Showing papers in "Narrative in 2013"

The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative

Abstract: A new generation of minority and ethnic writers has come to prominence whose work signals a radical turn to a \"postrace\" era in American literature. Like Virginia Woolf ironically identifying the beginning of the modern era \"on or about December 1910,\" Colson Whitehead, in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times in 2009, marked the anniversary of the election of the first black man to the presidency of the United States by proclaiming that \"One year ago . . . we officially became a postracial society.\" I will return to Whitehead momentarily, especially in reference to three of his novels, The Intuitionist (1998), John Henry Days (2001), and Zone One (2011). For the moment, however, I wish first to set the context for my appraisal of what I am calling here a \"postrace aesthetic\" in contemporary narrative.

Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field

Abstract: Gérard Genette’s concept of the “paratext,” first introduced in Palimpsestes (1982) and elaborated in Seuils (1987), has enjoyed a tremendously successful career in literary studies over the past two decades. Inquiries into forms and functions of the literary paratext abound, especially since Seuils’ German and English translations in 1989 and 1997, and the distinction between text and paratext is now one of the basic analytical tools taught in textbook introductions to the study of narrative and explicated in handbooks on literary analysis.2 The concept of the paratext has since also been productively applied to other media, especially audiovisual forms, such as film and television—although Genette used a narrow definition of “text,” based his concept of paratext on an analysis of literary narrative materialized in the form of the printed book, and can be said to have consciously avoided the question of other media (Stanitzek, “Texts and Paratexts” 35).3 This cluster of articles explores the potential and limits of the concept for describing medial change, at a time when both the printed book and the celluloid film are supplemented—and maybe even supplanted—by new media and delivery technologies. More specifically, we are interested in the processes of digitization, that is, in the shifts that take place when originally analogue texts are rendered in digital

Expanding Genette's Epitext/Peritext Model for Transitional Electronic Literature: Centrifugal and Centripetal Vectors on Kindles and iPads

Abstract: Although avant-garde digital literature made inroads among a few experimental artists and a very small number of readers in the 1980s and 1990s, it was not until 2009 that sales of small portable electronic devices and easily obtainable digital texts changed reading patterns in the developed world. Sales of dedicated e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle mushroomed from early 2009 on, and with the introduction of Apple’s iPad in April 2010, a new form of transitional electronic literature began to take hold—an intermediary form between print and digital platforms without the complexities of avant-garde, digitally experimental literature. Whereas early multiform digital literature excluded much of the reading public with its extensive hyperlinks and sometimes confusing hypertextual pathways, the new transitional texts on small portable e-readers engage in much more moderate adaptations of traditional printed literature. In contrast to “digital born” literature such as blognovels, interactive texts with complex rhizomatic paths and algorithmic sequences, and multi-media digital genres that blur the borders between video, game, and literature, a much more palatable transitional literature is in the forefront of cultural change now—electronic texts that mimic the format and appearance of print books and add a few innovations.1

"I seemed to hold two lives": Disclosing Circumnarration in Villette and The Picture of Dorian Gray

Abstract: In the first of 44 direct addresses to the reader (the narratee), Lucy Snowe, the narrator of Charlotte Bronte’s villette, says, “I betook myself home, having been absent six months. It will be conjectured that I was of course glad to return to the bosom of my kindred. Well! The amiable conjecture does no harm, and may therefore be safely left uncontradicted. Far from saying nay, indeed, I will permit the reader to picture me, for the next eight years, as a bark slumbering through halcyon weather, in a harbour still as glass. . . . A great many women and girls are supposed to pass their lives something in that fashion; why not I with the rest?” (35). In this passage the narrator returns to a home about which the reader knows nothing, yet refuses to directly narrate her home experience. Instead of narrating any direct information about the eight years in which she comes of age, she suggests a conjecture that “will” be made by the implied reader and then “permits” the implied reader to picture her in a peaceful ex-

Bootleg Paratextuality and Digital Temporality: Towards an Alternate Present of the DVD

Abstract: “The digital realm is an avant-garde to the extent that it is driven by perpetual innovation and perpetual destruction. The built-in obsolescence of digital culture, the endless trashing of last year’s model, the spendthift [sic] throwing away of batteries and mobile phones and monitors and mice . . . and all the heavy metals, all the toxins, sent off to some god-forsaken Chinese recycling village . . . that is the digital avant-garde.” —Sean Cubitt

European Postmodernism: The Cosmodern Turn

Abstract: Postmodernism was the hottest item in literary studies—at least in the West, although it also made a considerable stir in China, for instance—for approximately two decades, roughly speaking from 1970 to 1990, but has been far less debated, as far as literature is concerned, since the end of the 1990s (D’haen, “(No) Postmodernism”). In many ways, it seems to me that Hans Bertens’ The idea of the Postmodern, the first edition of which appeared in 1995, marks the end of the debate on postmodernism as a vitally alive and culturally dominant literary movement or current. Since then, multiculturalism and postcolonialism, and latterly world literature, have taken center stage in discussions of current literature. This is not to say, though, that postmodern narrative techniques, or at least techniques usually associated with forms of postmodern writing as practiced in the movement’s heyday between—say—1960 and 1990, do not continue to be used by contemporary writers. In fact, the same Hans Bertens (“Postmodern Humanism”) just recently wrote an essay in which he argues precisely such continuation, but in which he also indicates that these techniques are now being put to different ends than was the case earlier. To stay within Bertens’ own terminology as established from his earliest writings on postmodernism (1986), these same “postmodern” techniques now give expression to a different Weltanschauung. In what follows I will demonstrate as much with regard to two recent European novels, one a

After the Revolution: US Postmodernism in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: For thirty years, early each winter, as the newspapers roll out their end-ofyear obituaries and take to listing the year’s proudest, most achieved disasters, I’ve read out loud, to myself or to anyone who will listen, a passage from that book that ruined me for science and made me think of writing as a life. Nine pages: that battery-ringed evensong service, set somewhere in Kent— the closest thing I have to a private religious ritual. I do it to remind myself of the size of the made world, of what story might still be when it remembers itself, of the look of our maximum reach outward, of the devastating charge of words. (Powers 40; emphasis original)

Here's How You Produce This Play: Towards a Narratology of Dramatic Texts

Abstract: Virtually every essay on drama and narrative in the past fifteen years begins by noting that traditionally narratology has been resistant to talking about narrative in drama, and more specifically, narration in drama; this essay is no different, in that despite consistent exhortations by Brian Richardson, Manfred Jahn, Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer, and Monika Fludernik, we are still at the very beginning of a process that theorizes dramatic narratives. We agree that most performed plays relate narratives, in that on a specific occasion (the performance) someone (the actors and production staff) represents something that happens (the plot of the play) to someone (the audience) for a specific purpose (whatever the rhetorical ends of that performance may be). Of course, work has been done by those mentioned above to theorize the ways that dramatic and other performance narratives benefit from as well as complicate and enrich the terms of narrative analysis. And yet still frequently, drama is cordoned off from the study of narrative, often with an argument citing the ancient distinction of narrative, drama, and lyric that conscribes drama to a separate category of analysis, even though, as Brian Richardson has pointed out, “Aristotle’s Poetics, still the starting-point for any narrative theory, devotes more space to drama than to epic” (Richardson, “Drama and Narrative” 142). Elsewhere, Richardson has persuasively demonstrated, we can talk about drama in those rare instances when it

Authority, the Newspaper, and Other Media, including J.M. Coetzee's Summertime

Abstract: These pages seek to simulate the score of a contrapuntal composition that plays across three imbricated voice-parts as though it were some sort of fugue. By such gesture, music presents itself here among other media. Etymologically derived from fugere and fugare , to flee and to pursue, fugue has since the renaissance been imagined as a product of simultaneous composition along vertical and horizontal axes. In its call and response articulation among (here three) parts, such composition is always imitative. These pages thus imitate and contrapuntally respond to the call in J.M. Coetzee's fiction, especially after the "Plunk-Plink-Plonk" of banjo in Disgrace , and the polyphonic page presentation in Diary of a Bad Year .

Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in Benedetti's "Five Years of Life"

Abstract: This article deals with the relations between narrative (more precisely, narration) and fiction in a short story by Mario Benedetti, “Five Years of Life.”2 Its theoretical frame of reference is S.-Y. Kuroda and Ann Banfield’s non-communicational or poetic theory of narrative, seen as an alternative to communicational narrative theory, which has occupied a dominant position since narratology came into being. Given that the terms narrative theory, communicational theory (or theory of narrative communication), and narratology are all often used and often used ambiguously, I would like to clarify what I understand by narratology and communicational theory of narrative as well as the context of what might be interpreted as a “return” to Kuroda’s and Banfield’s theories.3 By narratology, I understand first a school of literary theory or, more precisely, of the theory of literary narrative, which was first formed in the mid 1960s and based at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, then at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales in Paris (its socio-institutional heritage is not indifferent but determines the meaning of the adjective structuralist in the term structuralist narratology). Gérard Genette swiftly became its leading figure. For historical reasons which deserve closer

Introduction: Historicizing Postmodernist Fiction

Abstract: In today’s academic research and publications, one term still frequently appears in different forms in conferences and journals: postmodernism or postmodern or postmodernity. Although people might well think that postmodernism has long come to an end, it is indeed still influential through its fragments. I here borrow Jacques Derrida’s word from The Specters of Marx (1994): the specters of postmodernism have now permeated all the aspects of our culture and life as well as theoretical discourse. It is true that postmodernism was once one of the most heatedly discussed and debated theoretical topics, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s in North American literary and cultural circles. Later, it traveled to Europe and became a powerful philosophical and intellectual movement. Finally, it became a sort of “international postmodernism” (Bertens and Fokkema). Whether there even is such a thing as postmodernism has been, and will continue to be, controversial, not only in the West, but also elsewhere in the world. For the past thirty years or more, the debate about postmodernism or postmodernity has been of acute interest to major Euro-American scholars and critics in the humanities and social sciences. It has involved almost all the major literary and cultural scholars, both from the West and from the East. Over the course of this international postmodernism debate, the term has undergone continual redefinition and redescription. Such eminent Western theorists and thinkers as

Implied Author, Authorial Audience, and Context: Form and History in Neo-Aristotelian Rhetorical Theory

Abstract: Neo-Aristotelian rhetorical theory has been mainly developed by the second and third generations of the Chicago School of criticism. It is widely believed that all three generations of the neo-Aristotelians share a concentration on textual form and a preclusion of the historical context of creation despite the fact that the first generation is concerned with poetics (i.e., the text) while the latter two, by contrast, with rhetoric (i.e., author-audience communication). As far as the critical practice of the three generations is concerned, this belief is well grounded, since no matter whether the concern is the poetic or the rhetorical, neo-Aristotelian critics in general have consciously precluded consideration of the historical context of creation (see Shen, “Neo-Aristotelian”). However, the picture is quite different when we explore the theoretical potential itself. If we examine carefully the relation between the theory of the first generation and that of the latter two and come to grips with the central rhetorical concepts of the “implied author” and the “authorial audience” (“implied reader”), we may discover that the theory of the latter two generations differs essentially from that of the first in that this later theory, in fact, has an “unseen” or unacknowledged contextual requirement, implicitly calling for the consideration of the historical context of literary production and reception. I will start with a defense of the rhetorical concept of the “implied author” against recent attacks. Based on the defense, I will reveal the implicit contextual requirement

Afterword: Reconstructing Postmodernism

Abstract: Opportunistically, I seized on Katz’s wittily unpretentious figure of speech as a convenient metaphor for the literary-historical mechanism that I thought was responsible for the emergence of postmodernism in fiction. Resisting the model of Zeitgeist that McCaffery had offered him, Katz suggests that a number of American writers, independently of each other, had all arrived at the same aesthetic threshold at about the same time, not because they were implementing some theoretical project—ideas “in the air”—or because they were in communication with each other (which would not happen until sometime later, after the fact), but as a consequence of the shared literary-historical situation in which they all found themselves. According to this account, the breakthrough to postmodernism in fiction—or Katz’s breakthrough, any-

Planet of the Frogs: Thoreau, Anderson, and Murakami

Abstract: Frogs have consistently inspired the literary imagination, from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1849 black-comic tale “Hop-Frog,” featuring a “freak” seeking revenge on a harsh king, to Mark Twain’s 1865 hoax, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” based upon an incredible folktale from the heyday of the Gold Rush, to Loren Eiseley’s 1978 piece of nature writing “The Dance of the Frogs,” in which the “discovery of latent stores of energy and agility” (113) is transcendentally related to amphibia, down to Patrick Süskind’s 1985 magic realist novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, whose anti-hero, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (or “frog” in French), is endowed with hyperosmia, a keen sense of smell. Very recently, in her 2011 keynote lecture “Global America Revisited: Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Modernist Japonisme,” delivered at the fifth Nanzan American Studies Summer Seminar, Anita Patterson pointed out that Ezra Pound could not have launched the Imagist poetry movement without the transnational impact of Yone Noguchi, a.k.a. Yonejiro Noguchi, the first Japanese poet to compose poems in English, and a figure who provided insight into links between American Renaissance poet Walt Whitman’s pathos and seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho’s haiku. Basho’s haiku include the well-known masterpiece featuring frogs: “Furu ike ya / Kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto” (Into an ancient pond / a frog jumps / splash of water). However improbable it might seem at first sight, at

Narrative Temporality and Slowed Scene: The Interaction of Event and Thought Representation in Ian McEwan's Fiction

Abstract: . . . [I]t was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished— how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages. She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright. For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,— one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 3–4) * * * . . . “It can’t be as bad as where we’ve been,” Fezzik snapped, and down he went.

Simultaneous Narration and Ethical Positioning in Three Short Animated Films

Abstract: Cartoons, short animations, animated films, the majority of cgi effects, all originate in the forward rush of single images flipped so quickly one after the other that the eyes are fooled into perceiving motion where none exists. On a micro level, animation is inherently narrative, a series of nano-events unfolding sequentially, frame by frame, at roughly twenty-four frames per second1 to create, if only for a moment, an illusion of a whole. Animation is also an art of extravagant metamorphosis. Linedrawn characters squash, stretch, twist around themselves; rooms turn into windows turn into trees; the letter “A” becomes a hat; superman leaps over buildings. For all of the relentless forward motion and wild narration, animation paradoxically also has the capacity to stop and hold stories still, if only for the long take of Wile E. Coyote, looking directly at us between the time he steps off the cliff and the time gravity takes hold, and he plunges downward. In that glance is held animation’s capacity to fool the eye, to fool a gravity-fearing mind, and to hold in suspension a number of narrative strands running through the cartoon simultaneously: the snares Wile E. Coyote has invented for the Road Runner have once again backfired on him; Wile E. recognizes his failure and shares this recognition with his audience, also given, from time to time, to similar failure; Wile E. has also lost to an animator who can foil gravity itself. The purpose of this study is to investigate on two fronts the aesthetic and ethical components of animation’s extravagant and complex artifice: first, as they engage the

A Mosaic of Fragments as Narrative Practice: Maqiao Dictionary

Abstract: In his very ambitious mapping of Chinese postmodernism or postmodernity, Wang Ning compiled a long list of postmodernist writers in China, but Han Shaogong’s Maqiao Dictionary appeared too late for Han’s name to be included on the list (Wang 29). Now that the avant-garde has become a historical phenomenon, I find, in rereading Han’s novel carefully, that it is his experimental “dictionary” more than any of his other writings that earns him a place on this list. Among the many remarkable features of this work is its generic deviance from the conventional schema, its mosaic of fragments organically interwoven into a systematic reference book on a fictional yet realistic local dialect, which nevertheless produces a coherent narrative discourse, in the sense of “a perceived sequence of nonrandomly connected events” (Toolan 8). This fictional dictionary explores the enormous possibilities of linguistics-oriented writing and enriches the definitions of “narrativity” and “narrativeness” (Prince 44) in postmodernist fiction.

The Chronicle and the Reckoning: A Temporal Paradox in Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales

Abstract: One can argue that there is a dual temporality implicit in reading most, if not all, fictional narratives. First, the reader comprehends the text in the temporal sequence of its unfolding, adding to her understanding as that sequence gives more information about a character’s personality and his choices. Second, the reader (re-)understands the entirety of the text as well as its constituent parts in light of the story’s ending. For example, if a protagonist goes on to become president of the United States, his election as preschool line-leader can take on new, even typological, significance: we can understand the character as predestined to be president. Sometimes this second mode of comprehension precedes the first. With a text like Hamlet, for example, the vast majority of people have an idea of the ending, of Hamlet’s tragic flaw, and of the play’s cultural significance before ever experiencing the play; they thus have some sort of reckoning of the character and the play before they see or read it. Moreover, since the narrative sjuzhet often deviates from the chronological sequence of its fabula, the disclosure that requires, encourages, or allows a reader to (re)conceptualize a chronologically prior happening does not have to be in the final paragraphs of a text. In reading, as in life, our opinions and understandings of previous occurrences are constantly revised in the light of new information and happenings, whether they occur towards the beginning, middle, or end of a codex.