Narrative discourse : an essay in method
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: The authors investigates the unique place in the development of free indirect discourse in Sense and Sensibility, and argues that the confession scenes in the novel not only reveal the back-stories of the novel, but also dramatize the interplay between voices that characterizes Austen's development.
Abstract: This essay investigates the unique place Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility occupies in her development of free indirect discourse. The novel reworks the original epistolary design of Elinor and Marianne into third-person narration, and it contains extended passages of direct discourse. Characters make these extended speeches when they confess their pasts to Elinor, who then repackages their stories for others. This essay argues that the confession scenes in Sense and Sensibility not only reveal the back-stories of the novel, but also dramatize the interplay between voices that characterizes Austen's development of free indirect discourse.
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TL;DR: The authors compare the configuration of narratives designed to inform readers about the signification of a past event with the emplotment of narratives aiming to immerse readers in a simulated past or a fictive storyworld.
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Reflecting on Paul Ricoeur's discussion of historical configuration and fictional emplotment, this article proposes to actualize his model to oppose two prototypes of narrativity, which form two poles between which narrative representations extend. Instead of basing these prototypes on narrative genres such as historiography and fiction, it compares the configuration of narratives designed to inform readers about the signification of a past event with the emplotment of narratives aiming to immerse readers in a simulated past or a fictive storyworld. While contemporary narratology has been mostly concerned with the latter case, we will see that a comparison between narratives belonging to these two poles can help us better understand the functioning of narrative texts, most of them situated between these two extremes. Drawing on stories of a plane crash found in daily newspapers and magazines, the article shows that news stories usually favor the informative function, but when an event cannot be fully told, information enters a process of serialization, leading to the emergence of a “natural” plot. This leads to the conclusion that artificial emplotment is an imitation of prefiguration rather than the triumph of concordance.
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TL;DR: This article argued that the epistemology of empiricism, inference, colligation, and representationalism ultimately fails to deliver meaning and explanation, and that the common figure of "a conversation" with the past occludes the fictive nature of the history/past engagement and cast substantial doubt on the mechanism of conversational knowledge acquisition.
Abstract: In endeavouring to evaluate how historians communicate with the past, I argued in this short presentation at the 2012 Social History Society Conference that the epistemology of empiricism, inference, colligation and representationalism ultimately fails to deliver meaning and explanation. The reason is because the common figure of ‘a conversation’ with the past occludes the fictive nature of the history/past engagement and which cast substantial doubt on the mechanism of conversational knowledge acquisition which assumes that (1) the inference as to what the empirical sources might mean can be accurately delivered in the ‘history text’, but as a result (2) the ‘truth’ and (3) ‘objectivity’ in, and (4) the ‘historical interpretation’, are in no way compromised by (5) the ‘narrative delivery’ of the presumed most likely history of the past.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the similarities between film and literature have been a frequent subject of theoretical and analytical discussion, and the most interesting work in both filmic and literary textual criticism has been carried out within the framework of French structuralism and semiotics, with the result that many scholars now subscribe to the notion that it is in the field of narratology.
Abstract: Inevitably, similarities between film and literature have been a frequent subject of theoretical and analytical discussion. Some of the earliest substantial studies were written by French scholars. Book-length studies in English have, though, probably been more numerous. Many, in both languages, have with varying degrees of success dealt with the problems of the filmic adaptations of either dramatic or narrative texts. Generally speaking, until the mid-1960s, most cinema/literature studies were what would be termed, in the broadest sense, humanistic. Since then, however, some of the most interesting work in both filmic and literary textual criticism has been carried out within the framework of French structuralism and semiotics. Furthermore, the parallels between, on the one hand, film as a dramatic art and, on the other, film as a narrative art seem to have been at last identified and differentiated, with the result that many scholars now subscribe to the notion that it is in the field of narratology tha...
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: The Plot Against America (2004) as mentioned in this paper is a classic example of the genre of allohistory with historical contingencies, which has been gaining momentum since WWII, with the inclusion of the theme of social engineering, including the Just Folks Program, the Homestead 42 Act, and the Good Neighbor Pro- gram.
Abstract: Staging a what-if kind of Gendankenexperiment with historical contingencies, The Plot Against America (2004) belongs to the genre of allohistory, which has been gaining momentum since WWII.2 Yet its inclusion of the theme of social engineering, with the Office of American Absorption overseeing the Just Folks Program, the Homestead 42 Act, and the Good Neighbor Pro- gram, endows it with elements of dystopia. Between these two experimental morphologies, the novel also, and perhaps mainly, tells the story of a single family facing hard times, seen through the eyes of its 7 to 9 year-old younger son. This story is told from a retrospective standpoint of, as it were, the same person when he is a septuagenarian intellectual. In Gerard Genette's terms, the "focal character" of the story is this child, the fictional extension of Philip Roth, caught in the "why-can't-it-be-the-way-it-was" (Plot 172) predicament and exposed to a variety of dangers despite his parents' devoted protectiveness; the voice is that of a remorseful survivor. This paper deals with the ethics of narrative form in respect to the narrator's complex attitude to himself as the protagonist.When I told several friends that I was reading this novel for the first time, the advice was to get ready for a frustratingly weak ending.3 And yet, com- ing to this book after long immersion in dystopian narratives, I did not find the ending weak. Both allohistory and dystopia have problems with endings, mainly because their main concern is with the bend-sinister inceptions of tyrannical regimes and with the shapes that they take at their peaks. The endings of such novels are usually associated with the authors' beliefs about whether the societies which provided the soil for the sprouting of tyranny pos- sessed mechanisms of self-correction (cf. also Wirth-Nesher 171). In one way or another, evil usually exhausts itself-this is the implication behind Nabo- kov's Invitation to a Beheading and one for which Camus's The Plague came in for some unfair criticism. However, in the absence of mechanisms of self- correction, too many lives are lost or damaged by the time this happens. The main difference between the legislative experiments in Roth's novel and in its precursor, Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, is that in the latter allohistory the sine qua non part of President Windrip's program is its so-called Point 15, which cancels the separation of authorities. In Roth's novel the constitutional separation of authorities may be undermined but is not canceled, which still leaves the anti-dictatorial anti-fascist forces a fighting chance.4Yet the main reason why the ending did not strike me as weak is that despite the author's Postscript, his sideline on history, it is not the happy-end political counterplot that concludes the novel but the Roth family's rescue and sheltering of the orphaned Seldon Wishnow after he loses his mother to anti- Semitic violence in a strange town. Seldon must be at least partly rehabilitated after his ordeal, not unlike the way cousin Alvin is rehabilitated after losing his leg fighting the Germans in Europe. Indeed, the main text of the novel ends with the word "prosthesis," which is here no less internally significant than, mutatis mutandis, the word "Yes" at the end of Joyce's Ulysses.On the first reading of the novel, the amount of text devoted to Alvin's stump-Philip's care of it, the problems with the fit of the artificial leg, the accidents, the crutches, the pain, the disgust-are perceived as a kind of a novum, a virgin plot of human experience to be explored through fictional representation. For a long time it seems extraneous to the political concerns of the novel, as if introduced in parallel to them, whether to display the author's skill in co-opting still uncharted lands into the province of belles lettres or whether to flesh out the story of a single family by amputating the flesh of its marginal member. But then the last phrase of the novel, "I was the prosthesis" (362), turns the word "prosthesis" into a metaphor, and this move from the literal to the figurative retroactively reshapes the theme of amputation, sug- gesting the possibility of reading it as part of the novel's cultural and symbolic codes rather than merely as an inroad of naturalism into the experimental mode (see also Duban 33-34). …
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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