Showing papers in "Style in 2015"

Evolutionary Social Theory: The Current State of Knowledge

Abstract: BOOKS UNDER REVIEW Boehm, Christopher. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books, 2012. Print. Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP; 2011. Print. Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print. --. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Print. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012. Print. Nowak, Martin A., and Roger Highfield. Supercooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. New York: Free P, 2011. Print. Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking, 2011. Print. Wilson, Edward O. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: Liveright, 2012. Print. A USABLE MODEL OF EVOLVED HUMAN SOCIALITY "Biocultural theory" is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interactions between biological adaptations and cultural constructions. The central premise of biocultural theory is that human behavior is produced by interactions between human nature and culture. "Human nature" in this usage designates a species-typical array of evolved, genetically transmitted features of anatomy, physiology, and neurology. "Culture" designates a collective, transmissible body of shared skills, practices, beliefs, values, and imaginative experiences (Baumeister; Carroll, "Truth"; Hill; Richerson and Boyd; Sterelny; Tomasello et al.). From the biocultural perspective, cultural processes are rooted in the biological necessities of the human life cycle: specifically human forms of birth, growth, survival, mating, parenting, and life in a social group (Muehlenbein and Flinn). Conversely, from the biocultural perspective, human biological processes are constrained, organized, and developed by culture, which includes technology, culturally specific socioeconomic and political structures, religious and ideological beliefs, and artistic practices such as music, dance, painting, and storytelling. Because culture is social, biocultural theory must include a good basic model of evolved human sociality. The elements of such a model have become available only within the past few years. Those elements are scattered throughout the books here under review and a small set of recent articles. None of the books or articles fully exemplifies the whole model. After laying out the model, I shall use it to evaluate the books, describing how each contributes to it, and measuring each against it. Until very recently, most discussions of evolved human sociality turned endlessly on an inconclusive debate between proponents of "inclusive fitness" theory and proponents of "group selection' (Alexander; Boehm, Moral Origins; Hamilton, "Rule," "Aptitudes"; Nesse; Pinker, "Allure"; Sober and Wilson; Trivers; D. S. Wilson, "Critique"; Wilson and Wilson; E. O. Wilson, Social Conquest). Advocates of "inclusive fitness" reduced social motives to nepotism, direct reciprocation (mutual back-scratching), and indirect reciprocation (giving credit to people with a reputation for reciprocating) (Boehm, "Bullies," Moral Origins; Nowak). Proponents of group selection felt rightly that these three sources could not adequately account for human prosociality, but they usually acceded to a misleading formula: selection favors selfishness within groups and favors altruism only in conflict between groups. As David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson put it, "in virtually all cases, traits labeled cooperative and altruistic are selectively disadvantageous within the groups and require between-group selection to evolve" (335). …

Is Narrative “The Description of Fictional Mental Functioning”? Heliodorus Against Palmer, Zunshine & Co

Abstract: This essay challenges concepts that consider the theory of mind to be key to our response to narrative from a historical perspective. Although the classical modern novel lends itself to the claims of Palmer, Zunshine, and others on account of its prominent consciousness presentation, the ancient novel as well as modern paralitterature cannot be adequately described as “the description of fictional mental functioning.” An exemplary reading of Heliodorus’ Ethiopica draws our attention to an aspect that is in danger of being downplayed in cognitive narratology, namely the temporal dynamics of narrative.

Dual Textual Dynamics and Dual Readerly Dynamics: Double Narrative Movements in Mansfield's "Psychology"

Abstract: In many fictional narratives, behind the plot development, there exists a powerful dynamic that runs, at a deeper level, throughout the text. This hidden dynamic paralleling the plot development is what I designate as covert textual progression" (see Shen, "Covert," Style). It involves different "instabilities" on the story level and different "tensions" on the discourse level (see Phelan, "Narrative Progression," Narrative), thereby conveying contrasting or even opposing thematic significance, character images, and aesthetic values to those in the plot development, and arousing or having the potential to arouse contrasting or even opposing response from readers. In my previous work, I have distinguished "covert progression" from other types of covert meaning as investigated by various critical approaches since the nineteenth century, including the covert meanings revealed by New Critics and contemporary literary/narrative critics (see Shen, Style 7-12, "Covert" 148-52). Other concerns with covert meaning focus on deep or deeper levels of meaning of the plot development, especially ways in which latent meanings of the plot subvert or oppose its manifest ones. In contrast, my concern with covert progression is a concern with a hidden narrative movement paralleling the plot development. But previously I did not pay sufficient attention to the interaction and joint fonctioning of the two parallel narrative movements, especially in cases where the meanings of the covert progression subvert those of the plot development. This is the first time I try to offer theoretical models of the dual textual dynamics and the corresponding dual readerly dynamics, both to show and to call for attention to the joint functioning of the two parallel narrative movements. This may enable us to do better justice to the instability, tension, complexity, and otherwise self-contradictory nature of literary narratives. The present effort to theorize about the dual textual and readerly dynamics is based on the most telling case of Katherine Mansfield's "Psychology." In this narrative, the covert progression takes on an opposite event structure, contrastive focalization, and different degrees of narratorial reliability. More specifically, while in the plot development the event structure is merely "revelatory" and things "stay pretty much the same" (Chatman 48), in the covert progression the event structure displays a progress towards a resolution; while in the plot the focalization keeps shifting, in the covert progression the focalization is quite fixed. Moreover, what appears to be reliable reporting by the narrator in the plot development frequently turns out to be merely character's illusion in the covert progression. This covert progression in Mansfield's Psychology" very much relies on the ambiguity created by the use of free indirect discourse and point of view or focalization. These devices, among other modernist techniques, have attracted much critical attention in the investigation of Mansfield's fiction, including "Psychology," since she is well known for her masterful use of such techniques. But the covert progression in Psychology" has remained overlooked in existing literary criticism because ever since Aristotle, critical attention has focused on one narrative movement, the plot development. Indeed, the covert progression is a type of meaning that readers miss not because it's hidden but largely because their interpretive equipment won't allow them to see what is right there in plain sight (Abbott 560). As we will see below, unless we revise our interpretive framework and extend attention to another narrative movement behind the plot development, critical sophistication, acumen, and carefulness may not help much in discovering the double narrative movements as such. Significantly, the dual textual dynamics purposefully created by the author invites dual readerly dynamics. In more specific terms, the covert progression and the interaction between the covert and overt narrative movements invite the authorial audience to change the perception and judgment of various textual details in the overt plot, increasingly altering and complicating the understanding of the rhetorical purposes of the author and the thematic import, character relationship, and aesthetic effects of the text. …

Rhythm, Temporality, and “Inner Form”

Abstract: INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF POETIC FORM The problem of poetic form is an interesting and difficult one, especially if by "form," we mean, not a classification of poems by speech act, content, or versification (or some combination of these three), but poetic form proper, what Helen Vendler likes to call "inner form"--the flowing architecture created by a poem's internal structure and dynamic shape (Vendler 106, 113-19). Poetic kinds based on speech acts, content, and versification (or some combination of these three) are indeed forms of a sort, and can indeed present problems as well, especially as they blend these three concerns; but these forms and their accompanying problems are associated more with the other literary genres--drama, prose fiction, and song--than with poetic expression per se, and therefore have tended to be more accessible and tractable. Speech acts are performative, like plays; content is representational or referential, like prose fiction; and versification is largely a matter of meter and rhyme, like song. Over the centuries, we have accumulated quite a bit of information about these dramatic, fictional, and song-like poetic forms, and this knowledge has become well known. We have many excellent, detailed treatments of such things as versification and sonnets, elegies and pastorals, poetic meditation and prayer. (1) TYPES OF POETIC FORMS Form as Speech Act/Dramatic Performance --meditation, conversation, debate, prayer, etc. Form as Content/Fictional Representation --nocturne, elegy, aubade, epithalamion, pastoral, etc. "Outer Form" --sonnet, ode, song, ballad, limerick, etc. "Inner Form" --??? Our understanding of "inner" form in poetry has been much more scattered and uncertain, though, if we have understood it at all. In fact, we really haven't known enough about poetic structure to identify kinds of "inner" forms much at all, as we do when we classify poems by their speech acts, content, or versification. The best we have been able to do is to highlight some of the choices that are available in a poem's rhythm, language, rhetoric, and symbolism--and leave it there, assuming that a thorough analysis of a poem's "inner" form will consider as many of these formal choices as possible--come what may. (2) The major difficulty with this, of course, is that these formal choices are both multitudinous and diverse, and without much else being known and said, as more and more of these choices are considered, the critical result becomes more and more diffuse and ad hoc, too. It is all well and good if a poem turns out to be, say, binary, alliterated, nominal, 3rd person, paratactic, appositional, declarative, anaphoric, metaphoric, and metrical, as many poems are, but so what? Even if we describe as carefully as possible the individual contribution of each of these formed choices to the overall effect of the poem, the critical result does not have the stabilizing and unifying effect of the recognition of a poetic "kind" like a sonnet or an elegy. Just the opposite. The better and more complete the analysis, the more disparate and destabilizing the result. In fact, given what we know about these matters at the moment, any close, attentive reading of an accomplished poem's "inner form" will be so disparate and diffuse that most critics avoid such exhaustive formalistic reading entirely and pursue other critical tasks. (3) What does metaphor have to do with nouns, or alliteration with apposition, meter with the 3rd person, or parataxis with binary form? To this point, we have just not known enough about the constructional "logic" of the "inner form" of poetry to say. This "state of the art," I presume, is not lost on anyone who has to teach a course entitled "Introduction to Poetry," as I did, two or three times a year, for thirty years, and would like to find some material to help them with this task. At the same time that our most popular poetic pedagogies are often very thorough in their survey of the elements of "inner form"--sound, syntax, rhythm, imagery, tropes, schemes, and so forth--often providing full, detailed chapters on each of these topics, to the last, these verse pedagogies have next to nothing to say about how their chapters interrelate and therefore how the blither of formal patterns that they urge students to note can ever coalesce into either effective poems or recurrent poetic "kinds. …

Free Verse, Enjambment, Irony: A Case Study

Abstract: In prose, the lines run from one margin of the page to the other; in poetry, it is the poet who decides where the line ends. Fraser writes about blank verse: "... we might often be uncertain (particularly when the sense is run on from line to line, without punctuational pauses at the end of the line) how the lines divide. This is what Dr. Johnson meant when he said that English blank verse is often verse for the eye" (29). (1) If this were true, it would apply even more to free verse. Indeed, the surrounding empty space that indicates line endings in printed verse is not available in vocal performance. I claim, however, that just as white spaces break up the series of black marks on the paper into smaller perceptual units whose end may or may not coincide with the end of syntactic units, in aural perception, certain vocal devices may break up the text into versification units, and even indicate conflicts of versification and syntactic units. Indeed, Dr. Johnson does grant what Fraser is tacit on: there are "a few skilful and happy readers of Milton who enable their audience to perceive where the lines end or begin." In vocal performance, there are other means to indicate line ending: first of all, "punctuational pauses"; but also intonation contour, and some more elusive cues, such as the lengthening of the last speech sound or syllable, or overarticulation of the word boundaries, e.g., by inserting a stop release or a glottal stop where appropriate. Such cues may act in conjunction--indicating unambiguous continuity or discontinuity; or in conflict--indicating continuity and discontinuity at the same time. In this article, I will explore the possible mismatches between language and versification in poetry. It is a case study of a short piece of free verse, by the great Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai. [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 1. Rain in the Battlefield It's raining on the faces of my comrades; On the faces of my live comrades, who Cover their heads with the blankets-- And on the faces of my dead comrades, who Don't cover anymore. The adjectives "live" and "dead" are restrictive, whereas the "who"-clauses are nonrestrictive. Consequently, the phrase "live comrades" already suggests that they are contrasted to some other group of comrades. The nonrestrictive relative clauses, by contrast, though antithetical, merely give some additional information on the two groups of comrades. The parallelism of lines 2 and 4 points up the indifference of the rain as to whether the soldiers are alive or dead. It is their response that makes some difference--but no big difference either: These comrades cover their heads, these comrades don't. This trivial difference stands in opposition to the momentous distinction between life and death; hence its effective irony. The rain and the covering of faces may be construed as an instinctive gesture to cope with the hard circumstances soldiers must face. Looking back, then, from lines 4 and 5, the metonymy for discomfort becomes a metonymy for life and death. For Cleanth Brooks, "irony is not the opposite of an overt statement, but 'a general term for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context'" (Wellek 329; Brooks 171). The ironist pretends to know nothing, not even that he is ironical. He merely describes what he sees, with no patent purpose, as it were. Now, suppose Amichai wrote: 2. It's raining on the faces of my comrades; On the faces of my live comrades, Who cover their heads with the blankets-- And on the faces of my dead comrades, Who don't cover anymore. Some readers feel a considerable difference between the two texts. It is as if in Excerpt 1 the irony were subtler than in Excerpt 2. Notice, however, that the semantic and syntactic information are literally identical in the two versions. The difference is generated by the mismatch between syntax and versification. …

Intonation and the Conventions of Free Verse

Abstract: WHAT'S "FREE" ABOUT FREE-VERSE CRITICISM The organization of free verse poses well-known obstacles to description: unlike metrical verse, free verse lacks rhythmic patterns that can readily be notated. Nonetheless, good free verse achieves some kind of measure, by which I mean, it imparts to language an added intensity that makes the statement itself more meaningful, significant, complex, or interesting. William Carlos Williams's well-known habit of revising an entire free-verse poem without changing a single letter or punctuation mark is of interest here, as are the proofs given by critics' relineation or conceptual reframing of well-known free-verse texts. The most famous example is Hugh Kenner's proposal that we "imagine an occasion for this sentence to be said" (Homemade World 66). And as Kenner insists, the two versions of "The Red Wheelbarrow," the conjectural sentence and the published poem found in Spring and All, not only fail to be identical in visual appearance, spoken contour, or expressive content, but the quality of the two as poems is grossly unequal. Recognizing this to be true, however, is far different from explaining either this poem's prosodic organization or the prosodic organization of even a small percentage of the good free-verse poems in evidence, since free-verse poems not only exhibit a multiplicity of measures, forms, or shaping forces but also typically engage a multiplicity of measures or methods within the single poem. And yet I would argue that we can discern "the positive features" of a "new metric" in some early modernist free-verse practice and that this metric is intonational (Easthope 153; Cervenka 372-74). This argument is not new. Discussions of intonation in language and in verse date back to Joshua Steele's An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Sounds (1775). Nonetheless, despite the wealth of remarkable materials both by linguists (e.g., David Crystal, Bruce Hayes, and Miroslav Cervenka) and by literary critics (e.g., Justin Replogle, Eleanor Berry, Richard Cureton, Alan Holder, and G. Burns Cooper), intonation remains absent from most prosodic criticism, including the fourth edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). When theories of intonation are discussed, as they are in scholarship on Williams and Frost, the dominant critical impulse is usually to dismiss the possibility of creating a prosody based on intonational contours. It is crucial to establish not only that intonation is available as a prosodic measure but also that (a) it has structure, and this structure informs and enriches our understanding of the movement of the free-verse line, and (b) that intonation units "have a variable relationship to syntactic units" (Fox 289). Without consideration of intonation units, their function and structure, we cannot explain the abiding effects of free verse, such as how changing only the lineation or the spacing of a linguistic string affects both the poem's prosody and its meaning in ways that are fundamentally tied to the phonology of a language and so are "hard-wired" so to speak in speakers or readers. The usual conversations about the unfolding relationship of syntax and line must expand to include awareness of the relationship of line, syntax, and intonation, with the goal of noting how it is often the divergence of these three variables that leads to free verse's most memorable lines and effects. THE NATURE AND STRUCTURE OF INTONATION: A BRIEF OVERVIEW The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (1997) defines "intonation" as "a distinctive pattern of tones over a stretch of speech in principle longer than a word. Thus there is a difference in intonation between e.g. That's 'IT ('I'm finished') and That's 'IT? ('Is that all?'). [...]" The example demonstrates how the identical sequence of words can have two distinct meanings based on its intonation. While the words do not change, the intention of the speaker does. …

The Case for Pace

Abstract: I wish to suggest one category that can be helpful in focusing our attention on the rhythm of free verse, one that is similarly applicable to metrical verse. The category of pace, which I am offering here, has the advantage of operating across several levels of a given text and its perception. In linguistics, one finds that pace (often termed tempo, and at times inaccurately meshed with duration) is a suprasegmental parameter that sometimes appears as a component of rhythm in ordinary language. (1) As a crude working definition, one can begin to think of pace as the speed of a stretch of language. Changes in pace can explain some of the flexibility in metered verse (two iambic pentameter lines can have differing pace dynamics), and pace can also operate in free verse regardless of the metrical element. In the context of the traditional distinction between meter and rhythm, pace can be found on the side of rhythm: pace is not metrical, and it operates both inside and outside of a metrical context. Furthermore, pace does not necessarily rely on a regularity or recurrence of numerical elements in any strict sense. It is rhythmical by virtue of engaging the reader in an experience of speed, and therefore temporality. Researchers in linguistics or psycholinguistics classify pace, which they call "speaking rate," into two or three components. The first is "articulation rate," "the tempo of articulating an utterance, excluding any silent pauses, but including non-linguistic speech material such as filled pauses [=any gap in the verbal structure of a speaking-turn filled by non-linguistic material] and prolongations of syllables" (Laver 539). This is measured in number of syllables or words per time units, for example, number of syllables per millisecond. The other two variables, embedded under the term "pause rate," have to do with the number and duration of pauses in the examined utterance. In a stretch of speech, the overall impression of tempo has to do both with speed/pace/rate of the words uttered and (sometimes independently) with the frequency and duration of the pauses interspersed between the syllables or words uttered. John Laver points out that there are different relationships possible. For example, a stretch of speech can be characterized by a fast articulation rate, but could still exhibit a relatively slow speaking rate, if the speech has frequent or long silent pauses (541). Empirical research on speaking rate has produced a myriad of results, which may hint at the significance of pace in poetry, though the area of investigation is not poetic. (2) John Ciardi, the American poet and critic, stands out as giving the most attention to pace as the key to illuminating the effects of poetry. In his book, How Does a Poem Mean?, Ciardi states plainly that "[a] poem, by the very fact of its existence in time rather than in space, has duration and pace" (994, emphasis in the original). Earlier Ciardi argues that "one poem may obviously urge the voice at a faster pace than does another. Within the same poem, moreover, one part may urge itself much more rapidly than another. Even within an individual line, one phrase may clearly be indicated as moving more rapidly or more slowly than another" (920). In fact, it seems that for Ciardi, pace is the definitive element of rhythm in poetry, and he makes an effort to systematically account for devices that affect a poem's pace. When Ciardi claims that one part of the poem "may urge itself much more rapidly or more slowly than another," he is suggesting not just that pace changes throughout the poem, and is therefore relative, but also that the poem itself indicates its pacing. Although pace becomes physically manifested when the poem is read out loud (and echoes of pace can be heard by an attentive silent reader in the proverbial mind's ear), there are cues or indicators of pace within the written text, and we are not solely in the realm of subjective performance whereby any string of words can be performed at various speeds at will. …

Toward a Second Phase of Postclassical Narratology

Abstract: David Herman, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol. Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2012, xiv+280 pp. When David Herman coined the term postclassical narratology, (1) he did it with the aim of describing the "contrast between structuralist narratology, as practiced by Barthes, Greimas, Genette, Todorov, and others, and approaches to the study of narrative that draw on frameworks for inquiry that were either inaccessible to or ignored by the structuralist theorists" (Herman and Shang 98). The term was further identified and recognized in Herman's edited collection Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (1999). As the title of this groundbreaking volume suggests, owing to the rise of its postclassical counterpart, narratology is no longer used in the singular sense, but instead it takes on the plural form narratologies, which is aptly evidenced in Ansgar Running's classification (249-51). Like Nunning, I am also interested in the plurality of postclassical narratology, which in my view exists at the level of both media and approaches. In terms of media, postclassical narratology goes beyond literary narrative, which leads to the flourishing of studies on digital narrative, narrative in music, narrative in paintings, narrative in law, etc.; while in terms of approaches, postclassical narratology goes beyond Saussurean linguistics, leading to the boom of cognitive narratology, rhetorical narratology, feminist narratology, postcolonial narratology, etc. To put it another way, what we are encountering now is not one postclassical narratology but multiple postclassical narratologies. In Herman's view, this proves to be one of the achievements that postclassical narratology has reaped in its first phase of developments by "integrating new concepts and methods into the field of narrative inquiry" (Herman and Shang 99). I agree with Gerald Prince, who keenly observes that "the distinction proposed by Herman was compelling enough to acquire mainstream ('historical') status in less than ten years" (115). What is more, this distinction has already led quite a few scholars (Fludernik, Nunning, Shen, Prince) to compare classical narratology with its postclassical counterpart and discuss the relations between them. What seems to have been inadequately done in current narrative studies is to investigate the relations among various postclassical approaches. Until quite recently, some narrative theorists devoted their attention to this issue. For instance, Herman attempts to classify postclassical narratology into two phases, arguing that if postclassical narratology in a first phase involves incorporating ideas that fall outside the domain of structuralist theory, in order to reassess the possibilities as well as the limitations of classical models, new challenges emerge in a second phase. What is now required is to bring into closer dialogue the full variety of postclassical approaches--feminist, transmedial, cognitive, and other. In this connection, my suggestion is that by juxtaposing the descriptions of narrative phenomena (narration, perspective, character, etc.) made possible by these approaches, testing for overlap among the descriptions, and then exploring the degree to which the descriptions' non-overlapping aspects might complement one another, theorists can begin to map out the interrelations among postclassical approaches. (Herman and Shang 99) Herman's initiation of two phases of postclassical narratology finds its echo in Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik's edited collection Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses (2010), which claims to be the sister volume of Narratologies. For Alber and Fludernik, Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists' models of narrative analysis represent the infancy of narratology, and the structuralist models of the 1960s and 1970s its adolescence. Herman's volume Narratologies represents the first adult phase in a. …

Feminist Narratology Revisited: Dialogizing Gendered Rhetorics in Alias Grace

Abstract: In 1986, in the pages of Style, a debate was launched between Susan Lanser and Nelli Diengott on the feasibility of a new theory, which Lanser named "feminist narratology." Lanser argued that as a textual and structuralist methodology "narratology" could be very useful to feminist critical inquiry, but only if its principles were fundamentally changed to accommodate the materialist issues vital to most feminist critics, including the gender of the author, the psychology of the character narrating, and the time and place of the fiction. In a subsequent issue, Diengott countered that such synthesis, by its own terms, would not be possible because materialist feminism is completely antithetical to narratology as theory; combining the two into a single methodology called "feminist narratology" would cross the impenetrable line between narrative poetics and interpretive criticism that narratology in practice strictly observes. The debate was revived by Kathy Mezei a decade later in her Introduction to Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. There she explicitly argues for the legitimacy of Lanser's definition over Diengott's opposition, defining "feminist narratology" as a method of analysis that includes "the sexuality and gender of the author, narrator, character, and reader" (2), elements that transcend narratology's normal structural and textual bounds. In 2002, in Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel, I argued, in contrast, for a theory of "feminist narratology" that does not depend on the gender of the author or the qualities of the female narrating character as "person." My thesis instead focused on the structure and discourse of the woman's narrating activity on the level of text, demonstrating that "feminist narratology" is feasible as a strict narratological theory and can also be used as critical methodology in that way. Since that time, perhaps because of the oxymoronic difficulties inherent in the term, "feminist narratology" has mostly been dropped from the critical lexicon and its use in feminist criticism has become almost extinct. The kinds of analyses produced in response to Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, however, suggest the relevance of reexamining "feminist narratology" as a methodological approach and the validity of renegotiating its possibilities to include both sides of the theoretical debate. Alias Grace is a novel based on the real murder of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery in 1843. Each chapter opens with excerpts from actual historical documents relevant to the murder case and published around the same time as the crime. Alongside these excerpts are pieces of canonical English and American poetry, all also written during the nineteenth century and all by or on the subject of women. The primary narrative, however, is delivered by a fictionalized version of the real convicted female killer, Grace Marks, imprisoned for the crime and trying to reconstruct, in a mostly linear fashion, the events leading up to the murder she claims she cannot recall. Also included in the narrative text are fictional sections of free indirect discourse attributed to Simon Jordan, the male psychiatrist who elicits Grace's first-person story, as well as the occasional fictional letter from other official and unofficial sources in connection with his enterprise. Precisely because of this unique structural polyphony of different generic narratives, the focus on narration in the critical response to this text is almost inevitable; and because the primary narrative, the one that shapes the plot and structurally coordinates all other discourses, is delivered in the voice of a woman, the complexities of the woman's narrating act become central to a number of critical essays on a variety of hermeneutic subjects written in response to the book. (1) To date, all the critical attention paid directly to the complexities of female narration in Alias Grace has concerned itself with the credibility of its main narrating character as a person and, consequently, as a story teller. …

Verse structure and literary tradition: The interaction between rhyme and stress in the Onegin stanza

Abstract: This essay discusses rhyme and rhythm in sylabo-accentual verse, in which the term "rhythm" refers to stress patterning within the line. Rhyme and rhythm have been investigated in isolation, yet no studies exist that provide a rigorous framework for correlating their effects. This essay shows, based on a thorough statistical analysis of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, that rhythm of individual lines can mimic rhyming structures within the stanza. In addition, we trace the evolution of the Onegin stanze in the Russian literary tradition uncovering the ways in which covert transformations of poetic form reflect shifts in literary history from late Romanticism to Modernism.

Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noel Thon, Eds. Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology

Abstract: Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noel Thon, eds. Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2014. 363 pp. A new edition to the University of Nebraska's Fields of Narrative Series, Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noel Thon's Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology clarifies and advances questions of trans-media storytelling, building upon works such as Ryan's Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (University of Nebraska Press, 2004) and Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas's New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age (University of Nebraska Press, 2011). By redefining the concept of "media convergence" as the creation of specific yet hybrid storyworlds, aspects of which are clarified by different media technologies, this collection of essays assesses "the abstract type of content constitutive of 'narrativity,' a content that we can define as that which all stories share" (3). In so doing, Storyworlds across Media enlarges and opens up the theoretical conversation regarding the development not simply of a media-conscious narratology, but of a narratology aware of multi-modal and cross-medial manifestations of storyworlds. Storyworlds across Media is divided into three parts, each of which contains a set of essays that supplement and even challenge one another in order to explore the emerging and complex facets surrounding a specific issue of transmedia storytelling. The first part, which is the most theoretical in nature, is titled "Mediality and Transmediality." In the leading essay, "Story/ Worlds/Media: Tuning the Instruments of a Media-Conscious Narratology," Ryan clarifies the two terms central to the volume, namely, "storyworlds" and "media." To this end, she distinguishes between the "world" of the author, the "textual world" of a novel, "fictional worlds," and "storyworlds," the last of which is "a broader concept than fictional world because it covers both factual and fictional stories, meaning stories told as true of the real world and stories that create their own imaginary world" (33). Likewise, comparing current conceptions of media to Jorge Luis Borges's famous taxonomy of animals, Ryan calls for a reassessment of the categories we use to label media, and she identifies three criteria to this end: namely, semiotic substance, which "encompass categories such as image, sound, language, and movement" (29); technical dimension, or media that involves both a "mode of production and a material support" (29); and cultural dimension, including such media as "the press, the theater, or comics, [which] are widely recognized as playing a significant cultural role but that cannot be distinguished on purely semiotic or technological grounds" (30). These three criteria correspond to the three approaches that Ryan identifies as ways of participating in a "media-conscious narratology" (30). Even as these definitions are important in their own right, they likewise establish a theoretical framework upon which many of the following essays build. Indeed, in his contribution, "Emplotting a Storyworld in Drama," Patrick Colm Hogan uses the concept of a storyworld to reassess narratological configurations of drama, and he argues that the discourse of drama--comprised of emplotment and narration--is often manipulated in mimetic forms, evidencing the presence of a nonpersonified narrator within dramatic works; Hogan demonstrates his theory through a close reading of the first two acts of Hamlet. Jan-Noel Thon examines how various media operate by comparing the subjective representation of consciousness--particularly the "perceptual or quasi-perceptual aspects" of a character's mind--within three forms, namely, contemporary feature films, graphic novels, and computer games. …

Hypallage and the Literalization of Metaphors in a Dickens Text

Abstract: One of the reasons for the famously "inimitable" quality of Dickens's style is its oscillation between the literal and the figurative uses of vocabulary Dickens's texts are monuments to the idiom of his times--shape-shifting monuments in which figurative language often turns into fabula details and sometimes seems to generate fabula events In this paper, I shall focus on one specific figure of speech, namely hypallage, metaphor's neighbor, which shares some features of metonymy and enthymeme I shall discuss the local effects of this figure and its possible connection with fabula events The Greek meaning of hypallage is "interchange, exchange"; the most common example is "her beauty's face" In the Cyclops episode of Ulysses, Joyce provides us with hypallage as word play: when Joe Hynes offers the narrator a drink, saying "Could you make a hole in another pint?" the answer is "Could a swim duck?" (405) According to Walter Shandy in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, love can hardly be discussed without this quaint trope: "You can scarce," said [my father], "combine two ideas together upon it [love], brother Toby, without an hypallage"--What's that? cried my uncle Toby The cart before the horse, replied my father-- --And what is he to do there? cried my uncle Toby-- Nothing, quoth my father, but to get in--or let it alone Tristram Shandy, VIIIxiii501 Walter uses the idiom "the cart before the horse" as an image-bearing example of "exchange or inversion"; Toby hears it literally, reviving the metaphor and personifying the cart as "he" In his rejoinder, Walter extends the metaphor by cancelling Toby's personification, reinterpreting the "he" as a human subject faced with one of the radical absurdities of the human condition and having to consider taking a plunge and getting trapped in the container (1) This is where Dickens must have gone to school for the use of extended metaphors Yet the Dickensian hypallage is not the same as Walter Shandy's Rather, it belongs to the more narrowly defined but also more broadly used variety of this trope, namely epithet transfer, in which inversion takes the shape of the attribution of a quality to the wrong exponent (2) Unlike Irish-bull transpositions, such as "Could a swim duck?", epithet transfer is akin to metaphor in that it moves a feature from one object to another Yet unlike metaphor, epithet transfer does not involve a substitution of a noun for a noun-adjective phrase, as in "he is a lion" instead of "he is a very brave person" Instead, it transfers the adjective from an unnamed noun or pronoun to a non-metaphorical noun Here are some examples of epithet-transfer hypallage in poetry, before and after Dickens In "Tintern Abbey," recollecting his unhappy five years between his two visits to the river Wye, Wordsworth's speaker places himself "In lonely rooms / Amid the din of towns and cities" "Lonely rooms" is a hypallage: it is the lyrical hero who felt lonely--the rooms were no hermitage but spaces of precarious separation from the urban din This epithet shift has a metonymic force rooted in contiguity: "compressing" two inputs, an alienating indoor space and the lover of nature who inhabits it, the "conceptual blend" (see Fauconnier and Turner, esp pp 113-37) suggests that loneliness, solitude, an almost Platonic reality, was extended over (and perhaps also forced into) the Procrustean container of unloved lodgings It is in and from that setting that the speaker had his escapes into memories of the landscapes of earlier days and into moments of recreated joy in which the aesthetic, the psychological, and the mystical became interfused Mental escape is less valorized in another poem of nostalgia, Thomas Hardy's "The Self-Unseeing," where the speaker revisits his childhood home The first stanza is as follows: Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet walked in …

The Rhythms of Free Verse and the Rhythms of Translation

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to place free verse in a variety of briefly visited translational situations in order to understand not only why free verse is peculiarly adapted to translational processes, but also what such processes can suggest to us about free verse's relationship with its own rhythmic resources, and what implicit suggestions translation makes about free verse's further development. Underlying this enterprise is the belief that free verse peculiarly provides translation with the wherewithal to discover rhythmic continuities between different languages, simply because free verse, perhaps as its defining characteristic, positively frees rhythm into a multidimensionality that it does not enjoy in regular verse, where, frequently regarded as a variation of metre, it is bound to metre's monodimensionality (syllable and accent), at the cost of other paralinguistic features: duration, pausing, tempo, loudness, tone, and intonation. It is these paralinguistic features that promote rhythm as an experience of the reading consciousness rather than as a feature of textual structure--a shift of emphasis that free verse itself engineers; for the translator looking to translate the phenomenology of reading rather than the interpretation of text, looking to capture reading as a multisensory, whole-body experience, as I am, the paralinguistic performance of rhythm is paramount. Histories of free verse and of its origins (e.g., Steele 1990, Scott 1990, Kirby-Smith 1996, Peureux 2009) are important because they give us a clearer view of the multiple sources of free verse's inevitability. But there is the danger that they will cast free verse indelibly as postregular (postmetrical) (or in the French case, post-libere) rather than as prototabular (postlinear) and that, in so doing, they will encourage us to think of free verse as unmetrical, or non-metrical, rather than as demetrified. (1) There is the concomitant danger that commentators will busy themselves with the development of a typology of free verses, that is to say, of certain formal blueprints, toward which, or away from which, particular poems will gravitate. This maps out free verse's task as the continued, albeit involuntary, fulfillment of certain transcendental Gestalts, whereas the whole purpose of the "break" with regular verse might be supposed to be the maximization of verse-immanence and of nonteleological polymorphousness. From time to time (Lowes 150-51; Silkin 7), it is said that while regular verse enjoys the bivocality of metre and rhythm, free verse has only rhythm. But while for Lowes this observation has a lightly depreciative intention, Silkin begins to see what free verse's consequential opportunities might be: "Dispensing with metricality, it is not enough to make a non-metrical poem. Such poetry must redesign the resources released in non-metricality so as to produce something vital" (41). This remark has a double significance for translation: first, it begins to indicate the sense in which free verse can act as an ideal instrument of translation: free verse must justify itself by constantly redesigning verse-resources, by relocating expressive energies, which in turn involves reconfiguring the structural dynamics by which the source text (ST) is delivered to the reading consciousness, and thus the reader's perceptual posture toward it. Furthermore, part of the reconfiguring of perceptual posture is the broadening of rhythmic possibility; since rhythm, as we have said, no longer functions, as so often in regular verse, merely as metrical variation, bound to metre's monodimensionality (syllable and accent), it can come fully into its own as a multidimensional principle, expanding its area of operation to all the other paralinguistic features of verse-making. Let us make no mistake: whereas metre is principally embedded in the linguistic, rhythm has its natural home in the paralinguistic; whereas metre is embedded in text, rhythm is a manifestation of readerly play with text. …

Free, Verse, Rhythm: An Introduction

Abstract: FREE VERSE VERSUS RHYTHM Take this very sentence, for example. Read it a few times. Read it again. Does it have rhythm? Or, put differently, is there a (legitimate?) way to read it that can expose the rhythm that it has, or give it rhythm? Does it come down to performance? Could the act of lineating this sentence grant it rhythm? Could some other linguistic or cultural context used to frame this sentence give it rhythm? If we knew that it was taken from a poem deemed to be metrical, would we be more inclined to find or make it rhythmical? Of course a large part of the answers to these questions would come down to our definition of rhythm, rightly described in a parenthetical aside by T. V. F. Brogan as "surely the vaguest term in criticism" (1068). Taking the road most travelled by, we would probably focus on syllables; given that the sentence is in English, we would be attentive to the distribution of stressed and unstressed ones. Although any sequence of words can technically be scanned for stresses and slacks, one is often searching for some recurrence or patterning. Indeed, a typical description of rhythm refers to things such as regularity, repetition, expectations, and pattern. (1) Finding such recurrences, under certain conditions which themselves are subject to debate, can salvage the line (is this a line?) from nonrhythmicity or arrhythmia. When the recurrence is palpable and recognizable enough, we would probably place the line within metricity, and therefore certainly within rhythmicity. In fact, rhythm and meter, at least within literary prosody and pedagogy, are so commonly linked, and the focus of prosodic study on the cases of meter is so dominant, that it is not a trivial matter to think of rhythm outside a metrical context. Take, for example, Philip Hobsbaum: "Metre is a blueprint; rhythm is the inhabited building. Metre is a skeleton; rhythm is the functioning body. Metre is a map; rhythm is a land" (7). These metaphors convey both the connection and the distinction between the two terms: whereas the metrical pattern is a deep-structure defining feature of the verse line, rhythm is what is fleshed out in the phenomenology of the specific line. Yvor Winters makes the same point when he writes that, though the two terms are often confused, "Meter is the arithmetical norm," and "rhythm is controlled departure from that norm" (133). (2) G. S. Fraser writes that a "succession of lines of the same metrical pattern, a succession of iambic pentameters, for instance, is rather like the succession of waves breaking on the shore. Each has a similar pattern ... but none is absolutely identical with any other" (2). Two lines of iambic pentameter, then, are identical metrically, but may still differ rhythmically. Traditional foot-substitution approaches capture part of the flexibility and enormous rhythmic variations between the two lines of iambic pentameter (e.g., trochaic substitution, truncated foot, extrametrical syllable). (3) Variation is also elegantly captured by generative prosody, which aims to delineate the contours of the boundary between the metrical and nonmetrical. The number and location of in-line pauses (caesuras and other breaks), as features not captured by simple scansion, also contribute to rhythmic variation. In addition, the difference between the two iambic pentameter lines could reside in relative degrees of stress, since "iambic" typically means any foot in which the first syllable is somehow less stressed than the second. Using a more elaborate system of degrees of stress (like Trager and Smith's system that utilizes four such degrees) would expose other differences between the two iambic lines. Thus, in much of the thinking that is represented by the foregoing, rhythm and meter are interdependent. Understanding meter as a case of rhythmic regularity, or rhythm as a controlled departure from a metrical base, offers a conveniently simplified way to discuss rhythm and to combat its daunting vagueness. …

Michael Burke, Ed. the Routledge Handbook of Stylistics

Abstract: Michael Burke, ed. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. viii + 540 pp. In the history of the development of stylistics, there had never appeared a handbook until the second decade of the twenty-first century when stylistics "is moving out of young adulthood and into its prime" (Burke 7). The first half of 2014 saw the publication of The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics (February) and The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (May; see the following book review). The two handbooks, which together form a milestone in the development of stylistics, stand in a complementary and reinforcing relation to each other. The body of The Routledge Handbook consists of four parts: (I) "Historical perspectives in stylistics"; (II) "Core issues in stylistics"; (III) "Contemporary topics in stylistics"; and (IV) "Emerging and future trends in stylistics." And the body of The Cambridge Handbook comprises five parts: (I) "The discipline of stylistics"; (II) "Literary concepts and stylistics"; (III) "Techniques of style"; (IV) "The contextual experience of style"; and (V) "Extensions of stylistics." In a sense, the content design of both handbooks points to the maturity of the discipline. The picture will become clearer if we trace the content design of some representative volumes of essays in the stylistic field in the past fifty years or so. In Literary Style: A Symposium (Chatman), published in 1971 when modern stylistics was still at an early stage with few approaches, the body of the book had been divided mainly according to different aspects of style: "Theory of style," "Stylistics and related disciplines," "Style features," "Period style," "Genre style," and "Style of individual authors and texts." Similarly, in Essays in Modern Stylistics (Freeman), the body design was based on literary genres ("Approaches to poetics," "Approaches to metrics," "Approaches to prose style"). In the 1990s, when diversified stylistic approaches flourished, The Stylistics Reader (Weber) divided its eight parts in terms of eight distinctive stylistic approaches. The first decade of the new century saw the publication of Contemporary Stylistics (Lambrou and Stockwell) and Language and Style (McIntyre and Busse). Both divide the parts of the body according to the three major literary genres, but instead of the vague "approaches to," we have the more explicit "stylistics of" prose fiction, poetry, and drama (also dialogue). In fact, the body design of Language and Style is modeled after the title of the single-authored Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose by Mick Short, to whom the volume is dedicated. As for Contemporary Stylistics, the fact that it still uses literary genres instead of stylistic approaches as the basic criterion for division may be accounted for by two factors. First, the volume gives equal weight to approaches and practices, as the book description runs, "this volume provides a showcase for the range of approaches and practices which form modern stylistics: from cognitive poetics to corpus linguistics, from explorations of mind-style and spoken discourse in narrative to the workings of viewpoint in lyric poetry, from world-meanings to the meanings and emotions of literary worlds, and more" (Lambrou and Stockwell). Second, one stylistic investigation may have the potential of being classified into different approaches according to different criteria. For instance, an essay that uses functional linguistics to investigate the gender politics in narrative fiction can be classified as either functional stylistics (linguistic model), or feminist stylistics (thematic concern), or narrative stylistics (object of inquiry). Against this background, the part design of the two stylistics handbooks, which mark disciplinary maturity, shows a more thoughtful, sophisticated, and masterly arrangement of the content. The division of parts in The Routledge Handbook foregrounds the relation between the past, the present, and the future of stylistics, with an emphasis set on core issues and current topics in the field. …

Back to Owl Creek Bridge: Robert Enrico's Adaptation Reconsidered

Abstract: In 1978, reporting on a workshop on "Literature into Film," Harry M Geduld spoke of Robert Enrico's adaptation of Ambrose Bierce's "The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" as follows: "it was evident that if one saw Enrico's film without having read the story, one would have no sense of the author's ironic style" (56) The critical discussion of the film's style seems to have advanced little since Geduld's observation is true enough, but it needs to be qualified; it does not do justice to the film's rich texture Despite the general acclaim and several special studies devoted to it, (1) Enrico's adaptation has not been fully appreciated in terms of its stylistic achievement The present article seeks to rectify this situation Bierce's "ironic style" is palpably felt from the beginning of the story (2) In the first sentence of the third paragraph the narrator designates the protagonist as "the man who was engaged in being hanged" (41) (3) Here, the crucial touch is the insertion of the phrase, "engaged in" While its formal ring is suitable for the solemn occasion, to say somebody is engaged in dying is peculiar, and it signals the narrator's distance from the event The distance is magnified in the middle section of the story Farquhar is revealed to be "a slave owner" (42) and his wife, we are told, is "only too happy to serve" the supposed Southern scout "with her own white hands" (43) The ironic tone in the choice of the word "white" is unmistakable Lawrence I Berkove makes an interesting case for this middle section of the story as "the most brilliant and underestimated part" (123) He argues that what we mainly get here is not the report of a neutral narrator, but Farquhar's mental rationalization, which shows "how completely self-deluded he is" (125-26) A good example is the sentence, "No service was too humble for him to perform in aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier" (43) This is "utter nonsense," according to Berkove (125), betraying as it does Farquhar's misguidedly romantic notion of heroism (4) In Berkove's view Farquhar is arrogant, dishonest, deluded, immoral, and stupid He goes as far as to say: "Bierce despises Farquhar Never before or afterward did Bierce create a character upon whom he lavished such utter scorn" (129) Although I find Berkove's reading a little extreme, I agree with him in seeing Farquhar essentially as a foolish man (5) For this interpretation of the character, the most telling detail is his remark, "I am a student of hanging" (43) Several views have been offered about this curious sentence, with varying degrees of persuasiveness (6) But whatever the import of Farquhar's cryptic utterance might be, Bierce's point is, I would argue, to reveal the character's stupidity Here, as he is trying to impress a man whom he believes to be a Southern scout, it would be natural if Farquhar said something like "I am a student of civil engineering," so as to stress his capability as a saboteur who might destroy the bridge Instead, he says he is a student of hanging We are made to wonder: who is this man to say such an extraordinary thing? We can imagine Bierce telegraphing to the reader, with cruelly absurd logic, that because he makes such an idiotic remark about hanging he ends up actually being hanged In making a film out of the story, Enrico deleted its middle section, which, as we have just seen, is where Bierce's irony is acutely present This excision was done with deliberation In an interview the director gives his rationale for the decision as follows: When I went over this draft I realized that in this episode with the scout what I had was simply plot First of all, it supplies a reason for the death of Peyton Farquhar I found this too complicated I think that Bierce's story is beautiful if one takes it at its most basic level--in other words, a man, a civilian, will be hanged …

Irene De Jong. Narratology and Classics: A Practical Guide

Abstract: Irene de Jong. Narratology and Classics: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 240 pp. $35.00 paper. In this introduction to narratology, Irene de Jong tries to cross disciplinary boundaries. As a classicist, she has been inspired by narratology; and now she wishes to reciprocate, to offer something in return for narratologists, namely to show information how much of narratology is relevant already for the study of classical texts. In other words, the book makes a strong statement for diachronic narratology, illustrating how almost all of the aspects and concepts of narratology can be demonstrated to be applicable to Greek narratives. These findings are somewhat paradoxical: On the one hand, a diachronic approach to narrative suggests a modification of categories, possibly an addition of narrative categories based on features which existed in Greek narratives but perhaps disappeared at later periods; on the other hand, what de Jong's book actually achieves is a corroboration of narratology's universalist qualities--basically, all her categories are illustrated by examples from Greek texts. The main thrust of the book is to pair passages from Greek and English literature, category by category. In Part II of the book, three passages from different genres are discussed in detail--one from epic poetry, one from historiography, and one from drama--thus arguing that the narratological approach to Greek antiquity extends across a wide spectrum of texts. For non-classicists, this is an astounding work of criticism since narratologists as a rule have not been following classical studies closely and therefore will tend to be duly impressed with the mass and quality of criticism in classicist narratology. Each chapter has a bibliography which contains a section on classicist narratological work relevant to the issues under discussion. Irene de Jong herself has been involved in a multi-volume project on narratologic analyses of Greek literary texts. (1) Much work has also been done by scholars in ancient history, among which Jonas Grethlein is one of the most prominent. There exists, thus, a flourishing community of narratologists dedicated to the literature of antiquity (de Jong unfortunately does not mention the Latin side, which--for the non-classicists--would have been useful). The book is, however, also an introduction to narratology for classicists, providing a survey of major narratological concepts with illustrations. After the introduction, there are four chapters of this survey entitled "Narrators and Narratees," "Focalization," "Time" and "Space." Part II then provides in-depth analyses of the Aphrodite and Anchises love affair in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite; the story of Atys and Adrastus in Herodotus' Histories (Book I); and the death of Pentheus in the messenger report from Euripides' Bacchae. All the Greek quotations are cited with English translations, thus making it easy for non-classicists to understand how similar the Greek examples are to their English equivalents. The four theoretical survey chapters will strike narratologists as somewhat odd. Although de Jong, as she says herself, espouses the model of Gerard Genette, a four-part schema "Narrators"--"Focalization"--"Time"--"Space" does not at all correspond to the Genettean framework. One would either have expected Tense (Time)--Mood (Focalization)--Voice (Narrators); or Narration--Discourse--Story. For one, de Jong is trying to modify Genette (and narratology in general) by adding space as an important basic aspect. She says a great deal about description in this chapter, distinguishing a variety of functions of the descriptive (123-30) and providing excellent insights into narrative texts applicable to all kinds of stories. She also notes examples where description does not merely provide a pause, but narrative time moves on during the descriptive passage (114). An especially striking point is her discussion of spaces in drama (109-10). …

Audio Description on the Thought-Action Continuum

Abstract: 1 INTRODUCTION The term audio description refers to the spoken commentary that is added to film soundtracks to enable visually impaired people to follow the action on the screen by supplementing the information that is already available from character dialogue and other parts of the soundtrack As this essay explains, there is currently a debate within this field regarding the possibility and desirability of "objectivity" in audio descriptions Although this debate may appear to be of limited interest to anyone who is not directly concerned with the production and reception of audio descriptions, we feel that it raises large and important issues that are of relevance to all those who work in the much wider fields of narrative theory, stylistics and literary theory generally We have in mind, in particular, our questioning of the apparently obvious distinction between descriptions of characters' actions and descriptions of characters' mental processes in fictional narratives Specifically, this essay seeks to show how concepts from narratology and techniques from corpus linguistics can be applied to the analysis of audio description We are concerned with the issue of what should be described in audio description for feature films, and how it should be worded We introduce narratological concepts that can help to better articulate this issue and to better analyze and compare examples of audio description To complement the application of narratological concepts for a close reading of audio description samples, we show how corpus linguistics techniques can be used to learn about what is being described, and how, in a corpus of ninety-one audio description scripts Our focus is on how an audio description utterance can, and, as it turns out, often does, describe a character's actions as depicted on-screen while simultaneously giving some information about the character's thoughts Central to the practice and theory of audio description is the question of what should be included in a description (Vercauteren) Concerning the issue of what to describe, and how to describe it, some recent guidelines for audio description state: "The best audio describers objectively recount the visual aspects of an image Subjective or qualitative judgments or comment get in the way--they constitute an interpretation on the part of the describer and are unnecessary and unwanted Describers must differentiate between emotion or reasoning (which requires an interpretation on the part of the observer) and the physical characteristics of emotion or reasoning (which are more concrete and allow description users to conjure their own interpretations)" (Snyder 17) While striking an exceptionally unequivocal tone, these guidelines reflect a point of view that has been prevalent among audio description practitioners Earlier guidance on standards for audio description provided by ITC is similar in advising not to "interpret events" or "give away the plot" (ITC) The ITC guidance also flags a contentious point about whether or not to give information "that is not apparent on the screen," without really explaining how to determine what is "apparent" It seems to us that such guidelines leave unanswered questions about what information is necessary for an audience to understand and enjoy a film, and what "interpretation" means in this context Also, and this becomes the main theme of the essay, with regards to what can be seen and hence described, we take issue with the supposedly clear-cut distinction that is made between a character's "emotion or reasoning" (thoughts, which should not be mentioned according to the guidelines) and their "apparent" physical manifestations (actions, which may be described) This essay seeks to contribute to audio description theory and practice in two ways First, we introduce more rigorously defined terms from narratology to clarify and simplify the issues alluded to in the previous paragraph …

Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noel Thon, Eds. Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology

Abstract: Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noel Thon, eds. Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. xi + 363 pp. $35.00 paper. The last decade has seen a growing interest in fusing narratology and media studies, or more aptly, in applying narratological tools to an ever-expanding corpus of both old and "new" media. As our daily life becomes more and more dependent on engaging with a proliferation of different media, "understanding media," as the dust jacket of this volume has it, "is key to understanding the dynamics of culture and society." Marie-Laure Ryan has been at the forefront of such developments in editing, solely and in conjunction with other scholars, a number of volumes that expand the scope of narratological concepts to a range of different media. After Narrative across Media (2004) and Intermediality and Storytelling (2010), the latter coedited with Marina Grishakova, the present volume, Story worlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (2014), coedited with Jan-Noel Thon, can indeed be seen, as the editors suggest, in terms of a "sequel" to Ryan's earlier publications--albeit with some significant differences. Narrative across Media provides comparative studies between the limitations and possibilities of different media, thereby illustrating and bolstering Ryan's claim that "media are not hollow conduits for the transmission of messages but material supports of information whose materiality, precisely, 'matters' for the type of meanings that can be encoded" ("Introduction" 1-2). Storyworlds across Media continues this work, showing that "the choice of medium makes a difference as to what stories can be told, how they are told, and why they are told. By shaping narrative, media shape nothing less than human experience" ("Story/Worlds/Media" 25). Both the 2004 and the 2014 volumes provide enlightening examples of how contemporary narrative theory can be applied to different medial contexts, while also exploring, conversely, how case studies of particular media can contribute, bottom-up, to the toolbox of narratological theory. This aim is even more explicit in Storyworlds, in that the volume as a whole seeks to provide the foundation for a media-conscious narratology. The most obvious difference in the present volume is the shift from "narrative" to "storyworld," which, according to the editors, reflects the "new directions that the study of the multiple medial incarnations of narrative has taken in the meantime" as well as "the emergences of the concept of 'world' not only in narratology but also on the broader cultural scene" (1). Furthermore, the scope of the term "across" is expanded to include not only the sense of comparing storytelling practices in different kinds of media environments, as in the earlier volume, but also the notion of transmedial storyworlds that are activated across different media environments (1-2). This makes for an entire section on transmedia storytelling and transmedial worlds. The volume is divided into three parts, each focusing on a different aspect of storyworlds across media in a bid to outline directions for inquiry for a media-conscious narratology. The first part, "Mediality and Transmediality," serves, in a sense, as a theoretical introduction to the book as a whole. It tests the applicability of a number of key narratological concepts--such as storyworld, narrator, representation of consciousness, and fictionality--across different medial environments. This section lays the groundwork for a number of cross-, trans-, or intermedial approaches to storyworlds, while also throwing up some of the theoretical problems concerning the applicability or validity of what the editors term "medium free, transmedially applicable, and medium-specific [narratological] terms and concepts" (5). Marie-Laure Ryan's contribution characteristically achieves an excellent introduction to the entire volume by providing working definitions for the key terms "storyworld" and "media," while also exploring specific analytical uses of these terms (25-49). …

"A Regime of Small Kindnesses": Order, Hospitality, and a Legacy of Narrative Styles in Robinson's Housekeeping

Abstract: The monosyllabic opening of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), "My name is Ruth," immediately conjures up Melville's brash invitation, "Call me Ishmael!" (25). Yet her own haunting spondaic rhythm serves as a quiet drum roll for the funereal list of family members that follows, until the style metamorphoses within a page, in Ruth Stone's account of her grandfather's westering to a land of "uncountable mountains" (4). Abruptly, time and space pull asunder as Fingerbone Lake floods the family home, with Ruth scrambling descriptive tenses, gently echoing herself, swelling lyrical in a recollection of then and now, there and here: "It seems there was a time when the dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of puzzling margins, as between the mountains as they must have been and the mountains as they are now, or between the lake as it once was and the lake as it is now. Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return. One will open a cellar door to wading boots floating tallowy soles up and planks and buckets bumping at the threshold, the stairway gone from sight after the second step" (4-5). The "puzzling margins" of things are puzzling first at temporal limits, as past and present collide (former mountains, older lake), before she veers into a future tense ("One will open") that paradoxically strains temporal limits, anticipating the novel's "resurrection of the ordinary" (18). It is as if the flooded basement itself provoked the emergence of a lyrical voice ("wading boots floating tallowy soles up and planks and buckets bumping at the threshold"), with water, air, vegetation, basement, all commingling, outdoors and in, while the tableau slips and slides among descriptive registers. This forms a baffling dislocation of setting as well as style before we realize how fully the novel celebrates things out of place, not merely in scenes that defy conventional household management but in a narrative voice loosely constrained by figurative forms of housekeeping. Robinson's title refers to more than just keeping house, then, becoming a trope for strategies of imposition and order as well as for gestures of restoration and accommodation. The very word "housekeeping" registers this ambivalence: "the maintenance of a household; the management of household affairs," but also "keeping of a good table--hospitality" (Shorter OED). In turn, "hospitality" is cited as "the reception and entertainment of guests or strangers with liberality and goodwill." The tension between these polarities structures Ruth's efforts to assuage her feelings of abandonment, imagining the lost voices of her grandfather, grandmother, mother, and sister as she plucks from memory the shards of a past that might help shape a tolerable future. Yet she does so in a mixed mode, both stylistically and narratively, defined by the twin poles of housekeeping: she grants the guests of her fragmented life a hospitable hearing, even as she structures her account to ensure a suitable order. This ambivalence is evoked toward the end in a telling simile when Ruth concedes that "even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sorrows and incipient dreams" (207), acknowledging the ineffectiveness of too one-sided housekeeping in the very breath that fosters its restorative psychological analogies. And her narrative style pays tribute to her grandmother's striving for domestic harmony and order, even as she models herself on her aunt Sylvie's eccentric discombobulations by shifting registers, entertaining anomalies, embracing paradox and contradiction. (1) In fact, the novel bridges the very tensions of its title, cherishing the recuperative possibilities of both housekeeping and narrative as if conceived reciprocally--of housekeeping as a form of imaginative accommodation akin to narrative, restoring a tentative order that nonetheless keeps ambiguity alive, paradoxically defying closure yet knitting a fragile resolution together. As Robinson elsewhere reminds us, "at a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm. …

Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley, Eds. the Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics

Abstract: Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. xvi + 689pp. As mentioned in the preceding book review, the almost simultaneous appearance of the Cambridge and the Routledge handbooks of stylistics in a sense marks the maturity of this discipline. As a sign of disciplinary maturity, The Cambridge Handbook, for the first time in the history of stylistics, arranges its parts with the consideration of different types of audience, trying "to look in several different directions at once" (6). The first part, which is intended for all readers interested in stylistics, offers a discussion of stylistics as a discipline with six chapters. The first three respectively deal with the theory and philosophy of stylistics (Toolan), the practical tool-kit of stylistics (Wales), and the computer-assisted quantitative methods in stylistic research (Stubbs). The latter three chapters discuss the nature and characteristics of stylistics from three complementary perspectives: a historical investigation of stylistics as rhetoric (Hamilton), a discussion of stylistics as applied linguistics in the form of a Socratic dialogue (Carter answering questions raised by the editors), and an exposition of the relation between stylistics and literary criticism (Hall). The second part of the volume is intended especially for "students and scholars of literature" (7). It contains eight chapters discussing, from a rigorous stylistic perspective, a range of literary concepts, including genre (Busse, paying attention to generic stylistic changes in historical context), intertextuality and allusion (Hogan), production and intentionality (Sotirova), characterization (McIntyre), voice (Gregoriou), narrative (Mason), defamiliarization (Gavins), and intensity and texture in imagery (Dancygier). The chapter on characterization and the last two chapters of this part all approach an "old" topic from a fresh cognitive stylistic perspective. It should be noted that the chapter entitled "Voice" is not concerned with a character's or a narrator's spoken words, but with a character's unspoken "mind style," which seems to be a more appropriate title for this chapter since it is based on Roger Fowler's model of "mind style" and it only deals with different types of "mind style." Similarly, the chapter entitled "Narrative" is not concerned with narrative itself, but with actual readers' interpretation of intertextual references concerning the plot development. The third part of the volume especially caters to "readers primarily concerned with linguistics and its application to literary texts" (7). It consists of nine chapters dealing with stylistic techniques and key features, including "phonostylistics" on paralinguistic vocal features in literature (Jobert); grammatical configuration (Mahlberg); "semantic prosody," as in, an exploration of the typical shadings of a word's meaning through collocation (Louw and Milojkovic); action and event investigated with M.A.K. Halliday's model of transitivity (Simpson and Canning); inference discussed from a pragmatic perspective (Clark); metaphor and style-distinguishing between different types of metaphor and analyzing metaphor across a poem (Steen); the foregrounding and burying of events in the plot construction of detective fiction (Emmott and Alexander); the analysis of dialogue in novel and drama--paying attention to the relation between a character's words and thoughts (Short); and, finally, a stylistic exploration of "atmosphere and tone" in literature, in relation to readers' cognition (Stockwell). Part IV of the volume, titled "The contextual experience of style," adopts "a perspective alongside the natural reader of literature" (8). It comprises eight chapters, respectively investigating the following issues in relation to style: iconicity in literary texts (Fischer); readers' ethical positioning (Whiteley); fictionality and ontology involved in interpreting mobile interactive narratives (Gibbons); literary readers' emotions and feelings (Miall), narrative structure-especially concerning the collective representation of real events in social media (Page); dramatic performance in relation to readers' cognition (Cruickshank); interpretation based on consensual meaning (Jeffries); and a portrait of historical stylistics (Bray). …

A Reading in Temporal Poetics: Emily Dickinson's "I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed"

Abstract: #214 I taste a liquor never brewed, From tankards scooped in pearl; Not all the vats upon the Rhine Yield such an alcohol! Inebriate of air am I, And debauchee of dew, Reeling, through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue. When landlords turn the drunken bee Out of the foxglove's door, When butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more! Till seraphs swing their snowy hats, And saints to windows run, To see the little tippler Leaning against the sun! --Emily Dickinson (1) In #214, Emily Dickinson gives us a riddling allegory of a "little tippler" drunk on nature--sky, air, flower, and dew. Kin to butterfly and bee, this being soars through the fiery blue sky, quaffs the intoxicating air, guzzles down the nectar of flowers, and bathes in the morning dew. The sensibilities and activities of this speaker are ecstatic, acrobatic, and otherworldly, worthy of observation and awe. In purity of sensation and height of feeling, this being challenges seraph, saint, and summer sun. The answer to the riddle, a hummingbird, is important to uncover. Whatever else it might intend and do, the poem also serves as a description and appreciation of this natural being. But the central purpose of the poem is to express the process of identification with the hummingbird, and the psychological sources and consequences of this identification as a mode of being and becoming for the speaker (and therefore for us, as readers). To identify with a hummingbird so completely is to assume a merger of subject and object, perceiver and perceived, an ecstatic overcoming of the divorce between conscious and unconscious, outer and inner, that is at the source of so much tension and anxiety in human experience. Temporally this centers the poem in cyclical time--heavenly time--where subject and object are still one, the need for unification of subject and object does not even arise, and access to heights of experience comes through a psychological regression from volition to emotion to sensation, and by this means, to imagination, rather than the other way around (i.e., from sensation, to emotion, to volition, to imagination), as in the more natural course of human growth, maturity, and self-realization. For hummingbird/speaker, this romantic regression begins in interaction with the natural world, which is expressed with linear forms. In the narrative materials of the poem, this interaction is represented by the allegorical "landlords," who control the blossoming that the hummingbird/speaker feeds upon; the allegorical "doors" of the "inns," the groves and gardens that supply the flowers that "yield" the natural "liquor" that inspires and transports; the "air," the medium that enables this interaction; and, negatively, and therefore more obliquely, rivers, like the Rhine, whose occupants and their man-made liquors suffer by comparison to the natural delights of the hummingbird/speaker, and the "run[ning]" of the human observers ("saints," children?) to the windows to view the spectacle of the astonishing hummingbird/speaker's feeding and flight. Various other linear forms in the poem (sonic, syntactic, rhetorical) also express this interaction between subjects and objects, world and mind. The most striking names for the poet/hummingbird, "Inebriate of air" and "debauchee of dew" are logically metonymic. The hummingbird/speaker is affected by air and dew, and becomes the resulting attributes of those effects. Many interactions in the poem are appropriately expressed in transitive clauses ("see," "swing," "turn," "taste," "yield," "renounce"). The excesses of the hummingbird/speaker are expressed prominently with a future time reference ("I shall but drink the more!"). At line end, one of the sound linkages is not rhyme but consonance ("pearl"-"alcohor), the linear sound scheme. And the dominant grammmetric of the poem is clausal, which gives lines a dynamic, linear "feel," as they drive across the page from subject/verb to object/complement/adverbial (or when rearranged, at least represent this process): I I taste a liquor never brewed, Inebriate of air am I, Reeling, through endless summer days, When butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more! …

Two-Shots and Group Shots: Hong Sang-Soo's Mannerist and Classical Mise-En-Scene

Abstract: Like most auteurs, there are certain familiar and cliched phrases used to discuss the work of Hong Sang-soo, the most common of these being a variation on the idea, "all his films are the same." For instance, critic Mike D'Angelo begins his review of In Another Country (2012) by declaring: "Hong Sang-soo tends to make the same movie over and over: a multi-part story in which heavily inebriated males--usually academics or filmmakers--awkwardly woo one or more bewildered females." Similarly, in his review of Oki's Movie (2010), Nick Schager states, "it features so many elements that have calcified into the director's trademarks (solipsistic student and/or director protagonists, boozy escapades, clumsy romantic entanglements, divergent points of view, and segmented narratives) that it feels trifling at best." These statements are at once understandable and even accurate on a certain level, given the large number of repetitions of narrative and character that occur in Hong's films, while also being demonstrably false, especially in terms of visual style. While Hong's visual style is both recognizable and seemingly familiar from film to film, it is constantly evolving and rather difficult to define. As a result, more attention is often given to Hong's narrative experimentation and/or thematic concerns and less to his work as a cinematic stylist (for example, Deutelbaum, "The Deceptive Design," "The Structure of Hang Sang-soo's," "The Pragmatic Poetics," and "A Closer Look at Structure"; Diffrient, "South Korean Film Genres"; Chung and Diffident; Kim, The Remasculinazation, Virtual Hallyu; Quandt). This essay aims at systematically quantifying and explaining how Hong has constructed his mise-en-scene over the course of his career and analyzes the meanings of Hong's visual approach. While the term mise-en-scene has a long and varied history of multiple definitions and meanings, this essay will focus on mise-en-scene as the art of cinematic staging, further defined by Adrian Martin as "the art of arranging, choreographing and displaying" (Mise-en-Scene and Film Style 15). The concentration will be on two variations of Hongian shots, the two-shot and the group shot, and how each respectively provides examples of mannerist and classical approaches to mise-en-scene. There have been various attempts to label recent contemporary international art film style and how these films differ from the classical art cinema of the past. For example, Ira Jaffe's Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action (2014) outlines an international trend toward long takes, long shots, austere mise-en-scene, and the lack of emotion and affect, a cinema where "nothing happens," which includes such diverse filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch (United States), Alexander Sokurov (Russia), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), Cristian Mungiu (Romania), Lisandro Alonso (Argentina), Pedro Costa (Portugal), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), Jia Zhang-ke (China), and Bela Tarr (Hungary) (among others) (Jaffe 1-3). Matthew Flanagan, in his PhD thesis on "slow cinema," lists many of the same filmmakers, along with art cinema veterans such as Chantal Akerman and Theo Angelopoulos and experimental directors like James Benning and Straub/Huillet (Flanagan 8-9). Flanagan also quotes Tiago Magalhaes de Luca in stressing "the hyperbolic application of the long take" as the key formal component of the field of slow cinema (Magalhaes de Luca 21; quoted in Flanagan 9). However, Hong Sang-soo is not included within this classification, despite sharing many of the stylistic traits, particularly the use of the long take. I would argue that this is the result of the extreme amount of dialogue in Hong's films, combined with the generally comic tone the majority of his films employ (see Diffrient, "The Unbearable Lightness" for an extended analysis of Hong's use of comedy). As a result, the comparison made is usually to Eric Rohmer, a similarly dialogue-centric director of comedies of manners who, despite being part of the French New Wave, is often seen as something of a cinematic outlier (this tendency to compare Hong and Rohmer can be seen directly in Grosoli and is also discussed and critiqued by Deutelbaum, "Approaching Hong Sang-soo" 2-3). …

Prime Time: Visual Cognition in the Prelude to Citizen Kane

Abstract: To experience a work of art is to have a distinctive kind of cognitive experience. Stated more specifically, the largely unconscious interactions between certain sensory systems and the sensible qualities that define a given kind of art constitute in substantial ways our conscious apprehension of that art. This is obvious enough for the visual or musical arts. But, it is equally true that our embodied cognitive experience of, say, reading a novel the relatively automatic processing of conventionalized black marks from left to right and top to bottom, and so forth--is an essential element of our more directly conscious understanding of the content of a given story. A cognitively oriented examination of a given art form, then, will take off from the kinds of cognitive operations that most matter for the apprehension of that art form. Film, since its beginnings, has been discussed in terms of its psychological qualities and affects. (1) To this day, psychologist Hugo Munsterberg's 1916 The Photoplay: A Psychological Study remains a foundational work in film studies. Since that time, and especially in recent decades with the rise of second-generation cognitive psychology, two versions of a cognitive-psychological approach to film have emerged. We have a more strictly scientific version, grounded directly in cited laboratory research. It makes claims about the experience of film based on findings about the ways in which our eyes process moving images, the ways our eyes track the eyes of others, the ways that mirror neurons in the brain link us to the actions we see on-screen, or the ways our emotion systems respond to certain kinds of visual cues. This kind of study has been done in various ways by, among others, such scholars as Gregory Currie, Torben Grodal (Embodied Visions; Moving Pictures), Greg Smith, Per Persson, James Cutting (9-27), and Arthur Shimamura. But we also have a less strictly scientific version. As David Bordwell has observed, film "researchers aren't psychologists or sociologists, but we can draw upon the best scientific findings we have to mount a plausible framework for considering effects" (44). That is what I will be doing here. My approach--I will call it a cognitive phenomenology--examines the experience of film in relation to our everyday kinds of cognitive experiences of the world, and it taps into cognitive psychology for direct support only at strategic points. Otherwise, this approach simply makes sure not to violate the general kinds of knowledge established by cognitive (and evolutionary) psychology. This kind of project has been carried out by, for instance, George Wilson, Colin McGinn, Noel Carroll, and David Bordwell. Here, I will take up a variation of this latter kind of approach. I will primarily turn to the field of ecological psychology in order to provide a cognitive-phenomenological reading of the Prelude sequence to Citizen Kane. If we want to understand our embodied responses to fiction film, we may take as a first principle that film "engages our perceptual system directly, and we process the changing array of light before us as we process the natural world" (Anderson and Hodgins 65). Considered on the basic level of visuo-cognitive experience, motion pictures are the singular kind of visual imitation that comes closest to looking at the world. In fact as James Gibson, in establishing ecological psychology, explained, "we ought to treat the motion picture as the basic form of depiction and the painting or photograph as a special form of it.... Moviemakers are closer to life than picture makers" (293). Given this, we may explore our responses to film by asking: what every day acts of looking are like the special case in fact the unique case--of looking at movies? An unsurprising first answer to this question is that looking at a movie is like looking at a scene through an aperture of some kind. The most basic case of such an aperture would be, as Colin McGinn has argued, simply a hole (20). …