Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1982"

Narrative Analysis and Narratology

Abstract: W E ALL KNOW how to tell narratives more or less well; we tell them more or less frequently; and we distinguish them from nonnarratives more or less strictly. In other words, we have certain intuitions (or have internalized certain rules) about what constitutes a narrative and what does not. Moreover, we often agree as to whether or not a given set of symbols is a narrative. Thus, Camus's The Stranger, Perrault's "Little Red Riding Hood," the passage in the Gospel on the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), and even such insignificant texts as

Spectacle and narrative theory

Abstract: (1982). Spectacle and narrative theory. Quarterly Review of Film Studies: Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 293-308.

Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom!

Abstract: TO THE CRITIC concerned with the design and project of narrative, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalomr! presents a particularly interesting and challenging case. It appears to be one of those "Modernist" works that both sum up the entire nineteenth-century tradition of the novel-particularly its concern with genealogy, authority, and patterns of transmission-while subverting it, working its subversion in such ways as to reaffirm the traditional problematics of the novel without accepting its solutions. Here is a novel which in its appendix offers us a chronology, a genealogy, and a map, traditional systems for the ordering of experience from which Absalom, Absalom! so markedly and self-consciously departs, yet by which it is also haunted, as by the force of an absence. Absalom., Absalom! may indeed be very much the story of the haunting force of absences, including formal absences, in the wake of whose passage the novel constructs itself. In particular, to the critic interested in concepts of plot and plottedness-by which I mean both the shape and the intention of narrative: its design and its projectthis novel appears a kind of exemplary stumbling block. In what follows, I want essentially to talk about Absalom, A bsalom! as a problem in "narratology," that is, to pursue a reflection on the novel as it reflects on its narrative design and intention, particularly as it reflects on the very concept of plot as a structuring interpretive operation applied to, and elicited by, the unfolding of meaning through and within temporal succession. In a first approach to the place of plot in Absalom, Absalom! we might consider the conception of narrative as a coded activity, implicit in all narratology and urged perhaps most persuasively by Roland

Considerations on "time" in narrative discourse

Abstract: Narrative is a feature of human experience. Language users develop from a very early age, notions or intuitions about what constitutes a 'story'. Children can understand and produce narrative structures, and through the retelling of their stories, they organise and interpret their world experience and reality, which will then be systematically ordered. Over the last two decades, the study of Narrative, in the field of Linguistics and in Literary Criticism, has developed greatly. French theoreticians, like Barthes, Todorov, Bremond and Genette, to name just a few, have concentrated on narratives in such a way that the term Narratology is now used to describe the analysis of narrative texts. Linguists like Labov, Grimes and Longacre have also been concerned with narratives. The study of spoken, factual and fictional narratives is promising both as a study of language and as a study of human experience.

A Semiotic Definition of Aesthetic Experience and the Period Code of Modernism: With Reference to an Interpretation of Les Faux-Monnayeurs

Abstract: In the absence of a consensus of what literature is and how it is to be defined, many students of literature believe that the problem can be circumvented by disregarding the literary nature of their object. This tendency has given rise first to narratology, which is concerned with narrative, irrespective of whether it is received as being literary or nonliterary, and second to the study of texts in general (text grammar, Textwissenschaft, etc.), which includes the examination of all texts, narrative as well as nonnarrative, literary as well as nonliterary. The widening of the object originates in justified doubts about the possibility of identifying the aesthetic properties of texts, even of texts which have been received as literary by many generations of readers. However, anyone interested in the poetics of fiction cannot ignore those qualities of narrative which have triggered an aesthetic response among substantial groups of readers. We accept the view that, in principle, every text (in fact every random occurrence) may occasion an aesthetic experience in the recipient, if the latter is favorably disposed toward such an experience and is meeting the stimulus of text (or occurrence) under conditions which allow aesthetic perception. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that some texts are received as being literary more often than others; the nature of the text is not indifferent with respect to the response it is most likely to elicit among a particular readership at a particular time. It appears that in literary communication the aesthetic experience is conditioned by a constellation of factors, of which both the nature of the text, and the experience,

Description and Event in Narrative

Abstract: Up to now theorists of the narrative have paid very little attention to description in narrative texts. They have made a practice of distinguishing within a text between narrative and descriptive passages, considering only the first as being of importance to the analysis of narrative. Owing to this, description has become one of the least elaborate topics within 'narratology'. This neglect is not one of the most felicitous effects of narratological analysis. For it can not be denied, I think, that the meaning of a text is transmitted to a great extent by description and that any part of a text, in order to convey meaning, must contain at least some description. In this paper I will outline what place the concept of description may hold within narratology. I will do this on the base of a definition of narrative description in which I will distinguish between four elements : narrator, focalisator, subject and predicate. To emphasize the importance of description for the analysis of narrative, I will try particularly to relate the concepts of event and description with each other. As the basic pattern of an event, I will consider the substitution of a subject-predicate combination for an opposite subject-predicate combination. I will conclude that description is a concept that one cannot afford to neglect during the analysis of narrative.

Narrative theory and the Book of Job

Abstract: Alan Cooper is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at McMaster University, Hamilton. No account of biblical poetics survives from the ancient Israelites or their immediate successors. As a result, the study of the Bible as literature has always been comparative-drawing its methods and categories from the study of other literatures or general literary theory.1 Augustine applied the techniques of late classical literary criticism to the Bible,2 just as a modem exegete might turn to the structural poetics of Roman Jakobson. Successive vogues in literary analysis eventually affect biblical scholarship, as scholars endeavour to show how-to paraphrase Bishop Lowth-we can rightly estimate the excellences of sacred poetry.3 In this paper, I would like to discuss some recent attempts to apply theories of genre and narrative to the Book of Job. I should say first that I presuppose that Job is a suitable object for literary analysis regardless of its composite nature.4 Instead of relying on a literary notion of authorship to press such a claim, we should adopt the cinematic concept of auteur. The activity of the biblical auteur will surely be recognizable in this famous description of film editing: