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Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

31 May 1980-
About: The article was published on 1980-05-31 and is currently open access. It has received 1885 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Narrative structure & Narrative criticism.
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TL;DR: In this article, a major revision is made to the triadic typology of focalization based on a diminishing degree of access to the psychology of the characters, which has been the subject of a great deal of debate within the pages of Poetics Today.
Abstract: Ever since Gerard Genette coined the term in 1972, the concept of focalization has been the subject of a great deal of debate, some of which has appeared within the pages of Poetics Today. Focalization is defined by Genette as a restriction imposed on the information provided by a narrator about his characters. His well-known triadic typology (zero, internal, and external) is based on a diminishing degree of access to the psychology of the characters. In the terminology of Mieke Bal, internal and external focalization refer instead to the intraor extradiegetic locus of the focalizer, and have nothing to do with psychological penetration.l If we examine these and other theories with an eye toward retrospective personal narration, however, we find that a major revision is in order. Little attention has been paid to the problem of focalization in texts in which narrator and character are the same individual. Traditional studies on point of view have often failed to take into account the many possibilities open to the first-person narrator (FPN), who is of course a fictional creation and not a true autobiographer.2 Even modern theory is often inadequate

40 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors of fiction from the perspective of a relevance theoretic approach to communication have addressed issues in the philosophy of fiction, including the role of expressives in free indirect discourse and irony.
Abstract: This paper addresses issues in the philosophy of fiction from the perspective of a relevance theoretic approach to communication Its departure point is the assumption found in both pretence approaches to irony (eg Currie 2002, 2006, 2010, Recanati 2000, 2004, 2007, Walton 1990) and Sperber & Wilson’s (1995, 2006, 2011) echoic approach that free indirect discourse and irony should be treated in parallel Drawing on examples (mainly) from Mansfield’s short stories, It then addresses the question of how we should account for the role of so-called ‘expressives’ in free indirect style and argues that while authors may use them in the imitation of a character’s style or ‘voice’ (especially for the purpose of parody), they may also use them as a means of encouraging readers to construct their own meta-representations of a character’s state of mind Finally, it addresses the question of what the narrator’s/author’s role is in creating these effects, and argues that the function of a ‘speaking’ narrator must be de-coupled from that of an organizing, selecting narrator (the communicator) Although this distinction can be explained in relevance theoretic terms, it implies that free indirect thought representations must be distinguished from irony and parody, where the relevance of the utterance lies in the audience’s interpretation of the communicator’s thoughts Key terms expressive irony free indirect discourse/thought imitation (meta-)representation narrative/narrator parody pretence principle of relevance voice

40 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors draw on Jakobson's tripartite division of the notion of translation, and Eco's discussion of the terms in his book on translation, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (2003b).
Abstract: Abstract This paper draws on Jakobson’s tripartite division of the notion of translation, and Eco’s discussion of the terms in his book on translation, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (2003b). It focuses specifically on the issue of intersemiotic translation, questioning and showing what it means to “translate” from one “language” to another, such as from the novel to the medium of film, and to what extent the term translation is used metaphorically or whether it is semantically extended to include a broader notion of translation than that between natural languages.

39 citations