Showing papers in "Narrative in 2007"

Abstract: Can we really be surprised that readers have overlooked Nabokov’s ironies in Lolita, when Humbert Humbert is given full and unlimited control over the rhetorical resources? . . . One of the delights of this delightful, profound book is that of watching Humbert almost make a case for himself. But Nabokov has insured that many, perhaps most, of his readers will be unsuccessful, in that they will identify Humbert with the author more than Nabokov intends. (391) Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chapter 13

Abstract: In her deeply wise meditation on the question of continuity in human identity, the medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum offers us the elegant concept that "shape carries story."2 Her inquiry arose from her own personal experience of ob serving her father's shift in identity over 10 years of living with progressive demen tia. Bynum acknowledges three aspects of identity: individual personality, ascribed or achieved group affiliation, and spatio-temporal integrity, which is the sense of identity upon which she focuses. Her fundamental question is, "How can I be the same person I was a moment ago?" In other words, she asks how we can maintain a continuous sense of self as our bodies change over time. Being an historian, Bynum frames this issue as a historical one; being a literary critic, I am going to frame this question as a narrative one. That different framing leads me to adapt Bynum's phrase and refer to shape "structuring" rather than "carrying" story. Narrative is a way of constructing continuity over time; it is a coherent knitting of one moment to the next. Bynum's wisdom is to understand the narrative link between time and space, more precisely perhaps, between time and human materiality. A clunkier explication of this formulation is that the configuration and function of our human body determines our narrative identity, the sense of who we are to ourselves and others. In Bynum's words, "Story spreads out through time the behaviors or bodies?the shapes?a self has been or will be, each replacing the one before. Hence story has before and after, gain and loss. It goes somewhere... .Moreover, shape or body is crucial, not inciden

Abstract: ����� ��� For the growing number of critics concerned to trace the links among historical forces, psychic experience, and literary expression, the growth of trauma studies since the publication of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience (1996) offers an important opportunity for reflection. On one hand, the work in this field has been justly influential. It brings sophisticated psychoanalytic concepts to bear on collective processes, developing accounts of historical violence that are both socially specific and psychologically astute. These accounts are especially compelling when focused on what I call “punctual” traumas: historical events of such singularity, magnitude, and horror that they can be read as shocks that disable the psychic system. Thus, for example, in their readings of the Holocaust—the paradigmatic example for critics concerned with this kind of trauma—Caruth and others have helped us see how a historical moment might be experienced less as an ongoing set of processes that shape and are shaped by those living through them than as a punctual blow to the psyche that overwhelms its functioning, disables its defenses, and absents it from direct contact with the brutalizing event itself. Precisely because the violence suffered by Holocaust victims was so extreme, on this view, it affected those victims as a psychic concussion that short-circuited their capacity to “process” the traumatizing event as it took place. Traumas of this kind thus become accessible only in the mind’s recursive attempts to master what it has in some sense failed to experience in the first instance. A punctual incursion on the mind, having “dissociated” consciousness from itself, installs an unprocessed memory-trace that returns unbidden, as delayed effect, in an effort to force the mind to digest this previously unclaimed kernel of experience.

Abstract: Since the landmark publication of The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961, Wayne Booth's theoretical legacy can be found at the heart of at least two major schools of literary criticism. On the one hand, narratologists turn to Booth's theory for its insights into the anatomy of narrative form. Seymour Chatman and, more recently, Brian Richardson both defend, for example, Booth's notion of the implied author on "pragmatic" grounds (Chatman 75): Chatman believes that the implied author helps "to account for features [of narrative texts] that would otherwise remain unexplained, or unsatisfactorily explained" (74); Richardson similarly argues that the notion of the implied author is "a coherent and useful one for a wide range of critical practices" (165). But for a second school of American theorists, the narratological value of Booth's work cannot be detached from what for Booth makes narratology itself worth pursuing: the ethical effects of rhetorical practices. The ethical dimension of Booth's work has notably been furthered by a younger generation of neoAristotelians who advanced Booth's project within Booth's life time through their "coduction" with Booth into the ethical power literary texts have upon their readers.' In part because James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and David Richter are contributing to this special issue and can speak for themselves about Booth's centrality for narratology and for Chicago-School ethical theory, I would like instead to

Abstract: The understanding of narratives is closely tied to the experience of travel. In narrative theory, the travel story features regularly as either the model narrative or the model for narrative. In Vladimir Propp’s classic study of story grammar, for instance, the narrative functions are structured along a travel pattern between the hero’s departure and return. In more recent narratology and literary history, and in certain interdisciplinary approaches to the study of narrative, the notion of travel may even function as a code or key revealing how the narrative works. In the history of the novel, travel writing has helped to shape the genre. Narratives of travel to exotic lands have informed the modern novel with detailed foreign settings and a sense of authenticity in viewpoint. 1 Since the time of the Greek epics different types of journey—the quest, the odyssey, and the adventure—have served as powerful masterplots in literary narratives. For instance, the chronotope of the road, and the metaphor of “the path of life” that it realizes, is a central feature in Mikhail Bakhtin’s history of novelistic plot patterns and especially important for what Bakhtin calls the adventure novel of everyday life (120). The journey is universally recognized as a narrative in our culture. The narrative potential of travel lies in the fact that we recognize in it temporal and spatial structures that call for narration. The different stages of travel—departure, voyage, encounters on the road, and return—provide any story with a temporal structure that raises certain expectations of things to happen. Perhaps because of this pervasiveness of the travel narrative, we have come to understand personal life and mental development as a voyage. The travel metaphor is therefore not only a way to think about narrative; it also provides one with the means to think through narrative.

Abstract: The articles in this cluster demonstrate that narrative has many meanings and potential uses in the study of disability rights. Like the other contributors, we are strongly committed to scholarship that draws on narrative (Engel and Munger. Rights of Inclusion). We share the sense that narrative can help to breach the barriers of detachment, doctrinal technicality, skepticism, and even irony that often separate legal scholars from the actual life experiences on which they should draw when they write about disability?or other social issues. Yet, despite our attraction to the "au thenticity" of narrative, we are equally impressed with the fact that narrative is es sentially a fabrication. By this we do not mean that the stories we present are necessarily untrue but that they are put together, or spun out, by the narrators in par ticular ways as they draw on remembered experiences, perceptions, and feelings. In our research, we had the opportunity to witness the creative process of constructing

Abstract: The field of disability studies works actively to present counter-narratives to dominant biom?dical, sociocultural, and political narratives of disability (Couser),2 criticizing biom?dical narratives of deviance and cure (Mitchell and Snyder); cri tiquing historical and contemporary narratives of difference and transcendence, both in popular media as well as academic scholarship (Davis; Berub?; Snyder, Bruegge mann; Garland-Thomson); and resisting neoconservative narratives against civil rights established and (supposedly) enforced by laws such as Section 504 of the Re habilitation Act of 1973, IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990/1975), and the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990) (O'Brien). One of the key themes of these counter-narratives is the achievement and/or action of a disability identity?a fused personal and political awareness that Simi Linton char acterizes in the titles of her two books as Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Iden tity and My Body Politic. With respect to the law, a number of counter-narratives in disability studies construct the identity of individuals becoming aware of and acting upon the basis of their civil rights within the complexities of this lived experience. Cheryl Wade, for instance, a long-time poet and essayist of the disability rights movement, projects this identity to Helen Keller, not in the familiar narrative of transcendence from The Miracle Worker, but in a more politically charged counter-narrative of Helen Keller as one of the "ancestors [and] heroes" of disability

Abstract: In this essay I will analyze some court cases in which disabled people de- manded re-reading of the legal framing of their bodies and voices in American beg- ging law. My aims here are twofold. First: precisely because the history of begging and the history of disability have so long been practically synonymous (Garland- Thomson 35), the twentieth-century disability rights movement formed itself to a significant extent by developing narrative alternatives to and repudiations of the dy- namics of mendicancy. So, for instance, a participant in the landmark Section 504 disability rights demonstration in 1977 told a reporter: "We've been begging for a long time. Now we're demanding" (Treanor 76). Similarly, activist lawyer Robert Burgdorf, writing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in the Harvard Law Review in 1991, invoked a movement slogan: "You Gave Us Your Dimes, Now We Want Our Rights" (Burgdorf "The ADA" 426). This urgent project of rights-seeking has led to a radical forgetting of the figure of the beggar in disability history. But the beggar carries a reminder of something crucial: disability subjection in the United States is deployed and embedded, ideologically and structurally, in classed (as well as gen- dered and racialized), capitalist social relations. In the history of begging, as (al- most?) everywhere, "disability history" and "poor people's history" profoundly intertwine. Second: legal approaches to the figure of the disabled beggar illuminate problematic narratives often applied to all disabled people, even those who seem to be placed in positions utterly different than the mendicant (such as the rights-deman- der, the hard-worker, the professional, the sheltered child, and so forth). In this case study of begging law a broader principle becomes clear: the law has persistently de- politicized disabled people (and disabled bodies, and disabling environments), in ways that disability movements and disability studies today are still striving to counter.

Abstract: Her founding principle?shape structures story?draws upon an essay by Caro line Walker Bynum about metamorphosis and continuity, about change as identity. Garland-Thomson's twist on this idea is best captured in her exegesis of Simi Lin ton's memoir of identity formation after her car accident: "Although her new shape is instantaneous, the new sense of self develops as a process that is simultaneously growth and healing. The recently impaired body pulls along the new sense of self, which resists and struggles as it reforms itself within a new community based on a shared sense of being in and relating to the world" (Garland-Thomson 119). The changed body pulls along the inner self, shaping and recreating that self in ways be fore unimagined. The account Garland-Thomson gives us of shape structuring story may seem at first surprising. Initially her idea of bodies creating stories rather than stories creat ing bodies seems in tension with what is arguably a dominant narrative of disability studies?the idea that the social model of disability should triumph over the medical model.

Abstract: Wayne C. Booth's rhetorical narrative theory has not only enjoyed great influ- ence on narrative studies in North America but it has also exerted a wide-scale and profound impact in the most populous country on the other side of the globe. Of the long list of Booth's publications, The Rhetoric of Fiction has been the most influen- tial in China, currently existing in two Chinese translations, and having been em- braced and applied by a large number of Chinese scholars. The warm reception of this book and the significant role it has played in China are very much a consequence of the peculiar Chinese critical context. This essay will start with a discussion of this Eastern context, then go on to explore the functioning in this context of three specific concepts or aspects of Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction: (1) the implied author, (2) (un)reliability, and (3) narrative distance.

Abstract: In Aspects of the Novel, EM Forster makes a distinction between round and flat characters that has achieved a certain celebrity One reason for its celebrity is that it offers a plausible explanation for what might otherwise be inexplicable: the reader's tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to an otherwise very doubtful character, the indolent Lady Bertram in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park The passage in which Forster suggests Lady Bertram is transformed from a flat into a round character is ex plicable, however, in terms other than those the English novelist proposes Indeed, this alternative explanation is preferable because it throws valuable light on an aspect of novelistic discourse that has remained remarkably undeveloped: the " 'equiva lence' relation" that exists between direct and indirect speech (Leech and Short 320) In this essay, my intention is to demonstrate that the passage cited by Forster as part of his argument for the existence of flat and round characters demonstrates one half of a significant rhetorical strategy: the narrator's deliberate upgrading or rhetorical amelioration of the impact of a character's words I intend to show that this upgrad ing effect is matched, not least in Jane Austen herself, by the very opposite rhetorical effect, that of a deliberate downgrading or parodying of a particular character's re ported speech?something that Forster explicitly denies is part of Austen's reper toire As a result of the analysis, I draw the conclusion that Forster's focus on rotundity is in fact a misreading of the real significance of the passage about Lady

Abstract: In the course of arguing "Against Interpretation," Susan Sontag claims that "[i]n place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art" (14). This challenge appears for the first time, without gloss or elaboration, as the last line of her essay. It is a com pelling but vague call for literary scholars?and good readers in general?to do something outside their ken: take a work on its own terms without constructing a paratext in which all the symbols are unpacked, all the meanings laid bare. Sontag identifies "interpretation" as "presupposing] a discrepancy between the clear mean ing of the text and the demands of (later) readers.... The modern style of interpreta tion excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs 'behind' the text, to find a subtext which is the true one" (6). She also notes that "interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else" (10). Many authors whom John Cowper Powys particularly admired, such as James Joyce and Henry James, wrote novels that invite and reward careful hermeneutic ex plication. Sontag names Joyce and James in her short list of authors "around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold" (8). Their novels operate on several levels of significance simultaneously, developing intricate, intellectual rela tions between implied author and authorial audience, prompting the latter's interpre tation largely through their progressive exploitation and resolution of various tensions and instabilities.1 But in response to the influence of his contemporaries, Powys composed several digressive, improbable, ecstatic fictions that employ a con spicuously unfamiliar system of narrative progression, baffling his authorial audi ence's efforts at interpretation. The neglect shown to Powys's work by most scholars and teachers alike may be seen as a symptom of this bafflement.

Abstract: The post-Cold War decade of the 1990s has been labeled the decade of human rights . . . . Not incidentally, it has also been described as the decade of life narratives, what commentators refer to as the time of the memoir. Many of these life narratives tell of human rights violations. Victims of abuse around the world have testified to their experience in an outpouring of oral and written narratives.... [These narratives] begin to voice, recognize, and bear witness to a diversity of values, experiences, and ways of imagining a just social world and of responding to injustice, inequality, and human suffering. Indeed, over the last twenty years, life narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims. (1)

Abstract: When we think of the term "disability," the word conjures up a multitude of im ages, some of them positive, some not. Even the positive ones may carry with them a sense of "specialness" that is inconsistent with our sense of equal or fair treatment. Moreover, the differences among disabilities?physical or mental disabilities, men tal retardation or mental illness, deafness or autism, congenital disabilities or those that develop later in life after an accident or trauma, alcoholism or quadriplegia, ob vious or non-obvious (or hidden) disabilities, epilepsy or learning disabilities, back problems or obesity, single or multiple disabilities?not only have presented very difficult problems of political coordination, but cut against the notion that there is a master narrative that can function in disability cases. In this essay, I want to discuss the role of disability narratives in litigation. This task is potentially a quite complex one, one to which it is hard to do justice within a short essay. So rather than attempt a comprehensive assessment of the role of narra tive in disability cases, let me start with some general observations about the nature of disability litigation narratives, the barriers to narrative coherence created by the opacity of courts, especially the Supreme Court, and, finally, the possibilities that narratives can present for expansion of rights of people with disabilities. If we start with what might be called the pre-litigation or non-litigation narratives of people with disabilities we might be able to list a number of them, some of which are negative, some of which are positive (at least as conventionally understood), and still others ostensibly positive or neutral but containing troubling seeds of negativity. If one focuses not on full-fledged narratives but on abstracts of narratives with a heavy emphasis on the person's character, a non-exhaustive list might include the following:

Abstract: Hypertext fiction has provoked much debate since the appearance of the first examples in the late 80s. Much of this debate has been focused on questions regarding the status of these fictions, and their implications for the experience of writing and reading. Where close analysis of the form has been attempted (e.g. J. Yellowlees Douglas's readings of Joyce's afternoon, a story), it has mainly consisted of an attempt to "make sense" of the narrative, untangling the strands of the plot, and searching for some kind of closure. While this approach has offered valuable insights into the narrative structures of these fictions, and into the mechanics of the interfaces they employ, little attention has been paid to specific aspects of their style, especially the representation of speech and thought. Hypertext fiction has come a long way since the earliest examples, most notably in exploring the possibilities of creating a multimedia artifact where sounds and images accompany the written text.' However, this paper will focus on the use of dialogue in two early hypertext fictions. Both Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story (first published 1987) and Yellowlees Douglas's I Have Said Nothing (1994) have achieved near-canonical status having been excerpted in print in the Norton anthology Postmodern American Fiction (Geyh). As is often the case with hypertext fictions, the writers, Jane Yellowlees Douglas and Michael Joyce, also happen to be two of the foremost theorists of the form, and the sense of mutual influence is unavoidable. The aims of this paper are twofold: to explore the functions of dialogue in these fictions and the extent to which the representations are

Abstract: We proceeded at once to the Rue Morgue. This is one of those miserable thoroughfares which intervene between the Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch. It was late in the afternoon when we reached it; as this quarter is at a great distance from that in which we resided. The house was readily found; for there were still many persons gazing up at the closed shutters, with an objectless curiosity, from the opposite side of the way. It was an ordinary Parisian house, with a gateway, on one side of which was a glazed watch-box ... Before going in we walked up the street, turned down an alley, and then, again turning, passed in the rear of the building-Dupin, meanwhile, examining the whole neighborhood, as well as the house, with a minuteness of attention for which I could see no possible object. (13, emphasis added)

Abstract: There is no question that the works of artists Leon Golub and Sue Coe share an overwhelming political subject matter. Golub's series of paintings Mercenaries, White Squad, and Vietnam feature over-sized soldiers, singly or in small groups, taunting each other or torturing victims who are helpless and in suppliant positions. The resemblance between one of Golub's best known paintings, Mercenaries V (Fig. 1), completed in 1984, and one of the most widely circulated photos of the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004 makes Golub's much earlier work prescient and deeply disturbing. Sue Coe's much smaller prints, particularly those in the book Dead Meat, depict the inner workings and horrendous cruelty of slaughterhouses (Figs. 3, 4, 6). The images are accompanied by text which recounts the ways Coe gained access to various slaughterhouses normally barred from public view. The question is: What are those giant mercenaries, those hunched workers and twisted animals asking of us? It is impossible not to be taken in, not to be engaged by Golub and Coe, but what happens to us as a result? What is the ethical import of their work and of the violence their work confronts?