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

Although the chapters that appear in this book have been previously published separately in different places at different
times, they have been revised by the author for their publication as a book and are all related to the problem of
historical representation. By putting together essays on Droysen, Foucault, Jameson and Ricoeur, Hayden White hasmanaged to give an encompassing account of a problematic issue that has been one of the major concerns of
historical studies as well as of many other areas of the human sciences: that of the importance of narrative representation in the description or explanation of the “object” of study of
the human sciences. Although the authors mentioned deal with this subject in different ways, White finds in them
common characteristics which confirm the point made by him that historical narratives are, from a semiological
perspective, concerned with the production of meanings.

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The content of the Form: narrative discourse and historical representation

\"Hayden White...is the most prominent American scholar to unite historiography and literary criticism into a broader reflection on narrative and cultural understanding.\" --'The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism' In his earlier books such as 'Tropics of Discourse' and 'The Content of the Form', Hayden White focused on the conventions of historical writing and on the ordering of historical consciousness. In 'Figural Realism', White collects eight interrelated essays primarily concerned with the treatment of history in recent literary critical discourse. \"'History' is not only an object we can study,\" writes White, \"it is also and even primarily a certain kind of relationship to 'the past' mediated by a distinctive kind of written discourse. It is because historical discourse is actualized in its culturally significant form as a specific kind of writing that we may consider the relevance of literary theory to both the theory and the practice of historiography.\

Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (review)

Reviews Panel: Allan Graubard, Amy Ione, Anna B. Creagh, Annick Bureaud, Anthony Enns, Aparna Sharma, Boris Jardine, Brian Reffin Smith, Catalin Brylla, Cecilia Wong, Chris Cobb, Claudia Westermann, Claudy Opdenkamp, Craig Harris, Craig J. Hilton, Dene Grigar, Eduardo Miranda, Elizabeth McCardell, Elizabeth Straughan, Ellen Pearlman, Enzo Ferrara, Eugene Thacker, Florence Martellini, Flutor Troshani, Fred Andersson, Frieder Nake, George Gessert, George K. Shortess, Giovanna Costantini, Hannah Drayson, Hannah Rogers, Harriet Hawkins, Ian Verstegen, Jack Ox, Jacques Mandelbrojt, Jan Baetens, Jennifer Ferng, John F. Barber, John Vines, Jonathan Zilberg, Jung A. Huh, Jussi Parikka, K. Blassnigg, Kathleen Quillian, Lara Schrijver, Martha Blassnigg, Martha Patricia Nino, Martyn Woodward, Maureen A. Nappi, Michael Mosher, Michael Punt, Mike Leggett, Nameera Ahmed, Ornella Corazza, Paul Hertz, Rene van Peer, Richard Kade, Rob Harle, Robert A. Mitchell, Roger Malina, Roy Behrens, Sonya Rapoport, Stefaan Van Ryssen, Stephen Petersen, Valérie Lamontagne, Robert A. Vonlanthen, Wilfred Arnold, Will Luers, Yvan Tina and Yvonne Spielmann Art and the Senses

Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind

This study deals with the influence of film form in fiction in terms of narrative discourse, focusing on issues of genre, narration, temporality, and the imitation of cinematic techniques. It provides a theoretical analysis of different methodologies (intermediality theory, semiotics, narratology, genre theory) which are useful to assess how a cinematic dimension has found a place in literary writing. This research, in particular, puts forth the idea of a 'para-cinematic narrator', a 'flattening of the narrative relief', and a 'para-cinematic narrative contract' as constitutive items of strongly cinematised fiction. These three theoretical items are subsumed in the concept of 'cinematic mode in fiction', which describes a distillation of characteristics of the film form on the written page. This research therefore represents a theoretical attempt to demonstrate how the cinematic component integrates the stylistic and generic traits of novels and short stories relating to different periods, styles and genres of the twentieth century. The proposed theoretical model is tested on a corpus of American, French, and, especially, Italian case studies. The remediation of film that emerges from these texts points to a complex interconnection between cinema and literature which still requires full acknowledgment in literary history.

The cinematic mode in twentieth-century fiction a comparative approach

Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience

Le narrateur (reponse a la question « qui parle ? ») est une notion tres exploitee dans l’enseignement de la litterature et dans la critique litteraire, alors qu’elle fait l’objet d’un debat qui n’est pas encore tranche dans la ou les theories du recit. Y a-t-il un narrateur pour tous les recits de fiction ou seulement pour certains d’entre eux (ce qui suppose que des recits puissent etre dits « sans narrateur ») ? Cette question divise les theories « communicationnelles » du recit, pour lesquelles la communication entre un narrateur et un narrataire, reels ou fictionnels, est constitutive de la definition du recit, et les theories « non communicationnelles », qu’on peut aussi appeler theories « poetiques » du recit de fiction, qui considerent que le recit de fiction, ou un certain type de recit de fiction, et la communication sont des categories mutuellement exclusives. Selon ces theories, le recit de fiction n’est pas, ou n’est pas toujours, un acte de communication. A la question « qui parle ? », elles repondent que, dans certains recits de fiction, personne ne parle - plus exactement, la question ne se pose pas, elle est sans pertinence. Ces theories visent egalement a rehabiliter la fonction de l’auteur en tant que createur du recit de fiction.
La clarification du concept de narrateur necessite une approche historique et epistemologique des differentes theories, centree sur l’opposition entre les theories communicationnelles du recit en general (pas de difference entre le recit fictionnel, le recit non fictionnel et le discours communicationnel) et les theories non communicationnelles ou poetiques du recit de fiction en particulier (ces theories etant basees sur une etude approfondie des particularites linguistiques et textuelles du recit de fiction). L’ouvrage analyse la conception et le role du narrateur chez les narratologues et les autres theoriciens de la communication narrative, de tradition francaise (Gerard Genette), tcheque (Lubomir Dolezel), allemande (Franz K. Stanzel, Monika Fludernik), americaine (Seymour Chatman, Marie-Laure Ryan), chez les philosophes du langage (John R. Searle, Gottfried Gabriel) et les linguistes (Laurent Danon-Boileau, Alain Rabatel, Rene Rivara) qui se sont interesses aux problemes poses par le recit de fiction, ainsi que chez les representants des theories non communicationnelles ou poetiques du recit de fiction : Kate Hamburger en Allemagne, S.-Y. Kuroda et Ann Banfield, deux linguistes americains formes par la grammaire generative de Noam Chomsky, les chercheurs en sciences cognitives de
l’Universite de New York a Buffalo. 
L’ouvrage remet en cause la domination du paradigme communicationnel dans la theorie et dans l’analyse des recits de fiction. Il constate que la permanence de certains presupposes (par exemple, le presuppose que le narrateur est une voix et que, puisque c’est une voix, il parle) et la sous-determination de certaines notions (comme la notion de deixis ou celle de subjectivite) sont la consequence d’une attention insuffisante portee aux faits de langue. Il propose les elements d’une problematisation linguistique et pragmatique de la question du narrateur, fondee sur l’idee que le recit de fiction a le pouvoir de signaler, par des marques linguistiques precises (« je », des elements deictiques et expressifs), que le lecteur doit construire un narrateur, et qu’en l’absence de ces marques, il lui est possible de percevoir d’autres formes et d’autres effets narratifs, que certains auteurs se sont tout particulierement efforces d’obtenir.

Le narrateur : introduction à la théorie narrative

This article is made up of two talks presented in French and English, at two conferences : a symposium organized by Matti Hyvarinen and Kai Mikkonen, at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki, and a series of conferences which I organized at Paris 7-Denis Diderot University. The title, which is borrowed from Marc Dominicy's work on Jakobsonian poetics, sets out to analyze narrative theory from an epistemological viewpoint. On the one hand, I focus on Genette's narratology as it is presented in "Discours du recit", Figures III and Nouveau discours du recit (I also take into account Rene Rivara's attempt in La Langue du recit to give narratology a linguistic base, using enunciative linguistics). On the other hand I explore what I call, following S.-Y. Kuroda's cue, "non-communicational" theories of fictional narrative, of which Ann Banfield has developed the most formalized version. In spite of their very unequal popularity, I consider these theories as objective, which is to say, debatable and capable of being the object of a rational critique. Moreover, it is a matter of choosing between the two. The analysis is developed in three parts. The first concerns the object of narrative theory, in other words, the narrative as a constructed object, both in narratology (where the narrative is likened to a narrative discourse and attributed, in the case of fictional narrative, to a fictive narrator) and in Kate Hamburger's narrative theory (where the fictional narrative and discourse are mutually exclusive categories): this part poses the problem of the encounter between a theoretic object, defined by a certain number of properties and historical or empirical factors (notably those which deal with the distinction between "first person" narrative and "third person narrative"). The second part of the article examines whether or not the theory's assertions lend themselves to falsification. I consider in particular Gerard Genette's assertion, according to which "all narrative is, explicitly or not, in the first person, because its narrator can at any moment designate himself by the pronoun I", in light of Ann Banfield's theory of narrative and free indirect speech (free indirect speech as Ann Banfield defines it constituting a singular case of observation that falsifies the hypothesis of Genette and narratology). The third part of the article concerns the "reductionism" of narrative theory (or the way in which the theory's assertions are reducible to another level, in this case the linguistic level). Leaving aside Genette's narratology which never took interest in the "language of narrative", this part considers, successively, Rivara's enunciative narratology and Ann Banfield's theory of narrative and free indirect speech. This part shows that Rivara's program of enunciative narratology is based on a series of reductions that are difficult to justify and which leave room for real contradictions (in particular concerning the status of the "omniscient" narrator). It also shows that the assertion by Ann Banfield according to which the behavior of elements and constructions characteristic of free indirect speech, considered as a sub-category of narrative style, is part of the language and is capable of being formalized in the grammar of this language. It shows as well how Ann Banfield's assertion that the behavior of elements and characteristic constructions of free indirect speech, considered as a sub-category of narrative style, is part of language and can be formalized in the grammar of this language, this assertion is inseparable from the elaboration of "another grammar", which is to say, another conception of language. The conclusion proposes that the relation between the theory and the analysis of fictional narratives be reconsidered.

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On the Epistemology of Narrative Theory: Narratology and Other Theories of Fictional Narrative

Introduction à la narratologie postclassique : Les nouvelles directions de la recherche sur le récit

This article deals with the relations between narrative (more precisely, narration) and fiction in a short story by Mario Benedetti, “Five Years of Life.”2 Its theoretical frame of reference is S.-Y. Kuroda and Ann Banfield’s non-communicational or poetic theory of narrative, seen as an alternative to communicational narrative theory, which has occupied a dominant position since narratology came into being. Given that the terms narrative theory, communicational theory (or theory of narrative communication), and narratology are all often used and often used ambiguously, I would like to clarify what I understand by narratology and communicational theory of narrative as well as the context of what might be interpreted as a “return” to Kuroda’s and Banfield’s theories.3 By narratology, I understand first a school of literary theory or, more precisely, of the theory of literary narrative, which was first formed in the mid 1960s and based at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, then at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales in Paris (its socio-institutional heritage is not indifferent but determines the meaning of the adjective structuralist in the term structuralist narratology). Gérard Genette swiftly became its leading figure. For historical reasons which deserve closer

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Sylvie Patron

Papers

Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience

Le narrateur : introduction à la théorie narrative

On the Epistemology of Narrative Theory: Narratology and Other Theories of Fictional Narrative

Introduction à la narratologie postclassique : Les nouvelles directions de la recherche sur le récit

Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in Benedetti's "Five Years of Life"