After virtue, a study in moral theory

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

Theory of Literature

Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation

The Art of the Novel

Introduction: building a garrret in the ivory tower 1. From imagination to creativity 2. Disciplinary origins 3. Workshop poetics 4. Creative Writing in Australia 5. Negotiating Theory 6. What is a literary intellectual? Conclusion: towards a sociological poetics

Creative Writing and the New Humanities

I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient fea ture, or at least significant trend, in contemporary British and American literary fic tion: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly outmoded omniscient narrator. In the last two decades, and particularly since the turn of the millennium, a number of important and popular novelists have produced books which exhibit all the formal elements we typically associate with literary omniscience: an all-know ing, heterodiegetic narrator who addresses the reader directly, offers intrusive com mentary on the events being narrated, provides access to the consciousness of a range of characters, and generally asserts a palpable presence within the fictional world. The novelists I'm thinking of include Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, David Lodge, Adam Thirlwell, Michel Faber, and Nicola Barker in the UK; and Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Tom Wolfe, Rick Moody, and John Updike in the US. In this paper I want to consider why so many contempo rary writers have turned to omniscient narration, given the aesthetic prejudice against this narrative voice which has prevailed for at least a century. For instance, in 2004 Eugene Goodheart pointed out that: "In the age of perspectivism, in which all claims to authority are suspect, the omniscient narrator is an archaism to be patron ized when he is found in the works of the past and to be scorned when he appears in contemporary work" (1). How are we to evaluate novels which employ an ostensibly redundant nine teenth century form in the twenty-first century? Are they conservative and nostalgic

The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction

It is well known that classical narratology derived its categories from narratives of prose fiction. And it is largely accepted that to fully address the phenomenon of narrative, narratology needs also to account not only for narrative fiction across media, but for non-fictional narratives, from conversational storytelling to political rhetoric. A consequence of this transmedial, interdisciplinary expansion of the field is the realization that narratologists have tended to take fiction itself for granted and thus need to engage with the concept of fictionality as much as the concept of narrativity. On the one hand, we have calls for a fiction-specific approach to narrative, which Dorrit Cohn once suggested could be called fictionology (“Signposts” 110).1 On the other hand, we have calls for a general approach to fictionality across all narratives, fictional and non-fictional. At stake here is the broader question of the theoretical relation between fictionality and narrativity in the wake of the narrative turn across the humanities and social sciences. Fictionality as a nominal field of study emerged in the 1970s and 1980s within philosophy of language and logic rather than literary theory, and was explicitly

Ten Theses against Fictionality

The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction

This paper sketches out some methodological coordinates for investigating the formal category of narrative voice in a broader discursive context. It seeks to reformulate the classic model of narrative communication in order to redress the imbalance of current narratological scholarship, which focuses on theorizing the role of real readers without due attention to real authors. I have developed this approach to investigate and explain a specific problem: how to account for the increased prominence of omniscient narration in literary fiction over the last two decades. Does contemporary omniscience differ from the classic omniscience of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, and if so, what does that difference say about the cultural status of the novel in current public discourse? 1 I’ll begin by illustrating this problem through a brief discussion of narrative voice in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 Vanity Fair and Martin Amis’ 1995 The Information. At one point in Thackeray’s novel, the narrator pauses to address readers as follows: If, a few pages back, the present writer claimed the privilege of peeping into Miss Amelia Sedley’s bedroom, and understanding with the omniscience of the novelist all the gentle pains and passions which were tossing upon that in

Paul Dawson

Papers

Creative Writing and the New Humanities

The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction

Ten Theses against Fictionality

The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction

"Real Authors and Real Readers: Omniscient Narration and a Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model"