Showing papers in "Journal of Narrative Theory in 2007"

Storytelling in Time and Space: Studies in the Chronotope and Narrative Logic on Screen

Abstract: This paper is intended to contribute to the theoretical studies of two issues: chronotope, and narrative architectonics. It explores the narrative forms of the ritual journey, and expands the notion of the chronotope of ordeal, associated with a journey. A new type of chronotope, a derivative from the chronotope of ordeal proposed by Bakhtin, and yet a separate form of artistic time-space continuum—the chronotope of rise and fall—is introduced and explored in this paper. In narrative theory after Bakhtin and in film theory after Deleuze an interest in the exploration of fictional time-

Staging Psychic Excess: Parodic Narrative and Transgressive Performance

Abstract: Over the last two decades, performance has become the prevailing metaphor for discourse on gender, due largely to the influence of Judith Butler’s ground-breaking work on the topic. In texts published throughout the late 80s and early 90s, Butler lays out a comprehensive framework for conceptualizing how gender is constructed, reified, and potentially disrupted. In the field of performance studies, this framework has been consistently and fruitfully illustrated in the many avatars of performance art, a form effective in part because of its independence from an originary text, and in part because of the rise to prominence of that form as a mode for resistant theatre in the last thirty years of the 20th century. And yet when applied to more traditional drama of the same period, the question of gender critique is muddied, since, as Butler argues, gender codes are absorbed into the matrices of power by repetition and reproduction. Therefore, for the playwright—feminist and/or queer—working to enact such a critique on the stage, a peculiar bind arises, since dramatic texts execute these very operations in relation to performance. If the dramatic text serves as the reproducible trace of inherently ephemeral performance, how then can the playwright effect the transgression of gender codes without reifying them in her texts? Many playwrights grappling with this issue in the later years of the

"Now every word she said was echoed, echoed loudly in my head": Christophine's Language and Refractive Space in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract: Christophine is tangential to this narrative. She cannot be contained by a novel which rewrites a canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native. No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self. (253)

To Close or Not to Close: Alice Munro's "The Love of a Good Woman"

Abstract: “The Love of a Good Woman” poses unusual problems for the reader at its conclusion—which is virtually no conclusion at all. Many of the best analyses of closure in short fiction, particularly those of Susan Lohafer, have dealt with very short stories; here I examine closure in a difficult case at the opposite end of the scale. Munro’s story has already gained considerable attention, recent as it is; it first appeared in The New Yorker in 1996, and later as the title story in a 1999 collection. It has been the focus of several fine articles, in particular those by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Mark Nunes, Ildiko de Papp Carrington, Dennis Duffy, and Judith McCombs, but the implications of the ending have broad implications for how open endings in stories of different length might work and for the reader’s desire for closure in any narrative. The story centers on Enid, a practical nurse, caring for the dying Mrs. Quinn, a relatively young woman with two small daughters. It happens that Enid, a woman in her mid-thirties, still single, has known, as one might expect in a rural Ontario town, Mrs. Quinn’s husband Rupert since childhood. In grade school she had been part of a group of girls who enjoyed teasing him. Later in high school, her desk in front of his, she tried in small ways to make up for that mistreatment. Rupert Quinn seems to have taken no notice of her, not when she teased him, not in high school,

Genre and Gender in Don DeLillo's Players and Running Dog

Abstract: ����� ��� Critics have often regarded DeLillo’s fifth and sixth novels, Players (1977) and Running Dog (1978), collectively. Both Tom LeClair and Bill Mullen write about the novels together, while Mark Osteen refers to Running Dog as the “companion novel” (American Magic and Dread 144) of Players. This association is understandable given the close publication dates of the novels (only a year apart), and the similarities in their content and form. I intend to argue, however, that Players and Running Dog should not only be regarded as companion novels, but also as a continuous project. Players begins an exploration of a perceived shift in American culture, from the stability and certitudes of the 1950s to the epistemological uncertainty and indeterminacy of post-Vietnam America, that Running Dog continues and resolves. Furthermore, DeLillo’s employment of genre in each novel indicates that this is a continuous project, with the thriller genre adopted by Lyle Wynant in Players as a means of escaping the uncertainty of late twentieth century America, abandoned by Glen Selvy in Running Dog, when it proves inadequate to the task. But unlike other explorations of DeLillo’s deployment of genre, such as John Johnston’s “Generic difficulties in the novels of Don DeLillo” and John Frow’s interrogation of Running Dog alongside the thrillers of Robert Ludlum, I also demonstrate the connection between genre and gender in these novels. I argue that the disruption of gender in Players and Running Dog is a