to develop "unnatural narrative theory" in one important principle about theory construction: the choice of objects of study will inevitably influence one's theoretical generalizations. In practice, Richardson typically advances a specific version of what I will call, adapting the jargon of computer science, an XIXO critique and argues for the superiority of an XYIXYO approach, his versions being MIMO (mimetic in, mimetic out) and AMMIAMMO (mimetic and anti-mimetic in, mimetic and anti-mimetic out). Richardson contends that existing narrative theory is flawed because it has a mimetic bias, leading it to neglect the vast corpus of works that "defy the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, the practices of realism or other poetics that model themselves on nonfictional narratives, and which transcend the conventions of existing, established genres" (389). By attending to this corpus, he engages in his own AMIAMO operation, which leads him to various proposals about how to revise, extend, or supplement previous (mimetic) theory. In my view, the results so far have been salutary because Richardson has succeeded in calling attention to the importance of the unnatural in the history of storytelling, because he has developed numerous insightful tools and concepts (e.g., the concept of "denarration," the accounts of second-person and first-person-plural narration) for coming to terms with this corpus, and because he has developed numerous insightful analyses of individual narratives. (1) At the same time, I find that some important questions about the status of unnatural narrative theory and its place in the contemporary narrative theory landscape remain. Is it a substantially new theory that rivals existing ones such as feminist, cognitive, and rhetorical theory? Alternatively, is it primarily an engine for producing local insights into elements of narrative that other theories need to integrate? Something else? In the limited space I have here, I will work in devil's advocate fashion as I question the underlying methodology of Richardson's theory construction and pose some possible responses to this questioning. Let me start with Richardson's summary statement about his intervention into narrative theory: I do not offer an alternative paradigm so much as another, complementary one. In most areas, we do not need to reject existing models but rather to supplement them with a more comprehensive one that can embrace both mimetic and antimimetic narrative practices. By definition, a mimetic model cannot comprehend antimimetic works that violate the rules of mimetic representation. A complete narrative theory requires a binocular vision and a dialectical poetics ... Unnatural narratology is the capacious paradigm that supplies the missing parts, the missing theory, the missing vision. (394) The details of Richardson's claims here can be difficult to parse because he uses multiple, not entirely synonymous terms to describe what seems to be the same phenomenon, what I'll call accounts-of-narrative-containing-significant-generalization: paradigm, model, theory, poetics. But his overall point is clear: unnatural narrative theory provides the yin to existing theory's yang, allowing for the construction of a "complete" narrative theory--or at least one that aspires to completeness. In other words, Richardson asserts that one can build such a theory by combining the operations of MIMO and AMIAMO. In this way, he takes the principle that a theory is inevitably a reflection of its chosen objects of study and moves it to the very center of the project of theory construction. While the principle is sound in itself, I venture to say that making it the centerpiece of the project is the narratological equivalent of the Peter Principle: what works well at one level works far less well when elevated to a higher level. …

Unnatural Narratives and the Task of Theory Construction

Freedom (2010): Realism after Postmodernism

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/narrative/v014/14.2phelan.pdf

Editor's Column: Wayne C. Booth (1921-2005)

Charlie Marlow, Narrative Theorist, Discourses on "Youth"


 This article proposes to revise rhetorical narrative theory's model of audiences in fiction (actual, authorial, narrative, ideal narrative, and narratee) by replacing the term/concept of the ideal narrative audience with that of the ideal narratee, defined as the audience the narrator wishes they were addressing. This revision calls attention to the various ways that authors can handle the relations between the actual narratee and the ideal narratee (the actual may—or may not—coincide with the ideal), and such variety, in turn, points to the need for a more general taxonomy of authorial uses of the narratee. This taxonomy identifies three recognizably distinct ranges along a single broad spectrum of degrees of alignment between actual and ideal narratees: (1) clear alignment, (2) uncertain alignment, and (3) non-alignment. The taxonomy also identifies two main variants within each category, based on how an author's handling of the degree of alignment guides their readers’ focus: is it primarily on the narrated, the narrating, or both? The essay demonstrates the interpretive payoffs of the taxonomy through its analysis of a wide array of case studies including Mohsin Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist, Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress,” Sandra Cisneros's “Barbie-Q,” and Albert Camus's Fall.

James Phelan

Papers

Unnatural Narratives and the Task of Theory Construction

Freedom (2010): Realism after Postmodernism

Editor's Column: Wayne C. Booth (1921-2005)

Charlie Marlow, Narrative Theorist, Discourses on "Youth"

The Ideal Narratee and the Rhetorical Model of Audiences