Journal ArticleDOI
The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction
TLDR
In the last two decades, and particularly since the turn of the millennium, a number of important and popular novelists have produced books which exhibit all the formal elements we typically associate with literary omniscience: an all-know ing, heterodiegetic narrator who addresses the reader directly, offers intrusive com mentary on the events being narrated, provides access to the consciousness of a range of characters, and generally asserts a palpable presence within the fictional world.Abstract:
I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient fea ture, or at least significant trend, in contemporary British and American literary fic tion: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly outmoded omniscient narrator. In the last two decades, and particularly since the turn of the millennium, a number of important and popular novelists have produced books which exhibit all the formal elements we typically associate with literary omniscience: an all-know ing, heterodiegetic narrator who addresses the reader directly, offers intrusive com mentary on the events being narrated, provides access to the consciousness of a range of characters, and generally asserts a palpable presence within the fictional world. The novelists I'm thinking of include Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, David Lodge, Adam Thirlwell, Michel Faber, and Nicola Barker in the UK; and Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Tom Wolfe, Rick Moody, and John Updike in the US. In this paper I want to consider why so many contempo rary writers have turned to omniscient narration, given the aesthetic prejudice against this narrative voice which has prevailed for at least a century. For instance, in 2004 Eugene Goodheart pointed out that: "In the age of perspectivism, in which all claims to authority are suspect, the omniscient narrator is an archaism to be patron ized when he is found in the works of the past and to be scorned when he appears in contemporary work" (1). How are we to evaluate novels which employ an ostensibly redundant nine teenth century form in the twenty-first century? Are they conservative and nostalgicread more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Pre-Postmodernist Manifestations of the Unnatural: Instances of Expanded Consciousness in ‘Omniscient’ Narration and Reflector-Mode Narratives
TL;DR: The authors discusses the "omniscient" narration in many realist novels and the reflector-mode narratives of literary modernism as instances of expanded consciousness that involve blends between human and superhuman features.
Journal ArticleDOI
Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days : The Allegorical Sequel of The Arabian Nights
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the influence of The Arabian Nights on Najib Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days and examine the reformulation of four narrative elements, namely, plot, narrator, characters, and setting.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Genres and Politics of Refugee Testimony
TL;DR: The authors explores the genre and form of narratives that refugee applicants must present in order to move from refugee applicants to (refugee) citizens, and addresses these narratives as narratives as...
Journal ArticleDOI
Unreliability and Narrator Types. On the Application Area of ›Unreliable Narration‹
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that all-knowing narrators can only be unreliable in four of the five ways: they cannot be wrong or ignorant about them, they have complete knowledge of the story world facts, and their evaluative opinions are in conflict with a relevant value system.
Book ChapterDOI
Sense and Wonder: Complexity and the Limits of Narrative Understanding
TL;DR: In this article, the author considers cognitive constraints upon the possibility of understanding complexity, and identifies the most effective ways of negotiating with those constraints, as a first step towards identifying how to negotiate with those cognitive constraints.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The chronicle of higher education
TL;DR: Leaders of 23 of 139 public research institutions and public-college systems surveyed this year by The Chronicle will make more than $500,000, an increase from the 17 identified in last year's slightly smaller survey.
BookDOI
A poetics of postmodernism : history, theory, fiction
TL;DR: Postmodernisme membawa berbagai efek terhadap kehidupan. as discussed by the authors, salah satunya dalam karya sastra termasuk puisi.
Journal ArticleDOI
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.
Book
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a text and its reading of events, characters, and speech representation for the first time, with a focus on focalization and level and voice levels.
Book
The novel and the police
TL;DR: Through a series of readings in the work of the decisive triumvirate of Victorian fiction, Dickens, Trollope and Wilkie Collins, Miller investigates the novel as an oblique form of social control as mentioned in this paper.