Jarmila Mildorf

Bio: Jarmila Mildorf is an academic researcher from University of Paderborn. The author has contributed to research in topics: Narrative & Narratology. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 40 publications receiving 227 citations. Previous affiliations of Jarmila Mildorf include University of Stuttgart.

Sounding Postmodernity: Narrative Voices in the Radio Adaptation of Alasdair Gray's Lanark

Abstract: Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) eludes generic categorization by crossing the boundaries between dystopian fiction, fantasy novel, life writing, and fiction marked by magic realism. In postmodern fashion, it plays with spatiotemporal frameworks and narrative order, shifts narrative voices, and perspectives and uses a multiplicity of presentational modes including dialogue and scholarly text commentary with encyclopedic annotations. In its “Epilogue,” the novel features metalepsis when it introduces the author, who talks to his protagonist about his work. The question arises how the novel’s radio play adaptation, first broadcast by the BBC on 1 November 2014, translates this playfulness into its own semiotic system. This paper particularly focuses on the narratological category of “voice” and explores what happens when narrators’ and characters’ voices are actualized in radio drama, how the radio play uses voice-over narration, voice qualities and the doubling of parts to create a recognizable as well as surprising aural storyworld. It also analyzes how sound techniques and music are employed to create narrative structures. Because of their medial instantaneousness and evanescence, radio plays arguably have to rely on disambiguation to make themselves accessible to a listening audience. However, as this paper shows, they also have a range of radiophonic techniques at their disposal to create narrativity on their own terms.

Introduction: Narrative Knowing, Living, Telling

Abstract: Recent theories of narrative have highlighted the radically different functions and roles that narrative can perform — as a particular form and structure of discourse; as a form of knowing the social world; as a perspective and frame of action; as a form of human identity; and as a mode of human interaction. These perspectives shape the kinds of inquiry in the numerous disciplines in which narrative is practiced nowadays, but often with completely different agenda and emphases within different disciplinary fi elds. While literary scholars, for example, have demonstrated substantial interest in narrative as a way of knowing, this perspective has been largely absent from recent work in the social sciences — one exception is Jerome Bruner’s path-breaking contributions. The purpose of this special issue is to look for common ground between the agenda of narrative studies in postclassical narratology, sociolinguistics, and the social sciences. Almost ten years ago, David Herman (1999) suggested such an interdisciplinary program in his article “Toward a Socionarratology: New Ways of Analyzing Natural-Language Narratives.” Herman’s suggestion, which he further elaborated in Story Logic (2002) and continues in this issue, has not yet engendered major rapport between the disciplinary fi elds, a state of affairs this issue proposes to change, as much as it is possible in one publication. There is, indeed, a number of theoretical discussions that seem to offer new bases for broader scholarly exchange across the disciplines. One such theme — discussed in this issue by Herman and many others — is what philosophers of mind call “folk psychology,” the everyday assumption that other human beings have desires, beliefs, and reasons for their actions to be reckoned with. As Bruner (1990), Herman (in this issue), and Daniel Hutto (2007, 2008) have argued, the form of “folk psychological”

Reading Fictional Dialogue

Abstract: In recent years, cognitive approaches to reading fiction have continued and elaborated on previous work in the fields of reception and reader response theories. While there has been empirical work at the boundaries between narratology, linguistics and cognitive psychology with a view to identifying how real readers read (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003; Emmott, Sanford and Morrow 2003; Zwaan 1993), literary-theoretical approaches have sought to trace the interplay between textual features and mental processes that guide readers in their perceptions of fictional characters (Herman 2011; Palmer 2004; Zunshine 2006). The latter approaches typically focus on the presentation of fictional characters' thoughts, feelings, motives, intentions and the like as inferred from narrative presentations of those characters' thought processes but also movements, body language and glances, for example. Such textual cues are typically found in narratorial comments. What happens if such narratorial context is absent in a fictional text, as is, for example, the case with so-called dialogue novels? In this paper I explore the ways in which readers may read characters' conversations in dialogue novels. Starting out from the premise that reading and understanding fictional dialogue cognitively resembles hearing and interpreting real-life conversations but also involves drawing comparisons with other fictional dialogues one has read (cf. Ralf Schneider's (2001) cognitive theory that involves mental-model construction of characters), I ask to what extent readers can make sense of characters' utterances if those utterances are only minimally embedded in narratorial explanations or not narratively embedded at all. In order to answer this question, I will draw on recent cognitive approaches in pragmatics, which have brought speaker intention into sharper relief. Especially Istvan Kecskes' (2010) socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics will form a backdrop for close linguistic and narratological analyses. This will be supplemented by a discussion of how important it is – despite linguistic methodology borrowed from the analysis of everyday verbal interaction – to attend to the specific literary qualities of fictional dialogue, which arguably trigger additional cognitive mechanisms of reception. Here I will critically refer to a recent study by Sven Strasen (2008), who, building on Pilkington (2000) and others, adopted and further modified pragmatic Relevance Theory to propose new ways of theorizing reception. The novel I will use as a test case is Philip Roth's Deception. Before I present my argument, I will first briefly outline linguistic and stylistic approaches to the study of fictional dialogue.

Time and Narrative

Abstract: In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.