Showing papers in "Narrative in 2008"

Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry

Abstract: My title is frankly presumptuous. To imply that reflection on narrative in poetry begins here and now, with this essay, is to dismiss out of hand a huge body of precedent. Narrative theorists have been thinking deeply about poetic narratives since ancient times. Arguably, there would be no tradition of systematic reflection on narrative at all, at least not in the West, without the Homeric poems, which, from Plato on down to Genette and Sternberg and beyond, have continuously served as touchstones of narrative theory. Many important theoretical developments have hinged on analyses of poetic narratives; for instance, it would be hard to imagine Bakhtin finding his way to a theory of discourse in the novel without the example of Pushkin's Onegin. Nevertheless, presumptuous though it may be, my title does draw attention to a blind spot in contemporary narrative theory. We need to begin thinking about narrative in poetry-or perhaps to resume thinking about it-because we have not been doing so very much lately, and because, whenever we have done so, we have rarely thought about what differentiates narrative in poetry from narrative in other genres or media, namely its poetry component. Contemporary narrative theory is almost silent about poetry. In many classic contemporary monographs on narrative theory, in specialist journals such as the one you are now reading, at scholarly meetings such as the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, poetry is conspicuous by its near-absence. Even the indispensable poems, the ones that narrative theory seems unable to do without, tend to be treated as de facto prose fictions; the poetry drops out of the

Theory of Mind and Fictions of Embodied Transparency

Abstract: ests include eighteenth-century British literature, narrative theory, and cognitive cultural studies. She is the author of Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England; Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, and Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible; co-editor (with Jocelyn Harris) of Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Samuel Richardson, and editor of Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies.

Graphic Devices: Narration and Navigation

Abstract: �� ��� Readings of narrative texts rarely include attention to the graphic devices that structure presentation in print or electronic formats These devices are rendered largely invisible by habits of reading But, I would suggest, these graphic elements do more than structure the conditions in which narration is produced By their hierarchy, arrangement, organization, and other features they contribute to the production of the narrative in substantive ways In my usage, the term graphic includes all aspects of layout and composition by which elements are organized on a surface, though “surface” is a deceptive term for describing the temporal and spatial complexity of books, comics, and other textual instruments In an electronic environment, this complexity goes even further‐‐since the screen surface is clearly an illusion concealing a complicated model of narrative possibilities under a fully-rendered visual interface Navigation, the other term in play here, refers to the active manipulation of features on the level of discourse and presentation Though many of my examples are drawn from illustrated books or other dramatically visual materials, I would argue that graphic devices play an active role in all instances of textual presentation, not only those in which images or pictorial elements are present My goal here is to demonstrate that these graphic devices can be read as an integral part of narrative texts Demonstrating that the graphic devices that appear to constrain discourse functions also contribute to the chronological experience of events (within

Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction

Abstract: and starting October 2008, has a Junior professorship for American Studies at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He has studied at Indiana University, Bloomington, and at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, and got his M.A. from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany. His interests are in ethnic literature, ethical criticism, narratology, and superheroes and comics. Email: ruediger.heinze@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de. Address: English Seminar, Rempartstr. 15, D-79085 Freiburg, Germany.

Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design

Abstract: In narrative, plot exists on two levels: the plotting of the author, who creates the storyline; and the plotting of the characters, who set goals, devise plans, schemes and conspiracies, and try to arrange events to their advantage. The plotting of both author and characters is meant to exercise control: for the author, control over the reader, who must undergo a certain experience; for the characters, control over other char- acters and over the randomness of life. But sometimes the goals of the author are at odds with the goals of characters. The author needs to make the characters take par- ticular actions to produce a certain effect on the reader, such as intense suspense, cu- riosity, or emotional involvement; but acting toward this situation defies narrative logic, because is not in the best interest of the characters, or not in line with their per- sonality. In this article I propose to investigate two types of aesthetically deficient plot twists that arise from this conflict between author and character goals. One in- volves an active intervention by the author, an attempt to fix the problem through hackneyed devices; I call this "cheap plot tricks" (henceforth CPT). The other results from ignoring the problem, or covering it up, a strategy (or omission) that leads to what is known among film writers as "plot holes" (henceforth PH). Through this em- phasis on the kind of events that makes the sophisticated reader groan, I will be breaking away from the almost exclusively descriptive tradition of both classical and postclassical narratology, and I will adopt an evaluative stance closer to the prescrip- tive spirit of Aristotle's Poetics.

Narrative Interest as Cultural Negotiation

Abstract: Why are people attracted to stories? What makes narrative texts appealing? These questions continue to divide narrative theorists and lead to fundamental dis- cussions in which all parties keep searching for universals, be it of the text, its recep- tion, or a mixture of both. A recent example of such a controversy can be found in Meir Sternberg's ("Universals I" and "Universals II") rejection of Marie-Laure Ryan's (1991) views on tellability, a term first proposed by William Labov (1972) to describe narrative interest. Ryan locates this interest mainly in (pre)textual elements such as themes and plots, whereas Sternberg emphasizes that universals of narrative interest (suspense, curiosity, surprise) are grounded in the reader's processing of the text. Our goal in this article is to advance the debate by broadening the scope of the discussion. For us, the interest of narrative text can take such a variety of shapes that the only way to theorize it properly is to cast the net as widely as possible. We will do so by locating narrative interest in what can be described metaphorically as the cultural negotiation characterizing any kind of confrontation between reader and (narrative) text. The novelty of our proposal is meant to reside in the specific de- scription of this negotiation, which combines the impact of the (narrative) text with the activity and the cultural embeddedness of the reader. While Sternberg's position on narrative interest is much more sophisticated as a theory of reading, we believe Ryan's must not be entirely discarded. Indeed, her de- scriptions of narrative interest reflect the experience of actual readers. If they find a novel interesting, they attribute this appeal to the book itself and not to their own

Love’s Time and the Reader: Ethical Effects of Nachtraglichkeit in Toni Morrison’s Love

Abstract: In Love the characters’ severance from their past is a personal, not a worldhistorical event, an individual rather than a collective trauma. Yet in one respect at least, Heed’s and Christine’s experience parallels the experience of the captive Africans on the slave-ships: as a result of an early traumatic separation from the love that had been the ground of their childhood development, Heed and Christine lose connection with their past and its rich field of potentials and are consequently disoriented with regard to their present and future. The events that disrupt their temporal order are themselves a violation of chronology: Heed’s marriage at eleven to her twelve-year-old playmate Christine’s grandfather, the successful black entrepreneur Bill Cosey—and, hidden behind that marriage, the earlier intrusion of adult sexuality into the childhood world through Cosey’s molestation

The I that Tells Itself: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Narrative Identity

Abstract: The ambiguity of the title, borrowed from Derrida's The Ear of the Other (13), is not accidental: the I as both the addressee and the subject-object of a performative telling is precisely what is at stake in the question of narrative identity, a literary con- cept which has attained a near-Kantian magnitude since the 1980s and crept into, or perhaps even, as some have argued, taken over and colonized the discourse of philos- ophy, psychology, and historiography. 1 The cost of this narrative imperialism is a cer- tain dilution and trivialization of the conception of the human subject as a story-telling being, which calls for a more rigorous probing of the narrative identity thesis, its heuristic value, and its philosophical, psychological and ethical implica- tions. This challenge has been taken up by Galen Strawson in an article entitled "Against Narrativity," premised on a clear-cut distinction between the "Psychological Narrativity thesis"—"a straightforwardly empirical, descriptive thesis about the way ordinary human beings actually experience their lives," and the "Ethical Narrativity thesis," which states that experiencing or conceiving one's life as a narrative is a good thing" (428). Appealing as this neat distinction may be, I believe that we have more to gain by taking on board the essential and productive messiness of the concept, which does not lend itself to waterproof compartmentalization. Indeed, the most interesting feature of what has become a buzzword in those disciplines which deal with human beings is precisely this evident transition, made by so many of its proponents, from a descriptive (psychological) to a prescriptive (ethical) conception of narrative identity. The difficulty of extricating the psychological from the ethical aspects of the debate is evident in the critique of Narrativity thesis, mounted from two diametri-

Narrative Progression in the Short Story: First Steps in a Corpus Stylistic Approach

Abstract: I am interested in the putative textual signalings of narrative progression, and thereafter the reader expectations that these foster; I am trying to identify such signalings (or narrative prospection, as it is also called) with new research methods, namely those of corpus linguistics. Research of this kind, blending a literary interest with use of corpus tools, is coming to be known as corpus stylistics (or more narrowly, corpus narratology). For readers of this journal I assume that neither explaining nor justifying an interest in narrative progression is necessary, so I will discuss this relatively briefly. I will spend a little more time outlining what corpus stylistics entails and what its limitations are; and then I will share some ways in which I have tried to make it useful in the pursuit of my research interest, the textualization of narrative prospection. Narrative prospection is itself only a stage in the experiential sequence of interest to me. I assume that the text's prospections cumulatively and serially guide the reader to expect the story currently being read to continue and terminate in one way rather than others (at the least, the prospections will foster probabilistic expectations). The ways in which the subsequent narrative text confirms or flouts

What Some Ghosts Don't Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film

Abstract: In many ways, horror films appeal to our desire for life rather than to our death drive. We subject ourselves to the terrors of the genre in order to affirm the stability of our own existence in contrast to the expendable lives on screen. As Morris Dickstein argues, horror films offer us the opportunity of "neutralizing anxiety by putting an aesthetic bracket around it" (54). The grueling experiences we encounter in the dark world of the theater may deeply influence our relationship to our own world: "What we take with us from these films is a deeper perceptual awareness of life and of our involvement in its complexities" (Telotte 31). The tagline of the 1979 film Phantasm-"If this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead!"-plays on the restorative potential of horror by implying that the more terror we experience in the theater, the more we confirm our position as one of the living. The horror film franchise Saw (2004) recently thematized this function of the genre by featuring a villain who targets his victims according to their inability to value their existence. Affected by terminal cancer, he envisions elaborate tortures requiring "people who don't appreciate their blessings" to commit gruesome acts (such as amputating their own legs) in order to save their lives. The moralistic undertone of this popular series foregrounds the horror film's valorization of life through its rupture. In this essay, I will address a subgenre of the horror film, which I term "spectral incognizance," that seems dedicated to reassuring viewers of their safety. The subgenre includes films such as Charles Vidor's The Spy (1929), Robert Enrico's La Riviere du Hibou (1962), Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder (1990), M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999), Alejandro Amendibar's The Others (2001), and Mark Forster's Stay (2005). In contrast to the

Narrative Means to Lyric Ends in Wordsworth's Prelude

Abstract: �� ��� The temporal complexities of William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude have long attracted critical attention. M. H. Abrams, in his foundational study Natural Supernaturalism, notes, “The construction of The Prelude is radically achronological, starting not at the beginning, but at the end‐‐during Wordsworth’s walk to ‘the Vale that I had chosen’” (74), and further observes that “in the course of The Prelude Wordsworth repeatedly drops the clue that his work has been designed to round back to its point of departure” (79). That is, the episode which comes last in a chronological reconstruction of story events—the walk to the chosen vale—is narrated twice, at the beginning and again at the end of the discourse. In the course of this walk Wordsworth finds inspiration in the breeze, which “assures him of his poetic mission and, though it is fitful, eventually leads to his undertaking The Prelude itself” (Abrams 75). As a result, “The Prelude . . . is an involuted poem which is about its own genesis—a prelude to itself” (Abrams 79). Much of the poem consists of Wordsworth’s interactions with nature that “assure[d] him of his poetic mission.” The goal of the poem is to demonstrate his fitness to produce great poetry, and The Prelude itself becomes evidence of that fitness. Wordsworth alerts readers to this teleological drive of the poem in its opening book, when he asks, “Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song?” (1.269 ‐71) As Geoffrey Hartman explicates the rhetoric of this passage, “’Was it for this’ potentially simplifies into ‘it was for this’ and even ‘it was’. The question wants to be a statement about an ‘it’ (nature) that ‘was’ (acted in the past) ‘for this’ (a poetry it calls to birth)” (“Was it for this” 14).

Mutual Exclusion, Oscillation, and Ethical Projection in The Crying of Lot 49 and The Turn of the Screw

Abstract: California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 from the Harvard Department of English and American Literature and Language for a dissertation entitled “The Ethics of Uncertainty: Reading TwentiethCentury American Literature.” She has contributed articles to the journals Critique and Callaloo and to a book collection called On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English.

Narrator, Author, Reader: Equivocation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee

Abstract: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 1980 experimental text, Dictee, has garnered a great deal of critical attention. In Asian American studies in particular, analyses of the text have gone hand in hand with efforts to theorize poststr cturalist subjectivity and postnationalism in the critical turn against unified subjectivity and reactionary nationalisms, and towards fragmented, heterogeneous, multiple subject-formations.' But despite critics' theoretical orientation towards heterogeneity and the impossibility of final articulation, readers of Dictee nea ly unanimously speak of a narrator and/or acting subject, and moreover, identify that narrator as Cha. For example, critics have read the narrator of the following passage, which appears early in Dictee, as Cha:

The Mother's Unnarratable Pleasure and the Submerged Plot of Persuasion

Abstract: What do we know about Anne Elliot’s mother? The narrator’s extremely brief account seems to leave little room for speculation, as she appears never to have deviated far from the norms associated with the time, place, and circumstances in which she lived. Yet even before Anne is introduced to us as a woman disappointed in love, a woman who, “forced into prudence in her youth . . . learned romance as she grew older” (29), she is introduced to us as a motherless daughter, one in whom Lady Elliot’s closest friend “could fancy the mother to revive again” (7). In fact, the marriage plot of Persuasion is constantly influenced by a submerged plot in which Anne seeks her absent mother’s story and finds it by repeating her mother’s experience. The little we are told about Lady Elliot gives a glimpse into this crucial submerged plot, crucial because it significantly affects our understanding of the family situation Anne must negotiate and of her own reactions to and decisions regarding Mr. Elliot and Captain Wentworth. Tracing the submerged plot reveals that Anne’s quest is to discover that which, in the world of this novel, cannot be narrated: her mother’s experience of pleasure. Indeed, one way of understanding why the pleasure Anne ultimately experiences must be delayed is to recognize that, before pleasure can be hers, she must find validation for it in her mother’s unnarratable story. In this essay, I shall offer a theoretical account of this concept of a submerged plot and how it relates to other work in narrative theory on plot and progression, relate the submerged plot of the mother’s pleasure to previous work on the unnarratable, and build on these theoretical accounts to trace the submerged plot’s substantial effects on the surface plot of Persuasion.

Tom and Vivien Eliot Do Narrative in Different Voices: Mixing Genres in The Waste Land's Pub

Abstract: �� ��� Jennifer Sorensen Emery-Peck is a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. This article is taken from the third chapter of her dissertation, Modernism’s Material Forms: Literary Experiments in Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1945. Her larger project contends that the formal strategies of modernist texts can only be fully understood when historicized and contextualized within the circuits of print culture through which they were produced and distributed. She argues that modernism’s material forms are fundamentally experiments with and in print culture by examining the work of T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and the practices and productions of the Hogarth Press and the Boni & Liveright Press.

Reading in the Blend: Collaborative Conceptual Blending in the Silent Traveller Narratives

Abstract: sphere” of the image, and then into sound or language—in many ways anticipating George Lakoff’s work on the embodied mind, which is posited as the basis of conceptual blending: “[t]he ‘thing-in-itself’ (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible for even the creator of language to grasp, and indeed this is not at all desirable. He designates only the relations of things to human beings, and in order to express them he avails himself of the boldest metaphors. The stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image: first metaphor! The image is then imitated by a sound: second metaphor! And each time there is a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere” (877). 7. Fauconnier and Turner argue that even identity and opposition, sameness and difference are “finished products provided to consciousness after elaborate work” (8). Interestingly, the similarityseeing on which blending depends and which blending also generates may be itself a product of prior blending, as we saw in the example of Margaret Thatcher, the U. S. presidency, and the labor unions: “elements of mental life that look like primitives for formal analysis turn out to be higherorder products of imaginative work” (6). Here, Fauconnier and Turner’s work resonates closely Conceptual Blending in the Silent Traveller Narratives 159

Mothering Siblings: Diaspora, Desire and Identity in American Born Confused Desi

Abstract: In this essay we consider the construction of cultural identity, motherhood and the family in ABCD, a film of the Indian diaspora that had its world premiere at the 2001 London Film Festival. This film reads family, apparently within familiar narrative structures such as the U.S.-immigrant story, as portrayed in films like Goodbye, Columbus and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the "leaving home" story, as classically portrayed in Pride and Prejudice, where a young person needs to escape from her clueless family. The irritating presence of the mother in the film, and the quickness with which her two children appear to make life-determining decisions following her death, seem to invite discussions of plot and character organized around ideas of individual development, self-improvement and understanding. This is the territory of the desire plot, an account of family history captured for the twentieth century by Freudian-Lacanian readings which position sexual desire within the unconscious history of familial fantasies, understood as vertical and Oedipal. In this territory, mothers and old ladies become, as Mary Jacobus memorably phrased it, little more than "the waste products" of a system in which marriageable women are objects of exchange between men (142) and a mother's death would be expected to grease the wheels of narrative. Identity and narrative are inextricably linked here: a certain understanding of narrative as developmental and teleological paves the way for an understanding of identity as either/or. There are problems, however, in trying to read ABCD as a bildungsroman structured by what Susan Freidman calls "the temporal plots of the family romance, its repetitions and discontents" (137), rendering the "Indian" characteristics of the plot unreadable, and the apparently self-defeating nature of the characters' choices and behavior, rather pointless. A central [End Page 16] difficulty is that the film both responds to and resists readings based on the Oedipal model of the bildungsroman with its focus on linear development through time.

Amnesia, Anamnesis and Narrative Desire: A Dialogue about Susan Rubin Suleiman's Crises of Memory and the Second World War

Abstract: Toward the end of her recent book on individual and collective memory of World War II and the Holocaust, Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Susan Rubin Suleiman writes: "I think we need a moratorium, or even a downright taboo, on the use of the word 'unspeakable' in connection with the Holocaust. If a thing is spoken about, however obliquely, then it is not unspeakable-on the contrary, it may be the object about and around which one can never stop speaking" (188). With this emphatic assertion that borders on the polemical, Suleiman challenges a certain thread of postwar cultural discourse that characterizes the Holocaust, in the words of the survivor-writer Elie Wiesel, as "a universe outside the universe, a creation that exists parallel to creation" (165), a realm that lies beyond the ethical or even possible reach of human language. In her adamant rejection of such a position, Suleiman aligns herself with a particular perspective on Holocaust representation that, increasingly and ever more intensively over the last twenty years, has come to question the notion of the Holocaust as an incomprehensible, ineffable, sacred event whose alleged unspeakability, as Thomas Trezise argues, has been constructed discursively as both an ontological condition and a normative moral precept (39-40).' With her book, Suleiman self-consciously positions herself within this critical discourse and