Showing papers in "Narrative in 2015"
TL;DR: For example, at the end of his speech at the 2013 correspondents' dinner, Obama praised the journalists who had covered the recent terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon for their exemplary work, emphasizing the importance of thorough, deep-digging journalism that "painstakingly puts the pieces together" and "verifies facts" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: President Barack Obama, at the end of his speech at the April 28, 2013, correspondents’ dinner, praised the journalists who had covered the recent terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon for their exemplary work, emphasizing the importance of thorough, deep-digging journalism that “painstakingly puts the pieces together” and “verifies facts” (“Watch: President Obama” 19:36–19:52). Just a few minutes earlier, however, Obama had jokingly treated several issues in a way that played fast and loose with verified facts. Among other jests, he an-
109 citations
TL;DR: The authors appropriates and extends Gerard Genette's delineation of paratext in analyses of fan fiction, highlighting media specificity, authoring functions, and altered reading habits following n...
Abstract: The article appropriates and extends Gerard Genette’s delineation of paratext in analyses of fan fiction, highlighting media specificity, authoring functions, and altered reading habits following n ...
26 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue for a general approach to fictionality across all narratives, fictional and non-fictional, and argue that the theoretical relation between fictionality and narrativity should be explored.
Abstract: It is well known that classical narratology derived its categories from narratives of prose fiction. And it is largely accepted that to fully address the phenomenon of narrative, narratology needs also to account not only for narrative fiction across media, but for non-fictional narratives, from conversational storytelling to political rhetoric. A consequence of this transmedial, interdisciplinary expansion of the field is the realization that narratologists have tended to take fiction itself for granted and thus need to engage with the concept of fictionality as much as the concept of narrativity. On the one hand, we have calls for a fiction-specific approach to narrative, which Dorrit Cohn once suggested could be called fictionology (“Signposts” 110).1 On the other hand, we have calls for a general approach to fictionality across all narratives, fictional and non-fictional. At stake here is the broader question of the theoretical relation between fictionality and narrativity in the wake of the narrative turn across the humanities and social sciences. Fictionality as a nominal field of study emerged in the 1970s and 1980s within philosophy of language and logic rather than literary theory, and was explicitly
23 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines how Renaissance notions of the mind and the subject, as constrained and constituted by social means, are narrated and staged in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and focuses on the linked concepts that a multiplicity of agents can operate within a single human being, and conversely that multiple individuals can form a cognitive unit.
Abstract: This paper examines how Renaissance notions of the mind and the subject, as constrained and constituted by social means, are narrated and staged in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This analysis is supplemented by a few references to Montaigne’s essays, whose influence on Shakespeare and concern with the nature of the mind and self are long established (Ellrodt). To further ground the case, it begins with two brief overviews: firstly, on narratological approaches to drama and their particular relevance to Renaissance drama, and secondly, on various current approaches to social cognition. I focus on the linked concepts that a multiplicity of agents can operate within a single human being, and conversely that multiple individuals can form a cognitive unit. These related notions of the mind as social, both in Renaissance fictional and factual narratives and in current cognitive science, are understood to be due to human psychophysiological capacities. These capacities both afford and require boundaries and flow between the constituent parts of the self, both as regards those within skull or skin, and as regards those in the world. As I want to highlight the issue of divisions, as well as sharing, between individuals and within an individual I have adopted the
22 citations
TL;DR: In The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, the 16th century Spanish mystic includes a brief but curious record of her response to reading another important spiritual autobiography written some eleven hundred years prior: Saint Augustine's Confessions as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, the 16th century Spanish mystic includes a brief but curious record of her response to reading another important spiritual autobiography written some eleven hundred years prior: Saint Augustine’s Confessions. In her ninth chapter, Teresa describes a deeply emotional and empathetic reaction to Augustine’s narrative of his conversion, his experience of hearing an unseen child’s voice in a garden speaking the words “take it and read, take it and read” (Augustine 177). Understanding this voice as a sign, Augustine describes opening the Epistles of Saint Paul at random and finding words urging their reader to convert to Christianity. “All the darkness of doubt was dispelled,” Augustine writes (178). Prior to this experience and this scene in his Confessions, Augustine struggled with a conflict between his desire to embrace Christianity and his continued craving for “worldly” ambitions and experiences. At just this moment, Augustine describes the conflict as evaporating from him. Reading his Confessions, Teresa seems to experience what Augustine experienced; through his narrative telling, she feels what he felt with him. “When I began to read the Confessions,” she writes, “ I seemed to see myself portrayed there, and I began to commend myself frequently to that glorious Saint. When I came to the tale of his conversion, and read how he heard the voice in the garden, it seemed exactly as if the Lord had spoken to me. So I felt in my heart. For some time I was dissolved in
16 citations
TL;DR: The first three-quarters of D. H. Lawrence's "Things" (1928) and two chapters of Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963, see Fludernik 224-25); Georges Perec's Les Choses (1965) and Maxine Swann's Flower Children (2007) as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The representation of social minds can be done in many ways, including the familiar group perspective in nineteenth century fiction that Alan Palmer has documented so thoroughly. In many cases, however, authors feel a need to present collective experience in an unusual or innovative form. This has led to the rise of first-person plural or “we” narratives, prominent examples of which can be found throughout the twentieth century, as I have discussed at some length in Unnatural voices (37–60). “We” narration easily slides into distortions of ordinary usage and readily becomes nonrealistic or what I have called “unnatural,” as we will see in the accounts below. “They” narration, by contrast, is much more rare; it is found in only a few works, such as the first three-quarters of D. H. Lawrence’s “Things” (1928); two chapters of Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963, see Fludernik 224–25); Georges Perec’s Les Choses (1965), and two chapters of Maxine Swann’s Flower Children (2007). “They” narration rarely loses its basis in realism, though as such a narration continues it seems odder and odder that the narrator doesn’t refer to the characters individually; in the case of D. H. Lawrence, the shift from an insistent “they” reference to the more conventional
15 citations
14 citations
TL;DR: The formation of a social mind is discussed in this article, where the authors start from the premise that the techniques for representing the agents of shared experience (social minds, meaning groups of various sizes, shapes, and modalities)constitute intra-narrative phenomena which, despite their individual selves gathered into something very close to a single presence, are not singular protagonists.
Abstract: Narratives detail the multifarious fortunes of individuals entangled in social scenarios. The emphasis in scholarly expeditions has overwhelmingly been on the first part of this equation, single protagonists. The end of the passage above, however, highlights the formation of a social mind: “ . . . together their individual selves gathered into something very close to a single presence.” Such collective experience, as represented in textual narrative, is the overarching object of study for this special issue. My co-editor, Eva von Contzen, and I start from the premise that the techniques for representing the agents of shared experience—social minds, meaning groups of various sizes, shapes, and modalities—constitute intra-narrative phenomena which, despite
11 citations
11 citations
TL;DR: The authors compare factual and fictional we-narrative with regard to the connections between the represented minds included under the we, as well as the ideological ramifications of the depicted transpersonal experiences.
Abstract: This paper deals with factual and fictional we-narratives of the twentieth century. Like Amit Marcus, I refer not only to narratives told wholly or mostly in the firstperson plural, but also to “narratives in which there are thematically significant shifts from ‘we’ to other pronouns and vice versa” (“We Are You” 2). The first-person plural pronoun always refers to two or more protagonists to represent collective or otherwise shared experiences. Multiple agents are subsumed under the heading of shared world views, assumptions, intentions, or thought processes. Either the speaker speaks for himor herself and somebody else or we listen to a collective voice, which consists of several speakers at the same time. Also, the “we” may refer to different groups during the course of a narrative. In this paper, I compare factual and fictional we-narratives with regard to the connections between the represented minds included under the “we,” as well as the ideological ramifications of the depicted transpersonal experiences. I distinguish between different types of we-narratives, while formulating connections between the use of “we” and ideological purposes.2 I do not posit an intrinsic connection between
10 citations
TL;DR: Home as discussed by the authors is a one-man game where players wake up in a deserted house, wondering how they ended up there, and soon stumble on a dead body lying on the floor.
Abstract: You wake up in a deserted house, wondering how you ended up there, and soon stumble on a dead body lying on the floor. As you explore the house, you discover a gun, newspaper clippings, a list of names—all clues pointing to a serial killer’s scheme to murder several women in the neighboring town. You find out that your wife’s name, Rachel, is on the list too. As you rush home to protect her, you run into a number of clues—a credit card, a driver’s license—suggesting that you have been there before, but you still don’t remember anything. Somehow you manage to find your way through a dark forest and an abandoned factory. When, finally, you reach home, you can choose whether your wife has already left for an unknown destination, or whether she’s dead, her corpse hidden behind a thin divider wall in the basement. You can also choose whether you are the murderer, or whether someone else killed your wife. Finally, you can choose whether the previous events were just a figment of your imagination, or whether they actually happened. No matter what you decide, the story won’t make much sense. This is a brief and somewhat partial summary of Benjamin Rivers’s 2012 adventure videogame Home.2 A one-man creation in a medium where most projects involve dozens of developers, Rivers’s game is as technically simple as it is effective in creating a disturbing atmosphere while challenging the player’s expectations
TL;DR: In the TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm, celebrities play fictionalized versions of themselves in movies, TV series, commercials, and campaigns has become a widespread media cultural phenomenon as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Celebrities playing fictionalized versions of themselves in movies, TV series, commercials, and campaigns has become a widespread media cultural phenomenon. John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich. Julia Roberts in Oceans 12. Emma Watson and Rihanna in This Is the End. Kate Winslet, Ben Stiller, Daniel Radcliffe and others in Extras, and numerous American celebrities in The Larry Sanders Show. George Clooney in commercials for Nespresso, Madonna for BMW, and Brad Pitt for Heineken. Even President Barack Obama used this strategy at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2013, where he starred as Daniel Day-Lewis playing Obama in the spoof follow-up for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Perhaps one of the most conspicuous and remarkable platforms for this kind of self-acting is the American TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–present). In the show, the famous Seinfeld-creator Larry David stars as the famous Seinfeld-creator Larry David. He has the same name, the same job, and the same friends that he has in real life. A number of American celebrities, such as Richard Lewis, Ted Danson, Diane Keaton, Martin Scorsese, Anne Bancroft, Meg Ryan, and the entire cast of Seinfeld co-star in the show where they, like Larry David, seemingly act as themselves. In
TL;DR: The authors investigates the history of narrative features such as focalization, description and metalepsis as well as into the metamorphoses of genres, and argues that a synchronic focus is part of the discipline's structuralist inheritance and has been adopted by some of the new narratologies that emerged in the last two decades.
Abstract: It has become clear only in recent years to what extent narratology can benefit from historical analysis. A synchronic focus is part of the discipline’s structuralist inheritance and has been readily adopted by some of the new narratologies that emerged in the last two decades. However, narrative forms and functions change over time. It is worth inquiring into the history of such narrative features as focalization, description and metalepsis as well as into the metamorphoses of genres. Monika Fludernik’s programmatic investigation of scene shifts provides a splendid example (“Diachronization”). In Middle English prose and verse narrative, a shift of scene is frequently introduced by such formula as “we now leave X and Y and turn to A and B, who were . . .” Such markers were made superfluous by the introduction of chapters. They nonetheless survived and can still be found in the modern novel, albeit with a new function: here, the metalepsis is used for ironic and parodic purposes. What was originally a structuring device has become an instrument of metafictional play. Historical analysis not only alerts us to the transformations narrative features undergo, it can also help us reconsider the theory of narrative. In this essay, I shall
TL;DR: The operative paradox of realism as mentioned in this paper is defined as the sense that the world experienced by characters is open-ended and contingent, where the particular chains of cause-and-effect that comprise the novel's plot appear as the consequence of characters' choices.
Abstract: How does the novelist preserve the illusion of her characters’ autonomy while simultaneously determining what happens to them in her invented plot? Or, put differently, how does a novelist such as George Eliot make us momentarily forget that her characters’ apparently lifelike agency is directly a result of her authorial construction? These questions point to the broader problem of how fictional texts engage their readers, and more specifically, how these texts sustain their readers’ belief in the autonomy of the fictive world. At the root of these questions lies a paradox: for the reader, consuming fiction requires a double consciousness, one that recognizes narrative constructs (such as characters) as fictional and yet remains deeply invested in their development. For the novelist, however, the representation of characters as developing (and hence lifelike) needs to proceed within the requirements of her narrative design. I refer to this tension as the operative paradox of realism: the world experienced by characters is open-ended and contingent, where the particular chains of cause-and-effect that comprise the novel’s plot appear as the consequence of characters’ choices. At the same time, however, readers are aware that the novel is a fiction written by an author, and as such, the characters’ seeming open-endedness and agency are merely apparent, since the author has already determined how those chains-of-events will unfold. The realist effect depends upon the reader simultane-
TL;DR: The authors argue that Bartleby is a thoroughly alien intruder into the world of Melville's narrating lawyer, pushing the latter to a moral and epistemological crisis by evading or indeed destroying the basic heuristics by which the narrator has hitherto made sense of the world.
Abstract: Over the past century, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” has generated a wild proliferation of critical interpretations, drawing upon theoretical lineages ranging from continental philosophy to American historicism and presenting the story as anything from a Marxist fable to a psychoanalytic confession.1 Behind these diverse arguments, though, rests a single shared presupposition: Bartleby is a thoroughly alien intruder into the world of Melville’s narrating lawyer, pushing the latter to a moral and epistemological crisis by evading or indeed destroying the basic heuristics by which the narrator has hitherto made sense of the world. Within the continental tradition, such heuristics have typically been presented as linguistic (as in Deleuze’s characterization of Bartleby as a “pure outsider” whose speech refuses any shared syntax) or metaphysical (Agamben’s appropriation of the scrivener as an avatar of “pure potentiality”)—not so much specific and adaptive strategies of interpretation as conditions of sense-making itself, whose contours and limitations Bartleby exposes by existing stubbornly beyond them. Yet even recent efforts within cultural studies and cognitive narratology to define the lawyer’s interpretive paradigms as psychologically localized and historically
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider passages such as the following, where an omniscient narrator often recounts what happened in the absence of any other witnesses, in the presence of no other witnesses.
Abstract: From a “traditional” narratological point of view, such texts as chapter one of Thomas Hardy’s The return of the Native and part two of Virginia Woolf ’s to the Lighthouse would be categorized as narratives that frequently deploy extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narration with zero focalization, since in each case an omniscient narrator often recounts what happened in the absence of any other witnesses. The adequacy of that categorization, however, becomes questionable once we consider passages such as the following:
TL;DR: In one of my late revisions for The Most Dangerous Book, my editor wrote a note in the margin of my introduction that encapsulated the challenge of writing for scholars and general readers simultaneously: “Take a beat here to briefly establish what Ulysses means to modernism.” It remains the most difficult editorial suggestion I’ve ever received, for it was asking me to distill, in a few sentences, the complexity of a relationship that has consumed many scholars' careers, and to do so without reducing that complexity to meaninglessness as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In one of my late revisions for The Most Dangerous Book, my editor wrote a note in the margin of my introduction that encapsulates the challenge of writing for scholars and general readers simultaneously: “Take a beat here to briefly establish what Ulysses means to modernism.” It remains the most difficult editorial suggestion I’ve ever received, for it was asking me to distill, in a few sentences, the complexity of a relationship that has consumed many scholars’ careers, and to do so without reducing that complexity to meaninglessness. In the margins of every page of the so-called “crossover” book, there is a tug of war between scholars on one side who want to know how the details of a censorship case shaped transatlantic modernism and general readers on the other side who just want to know what modernism is. The text is the rope straining between two readerships. Daniel Schwarz recognizes these competing forces in the midst of his generous praise for my book, and if my narrative offers anything that seems new and indispensable to a scholar as knowledgeable and perceptive as he is, then I can ask for little more. Schwarz instinctively shares the principle underpinning this project: that the “warm fullblooded life” (Ulysses vi. 1006) of literary history—a history that takes seriously such details as Ezra Pound’s letters to Santa Claus and Sylvia Beach’s first glimpse of James Joyce—can be as conceptually rich for the expert as it is narratively rich for the beginner. Pound’s letters to Santa can reveal the underlying tendencies
TL;DR: Palmer as mentioned in this paper proposes a paradigm shift in the analysis of narrative: "traditional" narratological approaches, Palmer claims, have put "undue emphasis" on an internalist perspective on the representation of consciousness in narrative, focusing on private, solitary, and highly verbalized thought.
Abstract: In his study Social Minds in the Novel, Alan Palmer proposes a paradigm shift in the analysis of narrative: “traditional” narratological approaches, Palmer claims, have put “undue emphasis” on an “internalist” perspective on the representation of consciousness in narrative, focusing on “private, solitary, and highly verbalized thought” (39). Palmer, however, stresses the importance of an “externalist” perspective that examines the social nature of fictional thought in the novel and focuses on “socially distributed, situated, or extended cognition” (41). In light of this distinction, Palmer differentiates between intramental (individual or private) thought, and intermental (i.e. joint, group, shared, or collective) thought (ibid.). The entities that are ultimately capable of intermental thought, Palmer labels social minds1. Social minds and intermental thought, finally, he considers “a crucially important component of fictional narrative” (ibid.) that should be “at the center of narrative theory” (42). Palmer’s arguments and ideas have elicited some scholarly opposition and, occasionally, even harsh criticism.2 Specifically, it has been claimed that Palmer does
TL;DR: The authors compare the role of metaphor in framing kinds of social minds in Rousseau's novel Julie (1761) and his treatise The Social Contract and show that metaphor is among our central instruments for conceptualizing and expressing such subjective and abstract matters.
Abstract: Rousseau’s writings seem to call out for analysis in terms of social minds, because he looms so large in the conceptual framing of modern psychosocial dynamics in their primary units, and the narrative framing of them in their primary cultural genres. He did much to invent our ideas of the solitary individual in autobiography, friends and lovers in the sentimental novel, and democratic societies in political philosophy. If narratology needs to address the “formation, development, maintenance, modification, and breakdown of . . . intermental systems” (Palmer 41), and metaphor is among our central instruments for conceptualizing and expressing such subjective and abstract matters, then narratology should get metaphorical. Underlying Rousseau’s revolutionary writings on social minds are multiple models of intermentality, built partly from particular combinations of metaphors. To understand how intermentality is narrated, we need to understand how metaphors are narrated. I develop this perspective by comparing the role of metaphor in framing kinds of social minds in Rousseau’s novel Julie (1761) and his treatise The Social Contract
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the musical aspect of the narrative discourse of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu and foreground the adaptation of a leitmotiv technique, a term that is grounded in a rudimentary familiarity with Wagner's music.
Abstract: . . . and what if music were not resounding throughout Marcel’s1 quest? Unthinkable! literary critics have unanimously concluded ever since his quest began.2 But how is music indispensible for Marcel’s development? Which kind of “profundity” might be grasped “with a Vinteuil”? And how does Marcel’s book reckon with the dependence on this particular medium? Does his literary composition implement musical structures? Considering these questions, the route of the following investigation is clear. First, the discursive architecture of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu must be analyzed. The musical aspect of the narrative discourse that I recognize in the recherche and will foreground involves the adaptation of a leitmotiv technique— a term that, while grounded in a rudimentary familiarity with Wagner’s music