Showing papers in "Narrative in 2018"
TL;DR: This paper examined the critical proposition that common versions of narratology do not provide an accurate description of narrative fiction and analyzed why this critique has mostly been disentangled from narrative fiction.
Abstract: In this article we examine the critical proposition that common versions of narratology do not provide an accurate description of narrative fiction and analyze why this critique has mostly been dis
11 citations
TL;DR: The braided narrative as mentioned in this paper is a subtype of the short story cycle, where multiple narrators tell distinct, sometimes incommensurate, stories, and it is used to deal with the chasm that historical violences carve between social groups.
Abstract: abstract:Many contemporary novels feature multiple narrators who tell distinct, sometimes incommensurate, stories. While this narrative strategy is often viewed as a relic of the short story cycle tradition, I argue that this technique actually constitutes a new subtype of the novel that I call the braided narrative. In braided narratives, novelists plait together different narrative threads, distinct in terms of both narrator and story, to grapple with both the poignant fissure that fractures the most intimate attachments between individuals and the chasm that historical violences carve between social groups. Here, I focus on Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005) and Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves (2008) to detail the way the braided narrative’s formal features facilitate ethical work that requires the recognition of different, often opposing, experiences. By pairing narrative theory with cognitive approaches to literature, especially the psychoanalytic concept of intersubjectivity, I highlight the ethical possibilities of this new genre. Recognizing the nuances of the braided narrative not only allows us, as critics, to see similarities between novels usually read separately, such as Erdrich’s and Krauss’s, but also draws our attention to the way this narrative technique can train us, as readers, in a particular form of ethics—one that requires us to hold different, sometimes conflicting, perspectives in our minds simultaneously.
9 citations
TL;DR: How noise can signal crucial fissures in an unreliable narrator’s story is highlighted and more broadly exemplifies the profits of further merging sound studies with narratology.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:Responding to Ansgar F. Nünning’s oft-neglected call to locate the “clues” indicating unreliable narration, this essay offers a theory of what I call “narrative noise,” a sonic signal of unreliable narration (“Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration” 105). I propose that authors sometimes deploy noise to mark a narrative disturbance, a fracture in a narrator’s seemingly harmonious and coherent story, and I support this claim with a case study of Jane Eyre. I suggest that Bertha Mason’s repeated sound, what Jane calls Bertha’s “eccentric murmurs,” highlights not Bertha’s speechlessness (as critics have almost unanimously suggested) but Jane’s narrative distortions— her transformations of Bertha’s legible speech into noise (93). By attending to Bertha’s noise, I uncover the strategic narrative evasions and obfuscations that have helped Jane conceal Bertha’s voice, degrade her speech, and compromise her humanity. Yet I also show that this same noise retaliates against Jane, destabilizing her authorial identity as a writer of the “plain truth,” for Jane proves far more calculating than her humble self-proclamation suggests (93). Narrative noise thus enables Jane to debase Bertha and contain her voice, yet it also empowers Bertha, a character largely deprived of speech, to articulate a sonic counter-narrative to Jane’s. In sum, this essay highlights how noise can signal crucial fissures in an unreliable narrator’s story and more broadly exemplifies the profits of further merging sound studies with narratology.
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors analyzes Open City by Teju Cole as an example of a Theory Generation novel, positing that neither a strictly surface reading nor symptomatic reading approach alone is adequate for this sort of text.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:This article analyzes Open City by Teju Cole as an example of a Theory Generation novel, positing that neither a strictly surface reading nor symptomatic reading approach alone is adequate for this sort of text. Expanding and complicating the novel's aside on the biology of bedbugs, the article argues that Julius, the book's protagonist, can best be understood not as a flâneur, fugueur, or model cosmopolitan, but, instead, as a parasite. His narratorial perspective is more analogous to the claustrophobic touch-driven irritations of the bedbugs that infest his mentor's Manhattan apartment than to the detached scopic flights of the birds that fill his free-associative reveries (and decorate the book's cover). Drawing on the work of J. Hillis Miller and Michel Serres, I posit that Julius's parasitic mode of interaction, which relies on brief moments of contact with others who are quickly mined for their stories and discarded, is deeply tied to the novel's reliance on tangential narration. The article argues for the unsettling ethical and affective implications of the similarities between the mechanisms of mathematical and narrative tangent-making vis-à-vis Julius's treatment of other characters in the novel. It finally asserts that Julius's rape of Moji is central to understanding both the affective discomfort of the novel as a whole and the limitations of similar protagonists who parasitically plot their way through Theory Generation novels.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the study of authorial image management should give more attention to the way literary fiction participates in shaping the author's public image, and they suggest a method of reading fiction (alongside paratexts) with a focus on the importance of the conflation and interconnection between characters and authors.
Abstract: abstract:This paper argues that the study of authorial image management should give more attention to the way literary fiction participates in shaping the author’s public image. This point has not been sufficiently taken into account in studies of author celebrity or persona making. These studies, to a great extent, focus on extraliterary activity. From another direction, some critics in narrative studies have given place to ways in which fiction shapes judgements of the author. However, these approaches, by and large, subordinate the author’s image to a more general approach to the interpretation of texts. Such approaches do not give enough room to the way some people read in order to learn about the author. The paper, therefore, suggests a method of reading fiction (alongside paratexts) for authorial image with a focus on the importance of the conflation and interconnection between characters and authors. The special value of characters who are authors is explained. As an example of this emphasis, the paper analyses how authors present themselves as old. The paper briefly analyses how Philip Roth highlights his age circa the publication of Exit Ghost (2007), to then present a reading of Nicole Krauss circa the publication of The History of Love (2005), who is associating herself with old age despite in fact being in her early thirties. Both authors depict elderly author-characters in order to shape their images. As a whole, the paper offers an emphasis on reading novels and especially character in the context of literary celebrity and authorial image.
6 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that readers can gain musical experience from what Scher dubs "verbal music" which is diegetic music's textual exponent, which they re-theorize in terms of audionarratology.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:Seeing it as a test case for the experientiality of narrative, I reclaim the concept of diegetic music from film to literature studies. My concern is whether readers can gain musical experience from what Scher dubs “verbal music”—diegetic music’s textual exponent, which I re-theorize in terms of audionarratology. As a storyworld phenomenon, diegetic music is literally heard by characters. However, we can only privilege it over other sonic events of the fictional universe if a specifically musical experience is transmitted across the borders of the diégèse. Seeking a solution to this problem, I borrow theoretical tools from the philosophy of music and cognitive narratology. First, I map three aspects of music—physical sound, tonal movement, and affective narrative—on what I call the “Triangular Iceberg of Musical Experience,” arguing for their complementary presence in individual listening acts, in different proportions. Second, I apply Jahn’s model of externalization/internalization of stories to show the cyclic nature of music’s circulation, which also applies to transitions of music to worlds of narrative fiction and back. Third, my three example case studies of verbal music outline the routes and constraints for readers’ enactive overhearing of diegetic music. Finally, I chart some textual variables to be manipulated in empirical testing of my hypotheses as my proposed follow-up to the present study. The essay demonstrates how “musicalized” prose provides a unique meeting point for reader-oriented narrative theory, intermediality studies, and empirical aesthetics.
4 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors deal with the relationship between verbal narratives and images in the illustrated edition of a short story by Mario Benedetti, "Cinco anos de vida," taken from Historias de Paris.
Abstract: This article deals with the relationship between verbal narrative and images (iconic narrative) in the illustrated edition of a short story by Mario Benedetti, "Cinco anos de vida," taken from Historias de Paris . It forms a companion piece to an article I published in 2013 on the relationship between (verbal) narration and fiction in this short story, particularly its ending. The theoretical framework of the present article is that of transmedial narratology. From transmedial narratology, I retain five major propositions which are presented in the first section. There is one proposition, however, which I cannot accept. It concerns the necessary presence of a fictional narrator in every fictional verbal narrative. In my 2013 article, I tried to show that the analysis of a fictional third person narrative like "Cinco anos de vida" could completely dispense with the concept of a fictional narrator. What I would like to show here is that this approach does not contradict the other propositions of transmedial narratology, nor an analysis based on these propositions. My position is that there are fictional narratives with and without a fictional narrator, but this opposition does not correspond to an opposition between media, namely between (verbal) language and other media. The two forms of fictional narrative coexist in some media, but not in all. The demonstration also rests on the interview I had with the painter Antonio Segui in his workshop in Arcueil, near Paris, on June 29, 2015.
3 citations
TL;DR: Forster's Stranger than Fiction as mentioned in this paper emphasizes the film's telepathic nuances, illustrating literary telepathy's role in the metaleptic events that the ostensibly "innocent" protagonist experiences.
Abstract: This article begins with an analysis of Marc Forster's Stranger than Fiction that emphasizes the film's telepathic nuances, illustrating literary telepathy's role in the metaleptic events that the ostensibly "innocent" protagonist experiences. Elaborating on existing work in literary telepathy, the article then brings Seo-Young Chu's SF model of mimesis into dialogue with that of unnatural narratology in order to illustrate how telepathic metalepses bear on our understanding of mimesis more broadly. With this understanding of mimesis, the article demonstrates how metalepsis upends the dominant structures of knowledge dissemination and reception, bringing the so-called innocent—and the "subnarratable" features of his life—to the fore. Returning, finally, to a critical discussion of Stranger than Fiction , the article demonstrates how telepathic metalepses foster the protagonist's authorial role in his own narrative, thereby challenging a number of conventions, chief among them the category of innocence and the generic conventions it supports.
3 citations
TL;DR: Point Omega as discussed by the authors is a post-paranoid novel with a poetological agenda and the receptive mode that it harbors mark a break with the concern with paranoia that was the staple of DeLillo's earlier, longer, Cold War novels.
Abstract: This essay turns to Don DeLillo’s novel Point Omega to revisit a blind spot of narrative theory—narrative’s relation with lyricality and poeticity. Responding to recent debates on this topic by shifting the emphasis toward modes of reception and readerly engagement, my essay examines how the novel’s experimental mix of literary forms changes the game of what narrative commonly does. Point Omega’s unusual brevity (it is the shortest of DeLillo’s recent short novels) and eventlessness (nothing much happens, and much of what happens evades reconstruction) are key to this operation. I argue that the novel endorses lyric and poetic strategies—among them slowing down the reading process by amplifying the demand for speakerly appropriation, and spacing the narrative by exploiting the cinematic frame as the prime compositional measure—with the effect of impairing the temporal reign of emplotment along with the knowledge-generating logic of cause and effect. As a result of downplaying narrative dominance (and frustrating our expectations to find out what has happened), we read for cohesion (a sense of unity) rather than for coherence (a system of rules). I contend that this poetological agenda and the receptive mode that it harbors mark a break with—or plot against—the concern with paranoia that was the staple of DeLillo’s earlier, longer, Cold War novels. And I suggest that Point Omega’s post-paranoid style thrives on a lyric-poetic instance on the fundamental unknowability of reality that the late DeLillo casts against the blazing knowledge regimes of our crisis-ridden age.
2 citations
TL;DR: The authors discuss The Human Stain by Philip Roth and question the standard view of fictional narratives as being told by a narrator and as beingformal imitations of natural narrative narratives, and propose a different view.
Abstract: By discussing The Human Stain by Philip Roth, this article aims toquestion the standard view of fictional narratives as being told by a narrator and as beingformal imitations of natural narrative d ...
2 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine how Karl Ove Knausgard's My Struggle intertwines with contemporary developments in media and technologies of self-representation and -expression and argue that these together amount to a shift to a more inclusive scope in literature.
Abstract: This article examines how Karl Ove Knausgard's My Struggle intertwines with contemporary developments in media and technologies of self-representation and - expression First, I situate this series within the generic frame of 'autofiction' and explain the rationale behind this categorization Then I outline developments that have led to an increasing emphasis on scale and quantification in Western culture: the emergence of big data, the accompanying mindset of 'datafication,' and 'quantified self-movement,' and the shift from narrative to database I argue that these together amount to a shift to more inclusive scope in literature I propose that My Struggle subverts the binary between narrative and database, and single out three devices through which this is done: interminable narration, lists, and the anaphoric singulative frequency On the basis of these, I pose that My Struggle adopts an aesthetics of scale: a quantitative mode of narration in which causality and closure make way for seriality and accumulation The second part of the article considers important media-specific differences between these works and self-representation through digital media It examines how Knausgard's literature promotes an awareness of writing as a digressive and regressive mode of recording characterized by delay and poses an alternative to ideals of instantaneity and immediacy underlying trends of quantified self and big data I conclude that contemporary autofictional narratives harbor a potential of provocation and a promise of pleasure and reflection in societies that privilege speed and immediacy Thus, the article offers new insights in how book-bound literary narratives undergo transformations under the influence of digitalization
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on a subset of narrative communication: unreliable narratives, which, despite their original conceptualization as building a relationship of distance between narrator and reader, often engage the reader's sympathy.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:In recent years, critics have theorized ethically unproblematic versions of sympathy or empathy, ones that avoid cultural appropriation or the dismissal of crucial differences between witness and sufferer. Despite the admirable impulse of this project, this article claims that these sanitized versions cannot do justice to the complex ways that sympathy works in narrative communication, especially the varied ethical ends to which readers's sympathetic reactions can be put. This article focuses on a subset of narrative communication: unreliable narratives, which, despite their original conceptualization as building a relationship of distance between narrator and reader, often engage the reader's sympathy. This article uses three cases of unreliable narration, drawing on both fiction and film, to demonstrate both their different ethical effects and how frequently "feeling with" (sympathy) and "feeling for" (empathy) are conflated. This article shows sympathy not only to be ethically complex but powerful because of its ethical complexity.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the auto/biography's paratextual apparatus that constructs it as an artifactual object (a manuscripture) and thus transforms subaltern auto-biography into an exercise in aesthetic iconography.
Abstract: abstract:This essay examines Venkat Raman Singh Shyam and S. Anand’s Finding My Way (2016), a graphic auto/biography by a member of a tribal community (Shyam). It examines the auto/biography’s paratextual apparatus that constructs it as an artifactual object—a manuscripture—and thus transforms subaltern auto/biography into an exercise in aesthetic iconography. The co-presence of at least three voices makes the text a heteroglossic one, so that an individual’s voice is located in conjunction with historical and other voices. The essay then argues that the text generates a sequential or anamnetic authorship—a textual process wherein later authors, often over centuries, add to the ‘original’ author’s texts, and the texts often retain the original author’s name—by reinstating Gondi texts and singers, even as it offers Shyam a place in the genealogy. Finally, it proposes that the text’s intervention in the public memory of the Mahabharata generates a new form of the public sphere—one where an entirely new memory of the destruction of forests, the dwellings of the tribal persons, and the exploitation of natural resources is introduced into the ancient memory. The essay thus contributes to the thinking on graphic texts, even as it studies the narrative modes of subaltern lifewriting that generate a different public sphere in postcolonial readership.
TL;DR: The authors retrieves Gérard Genette's concept of the paratext and discusses the implications of this relation for notions of authorship and authorship in the context of historical narratives.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:Against the backdrop of a recent return to the institutional conditions of literature and an extension of the discipline of narratology, this essay retrieves Gérard Genette's concept of the paratext. It does so by centering on the relation between literary narration and paratexts and by discussing the implications of this relation for notions of authorship. On the one hand, the paratext can be usefully deployed for challenging the confines of classical narratology: once the channels between paratext and text are recognized and opened, the status of narratological categories such as character, event, and narration needs to be reassessed. On the other hand, Genette's concept helps expose the conditions of contemporary literary historiographies, to the extent that it maps the functions of authorship and the institutional contexts of literary production and reception. Dave Eggers's Zeitoun serves as a case study to explore some concrete manifestations of paratexts. Claiming both the literary and the nonfictional, Zeitoun mobilizes various paratextual layers to negotiate Eggers's authorship and the cultural status of the independent publisher McSweeney's, and to foreground the link between literary and political hermeneutics.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on Chinese television dramas' distinctive characteristic of homodiegetic musical narrations performed by the character-actor-singer, given the sophisticated ways by which they complicate our sense of narrative agency, elude spatiotemporal anchoring, and purposefully limit/ facilitate transparency.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:Diegetic distinctions are a crucial part of film/television scholars' vocabulary for discussing music's narrative functions. However, terms such as nondiegetic, extradiegetic, and intradiegetic music are defined and used inconsistently across the field, which limits the effectiveness with which narrative theory can be used to discuss musical narration. I address this issue in my article, even as my case studies in Chinese television music complicate ongoing debates about music's diegetic status: do we treat theme songs—performed by actors/actresses, often with lyrics rendered from their characters' perspectives and overlaying the dialogue—as nondiegetic, metadiegetic, extradiegetic, intradiegetic, or diegetic music? Using The Journey of Flower (2015) and Nirvana in Fire (2015) as my case studies, I explicate television music's narrative functions by mapping Lisa Zunshine's theory of transparency onto the study of sound diegesis. I define diegetic distinctions in relation to audiences' degrees of access to the story through its soundscape. My article focuses on Chinese television dramas' distinctive characteristic of homodiegetic musical narrations performed by the character-actor-singer, given the sophisticated ways by which they complicate our sense of narrative agency, elude spatiotemporal anchoring, and purposefully limit/ facilitate transparency. My analysis highlights the significance of Chinese television dramas as a rich resource for research being undertaken in media, cultural, and narrative studies. Given that China has one of the world's largest yet most under-researched television markets, my work bridges the scholarly gap in understanding how Chinese television dramas' sonic landscapes are crucially intertwined with their storytelling practices, by drawing attention to issues of diegetic ambiguity and story access.
TL;DR: In this paper, the role of covert word-play in Agatha Christie's detective stories is examined and the authors argue that covert wordplay functions as a tool for traditional fair play by serving as clues for readers in solving the plot-level mystery.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:This essay challenges the skepticism towards the formal and thematic complexity of Agatha Christie’s detective stories by revealing the role of covert word-play in her works. In doing so, the essay also questions the consensus in detective fiction studies that the use of covert wordplay in British and American detective stories is a distinct feature of works by postmodern authors (with the exception of Edgar Allan Poe) writing in the metaphysical detective story tradition. Combining biographical criticism, close reading, and Michel Sirvent’s concept of diegetic vs. extradiagetic clues as its critical framework, the essay analyzes Christie’s novel The A. B. C. Murders (1936) and the short story “Strange Jest” (1950) to contend that Christie uses clandestine wordplay for two purposes. On the one hand, it functions as a tool for traditional fair play by serving as clues for readers in solving the plot-level mystery. The same wordplay, however, also functions as clues within an intertextual puzzle game in which readers are asked to decipher the stories as competitive rewritings of Poe’s detective tales. As a result, the essay uncovers hitherto neglected aspects of Christie’s formal craft, particularly in terms of the device of fair play, as well as the intertextual relationship between her works and those by Poe. Moreover, it shows that Golden Age detective fiction, like its postmodern successors, also employ clandestine wordplay as a part of an intricate and sophisticated metafictional narrative design.
TL;DR: The concept of translocal narratability as discussed by the authors has been proposed to describe how places and cities can permeate each other as well as the world of the reader in urban narratives.
Abstract: abstract:This essay aims to fill a gap in the current research on translocal narratives by providing a concept that structures and defines the typical strategies found in contemporary global writing: translocal narratability. Translocal novels narrate side by side two or more different places, such as Lagos and Princeton in Adichie’s Americanah, and thereby show how places and cities can permeate each other as well as the world of the reader. Since contemporary Anglophone novels are increasingly characterized by a global, transcultural, and complex quality that becomes particularly tangible in their spatial settings and narrative voices, translocality has become an important field in literary research, but often responds to questions of ‘what’ rather than of ‘how.’ This essay will therefore illustrate how novels such as Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames, or Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For use specific sets of narrative techniques in order to layer urban spaces from diverse parts of the globe to create trans-local stories and to make them accessible and relatable for a wide readership. After briefly explaining which narrative strategies typically produce translocal narratability and which three areas of research inform the concept—translocality, narratology and urban studies—this essay provides an in-depth analysis of how Chris Abani, in his East LA novel The Virgin of Flames, employs the palimpsest as one of the most central tools of global urban narratives. This close reading aims to illustrate some of the techniques that are typical for translocal writing and further expand on the concept of translocal narratability.
TL;DR: The authors argued that animal fables are primarily narratives of symmetry and asymmetry, of balance and reversal that not only flip a story's composition, but upend its narrative and ethical assumptions as well.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:Using a rhetorical methodology, this essay argues that, rather than a narrative of character or of progression, animal fables are primarily narratives of symmetry and asymmetry, of balance and reversal that not only flip a story's composition, but upend its narrative and ethical assumptions as well. The success of the fable depends on the audience's willingness to be deceived, to be taken in by a narrative trick which keeps the distance between the telling and the told, the mimetic and thematic/synthetic functions of the story open and unresolved for as long as possible so that the narrative can complicate the stated or implied moral at its conclusion. Chuck Jones's Roadrunner cartoons exemplify the way animated film is particularly amenable to the exaggerations and spatial organizations inherent in the fable form particularly when used for a comic effect that complicates in rich and unexpected ways the ethical intentions of the story.