2016 was imbued with a sense of shifting sands in global politics, characterised by very little security in the old or – perhaps more accurately – a sense that tradition can take surprising new forms. In a way, browsing through the titles published in stylistics in 2016 gives the same sense, albeit with altogether more positive developments. I will try to explain what I mean, first looking at the solid foundations on which these changes are wrought. With the recent publication of two discipline-defining handbooks (Burke, 2014; Stockwell and Whiteley, 2014) and a comprehensive compendium (Sotirova, 2015) the contemporary field of stylistics has been very clearly set out. There is general agreement in the remit of research in stylistics, as well as in the eclecticism that it embodies. Sorlin’s cross-referencing review of these three volumes, published in Language and Literature last year (Issue 3), makes this harmonious agreement clear, leading her to conclude that stylistics has matured and is indeed in ‘good shape’. Reflecting on an outdated suggestion that stylistics lacks an ‘autonomous domain of its own’ (Widdowson, 1975: 3) and that it is a method of analysis rather than a discipline, Sorlin asserts that in the intervening decades stylisticians have succeeded in creating a domain of their own, as evidenced by the publication of these comprehensive volumes. It is against that background of disciplinary health and energy that I undertake to review subsequent publications in the field, which both contribute to and develop the lay of the land. However, I would venture to surmise that as a result of the sense of confidence in ‘our domain’, stylisticians are engaging more fully in the interdisciplinary work that has always been at the core of this eclectic field. In the opening lines of her

/pdf/the-year-s-work-in-stylistics-2016-3rum0o4wqy.pdf

Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative

The year’s work in stylistics 2016:

Audionarratology is enmeshed in the current trend toward media-consciousness in narratological debates. This article connect audionarratological concerns with the (trans- or inter)medial extensions of narratology offered by scholars such as Marie-Laure Ryan and Werner Wolf. It focuses on Richard Powers’s earliest musical novel, The Gold Bug Variations (1991), and his to-date latest novel Orfeo (2014), zooming in on their musical macrostructures, the musical forms and techniques that inform the narrative arrangement of the texts. Having positioned the narrative analysis of macrostructural musical elements within the research scope of a media-conscious audionarratology and having explored The Gold Bug Variations and Orfeo for such musical macrostructures, I reflect on the functions of imitating music in this way.

Musical Macrostructures in The Gold Bug Variations and Orfeo by Richard Powers; or, Toward a Media-Conscious Audionarratology

In line with the strong emphasis on visuality in the wake of the “visual turn” in literary and cultural studies, graphic novel adaptations of literary texts have recently been the objects of scholarly study and narratological theory building. Much less attention, if any, has been accorded to radio play adaptations of novels like Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy . An analysis of radio play adaptations acquires a special significance in the case of this highly enigmatic work, which makes a seriously playful use of postmodern narrative strategies. It is perhaps above all this feature which made the adaptation of the novel’s first instalment, City of Glass , into a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazucchelli so successful. While the graphic novel visualizes characteristic features of its mother text, this paper explores the different modes of narrative sound in three German radio play adaptations of Auster’s novel. Alfred Behrens’ Stadt aus Glas , Katharina Bihler’s Schlagschatten , and Norbert Schaeffer’s Hinter verschlossenen Turen employ narrative devices like voices in both German and English, the evocation of city soundscapes, the narrative uses of music as well as issues of the simultaneity and/or difference of story and discourse time. The narrative auralization of Auster’s novels in the radio plays under discussion can be shown to foreground non-visual aspects of the pre-texts and to add further dimensions for interpretation that underline the usefulness of audionarratological analysis for adaptation studies.

background

Narrativity and Sound in German Radio Play Adaptations of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy

This introduction reflects on the links between sound, voices, music, and literature. It also delineates the main tenets of audionarratology, a branch of postclassical narratology which focuses on the interfaces between sound and narrative. The forum explores presentations of sounds, silence, and music in fiction and explores voices and soundscapes in audio drama.

Narrating Sounds: Introduction to the Forum

The change of methodological paradigms, introduced by postclassical narratology and especially its cognitivist orientation, has thus far not reflected on the phenomenon of atmosphere. This is somewhat surprising, if we consider that the contemporary conceptualization of atmosphere and the increased interest in the questions it brings forth arise from new phenomenology and phenomenological aesthetics, fields that have directly initiated the development of postclassical narratology. Starting with the phenomenological concept of atmosphere of M. Merleau-Ponty and H. Schmitz (atmosphere as an ecstasy of experience, a specific modus of presence with a quasi-objective and inter-subjective status fitting into the extra-linguistic framework, atmospheric perception as seizing the surfaceless space) and the aesthetic relevance of the concept (G. Bohme, T. Griffero, E. Fischer-Lichte), this article presents the terminological instability and semantic vagueness of atmosphere and related terms within the narratological discourse of M. Bal, G. Prince, M.L. Ryan and P. Abbott (atmosphere as receptive and narrative disposition, the accompanying factor of morphological categories, the thematic-psychological distinctive characteristic of genre). The primary objective of the paper is to reexamine the methodological legitimacy of the concept of atmosphere, both regarding the limits of narrative understanding and its interpretative potential which might become relevant within cognitive theories of intertextuality (E. Panagiotidy, M. Juvan), while also being a humanistic response to the challenges of new epistemological paradigms and a return to the transcendental essence of literature.

/pdf/notions-of-atmosphere-toward-the-limits-of-narrative-1h72e2bury.pdf

Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative

Citations

The year’s work in stylistics 2016:

Musical Macrostructures in The Gold Bug Variations and Orfeo by Richard Powers; or, Toward a Media-Conscious Audionarratology

Narrativity and Sound in German Radio Play Adaptations of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy

Narrating Sounds: Introduction to the Forum

Notions of Atmosphere: Toward the Limits of Narrative Understanding

Related Papers (2)

The Structural analysis of narrative texts : conference papers

Narrative, Lists, Rhetoric, Ritual and the Pentateuch as a Scripture