Showing papers in "Narrative in 2014"

The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators

Abstract: The essay examines the phenomenon of non-human storytelling. We take our departure from the paradoxical idea that readers are invited to reflect upon aspects of human life when reading the fictional life stories of non-human narrators, whether they are animals, objects, or indefinable entities. By giving voice to non-human things and animals such as a stuffed squirrel, a lump of coal, or a dog, these narratives may highlight and even challenge our conception of the human. In addition, they may confront us with our propensity to empathize with fictional autobiographical narrators and to narrativize our own lives in particular ways. On the level of meaning, there is a whole range of motifs, themes, and functions with which non-human narration may be associated in particular narratives. On the level of form and effects, however, there are interesting parallels between different non-human narrators. It will become clear that, even though the umbrella term “non-human narration” comprises a great variety of narrators, these character-narrators have something in common as a narrative device.

Speak, trauma: toward a revised understanding of literary trauma theory

Abstract: Do we forget the traumas we suffer, losing them in an amnesic haze, or do our moments of deepest pain remain available to us? This question drives Tim O'Brien's 1994 novel, In the Lake of the Woods. In it, the Senate campaign of a Vietnam veteran named John Wade is derailed when word leaks that he was present at the My Lai massacre. Seeking escape after crushing political defeat, Wade and his wife Kathy retire to a remote lake house. Yet shortly after their arrival, Kathy vanishes, never to be found again. The novel's drama is fueled by the fact that the nature of Wade's involvement in each tragedy--the massacre in Vietnam and the disappearance of his wife--remains unclear. And this lack of clarity stems from the fact that he seems unable to accurately recall either event. Psychologists call the inability to remember an intensely painful experience traumatic amnesia, and the concept was central to specialists' understanding of trauma when Lake was published. (O'Brien directly quotes one of the great proponents of traumatic amnesia, Judith Herman, four times in the novel.) However, the suggestion that one may forget--or fail to accurately describe--trauma is also a foundational insight for the first wave of literary trauma theorists, among them Geoffrey Hartman, Shoshana Felman, and most importantly, Cathy Caruth. It is a testament to Caruth's over-size importance to trauma studies that Ruth Leys, in her 2001 "genealogy" of the field, devotes an entire chapter to Caruth's work--as much as Freud. And though Caruth's two books on the subject--Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and Unclaimed Experience (1996)--were published almost two decades ago, her influence endures. In 2011, Cambridge University hosted a colloquium on her work, and in an essay published that same year, Jean Wyatt writes that trauma theory is still "dominated by the theoretical framework" that she introduced (31). For Caruth, trauma is an experience so intensely painful that the mind is unable to process it normally. In the immediate aftermath, the victim may totally forget the event. And if memories of the trauma return, they are often nonverbal, and the victim may be unable to describe them with words. Yet Caruth maintains that imaginative literature--or figural, rather than literal language--can "speak" trauma when normal, discursive language cannot, and fiction helps give a voice to traumatized individuals and populations. Hence, her theory of trauma is a ringing endorsement of the testimonial power of literature. Caruth builds that theory on the work of prominent contemporary psychologists and psychiatrists, most prominently Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk. In the mid-nineties, few clinicians were so influential in the field of trauma studies as this pair, and their work directly supports Caruth's claims that trauma is amnesic and unspeakable. Because she constructed her critical edifice on a scientific foundation, her theory has long been resistant to critique, and this resistance contributes to her system's enduring use value. However, newer clinical studies of the psychology of trauma have challenged the theories on which Caruth relies. In 2003, Harvard's Richard McNally released Remembering Trauma, a review of new research that has been widely viewed as a shot over the bow of the trauma studies establishment--and that is now essential reading for specialists. In it, McNally summarizes dozens of new studies--both his own and others'--that challenge some of the field's sacred truths. Though his research is exhaustive, his central arguments are quickly summarized: traumatic amnesia is a myth, and while victims may choose not to speak of their traumas, there is little evidence that they cannot. While its importance for the field of psychology is crucial, McNally's research also lays the groundwork for a critique of Caruth's literary trauma theory. For McNally, unlike for Caruth, trauma is memorable and describable, and his... Language: en

Storyworld Possible Selves and the Phenomenon of Narrative Immersion: Testing a New Theoretical Construct

Abstract: Something mystifying about narrative engagement, be it with novels, plays, video games, or films, is that it does not work in the same way for any two readers, audience members, or players. Each of us undergoes the narrative experience as a personally relevant enterprise that differs from individual to individual. Why do some readers find certain narratives extraordinarily relevant, while others feel indifferent about them? Why do readers find great pleasure in a narrative that years before they discarded unfinished? Or, conversely, why do people sometimes wonder at the features of a past self who could find pleasure and self-transformative potential in a narrative that their present self cannot feel carried away by at all? These are some of the questions that my article sets out to answer. Recent contributions by the cognitive sciences to narrative theory, such as possible worlds theory, deictic shift theory, and neuro-psychological research into empathic responses, have paved the way for fresh approaches to the long-pursued issue of reader involvement in the narrative experience. This paper will discuss how, by combining these cognitive milestones with blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner), it may be possible to move one step forward in our understanding of the dynamics whereby individual narrative experiencers project themselves into storyworlds, a move necessary for literary appreciation and artistically motivated self-transformation. Immersion is an intuitively accurate description for what is required in narrative appreciation. The most extensively used metaphors expressing this phenomenon match narrative engagement with being “transported” or “carried away”—the READ-

The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese

Abstract: This conversation began at MLA in 2012 when we recognized that cognitive approaches to literature and disability studies, two rapidly and independently developing fields, must start talking to one another. The subject is autism: how it has been divergently understood and deployed and how it can be convergently understood and deployed. Kept apart, the two fields seem vulnerable to caricature. The former sometimes applies scientific and medical insights uncritically (such as the assertion that autistics have no theory of mind and, thus, cannot read fiction); the latter sometimes advances a completely social-constructionist understanding of physiological distinction (as if stigma were the entire story of alternative embodiment). Scholars in cognitive approaches to literature need the insights of disability studies to think about mind, narrative, and agency in neurodiverse ways; scholars in disability studies need the insights of cognitive approaches to literature to give the concept of neurodiversity,

The Problem of Fictionality and Factuality in Lyric Poetry

Abstract: The term “fictional”—as logically opposed to “factual”—normally refers to “the species of literature which is concerned with the narration of imaginary events and the portraiture of imaginary characters,”1 comprising novels, short stories, novellas, and also—by implication—dramas and films. Applying the terms fictionality and factuality to lyric poetry is uncommon and usually considered inappropriate or irrelevant. But implicitly most poetological concepts by poets, critics, or theorists do in fact contain statements that opt either for the fictional or the factual status of poems, without using these terms. However, explicitly applying these terms to lyric poems is apt to highlight specific and distinctive features and functions of poetry. Comparing the poetic genre in this respect with the other two genres can be justified by the observation that, like fiction and drama, poetry in principle also features narrative elements, albeit with significant differences. Poems contain narrative sequences predominantly of a mental kind such as thoughts, perceptions, emotions, recollections, imaginings, or generally experiences, and they present them typically in an abbreviated, condensed, compact form, as micro-narratives so to speak, relying on the narrative competence and world-knowledge of readers to fill in gaps and provide missing links.

Narrative in Poetry: A Problem of Narrative Theory

Abstract: In “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry” Brian McHale has proposed correcting contemporary narrative theory’s near-silence about poetry with a research program aimed at a comprehensive theory of poetic narrative. Accepting narratology’s theoretical understanding of “narrativity” as his starting point, and conceptualizing “narrative in poetry” as a combination of pure narrativity (narrative-withoutpoetry) and pure “poeticity” (poetry-without-narrative), McHale seeks out a theory of “poeticity” to complement “narrativity,” and finds it in Rachel DuPlessis’s idea that the constitutively dominant feature of poetry is “segmentivity”: “[Poetry] is the kind of writing that is articulated in sequenced, gapped lines and whose meanings are created by occurring in bounded units . . . operating in relation to . . . pause or silence” (DuPlessis 51; McHale 14–15). Segmentivity stands in sharp contrast to the progressive sequencing that is supposedly the dominant feature of narrative, and McHale proposes that when poetry and narrative combine in “narrative in poetry,” meaning is generated by the need to bridge the interruptions of narrative continuity imposed by poetic form (McHale 16–18).

Walter Besant's Democratic Bildungsroman

Abstract: In an 1888 article titled “Two Philanthropic Novelists,” Edith Sichel identifies Walter Besant’s all Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) as a specimen of a new genre of fiction: “We have had the Historical Romance, the Mystic Romance, the Social Romance, the Psychological Romance; it has remained for the present day to give us the Philanthropic Romance . . . [Though Dickens and Gaskell] described the poorer classes with master-pens, Dickens had little or no purpose of their mental improvement. ‘Oliver Twist’ was certainly not written to induce reform among thieves, [and Gaskell proposed] purely local and temporary answers to purely local and temporary questions” (506). These new “philanthropic romances,” she argues, are written with a wider aim. Besant advocates for “a [form of] modern asceticism [which] differs from medieval asceticism, in so far as it takes for its end the redemption of humanity instead of personal salvation” (506). Sichel suggests that Besant shows the ways in which interiority disconnects people from one another, even those living in a city:

In the Waiting Room: Narrative in the Autobiographical Lyric Poem, Or Beginning to Think about Lyric Poetry with Narratology

Abstract: Autobiographical lyric poetry seems to present three main issues for theorists of lyric and narrative: (1) how do lyricality and narrativity relate in such poems, and how does this relation relate to poetic voice; (2) where do these poems situate themselves in the fiction/nonfiction divide; and (3) how do the specifically poetic devices contribute to their signification?1 There are no one-size-fits-all answers, but the three issues, and their solutions, seem to be interrelated, and the consequences of these positions will become evident in the analysis of autobiographical lyric poems, among which I will place two—“In the Waiting Room” by Elizabeth Bishop and “Autobiography” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti—at the fore in a moment. First, however, I will outline a number of solutions and discuss the theoretical implications of these in more detail. First, we can say that typically autobiographical lyric poetry has some roots in events in the poet’s life, but the rendering of those events in poetic lyric transforms them in a few ways: (a) narrativity gets reduced and lyricality gets emphasized (otherwise we have autobiographical narrative poetry); (b) the question who speaks? becomes pertinent at the same time as this question is distorted by the lyrical transformation; and (c) the reader’s conceivable expectation of narrativity (and

Two Trajectories of Reader Response in Narrative Poetry: Roses and Risings in Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes"

Abstract: In contemporary narrative theory there is no single theory that we label reader response criticism, but some prominent approaches (e.g., rhetorical and cognitive ones) place an emphasis on the response of readers. Theories engaging with reader response, however, have rarely dealt with narratives in verse, and the few exceptions that exist (e.g., James Phelan’s reading of Robert Frost’s “Home Burial,” which focuses on ethical issues in lyrical narratives) do not engage with the poetic features or the poeticity of the narrative and their potential influence on reader response. The existing reader response criticism foregrounds cognitive, affective, or ethical concerns, but poeticity in itself is largely neglected. Wolfgang Iser’s theory of reader response employs the metaphor of a wandering viewpoint to describe the reader’s processing of the narrative. Because “the whole text can never be perceived at any one time” (acts 108), the reader’s engagement with the text is “wandering,” that is, her initial assessments of what has happened and her expectations about what will happen are modified by further elaborations as the text is being processed (experienced from the inside as a synthesis of reader and text) from

Gerald Prince and the Fascination of What Doesn't Happen

Abstract: The focus on the concept of narrativity in Gerald Prince’s work demonstrates a keen interest in uncovering the ways by which a narrative can interest or fascinate the reader. Studying narrativity involves the investigation of the relative effectiveness or tellability of particular narratives, or what Prince has also called “narratability” (“Narrativehood” 23). In the minimal narratives he developed to explore and compare individual narratives, he is like a narrative engineer: testing different models, looking at the complex mechanisms of narrative and inquiring how—and how well—they work, and thereby pinpointing their mechanisms more sharply. One of my favorites among these groups of minimal narratives, which never fails to provoke smiles and laughter of recognition and insight when used in the classroom, is the contrast between the mechanical “the cat sat on the mat” and the potentially explosive “the cat sat on the dog’s mat” (Narratology 147). This example never fails to alert students’ minds to two core aspects of narrativity and tellability: first, that conflict is central to interesting narrative, and second, that anticipation of future events fuels readerly interest. One of the remarkable and beneficial strengths of Gerald Prince’s gift to narrative studies is his ability to provoke thought on narrative in ways that open up possible

Even the Title: On the State of Narrative Theory Today

Abstract: This essay considers the state of narrative theory today, giving particular attention to the rhetorical figure of aposiopesis (the unfinished sentence) and mind-reading or telepathy. Detailed readings of Joseph Conrad, Elizabeth Bowen and Jon McGregor interweave with a critical assessment of the work if a number of contemporary narrative theorists, including Jonathan Culler, Brian Richardson and Lisa Zunshine.

Case Study: Writing Unreliable Narrator Will Martin

Abstract: This paper analyzes the imaginative journey taken when creating an unreliable narrator for my novella, “Will Martin” (2011). It charts the interplay between the theoretical and historical research and the writing of several drafts. “Will Martin” is based on the eighteenth-century sailing trip taken by explorers Matthew Flinders, George Bass, and Bass’s servant, William Martin, along the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, in the tom Thumb. Colonial boat-builder Daniel Paine writes in his journal that “the Boat not being above twelve feet long [was] a small Boat to Coast in” (39). Shortly after setting off, the explorers discover their water is contaminated. They have great difficulty landing their boat and struggle to find fresh drinking water. On the fourth day, thirsty and suffering from sunburn, they trade goods with two Koori men. Later, these two Kooris guide them to a stream (Flinders names it Canoe Rivulet) near Lake Illawarra. There they meet with local Kooris, but after filling their water barrel, the Europeans become frightened and retreat, although not without firing off a shot.

Form and Generic Interrelation in the Romantic Period: Walter Scott's Poetic Influence on Jane Austen

Abstract: Fanny Price, the ostensible protagonist of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), is unique in the tradition of Austenian main characters, in that she begins the novel in a psychological posture that seems designed to avoid both being “main,” and being a “character.” When she first arrives at Mansfield Park as a very young girl, for example, the narrator describes her as such: “Afraid of everybody, ashamed of herself, and longing for the home she had left, she knew not how to look up, and could scarcely speak to be heard, or without crying” (11). After a week of crying herself to sleep every night, and trying at all costs not to attract any form of attention, she is finally joined by her kind-hearted cousin Edmund, who attempts to console her. But when he tries to persuade her to “speak openly” about her unhappiness, “for a long while no answer could be obtained beyond a ‘no, no—not at all—no, thank you’” (12). When she does eventually speak to him, however, the way that her speech is represented suggests that the narrator is sympathetic with Fanny’s desire to avoid direct observation, and intentionally does what she can to protect her from it:

A Prince for All Seasons, With Notes Toward the Delineation of a New Yorker Narratee

Abstract: Gerald Prince does not know this, but he is often in my company. When I was daunted by preparing for an MLA panel on the short story, I was rescued by Prince’s “The Long and the Short of It,” which in just five pages lays out key issues for considering short fiction in narratological terms. When I taught Salman Rushdie in a narrative theory course, Prince’s pioneering “On a Postcolonial Narratology” became my guide. And when I was working out my concept of “negative plotting,” his notion of the “disnarrated” became a crucial point of contrast. Prince dropped by more recently when I first read “Zusya on the Roof,” a short story by Nicole Krauss that led to the metonymic misprision in my title (for as Prince would rightly remind me, the New Yorker, being no narrative, cannot in itself have a narratee). Before I address that misprision, though, I want to explain why Prince is my narratological man of all seasons—no misprision—and to highlight the approach to context through text that seems to me a hallmark of his method as it has developed in the wake of the “postclassical” turn.

To Be Continued: The Story of Short Story Theory and Other Narrative Theory

Abstract: The May 2012 special issue of Narrative provides preliminary answers to a question that seems to have gone unasked for far too long: what is the relationship between short story theory and other narrative theory?1 With narrative theory embracing and being embraced by fields as diverse as medicine and law, and at the same time engaging with a much broader corpus of narrative “texts,” it has long puzzled me that no work has been published on the relationship between narrative theory in general and theory dedicated to a genre whose very name contains a synonym for the term “narrative”: the short story. The May 2012 issue of Narrative thus makes an important and overdue intervention. Before responding to specific aspects of this intervention, I will pose some questions that probe the reasons for short story theorists’ and other narrative theorists’ extended silence on this issue. Of short story theorists, I ask: If all short stories are narratives, why has short story theory not availed itself of the tools and methodologies of narrative theory in general in a more sustained, systematic, and widespread way? Why are insights about particular short stories typically only connected to insights about the short story in general as opposed to the broader class of narratives in which the short story surely participates? Are there legitimate reasons, rooted in form, content, or some other aspect, to treat the short story as a special kind of narrative, fully or partially distinct from other kinds, in ways that qualify or limit the applicability of narrative theory’s

Sequence and Lyric Narrative in Auden and Isherwood's Journey to a War

Abstract: but are in retrospect better described by alterity. Its structural and rhetorical casuistries demand that we compare the rhetorical purposes of its sections to one another. Because the promise of coherence is only rescinded at the end of the book, the alternative chronologies of each of the different generic subsections can fruitfully be compared (there is no ultimate reason to prefer Auden’s sonnet sequence to Isherwood’s “Travel-Diary,” although many critics do). Moreover, my reading suggests that a limit-case like Journey to a War, composed of instantaneous lyrical fragments, can further expand current rhetorical theories of narrative within poetry and of lyric-narrative progression in particular. By all accounts made by real readers (contemporary reviews, Auden’s own later reassessment, Auden’s late-career embarrassment, etc.), judgment of the authors and their encounters occurs throughout the text as well as via retrospective assessment of the project. Tracking those judgments as they occur, and relating them to the text’s peculiar habit of eliciting hostile reactions to its mission, is integral to understanding the book’s structure and the rhetoric of its aspirations. Only once we recognize the weak narrativity of Journey to a War and modify our current understanding of how judgments drive readerly progression through lyricnarrative hybrids, can we begin to theorize its humane attempt to intervene in the Sino-Japanese conflict. Lyric Instantaneity and Montage Poetry criticism is at best ill-equipped to discuss poetic narrative; critics forfend talk of story by focusing largely on characterization, insisting that lyric speakers are utterly distinct from narrators, and that if those speakers accidentally narrate events, any consideration of their causal association should be subsumed to the greater understanding their rhetorical relation reveals about the speaker. As a genre, lyric is best known for the suggestion of intimacy between poet and audience. That intimacy has long been understood as the convention of lyric instantaneity—that no time passes over the course of a lyric, regardless of its length. Literary glossaries emphasize the ephemerality of the form, creating a context through which to read any slightly-longer-than-instantaneous utterance as if it transpired within an instant. A typical lyric, like “Yesterday” by the Beatles, may contain descriptions of prior events, but contains no narrative to speak of: the story behind Paul’s breakup with his unspecified paramour may be inferred, but within the “today” of the song’s recording, the persona is more concerned with bemoaning the fact that “she had to go” than finding out why (the lament that “she wouldn’t say” indicates his frustration with his beloved’s intransigence rather than prompting the reader to guess at her reasons for rejecting him). “Yesterday” circles repetitively around a single evocation of sadness and loss, and never progresses beyond it (indeed, why should it?); through several refrains, our acquaintance with his sullen loneliness becomes more and more profound. Time passes as one reads a lyric, but not within the world it conveys; any events mentioned are related retrospectively, because action is understood to exist outside of, or beyond the limited scope of, or superfluously beneath the interests of the lyric poem.

Unremembered Plots: Catachresis and Narrativity in Lucille Clifton's "why some people be mad at me sometimes" and Countee Cullen's "Heritage"

Abstract: “There is this difference between a story and a poem,” Shelley writes in “A Defense of Poetry”: “a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect.” But a poem is “the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature” (485). Poetry, in other words, is a purer form of art than narrative because it abjures natural time. Poetry distills and amplifies what it represents, even as it elevates it to the stillness of the eternal. Shelley’s definition, if not his hierarchy, accords closely with the contemporary operative distinction between narrative and poetry (or at least lyric). In a definition referenced by James Phelan to represent a consensus,1 Susan Stanford Friedman writes that while “Narrative is understood to be a mode that foregrounds a sequence

Neoliberalism, Magical Thinking, and Silver Linings Playbook

Abstract: A word-of-mouth hit in 2012, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook has been popularly discussed as successfully targeting an adult audience under-served in contemporary Hollywood, as “authentically” reflecting the parenting challenges of its star and director, and as portraying a “modern” romance about a sympathetic, deeply damaged protagonist couple.1 Less frequently recognized is how Silver Linings Playbook consolidates forms of social damage arising in neoliberal societies. Accordingly, we read the film as reflecting a postfeminist, post-recession narrative of social, familial, and economic pressures, and exposing the effect of those pressures on the struggle for intimacy in the twenty-first century. SLP engages a set of cultural narratives that produce a post-recession subject who restores his or her sense of self by re-narrating gender and family relationships. This re-narration reflects fictional control over psychological circumstances in order to compensate for uncontrollable material conditions. Specifically, the film, through a fantasy maneuver, invokes the compulsive nature of the current financial system in order to provide salvation for disenfranchised subjects by cathecting them to a flawed financialism.

The Phonetic and Spatial Effects of Discourse in Poetic Narratives: The Case of Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci"

Abstract: The vast majority of recent narratological analyses of poetry focus on the ways in which the conventions of lyric, epic, and narrative intersect in individual poems.1 Although these studies are useful for explaining how these different genres work together or against one another, they do not help identify how narratives function differently when communicated through the medium of verse rather than prose. In this paper, I offer an alternative approach, one that expands on the work of several scholars, namely Barbara MacMahon, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, John Shoptaw, Brian McHale, and Adrian Pilkington. By applying recent studies in relevance theory, phonetics, and oculomotor functioning to John Keats’s ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1820), I show how and why poetic devices play an essential role in the reader’s engagement with the events of a poetic narrative. More precisely, I demonstrate how phonetic and spatial forms of poetic segmentation interact with narrative forms of segmentation to generate meaning in a dynamic interplay between the reader and the text. Ultimately, my analysis reveals that we need to think more critically about the precise ways in which discourse signifies in cases of narrative poetry.

Isaac's Blindness: A Case of Narrative Deficiency

Abstract: In the stories of Isaac’s deception by Jacob and of Samson’s betrayal by Delilah, the central character makes a decision that seems unaccountable. Isaac is immediately and persistently suspicious of the son who presents himself as Esau, so much so that we may be surprised that he gives him Esau’s blessing anyway. Samson, even more clearly, knows that Delilah is going to betray him, but nonetheless tells her his secret. In both cases, an interpretive comment by the narrator attempts to explain the odd behavior—but in both cases, the explanation is, I will argue, incomplete or unsatisfactory. Isaac, we are told, was fooled. This is no help, since the problem is that his suspicions seem to suggest that he was not fooled. Samson, the narrator explains, was worn down by nagging, but this is simply unconvincing given his story to that point and in any case seems a very weak reason for him to effectively throw away his life. If the reasons given for the unexpected action are not satisfactory, what reasons might be? And if there are better reasons, why would the narrator give us weaker ones? These questions raise the possibility that the biblical narrator could be mistaken about the motives of a story’s protagonist. Traditional interpretation of the Bible holds that the ultimate source of the text is God, that the human author has been provided with the stories by God, and thus that the narrator should be regarded as omniscient. It would therefore make no sense to suggest that the narrator could be mistaken about anything. The belief in divine inspiration is very old, but has little support in the text itself. Moses is traditionally regarded as the author—or as God’s amanuensis—of the

Thinking Some More about Narrative in Poetry: A Brief Reply to Bruce Heiden

Abstract: My friend and colleague Bruce Heiden and I disagree on fewer matters than he seems to think we do, or in any case our respective positions can often be reconciled; but where we do genuinely disagree, we seem to disagree profoundly. Heiden thinks that analyzing verse in terms of the interruptions that lineation, stanza breaks, etc., introduce in the flow of language—as I propose to do in “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry”—is misguided. In his view, versification produces not interruption but combination and continuity: “phrases are modules of combination, and phrase-boundaries are not ‘breaks’ but junctures where phrases connect. . . . Verses are rotations, and every end is another beginning.” I concede that I favored the model of interruption in describing the segmentivity of verse precisely because it is somewhat counterintuitive, and so potentially (I hoped) illuminat-

Gerald Prince and Narrative Studies

Abstract: By granting Gerald Prince the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award, the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) made a splendid choice. Prince was one of the first American literary scholars to promote a rigorous structural theory of narrative and create the fundamental tools for such a theory. One of the most striking features of Gerald Prince’s work is its unswerving commitment to conceptual and stylistic clarity. Stylistic, first: all Prince’s books and articles—from his a Grammar of Stories: an introduction, published in 1973 at the beginning of structuralism’s rise in American literary studies, to his later Guide du roman de langue française (1901–1950), published in 2002, an encyclopedic repertory of more than 450 novels published in French during the first half of the twentieth century—are couched in a limpid, luminous language, always reader-friendly whether the topic is rather abstract, as in the Grammar of Stories, or, on the contrary, the work clearly espouses the most concrete features of the literary phenomena it analyzes. Conceptually, next: Prince is a master of clear thinking because he always targets what is genuinely essential in the literary issues he examines. Quite remarkably, for him what is really essential, conspicuously so, is always what attracts and holds our

The Work of Ambiguity: Writerly and Readerly Labor in Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries

Abstract: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995, Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries has fascinated and frustrated critics of the novel for nearly twenty years. The fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill—which includes a detailed family tree as well as, in the original edition, an eight-page section of “family” photographs—Shields’s novel in its very form blurs the lines between truth and falsehood, documentation and invention; it raises productive questions about the empowering possibilities of women’s autobiography while, at the same time, cutting those questions short in its status as fiction. And though it is deceptively linear in structure and chronology, following Daisy’s life from birth to death, The Stone Diaries is also disrupted by major formal shifts: the text oscillates from straightforward recounting of events, to collections of letters, to sections listing the various “Things People Had to Say” and multiple “Theories” about Daisy’s actions, to the final chapter’s disintegration into lists and frag-