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Journal ArticleDOI

Narrative discourse : an essay in method

23 Jan 1980-Comparative Literature (Cornell University Press)-Vol. 32, Iss: 4, pp 413
TL;DR: Cutler as mentioned in this paper presents a Translator's Preface Preface and Preface for English-to-Arabic Translating Translators (TSPT) with a preface by Jonathan Cutler.
Abstract: Foreword by Jonathan Cutler Translator's Preface PrefaceIntroduction 1. Order 2. Duration 3. Frequency 4. Mood 5. VoiceAfterword Bibliography Index
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that a narratological approach elucidates the outlines of an imagined state in the African realist novel and the challenges of imagining democracy, and they argue that this image of inclusivity belies its desire to consolidate, in nationalistic terms, a volatile middle-class identity.
Abstract: Although critics of the contemporary anglophone African novel acknowledge its transnational themes, they often associate it with an individualism that is harmoniously reconciled with national responsibility and, therefore, the eventual rehabilitation of the state. These critics’ implicit valorization of the nation-state as a site of shared affective ties overlooks the African novel’s dismantling of a geographically and ideologically determined writerly identity. This essay argues that a narratological approach elucidates the outlines of an imagined state in the African realist novel and the challenges of imagining democracy. Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah links reform to inclusive social dialogue. Half of a Yellow Sun resuscitates this possibility through its structurally complex representation of authorship. Echoing Anthills , Adichie’s novel extends the role of national storyteller to peripheral voices and appears to forecast state rehabilitation. However, this image of inclusivity belies its desire to consolidate, in nationalistic terms, a volatile middle-class identity.

7 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: A Question of Power and Maru as mentioned in this paper are two novels in which Bessie Head explicitly thematizes the relationship between authority and authorship, where the third-person narrator acts to counter the constricting and damaging effects of various authorities (whether they be political, gendered, or cultural) on the self.
Abstract: In her fiction, Bessie Head maps what I will call "strategies of recuperation" where the sympathetic third-person narrator acts to counter the constricting and damaging effects of various authorities (whether they be political, gendered, or cultural) on the self. My reading here focuses primarily on A Question of Power and Maru, two novels in which Head explicitly thematizes the relationship between authority and authorship. In A Question of Power, Head reinvents herself, an exiled colored woman who has lived a marginal existence suffering from mental illness, as a narrator with sympathetic control over the subject of her story. The author's explanations of Elizabeth's experience through the third-person narrator legitimize the activities of a creative self that invents in order to interpret and define experience. In Maru, Head pits the authority of a charismatic patriarch against the artist and her transcendent act of authorship. Margaret's paintings are more efficacious in facilitating social change because they help the characters in the novel imagine a future without discrimination. Issues of authority, especially when linked to problems of legitimation, have been a persistent focus of postcolonial theory. Since texts aspire to the condition of their own acceptance, as Edward W. Said has argued, authorship entails the delimitation of a constituency.1 Head's recuperative gestures legitimate her point of view by enacting its socialization, its participation in a system of discourses that define community. Rob Nixon has described Head's fiction in a similar way. Identifying the improvisational quality of Head's fiction, he has argued for its compensatory function. Head repeatedly negotiates the drama of "dispossession and affiliation" that determines her life story by "generat[ing] a compensatory matrix of allegiances transnationally to the Southern African region, locally to a particular village, and within that, to a community of women" (107). Thus repeatedly marginalized and delegitimated in real life, Head elaborates fictional belongings through a strong utopian vision. Yet I prefer a vocabulary of retrieval (and thus recuperation) to one of compensation (as used by Nixon) because retrieval suggests the putting back into motion of some existing potential for communal ties. To treat the fiction as compensation demarcates a space that is too distinct from the experience. In A Question of Power especially, Head self-consciously treats experience as inseparable from discourse and thus tries to break down the artificial disjunction between some originating experience and the subsequent narrative about the experience. The point I want to make about recuperation can be elaborated through a close examination of Said's pairing of authority and molestation in Beginnings. According to Said, "invention" and "restraint," the two explanatory terms for authority and molestation, are equally present as "beginning conditions, not as

7 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors proposed an application of narrative theory to the analysis and interpretation of the Romantic lied, illustrated with analyses of works by Schubert, Robert and Clara Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms.
Abstract: Despite the fact that the tools of narratology have been used to explore a wide range of musical genres, the nineteenth-century lied has never been the subject of sustained narratological inquiry. This article proposes an application of narrative theory to the analysis and interpretation of the Romantic lied, illustrated with analyses of works by Schubert, Robert and Clara Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms. Drawing upon recent scholarship on narrative in lyric poetry and the narratological theories of Mieke Bal, the article focuses on selected aspects of narratology: the events of lyric poetry and the ways music can create new ‘discourse events’, and how music affects issues of mediacy, in particular voice and focalization (perspective). Music provides much more than mere accompaniment; rather, it can become an integral component of the narrative discourse, bringing new potential meanings to the original poem and opening up for the music analyst new interpretative angles.

7 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Sidney Donnell1
TL;DR: In this paper, a comparative discourse analysis of Lost in La Mancha and Don Quijote is presented, in part to investigate whether Fulton and Pepe's documentary is generically the first of its kind and to argue that the distortion of reality and fiction in the lives of the subjects of Lost has a direct impact on its generic categorization and the unmaking of film itself.
Abstract: hat could be more quixotically modern than a movie about the making of a film version of Don Quijote de La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes’s novel about stories and storytelling? One answer to this question is Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha (2002), purportedly the first documentary in the history of cinema about the unmaking of a movie, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. My article presents a comparative discourse analysis of Lost in La Mancha and Don Quijote de La Mancha to investigate, in part, whether Fulton and Pepe’s documentary is generically the first of its kind. More important, I will argue that the distortion of reality and fiction in the lives of the subjects of Lost has a direct impact on its generic categorization and the unmaking of film itself. Codirectors Fulton and Pepe’s postmodern activity—the self-conscious, metatheatrical act of documentary filmmaking—is very much in keeping with the blurring of discourse and genre in Don Quijote, which itself is a self-reflexive, metaliterary text.1 There are primarily three discursive areas in which Don Quijote and Lost in La Mancha (Lost) overlap: intimacy with both literary and popular forms of discourse (that is, high and low cultural practices); reliance on perspectivist narrative techniques; and the objectification of their respective heroes’ forms of madness. Both Lost and its filmic object, the irreverently eccentric filmmaker Gilliam, are progeny of Cervantes’s novelistic legacy and part of the quixotic tradition of storytelling. The “unmaking” of a story can be used as a reading strategy for furthering the analysis of literary discourse and genre. The negation of a film genre— movies about the making of movies—is a way of interrogating quixotic storytelling’s relation to the many interruptions of its own narrative.2

7 citations

References
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Book
01 Jan 1959

61 citations

Book
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55 citations

Book
01 Jan 1954
TL;DR: Deuxieme tirage de cet essai critique de Georges Blin sur Stendhal, publie aux editions Jose Corti en 1954 as mentioned in this paper, et les images, une description a completer, une bibliotheque
Abstract: Deuxieme tirage de cet essai critique de Georges Blin sur Stendhal, publie aux editions Jose Corti en 1954.Deux images, une description a completer, une bibliotheque.

22 citations

Book
01 Jan 1950

7 citations

Book
01 Jan 1965

6 citations