Showing papers in "Narrative in 2012"

How Natural Is "Unnatural Narratology"; or, What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology?

Abstract: When I used the term natural in towards a “Natural” Narratology (1996), I tried to emphasize distinctly that this was a use of the term that was not to be contrasted with an opposite, the unnatural, dissociating myself from the moralistic, phallogocentric, heterosexual and generally conservative ideologies of the natural and their rejection, if not demonization, of the (unnatural, perverse) Other. To the extent that I needed to resort to dichotomy, I therefore employed the term non-natural as a, it seemed to me, less loaded contrary. Since Brian Richardson’s study Unnatural voices: extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006), however, the term unnatural has seen a landslide of popularity among younger narratologists, especially the coauthors of “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models” (Alber et al.), and has even been integrated into the Literary encyclopedia (Alber, “Unnatural Narratives”). Naturally, if one may phrase it like this, Alber et al. likewise stress that they do not take a moralistic, conservative stance, and that their “use of the term ‘unnatural’ is similar to the use of the term ‘queer’ in queer studies” (Alber et al., “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology,” 132, fn 5).

What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology?: A Response to Monika Fludernik

Abstract: Jan Alber is Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Freiburg in Germany. He is the author of a critical monograph titled Narrating the Prison (2007) and the editor/co-editor of several other books such as Stones of Law – Bricks of Shame: Narrating imprisonment in the victorian age (with Frank Lauterbach, University of Toronto Press 2009), Postclassical Narratology: approaches and analyses (with Monika Fludernik, Ohio State University Press 2010), and Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology (with Rüdiger Heinze, de Gruyter 2011). Alber has authored and co-authored articles that were published or are forthcoming in such journals as Dickens Studies annual, Journal of Narrative Theory, The Journal of Popular Culture, Narrative, Storyworlds, and Style. In 2007, he received a research fellowship from the German Research Foundation to spend a year at Ohio State University doing work on the unnatural under the auspices of Project Narrative. In 2010, the Humboldt Foundation awarded him a Feodor Lynen Fellowship for Experienced Researchers to continue this research at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Maryland.

Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme

Abstract: narrative fiction.1 For my part, reflecting on metalepsis has led me to an extension and a critique of the brief section in Narrative Discourse where Gérard Genette names and examines it. To begin, I will focus on two distinctions that seem essential to me. Genette defines narrative metalepsis as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.) or the inverse” (234–35). Metalepsis thus designates the transgression of a line of demarcation that authors usually do not touch, namely the “shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells” (236). The first distinction I wish to stress is between metalepsis at the discourse level and metalepsis at the story level.2 Metalepsis at the discourse level is (in the sense established by Genette) a kind of “figure”: it consists in the habit of certain narrators interrupting the description of the routine actions of their characters by digressions; it results in a light-hearted and playful synchronization of the narration with the narrated events. Genette illustrates this kind of metalepsis with several passages from

Microfiction: What Makes a Very Short Story Very Short?

Abstract: long it took to prepare them. “It depends,” Wilson told him. “If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now” (Boller 226; as the anecdote reminds us, Wilson was a college professor before getting into administration).1 In speeches and letters, as in journal articles, brevity is readily appreciated; in fiction, it hasn’t been so easy to defend. The stigmatization of the very short work begins at least as early as Aristotle’s stipulation that size does matter: “Beauty is a matter of size and order, and therefore impossible ... in a very minute creature ... the longer the story, consistently with its being comprehensible as a whole, the finer it is by reason of its magnitude” (233). Edgar Allan Poe concurred about the limitations of works that are “too brief ” (May 60): “Without a certain continuity of effort—without a certain duration or repetition of purpose—the soul is never deeply moved” (61); “a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all” (69). Nevertheless, there have always been artists willing to risk the miniature. Such short verbal forms as the parable, exemplum, fabliau, and fable have been widely and more or less continuously practiced for millennia. Our contemporary society has been especially prolific of miniature art forms, such as post cards, pop songs (and their accompanying videos), television commercials, and bumper stickers. My interest here lies in describing the contemporary miniature narrative genre variously called “microfiction,” “flash fiction,” “sudden fiction,” “minute stories,” “short-shorts,” and so on.2 While such poetic forms as the sonnet, haiku, and epigram have been recognized as prestigious genres, serious criticism of very short prose works has been

Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice

Abstract: In 1990, the South African artist William Kentridge completed Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, a large drawing in charcoal and pastel created on eleven sheets of paper that together arch over an area of approximately 24.5 x 9 feet (Figure 1). Typically installed high on a gallery wall, the shape of the work recalls the triumphal arches of the Roman Empire. Indeed, Kentridge may have had in mind a famous instance of triumphalist architecture, the first-century Arch of Titus in Rome, which depicts the bearing away of the booty of imperial conquest, including a menorah and other spoils from the sack of Jerusalem. In an often-cited theorization of the link between “documents of civilization” and “documents of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin implicitly evokes the same scene when he writes of “the triumphal procession [Triumphzug] in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate” (256). Close in spirit to Benjamin’s reflections on history, Kentridge’s cryptic and decidedly non-triumphalist procession nonetheless involves not imperial booty, but rather the detritus of the dispossessed. Most emblematically, on the far left-hand (or forward) side of Arc/Procession, the head and upper body of a hunched-over figure disappear beneath an indeterminate burden that includes cups and bowls, sacks and megaphones, all of which

Focalization and Digital Fiction

Abstract: “Focalization,” perhaps one of the sexiest concepts to surface from narratology’s lexicon, still garners considerable attention nearly four decades after its coinage. The entry for the term in the online Living Handbook of Narratology is by far the most popular one, roughly 400 page views ahead of the second most popular, for “author.”1 Granted, that statistic may be more a function of the term’s inherent confusion than its inherent appeal, as classical narratology has spawned multiple models with irreconcilable differences and single terms with multiple meanings, all in the service of elaborating Gérard Genette’s foundational distinction that the agent who tells the narrative is not necessarily the same one who perceives it. In his contribution to the recent collection Point of view, Perspective, and Focalization, Uri Margolin outlines three directions for a revision of focalization theory: 1) expansion of its application to other media with theoretical modifications as needed; 2) reconfiguration of the available system and its categories; and 3) a reconceptualization of the whole theory by placing it within a more fundamental theoretical framework (41). A general term that Genette endowed with technical meaning in narrative theory’s structuralist prime, focalization is generally understood to involve the filtering of narrative information with varying degrees of subjectivity via any number of vantage points of characters and narrators.2 Given observations that it is, in a broader sense, “one component of a general theory of fictional minds, that is, of the literary representation of mental activity in all its varieties” (Margolin 45) and “is best understood as a reflex of the mind . . . conceptualizing scenes within storyworlds” (Herman 122), models and concepts derived from a cognitivist framework hold tremendous promise

Transparent Minds Revisited

Abstract: Those who have not reread Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds (1978) lately ought to do so, if only to remind themselves of how wide-ranging, how judicious, how nuanced, and how stimulating narratological analysis can be. In the hindsight of thirty-some years, Cohn’s book surely ranks among the half-dozen magisterial achievements of what we now call “classical” narratology—which, I realize, might amount to damning with faint praise in certain doctrinaire “post-classical” quarters (an issue I address below). On the occasion of Dorrit Cohn’s receipt of the 2010 Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, I took the opportunity to revisit Transparent Minds for the first time in years. This is not to say that I do not regularly consult certain parts of it, or assign specific chapters in courses, or discuss the book with graduate students; I do all of these things. But I do not recall having reread the entire book cover-to-cover with close attention since about 1980. The reason I read it with such care at that time was that I had been commissioned to produce an article-length review of the book, which duly appeared in Poetics Today in 1981. So I also took advantage of the occasion of Cohn’s Lifetime Achievement Award to reread that review article of mine—an experience that proved to be a good deal less gratifying than that of rereading the book itself. Who was this youngster, still in his twenties, who seemed to speak with such authority about what an adequate theory of consciousness in fiction ought to look like, and how it would fit into the larger

All Is Well: The Epilogue in Children's Fantasy Fiction

Abstract: Different eras have different preferences regarding endings—about when a story is really over and what determines that. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan argues that in the present day “suggestiveness and indeterminancy are preferred to closure and definitiveness” (61). However, this is not the case in children’s fantasy fiction, wherein the epilogue, unfashionable in most other prose genres, serves a few functions: it can offer a transition from the novel to the genres of myth and legend; it can provide the implied reader reassuring completion beyond closure; it can calm fears that a particular and possible bad outcome won’t come to pass down the road; in the case of the epilogue to Rowling’s final volume in the Harry Potter saga, epilogue can provide the implied reader the experience of an additional literary mode. The epilogue is an awkward convention and has been out of literary fashion for a while. There certainly can be no place for that device of ultimate closure, that extranarrative, almost peritextual event that, as Henry James complained, distributes last “prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs and cheerful remarks” (48). Pat Rogers describes the epilogue as a “Parthian dart,” a volley delivered in retreat. It is a parting shot that is both too much and too late for many readers, a “shift in tense, and a jump in tempo—an accelerando” followed by a sudden “loosening of the temporal screw, enabling us to move rapidly ahead over a period of years” (Rogers 91), most notably either as a summation of the future—which can be as short as a line or as long as several pages—or as a scene that takes place after a

Recalcitrant Simplicity: Thin Characters and Thick Narration in A Farewell to Arms

Abstract: Simplicity is rarely talked about in critical investigations of literary modernism, and it is even rarer to talk about simplicity in narratological terms. Here, I begin to suggest a vocabulary with which we can begin to discuss more precisely the hermeneutic effects of simplicity in modernist literature. I propose the term “thin character” as a way both to nuance traditional distinctions between minor and major characters and to introduce the idea of simplicity as recalcitrant. I examine how simplicity and “thinness” operate as implicit hermeneutic frames, what Werner Wolf refers to as “basic orientational aids,” which “inform our cognitive activities and generally function as preconditions of interpretation” (5). Using a Farewell to arms as a case study, I consider how a simply drawn character can suggest the terms of our rhetorical relation to the larger text while also causing us to think self-consciously about the relative importance we assign to mimetic, thematic, and synthetic character dimensions. Further, I argue that the experiencing-Frederic Henry persistently misreads Catherine Barkley’s recalcitrant simplicity and that the reader’s recognition of this misreading is key to understanding the novel’s interrogation of the limits of interpretation. While not all simplicity is necessarily recalcitrant—indeed, some simple texts make interpretation easier—I am interested in literary strategies of simplicity that challenge our interpretive efforts. My argument that the simple can also be recalcitrant does not sidestep the project of understanding simplicity as a strategy in and of itself. I do not wish to transform simplicity into its opposite; rather, to talk about

Engagement via Emotional Heightening in "Passion": On the Grammatical Texture of Emotionally-Immersive Passages in Short Fiction

Abstract: as we find out in Alice Munro’s story, “Passion.” Grace descends upon them: an intelligent, frustrated young woman, with a touch of the young Alice Munro about her no doubt (just as the older Grace may echo the older Alice, who could herself get onto Highway 7 to visit the Ottawa Valley, driving from Clinton to Stratford, in under an hour). Maury courts her, and assumes they will marry, but really what attract Grace are the space and creativity and scope for fulfillment that the family—especially Mrs. Travers at its center—seems to nurture and ratify in her. The Traverses are helping her to “get across” the socioeconomic gulf that separates working stiffs (caning chairs) from a life of thinking, possibility, leisure, and pleasure: life with a taste to it (to rewrite the sentiments of her stand-in parents and her high-school principal, who sanction her going off to get “a taste of life”—but always on the assumption that thereafter of that apple she will eat no more). Into this familiar configuration, on Canadian Thanksgiving eve, swerves the restless and dangerous Dr. Neil, in his wine-colored convertible, and there is an immediate mutual attraction and some borrowing (his surname is Borrow): her from Maury, him from Mavis. Still nothing might have eventuated, but for a nice convergence of Darwinian random conditions, where the chief uncertainty concerns how far back to trace these. But for Thanksgiving, there would have been no expedition to buy cranberries; but for Wat being out in the boat, Maury would not have had to drive away to get said cranberries; but for the insistence of Janey and Dana, Grace would have

The Short Story's Way of Meaning: Alice Munro's "Passion"

Abstract: Although Alice Munro has always insisted that she does not write as a novelist does, many reviewers and critics have tried to account for the complexity of her short stories by suggesting they are “novelistic.” I assent to the wise advice of C.S. Lewis, who once reminded us that, “The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. ... As long as you think the corkscrew was meant for opening tins and the cathedral for entertaining tourists, you can say nothing to the purpose about them (1).” I hope to say something to the purpose here about a single Alice Munro story by demonstrating that its complexity is not “novelistic,” as many critics and reviewers claim about her short fiction, but rather due to its generic characteristics as a short story. Munro once said that originally she planned to write a few stories just to get some practice, but got used seeing her material in a short story way (Rothstein). Accepting the critical assumptions of Medvedev and Bakhtin that some genres are adapted to conceptualizing aspects of reality better than others, with each genre possessing definite principles of selection—that genre is a “schema” that shapes seeing and that every genre has its own methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality (134)—I will try to delineate the short-story way of Alice Munro in the story “Passion” from her 2004 collection, runaway.

Critical Desire and the Novel: Ethics of Self-Consciousness in Cervantes and Nabokov

Abstract: The critical interpretation is oriented toward a consciousness which is itself engaged in an act of total interpretation. The relationship between author and critic does not designate a difference in the type of activity involved, since no fundamental discontinuity exists between two acts that both aim at a full understanding; the difference is primarily temporal in kind. —Paul de Man, Form and intent in the american New Criticism (31)

Coincidence as Realist Technique: Improbable Encounters and the Representation of Selfishness in Martin Chuzzlewit

Abstract: In recent years, coincidence has become an important object of investigation in the field of narrative theory. Coincidental encounters between characters—those uncanny collisions where there is “a zero level of character knowledge regarding the forthcoming meeting because the characters are brought together through unforeseen circumstances”—provide a fertile ground for theoretical examination because they raise important questions about plotting, causality, and realism in narrative fiction (Dannenberg 99). It is this final category of realism that will be the focus of this essay, because even though recent work by Hilary Dannenberg and Marie-Laure Ryan has significantly furthered our historical and theoretical understanding of coincidence, they have left unquestioned the implicit assumption that coincidence is by its very nature at odds with realist representation.1 In Coincidence and Counterfacuality: Plotting time and Space in Narrative Fiction (2008), for instance, Dannenberg recuperates coincidence by arguing that the cognitive effects of recognition generated by coincidental encounters encourage the reader’s immersion in the narrative world. Yet while she chides “the literary analyst who treats coincidence as a hackneyed device,” she also suggests that coincidence threatens realism since “mismanaged realism”—the failure to naturalize coincidence—expels the reader from the narrative world (93, 23). According to Dannenberg, even though realism has found ways of accommodating coincidence, it ultimately remains realism’s other.2 Ryan takes a different approach in her article “Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design” (2009). In outlining an Aristotelian, prescriptive account of narrative, she categorizes coincidence

The Body of the Child, the Body of the Land: Trauma and Nachträglichkeit in David Grossman's To the End of the Land

Abstract: the concerns that animate the fiction of David Grossman. This essay addresses the resonances of embodiment in Grossman’s fictional universe. By “embodiment” I mean to indicate both the contours of the child’s body and the configuring of the land as a political entity. Each is a “body,” either literally or figuratively. As such, the borders, surfaces, and orifices of both child and land are contested ground, subject to incursion and appropriation. David Grossman’s most recent novel, To the End of the Land, registers the traumatic impact of both of these encounters. I bring to this study of narrative and embodiment the psychoanalytic concept of Nachtraglichkeit that is associated with trauma. Commonly translated as “deferred action,” Nachtraglichkeit indicates a later experience of falling ill that is the consequence of the mind’s inability to process the impact of an earlier event in the moment of its occurrence. And yet the temporal structure of Nachtraglichkeit, caught between past and present, can also help to understand a more general feature of the mind, the idea that mental life involves a constant return to and reworking of earlier experience. The concept of Nachtraglichkeit draws attention to movements of the mind that involve both retrospection and anticipation from a position in the present. In this more general context, trauma indicates a breakdown in precisely the ability to move freely, mingling past, present, and future in one’s inner world of thoughts and feelings.

Munro's Handling of Description, Focalization, and Voice in "Passion"

Abstract: Her visuality is not merely a matter of rendering the surface, the realm of mere perception, for she has understood that one of the great advantages of any effective imagist technique is that the image not merely presents itself. It reverberates with the power of its associations, and even with the intensity of its own isolated and illuminated presence. Munro herself conveyed something of this when John Metcalf, remarking on the fact that she seemed to “glory in the surfaces and textures,” asked whether she did not in fact feel “surfaces” not to be surfaces, and she answered that there was “a kind of magic ... about everything,” “a feeling about the intensity of what is there.” (236)

Pockets of Nothingness: "Metaphysical Solitude" in Alice Munro's "Passion"

Abstract: astute and expansive reading of several Munro collections details “how the shadings of one volume come to the edge or to the center of another” (“Glimpse” 841). It’s not that Munro repeats herself; rather, Levene’s insightful metaphor suggests how Munro’s created an oeuvre that grows increasingly subtle in the ways it refracts (and comments upon) itself. If one considers runaway, to which the story “Passion” belongs, one can discern numerous “shadings” connecting each story to others in the text and also to prior collections. The book’s final story, “Powers,” can be read on its own for instance, but in a certain light, a sentence or scene or even a single word from this story (e.g. “kilter” 303, 173) suddenly summons other moments in this collection (and others as well). The effect is Proustian in that runaway appears to remember, and then seemingly forget, and then recast various components (thematic and stylistic) of itself throughout the eight stories. Munro’s interest in “connectedness” noticeably extends to the works of other authors.1 That “Powers” directly alludes to a number of writers—Dante, Milton and Tolstoy among others—and implicitly responds to stories such as Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” and James Joyce’s “The Dead” (the latter moving through the collection as a kind of sporadic wind) makes these “shadings” so complicated that to isolate even a few of them from the rest is to simplify their dynamic correlations. Fully recognizing the risk of simplification, then, let me start with the obvious: Munro has continuously found the human experience of temporality to be captivating. I will turn later to an examination of this interest in terms of the short story specifically and narrative generally; for the moment, let me remark that, while Munro’s treatments of temporality are necessarily manifold, they often illuminate each other.

The Multiplicity of Implied Authors and the Complex Case of Uncle Tom's Cabin

Abstract: understand the implied author in precisely the same way.1 As Nunning points out, there is “no widespread agreement about what the term actually designates” (239). Some writers highlight the implied author as a “core of norms” (as Wayne Booth put it [rhetoric 74]). Others emphasize the relation to the real author, as when Phelan characterizes the implied author as a “subset” of the real author (45). Still others, for example, Rimmon-Kenan (77), stress the reader’s role in constructing an idea of an author. These approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But some work is required to reconcile them. In the following pages, I will first try to clarify the idea of implied authorship and its relation to what might be described as the receptive or readerly intention of the real author. In the second section, I will take up the cognitive processes involved in such intention, arguing that the unity or consistency of their outputs is greatly overestimated. Rather than a single, consistent authorial or implied authorial intent, our cognitive architecture actually predicts that we will find partially contradictory ideas and attitudes. These partial contradictions affect not only theme and emotional response, but even some story elements, such as characterization. This is not to say that there is no unity. There are certainly strong tendencies toward continuity within most works. We may reserve the phrase “implied author” for the intentions that manifest or guide that continuity. For the more local, partially discontinuous intentions, however, we may refer instead to “implicated authors.”2 These implicated authors vary with the

The Stories of "Passion": An Empirical Study

Abstract: ing the summer when this vibrant girl, who is poor and adventurous, meets the Travers family, who are ... complicated. Now, more than forty years later, Grace has driven back to the scene of the romance, or the crime, or both. Though traditional in structure—an initiation-story within a frame-tale—the narrative isn’t simple. That younger self, on the cusp of adult life, is recalled by the sixty-something woman we meet on the first and final pages. She is driving, alone, through a landscape both familiar and strange, looking for a house that once belonged to the people who changed her life. For the literary critic trying to achieve the fullest understanding of Grace’s character; for the story-grammarian trying to parse the narrative sentence of her life; for the short fiction theorist seeing Munro as a challenge; and, last but not least, for the undergraduate student wondering, “Who is this woman, and what’s going on?”—for all these readers, there is a hole in the text. Grace is absent between her twenties and her sixties, living, it seems, in Australia. Those decades are missing. And yet the narrative presumes them, else the frame wouldn’t matter. And obviously, it does. It positions us to look back over a void to encounter a mystery. We’re to wonder about that girl whose life turned so many corners within the space of a few months. What was she like then? Was she naïve or self-serving, willful or rudderless ... the driver or the passenger? Because we meet Grace in a short story, we cannot ask these questions without noting the typology of the narrative she inhabits. In this genre, whose brevity and integrity descend from the anecdote, the exemplum, and the folk-tale, it is more than a quip to say “character is sequence, and sequence is character.” To learn who Grace is, we need, in a very technical sense, to graph the route she’s traversed with the help of the Traverses. Yet the path disappears.

Narrative Knowledge, Phronesis, and Paradigm-Based Medicine

Abstract: about illness and death. More fundamental by far than the content of Bleak House or King Lear is the modeling, by literary acts, of deeply transformative intersubjective connections among relative strangers fused and nourished by words. Recognizing that my responsibility toward my patient includes my being a dutiful and skillful reader helps me to understand what skills to develop within my doctorly self. —Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine (54)

Summary of Alice Munro's "Passion"

Abstract: ground and basis for the essays that follow. However, as a stop-gap, or as a spur to memory, here is a very brief summary of the story, with apologies to Munro for the immeasurable inadequacy of this rendering: After forty years, Grace revisits the summer community in the Ottawa Valley, where, at the age of twenty, she’d met the Travers family. Sighting their former house, she recalls the past, and the following story unfolds. After graduation from high school, she was expected to join her uncle in caning chairs for a living, but for the summer, she was waitressing at the inn in Bailey Falls to “get a taste of life.” There she is noticed by the younger Travers son, Maury, who falls in love with her, romanticizing her poverty and spirit. Grace is befriended by his mother, whose intelligence and history are at odds with the sort of comfortable, middle-class life that her second husband has given her and that Maury now plans for Grace. Putatively engaged to Maury, Grace meets his older half-brother, Neil, a married doctor for whom alcohol is a distraction from hopelessness. When Grace has a minor accident, Neil whisks her off to the hospital, and then, with her consent, takes her on an odyssey into the countryside, leaving duty and propriety behind. Neil teaches Grace how to drive his car and introduces her to passion when he casually licks her palm. They do not have sex, sharing instead a deeper connection—a vision of life’s promise undercut by its emptiness. The next day, knowing she can’t return to Maury, she learns that Neil has killed himself in a car crash. Maury’s father pays a visit, handing her a thousand-dollar check. After imagining a gesture of refusal, she uses the money to create a new destiny. Now, as an old woman, with perhaps some unresolved issues from the past, she has come back for a look at the place where her life had its turning-point.