Showing papers in "Narrative in 2010"

Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models

Abstract: where he teaches English literature and film. He is the author of a critical monograph entitled Narrating the Prison and the editor/co-editor of numerous volumes, such as Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age and Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Alber has written articles that were published or are forthcoming in international journals such as Dickens Studies Annual, The Journal of Popular Culture, Short Story Criticism, Storyworlds, and Style, and he has contributed to the Routledge Enyclopedia of Narrative Theory, the Handbook of Narratology, and the online dictionary Literary Encyclopedia. Stefan Iversen received his PhD in 2008 from the Scandinavian Department at Aarhus University where he is a postdoctoral scholar working on a project on Danish narratives from concentration camps. Iversen is the organizer of the Intensive Programme in Narratology (www.ipin.dk). He is co-editing Moderne Litteraturteori (a series of anthologies on modern literary theory) and has written articles and books on narrative theory, on trauma narratives, and on the Scandinavian fin de siecle. Henrik Skov Nielsen is Associate Professor and Director of Studies at the Scandinavian Institute, University of Aarhus, Denmark. In the first half of 2010 he is a visiting scholar at Project Narrative at The Ohio State University. He is the editor of a series of anthologies on literary theory and is currently working on a narratological research project on the relation between authors and narrators. Brian Richardson is Professor at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Unnatural Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative and Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, which was awarded the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies in 2006. He has edited two anthologies, Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames and Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices, and has published essays on many aspects of narrative theory. He is currently working on unnatural and antimimetic narratives.

Truth in History and Literature

Abstract: This essay will deal with the role of narrative in both fiction and historical writing. I shall be the first to admit that the topic is anything but original. Since Roland Barthes's book on Michelet of more than half a century ago, since Lionel Gossman's studies on La Curne de Ste. Palaye, on Thierry and (also) on Michelet, since Peter Gay's Style in History, the topic has been addressed by numberless philosophers of history and literary theorists. And, self-evidently, everyone will primarily think here of Hayden White, who determined more than any other the course of contemporary philosophy of history. As White put it in 1974: "how a given historical situation is to be configured depends on the historian's subtlety in matching a specific plot structure with the set of historical events that he wishes to endow with a meaning of a particular kind. This is essentially a literary, that is to say, a fiction-making operation" (85). As will be clear from this quote, when comparing history and the novel White was primarily interested in the literary dimension of historical writing. The proposal revolutionalized philosophy of history?and even now a lot still has to be done in order to cash in on all the promises of White's proposal. But exactly this might make us forget that the opposite route can be followed as well. That is to say, we may, and should, also ask ourselves whether historical writing can contribute to a better understanding of the novel, or at least of some variants of it. And if so, how. This, then, is the topic to be addressed in this essay.

Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values: Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract: One important kind of literary criticism involved in the "ethical turn" describes and theorizes the ethical relations that readers perceive among characters or between characters and the narrator.1 My interest in such value structures within a literary text, however, begins from an issue still rarely treated. I am concerned with experimental narratives with third-person narrators who deliberately make it difficult for readers to discern what evaluative stance they are supposed to have toward characters, events, or descriptions.2 In Virginia Woolf s middle-period fiction, the narrator's tonal cues within the text are frequently contradictory, inconclusive, or simply absent. By tonal cues I mean textual markers that prompt readers to have one affective response rather than another a response like sympathy, condescension, irritation, suspicion, approval and to make conscious or unconscious evaluations accordingly: a character is good, pompous, or inferior; a passage of dialogue or indirect discourse is misleading, pretentious, or to the point. In the fiction that interests me here, third-person narrators give conflicting or insufficient guidance about whether a character is admirable or trustworthy or about whether a passage in the narrative voice or an utterance by a character should be regarded seriously or ironically. In Peter Rabinowitz's terms, readers lack the wherewithal to make "snap moral judgments," a loss that makes moral judgment puzzling and thus important to the process of reading (Rabinowitz 84-93). Mrs. Dalloway, one of the most beloved of Woolf 's novels, is also one of the most experimental in terms of the values its third-person narrator complicates or withholds. Its affective indeterminacy leaves elements of the story open to different responses, and these responses cue conscious or unconscious judgments.3 For

Exquisite Moments and the Temporality of the Kiss in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours

Abstract: This chapter applies Eve Sedgwick’s concept of the “queer moment” to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to analyze a kiss between the title character and her childhood friend, Sally Seton. More than thirty years after it has occurred, Clarissa Dalloway still remembers this kiss as “the most exquisite moment of her whole life.” Using the work of queer theorists, this chapter argues that the kiss disrupts normative narratives of development, like the bildungsroman. The chapter moves from Mrs. Dalloway to Michael Cunningham’s reenvisioning of this kiss in The Hours. Cunningham’s text is filled with queer kisses, all of which present strange and complicated temporalities. Together these two texts offer a way to consider the kiss as a “queer moment” with the possibility to disrupt narrative continuity.

Interactions in Cuckoo's Nest: Elements of a Narrative Speech-Act Analysis

Abstract: Something peculiar happens when Charlie Cheswick, one of the characters in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), asks the ward’s head nurse about his cigarettes. The nurse controls the supply of cigarettes, and Cheswick does not relish that idea. However, his intended speech act, a complaint as well as a request, is ignored. Expressing the collective thought of the patients, he stresses that “[w]e want something done about it” (149). As he notices that his request does not have the desired effect nor the presupposed backup, he first increases the intensity of his request—shouting “I want something done! Hear me!” (149) —and then flies into a rage. Whether he puts his speech act in a polite formula or in a very intensive exclamation, it is not accepted as a conventional act. The scene is symptomatic not only of Cheswick’s character development but also of the fictional interactions and textual dynamics in Kesey’s novel. Looking at the scene from this angle, we catch a glimpse of the way in which our understanding can improve by an analysis of the speech acts of characters and narrators. From its foundation in the work of J. L. Austin until today, the theory of speech acts has been living several lives, one of which is in the world of narrative studies. Many scholars, such as Seymour Chatman and Susan Lanser, have integrated aspects of the theory into narratology, and a number of them, such as Mary Louise Pratt, Michael Kearns and Reingard Nischik, have granted it a prominent and permanent position in their narratological models. They basically argue that what authors, narrators and characters do with words—i.e., the illocutionary force

Narrating Oncogenesis: The Problem of Telling when Cancer Begins

Abstract: One morning, in December 1982, a medical student named John McCool developed a headache, and he wondered what it meant. We know this because several years later he wrote about that headache in an essay entitled "Brain Tumor." His story begins with the headache even though on that morning the tumor had already been growing in his brain for some time, though nobody had been able to tell it was there. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan has called illness narratives an "extreme test case"

"The Status is Not Quo!": Pursuing Resolution in Web-Disseminated Serial Narrative

Abstract: Anouk Lang looks at Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a three-act, 42-minute serialized musical which had its genesis in the Writers Guild of America strike in late 2007. Joss Whedon, writer and creator of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse, funded the project himself and co-wrote the script and the songs with his brothers Zack and Jed, and Jed's partner Maurissa Tancharoen. The three acts were disseminated via the internet on July 15, 17, and 19, 2008. The show's creators were explicit that this distribution model was a way of subverting the studio system and making use of new media opportunities for distribution.

Hairball Speaks: Margaret Atwood and the Narrative Legacy of the Female Grotesque

Abstract: "On the thirteenth of November, day of unluck, month of the dead, Kat went into the Toronto General Hospital for an operation. It was for an ovarian cyst, a large one." So begins Margaret Atwood's short story "Hairball," whose title mirrors the name that Kat affectionately gives to the growth removed from her body. "She asked for a jar of formaldehyde," the narrator casually reports at the beginning of the story, "and put the cut-open tumour into it. It was hers, it was benign, it did not deserve to be thrown away. She took it back to her apartment and stuck it on the mantelpiece" (41,42). Published in The New Yorker in 1990 and then included in Atwood's 1991 col lection Wilderness Tips, "Hairball" is a remarkable short story that has received little critical attention to date.2 Part of the wave of late twentieth-century women's writing that sought to reclaim the female body as literary subject matter, the story has a pow erful dimension of self-reflexivity, functioning as an ironic, insightful comment on the changing tradition to which it belongs. "Hairball" probes the still-powerful link between women's unstable, "disgusting" bodies and their violation of social norms?a link that, I argue below, has a specifically narrative history. Atwood is

The Forms and Functions of Back Story in the Novel

Abstract: If Aristotle advised the poet to "put the actual scenes as far as possible before his [the reader's] eyes" (Poetics 1455a), our modern injunction is "show, don't tell." While authorial telling in the novel has largely fallen out of favor, one tool remains indispensable: back story. Percy Lubbock, as fierce a critic of authorial interventions as any, notes why: "There comes a juncture at which, for some reason, it is necessary for us to know more than we could have made out by simply looking and listening. . . . [Y]ou cannot rightly understand this incident or this talk, the author implies, unless you know what I now proceed to tell you" (65). That back story is critical should not be surprising when it addresses the main questions of Quintilian's inverino: quis? quid? ubi? quibus auxiliis? cur? quomodo? quando? (Del Lungo 142-43). Werth observes that "background information . . . constructs the text world" (119). For Herman, it seems evident that "the storyteller is likely to tailor his or her narrative in accordance with the amount of background knowledge he or she assumes me to have" ("Stories" 164). And for Genette, an in medias res opening followed by an "explicative turning back" has become a formal topos (Figures 79); indeed, he defines narrative as "a transition from an earlier state to a later and resultant state" (Narrative Discourse Revisited 19), which makes it critical to ground the earlier state. To tell a story, the King of Hearts tells Alice, one must "[bjegin at the beginning" (Carroll 106) but if "[a] story has no beginning or end" (Greene 1), if "one may as well begin" anywhere (Forster, Howards End 19), then this advice is harder to follow. In a chapter of The Duke's Children entitled "In Medias Res," Trollope notes that beginning amidst the action gives "the cart before the horse," with the result that "a certain nebulous darkness gradually seems to envelope the characters and the incidents" and so these blanks must be filled in through back story (70).

Between Fact and Fiction: The Nature of Events in Joyce and Beckett

Abstract: It is a commonplace of Beckett scholarship that his narratives dramatize a retreat from the possibility of narration. Expression fizzles out into voicelessness as the narrated world evaporates thinner with every new text. My aim in this paper is to present this feature of Beckettian poetics as the final phase in the development of an experimental narrative tradition inaugurated by Joyce. Like Beckett, Joyce views the task of writing fiction as a means of reflecting on the ontological structure of events, and thus of re-evaluating the purchase of truth across fictional and factual narrative information. As we shall see, both writers explore the idea that the geometry of relations between fact, fiction, and truth needs to be radically rethought. But whereas Beckett's work tends towards the realization of a purely fictional state, a state ideally withdrawn from the empirical world, Joyce's method is to level the ontological distinction between fact and fiction to a point where they become indissociable. By staging a dialogue between Beckett and the later Joyce, I wish to read their increasingly radical narrative innovations as examples of a peculiarly modernist engagement with the nature of factual and fictional truth. It seems that a discussion of the nature of truth in Modernism must always fall between two stools. One is too easily seduced by the encyclopedic sweep characteristic of many twentieth-century masterpieces. The promise of total cultural recall, that is to say, of a complete re-appropriation of the past, constitutes an unavoidable epistemic paradigm. Yet this very taste for accumulation and historical

On the Borders of the Page, on the Borders of Genre: Artificial Paratexts in Golden Age Detective Fiction

Abstract: While the footnote in fiction has been explored in relation to specific agendas in different historical eras, 1 in relation to generic use, it has primarily been exam- ined as prefiguring or as one of the tropes of postmodernism. By examining the footnote in fiction in relation to issues of genre, we can explore the correlative sta- bility between the boundaries of the page and the boundaries of generic form. In the detective fiction genre, and particularly in the Golden Age clue-puzzle, 2 the foot- note in fiction specifically questions the role of genre in defining the boundaries be- tween our appreciation of reality and fiction, as can particularly be seen in the works of pseudonymous detective novelists S. S. Van Dine, Carter Dickson, and Ed- mund Crispin. The pseudonymous authorship of these detective series calls atten- tion not only to the notes' role in the fiction but also to the role of pseudonyms as fictional creations. Whereas in late twentieth-century literature attention to textual- ity is often assumed to undermine the realistic narrative frame, in the Golden Age detective novels the footnotes in the fiction reveal that acknowledged textuality can establish the realistic narrative frame while the notion of genre undermines it. Golden Age detective fiction is generally recognized for its clue-puzzle struc- ture, particularly as popular Golden Age authors like Van Dine propose that the de- tective novel is "a complicated and extended puzzle cast in fictional form" ("Detective Story" 5). 3 Because the form foregrounds the puzzle element, the genre has developed rules of "fair play" that are meant to enable the reader equal oppor-

Shameful Signification: Narrative and Feeling in Jane Eyre

Abstract: Is Jane Eyre the heroine of shame? Would such a reframing of the character famously dubbed the "heroine of fulfillment" constitute its own shamefully "shocking conduct"?1 Widely understood as a model of engaging and empowered female voice, Jane Eyre's distinctive "I" has often seemed bolstered, especially, by the emotional display and pull of that voice. Not just feeling, but specific feelings have captured critical attention, with anger and sympathy attaining pride of place in feminist assessments of Bronte's novel and of novelistic feeling in both Victorian and contemporary culture. From Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's influential reading of Jane Eyre's anger as exemplary of "rebellious feminism" to more recent critiques of the normalizing "triumph of sympathy" staged by the novel's end, the fraught yet potent agency, self-assertion, and emotional invitation of Jane Eyre's autobiographical narrative, and especially her voice, have been understood to thrive on anger or sympathy.2 Yet what are we to make of that emotion which inspires the first diegetic mention of Jane Eyre's surname and punctuates her physical imprisonment in the metaphorically rich red-room as a young girl "For shame! for shame! . . . What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre" (9)? This cry "for shame" suggests that shame constitutes both an introduction of "Miss Eyre" to the reader and an interpellation of Jane into the contours of gendered interiority and social relations. We might imagine it as the invasive voice of society threatening to repress the more authentic self-expression of the angry Jane, or, perhaps, as an affective force imposed from outside the individual that exposes the disciplinary violence inflicted by all emotions, even those seemingly more personal and salutary

Gérard Genette’s Evolving Narrative Poetics

Abstract: The article presents the author's perspectives on the narrative poetics in the works of GA©rard Genette, particularly in the book "Narrative Discourse." It states that the book searched several relations between the narrating act, the narrative text and the narrated story. Moreover, the book is said to establish a new standard by giving an approach to analyze and describe the quality of narrative as a self-regulating system.

Rebellious Identification, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Arabella

Abstract: Sue Bridehead, along with other characters in and some readers of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, finds something about Arabella irresistibly attractive, even though both Sue and the readers have every reason to dislike Jude's coarse, selfish, troublesome wife. Arabella is responsible for much of Jude's and Sue's troubles, preventing their marriage multiple times and interrupting their lives repeatedly. She is crass and lewd and has no sympathy whatsoever for Jude's higher goals and ambitions; as Jude puts it, there is "something in her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream" (84). Readers are invited by Jude, Sue, and Hardy himself to resent Arabella's disruptions and unruly presence. Why might a reader resist this invitation to condemn Arabella? What could readers possibly find attractive about Arabella?

Ralph Rader on the Literary History of the Novel

Abstract: For generations now, literary theorists have engaged the question of exactly how specific instances of the things that we call novels relate to the abstract notion of the novel as a genre. Perhaps the single most pronounced tendency in the writing on the novel as a genre is to identify its clear emergence in the 1740s in the work of Richardson and Fielding and then to offer instances of various novel-like writings that preceded the novel. The novel thus appears to have both a form and an ur-form in which it was almost or implicitly present. On the one hand, scholars such as Margaret Doody and J. Paul Hunter have suggested, respectively, that many recognizably novel-like works were read in classical antiquity and in the years leading up to those we have traditionally associated with the novel proper. On the other, the novel ap pears as a precipitate of a larger socio-economic transformation. The novel, having developed in the form of a rejection or negation, is explicable less in formal terms than as the negation of certain elements available to an earlier literature. Ian Watt and Michael McKeon, despite their differences from one another, share the view that the novel is a genre partially because it tries to write fictions with little appeal to the su perhuman elements of romance. For each of them the novel is directly continuous with developments in the socioeconomic worlds of the novelists: for Watt, the drive towards attitudes that combined both this-worldly practicality and intense introspec tion (for which he draws on Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism); for McKeon, an alertness to social and economic tensions that made the novel a stag ing ground for a contest between questions of truth and questions of virtue that ulti mately found some resolution in claims on behalf of pleasure or aesthetic knowledge.

"Specters of Kath": Negatives and Negativity in Penelope Lively's The Photograph

Abstract: Critics and photographers insist on the lethal and petrifying power of the photographic act, through which the subject becomes reified and disincarnated in a "micro-experience of death," as Barthes puts it in Camera Lucida {La Chambre claire 14). The photographic act seen as an "embalming" is such that the subject photographed "truly [becomes] a specter," Barthes goes on to say (14), thus taking up again almost word for word Susan Sontag's analysis in On Photography for whom photographic images are "ghost images," "death masks," and even "memento mori" (84, 168, 26). Conversely, the photographic image whether its referent in the real world is already dead or still alive has this quasi-magical power of maintaining it in an illusion of perpetual life, as it is cut off from time, and therefore of endowing it with a spectral quality. Photography as the trace of a body without a body, a "paradoxical incorporation" (Derrida 6) or the "tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh" (7), as Derrida puts it, thus corresponds to the definition of the specter as a "phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit" that he gives in Specters of Marx (6). Much has been said about the literary use of photography for realistic purposes photography being on the side of evidence, of authenticity because of its indexicality or illusionistic ones photography being a construct, and as such capable of lying and deceiving. Less has perhaps been made of its spectral nature and the fictional games made possible by what Regis Durand calls the "photo-

The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader

Abstract: Rader W. Rader consistently located his work within the tradition of Chicago School criticism, and he just as consistently characterized that tradition as a minor movement in the history of twentieth-century criticism and theory. But he only im plied what we will now say explicitly and with the hope that in our current climate of renewed interest in the affective and aesthetic dimensions of literature more people will be receptive to the message. The work is part of only a minor tradition?and it's a damn shame too. It's especially a damn shame because, across Rader's diverse body of essays on subjects ranging from Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" to Capote's In Cold Blood, he sketches a coherent and compelling vision of the nature and significance of literature and an impressive way of translating that vision into in terpretive practice. In this essay, we seek to reconstruct that vision and to explicate the interrelationships among several of its key components: Rader's definition of lit erature, his understanding of the tasks of criticism and theory, his concepts of literary form and literary quality, his work on the history of the English novel, and his meth ods of interpretive reasoning. In a sense, we understand our task as doing for Rader's critical work what he so often set out to do for another writer's imaginative work: identify the core principles of its construction. One prefatory note before we take up Rader's definition of literature: you will soon see that, from the perspectives of the current major traditions, those of

Explaining Literature: A Reflection on the Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader

Abstract: In a series of essays published over some three decades, the late Ralph Rader developed a theory of literary explanation that was remarkable for a number of rea sons. Among them were the clarity and hence intentional vulnerability of its hy potheses and its unembarrassed focus on the established classics of English literature. Rader drew his examples almost exclusively from the canon of the English and Irish novel, Defoe to Joyce, and of English lyric poetry from Gray to Eliot. This at a time when the larger enterprise of literary criticism was busily expanding if not dissolving the canons of the various national literatures and probing the boundaries between high literature and other modes of discourse. Rader's concentration on the canon was, however, a direct and deliberate consequence of an extraordinary ex planatory ambition. He aimed at nothing less than defining the essential nature of lit erary objects and, in the process, providing a basis in our shared experience for the explanation and resolution of interpretive controversy. One of the impressive features of Rader's theory is the complexity he generates out of a fairly small set of conceptual resources. This is easiest to see in his clearest and most comprehensive statement of the theory, his retrospective essay "Literary Constructs," published in Poetics in 1989. The ambition mentioned above is evident in the paper's abstract, where it is stated with characteristic precision, if also with a characteristically forbidding syntax and vocabulary: