The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction
TL;DR: 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 nostalgic
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01 Jan 2018
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.
Abstract: This essay considers certain cognitive constraints upon the possibility of understanding complexity, as a first step towards identifying the most effective ways of negotiating with those constraints. Its premise is that our narrative understanding of systemic behaviour latches onto the system’s emergent behaviour, at the cost of a disregard for how this emergent behaviour is actually being produced. This limit on narrative understanding points to a cognitive borderland, in which our cognitive engagement with complexity is felt as an “edge of sense” phenomenon. I pursue the qualities of this feeling in relation to the (rather surprising) attempts to define emergence in terms of surprise, and put the notion of surprise in narrative context by invoking Alfred Hitchcock’s well-known distinction between surprise and suspense. Doing so provides a way to clarify the affective dimension of the observer’s experience of emergence, and locates it in a certain double relation to knowledge in narrative. This double perspective clarifies the respect in which things may appear to make sense even while we are unable to make sense of them; an affective experience I equate with wonder. Wonder is, among other things, a religious feeling that conforms to this double perspectival structure by positing that the order of things, whilst eluding us, submits to omniscient cognition. I situate omniscience in relation to its literary analogue, omniscient narration, and contrast it with the position of the character narrator, in the middest—drawing upon Don DeLillo’s White Noise as example. DeLillo’s novel provides a suggestive link to The Cloud of Unknowing and a mystical tradition of understanding as a feeling, and even a relinquishing of knowledge. I end by relating this mystical sense of wonder to the unnarratable, and consider how it can help clarify our cognitive difficulties with emergence in complex systems.
6 citations
01 Jan 1971
TL;DR: The chilling true crime novel "In Cold Blood" as mentioned in this paper is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative published in "Penguin Modern Classics".
Abstract: The chilling true crime 'non-fiction novel' that made Truman Capote's name, "In Cold Blood" is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative published in "Penguin Modern Classics". Controversial and compelling, "In Cold Blood" reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved. At the centre of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, who, vividly drawn by Capote, are shown to be reprehensible yet entirely and frighteningly human. Truman Capote (1924-84) was born in New Orleans. He left school when he was fifteen and subsequently worked for The New Yorker, which provided his first - and last - regular job. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction - short stories, novels and novellas, travel writing, profiles, reportage, memoirs, plays and films; his other works include "In Cold Blood" (1965), "Music for Chameleons" (1980) and "Answered Prayers" (1986), all of which are published in "Penguin Modern Classics". If you enjoyed "In Cold Blood", you might like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs' "And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks", also available in "Penguin Modern Classics". "It is the American dream turning into the American nightmare...By juxtaposing and dovetailing the lives and values of the Clutters and those of the killers, Capote produces a stark image of the deep doubleness of American life ...a remarkable book." ("Spectator").
5 citations
TL;DR: Empirical realism has been attributed to the "hysterical realism" of realist novels as mentioned in this paper, where the author seems to know a great deal about the world.
Abstract: In April of 1873, four months after the publication of the final volume of Middlemarch, a glowing appraisal of George Eliot appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Whether her latest novel was a "success or a failure," the reviewer, Arthur George Sedgwick, hesitated to say. Rosamond and Mr. Brooke, he thought, were less memorable than Becky Sharpe or the members of the Pickwick Club, and Eliot's portrait of a provincial society was less "beautiful" than her portrait of sibling dynamics in The Mill on the Floss. Still, Middlemarch established Eliot as a novelist whose "erudition" was unprecedented: "History, science, art, literature, language, she is mistress of' (493). Along with her keen moral insight, one of Eliot's great gifts as a novelist, according to Sedgwick, was the sheer range of her knowledge. It is often said that the realist novel, relative to other literary modes (epic or romance) and genres (poetry or drama), orients itself toward the empirical realm, studding its plots with information about the natural and social world. (1) But certain realist novelists repeatedly get singled out for how much they seem to know. (2) Reviewers have praised, for instance, Goethe, Balzac, or Melville in the terms that Sedgwick applied to Eliot--whereas those terms are rarely applied to, say, Austen, Flaubert, or James. This holds true of contemporary fiction as well: novelists like Marilynne Robinson or Joseph O'Neill are hailed for their taut prose or control of mood, while Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen are more often championed for their encyclopedic intellects. One 2002 reviewer of The Corrections marveled that the novel's author seemed to know everything, from "the names of the flowers chosen by corporate gardeners (mums, begonias, liriope)" to "the wear and tear--both natural and malign--suffered by the signalling systems of branch railway lines in the rural Midwest" to "the depredations suffered by Brezhnev-era power generators in Soviet satellite countries" (Lezard). (3) Of course, not all critics find such knowledge praiseworthy. In 2001, James Wood famously denounced what he called the "hysterical realism" infecting contemporary fiction, exemplified by novelists such as David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith, who showcase a "wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge" by peppering their plots with information about everything from "the sonics of volcanoes" to "how to make a fish curry in Fiji" to "terrorist cults in Kilbum! And about the New Physics! And so on" (n.p.). While Wood credits (or rather faults) Don DeLillo for this trend in its recent iteration, the hyper-informed narrator is part of a long novelistic tradition, one that was crucially shaped, I argue, by George Eliot. By the end of her career, Eliot had become associated with a certain type of omniscient narrator--I will call it the omnicompetent narrator--that would be adopted by several novelists in her immediate wake (including Trollope, Flowells, and Dreiser), and would be revitalized by Smith, Franzen, and their peers. One factor that provoked Eliot to experiment with the omnicompetent narrator, I claim, was her fear that a specializing division of labor was leading to the extinction of the generalist. Some of Eliot's contemporaries attributed the rapid pace of specialization, in the late nineteenth century, to an accelerating pace of knowledge production: "Formerly, all science could be grasped by a single mind," remarked William Dean Flowells in 1891, "but now the man who hopes to become great or useful in science must devote himself to a single department" (144). But specialization, Eliot recognized, was not simply an organic effect of there suddenly being more to know. The notion that an individual needed to "devote himself' to a single field in order to be credible was also an ideological product of professionalization. Striving to establish "monopolies of competence" (Larson 15) over fields of knowledge, nineteenth-century professional organizations needed to persuade the public to distrust nonprofessionals: to distrust, that is, practitioners who had not been through their systems of training and credentialing. …
4 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that a considerable part of the attention that the novel habitually accords to the individualization of its characters is invested into what is often labelled, not unproblematically, the representation of consciousness.
Abstract: In his 1957 study The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt argues that “the novel is clearly distinguished from other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualisation of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment” (17–18). As the novel develops, from its incipient (post-)Renaissance forms and the eighteenth-century examples discussed by Watt into the period of ‘high’ realism2 during the nineteenth century, the relationship between individual and society becomes its increasingly intricate framework. Set in urban(ish) surroundings and enmeshed in social networks of various kinds, characters’ identities are negotiated between the two poles of solitary reclusion and societal interaction. A main character’s existence is usually ‘bi-polar’ in this sense, fashioning out the various ways in which, as John Richetti notes in The Columbia History of the British Novel (1994), “the novel is a vividly informative record of Western consciousness during the last three hundred years” (xiii).3 Concomitantly, a considerable part of the attention that the novel habitually accords to the individualization of its characters is invested into what is often labelled, not unproblematically, the representation of consciousness. This latter concern culminates in the “stream of consciousness novel” of the modernist period (Friedman 4). The techniques that modernist writers refined and elaborated (free indirect discourse, interior monologue) have been identified
4 citations
04 Jun 2018
4 citations
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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.
2,945 citations
TL;DR: Postmodernisme membawa berbagai efek terhadap kehidupan. as discussed by the authors, salah satunya dalam karya sastra termasuk puisi.
Abstract: Postmodernisme membawa berbagai efek terhadap kehidupan. Salah satunya dalam karya sastra termasuk puisi. Dimulai dengan modernisme tahun 1960an. Buku ini berisi permasalahan sejarah postmodernisme dan kritik-kritik tentang postmodernisme terhadap puisi, juga model postmodernisme terhadap parodi dan politik. Selain memberikan fokus terhadap kesejarahan metafiksi.
1,910 citations
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
1,852 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1983
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.
Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. Story: events 3. Story: characters 4. Text: time 5. Text: characterization 6. Text: focalization 7. Narration: levels and voices 8. Narration: speech representation 9. The text and its reading 10. Conclusion 11. Towards...:afterthoughts, almost twenty years later
1,191 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1988
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.
Abstract: 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.
655 citations