[N]arratives repeatedly speak of the problem of what there is to know and to tell, of the problematic boundaries of telling and listening, and of the process of transmission. (Brooks 221) As Peter Brooks observes, narratives speak of problems of knowing, telling, listening, and transmitting. While engaged in such speaking, narratives themselves are subject to the discourse of specific cultures and contexts that give them birth. That is, “what there is to know and tell” may vary markedly by culture, period, race, class, gender, and sexuality; similarly, those variables may affect processes of discriminating between telling and listening and processes of transmitting stories. In the first part of this essay, I chart ways in which Andre Dubus's short story “Graduation” articulates problems of telling—and, even more fundamentally, of being-experienced by a young woman, Bobbie Huxford, in white, middle-class America of the 1950s. Dubus's story opens with a statement of Bobbie's desire to narrate, a de...

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

What Cannot Be Told: Gender and the Limits of Storytelling in Andre Dubus's “Graduation”

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Grammatic Action and the Art of Tautology

Foolscap Subjects: A Story of Reading Byron's Don Juan

Through an analysis of the reception of Charles Dickens’ unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood this thesis establishes the centrality of the figure of the author as the perceived sanction for the completed text. Through an initial analysis of completed narrative, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, it shows that the ending is of particular importance as the point at which the reader can look back over the whole and confirm or disconfirm the provisional interpretations which have been made during the reading. It only makes sense to talk of unfinished texts or unfinished narratives in the context of a creative authority, generally identified as the author. An analysis of the reception of unfinished serial narratives of the late Victorian period, specifically the unfinished works of William M. Thackeray and Robert Louis Stevenson, confirms the centrality of the figure of the author in attempts to reconstruct the missing ending. The main body of the thesis provides a period-based analysis of Droodiana, the completions of and speculations about Dickens’ unfinished novel. In the analysis of the strategies employed to justify completions, and the responses to these, it establishes not only that the attempts to take on the authorial authority are perceived as sacrilegious, but that the perception of the completion-writers’ lack of the authority to posit an ending affects whether completions are read as able to complete the story: the willingness to submit to the ending (and revise provisional readings in light of it) is dependent on the perception of the authorial authority of the writer. The analysis shows that while the author-function develops over time, there is some continuity from the late Victorian period towards the present. The analysis of Droodian

background or methods

The completion of Edwin Drood: endings and authority in finished and unfinished narratives

The role of “story” in immersive theatre is one of continual interest. After introducing several key concepts from narrative theory—outlining past and current models of discourse, plot, story, character and causality—the chapter proposes a means to apply these concepts to immersive theatre and audience experience, using Punchdrunk’s linear immersive production The Crash of the Elysium (2011) as a case study. Arguing that this interactive promenade collaboration with(in) the BBC’s Doctor Who universe saw audience members physically embody narrative events, the chapter concludes that form and story structure have a reciprocal relationship in facilitating immersive experience.

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

What Cannot Be Told: Gender and the Limits of Storytelling in Andre Dubus's “Graduation”

Grammatic Action and the Art of Tautology

Foolscap Subjects: A Story of Reading Byron's Don Juan

The completion of Edwin Drood: endings and authority in finished and unfinished narratives

Follow the Story: Narrative and Immersion