/pdf/from-aristotle-to-gabriel-a-summary-of-the-narratology-350cbfximp.pdf

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

From Aristotle to Gabriel: A Summary of the Narratology Literature for Story Technologies

As Margaret Atwood's most faithful readers have frequently noted, each new novel creates a special excitement since she has seemed intent on undermining her readers' expectations of what the novel will be like, based on their reading of the novel which immediately preceded it. And that could not be truer than in the case of The Blind Assassin, a winner of the prestigious Booker Prize. If Alias Grace, the novel just before, may be read as a variety of anti-detective novel which draws readers in with the expectation that they might discover the extent of Grace' s culpability, only to leave them in the end without any confidence that she is clearly guilty or innocent, (1) The Blind Assassin is on one level a "whodunit"--with a vengeance. The narrative in this novel erupts into motion with the arousal of the desire for an explanation of the mystery expressed in its first sentence: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." The blunt assertion of this opening sentence generates immediate questions: Was it suicide or an accident? Why did it happen? Is there a culprit who triggered this apparent suicide? And, regarding the differences between these two recent novels, how does The Blind Assassin cue its readers that an "epiphany" awaits them at "journey's end" and Alias Grace prepare its readers for the eventuality of what is at best a mock-epiphany? To start with the last of these questions and to defer the others, it might be argued that The Blind Assassin cues its readers that a major revelation will come as the "climax" of this long narrative by constructing a first-person narrative in which readers are impressed into a race with Iris Chase Griffen to figure out whodunit before she reveals the guilty party. In addition, since Iris is writing a variety of confessional memoir, the reader is energized by the desire to pay attention to the clues which will connect Iris to the woman in the novel-within-a-novel. Because Iris represents herself as a "historian," if not a detective, examining the events leading up to her sister's apparent suicide, the reader is also constructed as a "detective," attending to the clues offered by the narrative to support the reader's suspicions. At the same time, the narrative must be careful not to make the clues so obvious that the reader loses interest by prematurely figuring out the answers to the whodunit questions generated by the opening sentence. In contrast, even though Grace is the object of that novel's focalization (2)--to borrow Gerard Genette's useful term--her complicity in the murders of her master, Thomas Kinnear, and his mistress, Nancy Montgomery, cannot be so easily established since many years have elapsed and Grace herself cannot easily "confess" to having been a free and willing accomplice in any psychologically credible manner--if, indeed, she even knows! The case of Laura Chase's suicide is far different since from the beginning Iris--the narrative's "I" who is also its "eye"--subtly communicates the knowability of both what caused the suicide and even who the culprit is. (3) The very length of the novel the reader is holding suggests that it will be possible in the fullness of time to know the truth, but only by establishing what led up to Laura's "precipitous" demise. The plot of The Blind Assassin is set in motion by its ending, an ending which the reader is led to believe Iris knows but will not reveal until the proper time. As one reviewer comments, this is a novel very much about time, (4) and, we might add, about timing in the ways that timing is crucial to knowing. The revelations toward which the narrative slowly draws its readers--taking its own good time--could all be made at the outset or at least somewhere well before this long narrative completes itself. However, their "truth" would be diminished without the slow preparation for the end. And with the mention of"the end" it is appropriate to turn briefly to a narratologist whose views illuminate the reading of this text--Peter Brooks. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/29533604.pdf

Waiting for the End: Closure in Margaret Atwood's the Blind Assassin

Reader-focused analyses of frame narrative (usually assuming and elaborating a liminal, distinguishing, or transitional “picture-frame” metaphor) are incomplete, describing only the initial experience of “coming at” and “moving off from” the text as a pre-existing artifact. An alternative analysis would emphasize narrative acts and enabling texts (guided by the metaphor of an internal, form-giving “frame-work”), and thus describe the process by which the textual artifact comes into being, shaping itself over time into the text we eventually read. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, we might distinguish three frame sequences: a reading sequence, an action sequence, and a narrative sequence. The narrative sequence is the primary, enabling frame shaping the novel, and is dependent upon three levels of narrative refiguring: rhetorical, elemental, and intentional. Each narrative act in Shelley’s novel is enabled and shaped by a previous narrative act, and each narrative text produced by these acts is the peculiar result of the narrative sequence that engenders it. The tension between narrative act and narrative text in Frankenstein forms a fundamental dialectic process, producing an ambiguously authoritative artifact.

Framing the Frame: Embedded Narratives, Enabling Texts, and Frankenstein

Through the paradigmatic example of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, I argue that contemporary post-apocalyptic fictions articulate temporalities critical of Western modernity’s apocalyptic understanding of history. The article’s first section outlines the history of apocalyptic discourse and fleshes out the connection between postmodern theories of historiography and contemporary post-apocalyptic novels: these invite us to reflect on history qua narrative, while challenging an essentially apocalyptic model of narrative. The second section focuses on Cloud Atlas’s concertina-like structure, which resists a telic closure, warps the deterministic linearity of apocalyptic history and of traditional plots, and, through recurring patterns, foregrounds the dystopian implications of apocalypticism. The third section considers these implications in Cloud Atlas—from colonialism to the future neo-colonial biopower of corporations and anthropogenic environmental crises. Finally, I examine how the content and st...

/pdf/time-no-arrow-no-boomerang-but-a-concertina-cloud-atlas-and-4ykm15k25r.pdf

“Time, no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina”: Cloud Atlas and the anti-apocalyptic critical temporalities of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel

What is at stake when we consider the legacy of a text like The Thousand and One Nights one generally accepted as widely influential, not only on individual writers but on entire traditions on contemporary literatures? The very mention of a legacy forces us to rethink what we mean by influence, originality, authorship, and literary lineages and genealogies. Where do stories originate?1 What is the best way to approach the inheritance of narrative? A major contribution toward addressing these questions, as I seek to show in this article, can be made through the study of translation. As Jorge Luis Borges has said: "Ningun problema tan consustancial con las letras y con su modesto misterio como el que propone una traduction" ["There is no problem as consubstantial to literature and its modest mysteries as that raised by a translation"].2 There are perhaps few texts which bring the issues of influence and of the power of narrative to the forefront as clearly as the collection AlfLayla wa-Layla, The Thousand and One Nights. Or perhaps we should say no text and its translations, for any story of The Thousand and One Nights and its inheritance is ultimately a story about the translation of the Nights. In this article, I explore the legacy of The Thousand and One Nights in three Argentine writers: Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Puig, and Ricardo Piglia. In the process, I offer a way to rethink the legacy of past literatures and concepts of the Orient in Latin America, specifically in Argentina.3 My focus is on the dialogical relation of Latin American literature with the past and with the center by way of another periphery (i.e., the Orient) through processes of translation. To this end, I analyze how translation from the periphery leads to reconsiderations of source and target texts and cultures,

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

Citations

From Aristotle to Gabriel: A Summary of the Narratology Literature for Story Technologies

Waiting for the End: Closure in Margaret Atwood's the Blind Assassin

Framing the Frame: Embedded Narratives, Enabling Texts, and Frankenstein

“Time, no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina”: Cloud Atlas and the anti-apocalyptic critical temporalities of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel

The Thousand and One Nights in Argentina: Translation, Narrative, and Politics in Borges, Puig, and Piglia