Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1983"

Introduction: Lacan and Narration

Abstract: Jacques Lacan as narrative theorist? A Lacanian narratology? The answer to both questions, as this collection advances generally, is a qualified yes. Jacques Lacan's concern with the Freudian subject suggests a position in regard to narration-an approach, even (with some elaboration) a narratology. It is an approach derivable from his view-his central insight into psychoanalysis-that l'inconscient est structure comme un langage. It says simply that narration, too, operates like a language, is a language, and manifests linguistic operations in various ways. Narration exists, finally, within the context of an unconscious "discourse," within the bounds of what Lacan calls the "discourse of the Other." Since the early 1970s, though earlier in France, literary theorists have busily sought to understand this central insight of Jacques Lacan's rethinking of psychoanalysis-in a sense to reverse it, not to disprove it necessarily, but to grasp how language in literary texts is constituted, buoyed up, permeated, and decentered by the unconscious. The aim has been to understand (reversing Lacan's statement) how "literature," in Shoshana Felman's words, ".... is the unconscious of psychoanalysis."' In this regard, the studies of this collection, focused as they are on narration, mark another step, possibly an advance, in the literary appropriation of Lacan. This collection as a whole experiments in the situating of narration as an effect (or product) of the unconscious-narration (in a sense) as already Lacanian even before or apart from, even in spite of, Lacan. Indeed, the theoretical melding of l'inconscient and le langagepsychoanalysis and linguistics-does take place before Lacan, as Lacan himself insists, in Freud, particularly in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Jokes and

Mise en Abyme and the Prophetic in Narrative in Narratology.

Abstract: L'efficace de la mise en abyme dans le recit: l'anticipation et la prophetie comme questionnement de la revelation. Application a Oedipe Roi et The Fall of the House of Usher.

Oedipus Wrecks: Lacan, Stendhal and the Narrative Form of the Real

Abstract: It is undoubtedly to semiolinguistics and structuralism that the enormous interest in narrative and narrative theory in the midtwentieth century may be attributed. Using Vladimir Propp's Morphology and Claude Levi-Strauss' Mythologiques in combination with certain of the Russian formalisms, the structuralists around Roland Barthes-Claude Bremond, A.J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov-were, in French criticism at least, able to make major analytic strides in understanding the structure of narrative by formulating models for their deductive study. The very heart of narrative is laid bare in their work, which Barthes himself celebrated in his famous 1966 essay "Introduction to the Structural Study of Narrative" (translated into English in 1975).1 Narrative, like a primitive myth, is seen by structural analysts as free from all mimetic constraints. It is that form which is not enslaved to reality. This freedom (of will; the arbitrary) is crucially important for structuralism. Narrative is, however, also the locus of a certain lack of freedom. In narrative one discovers the existence of certain

A Picture Equals How Many Words?: Narrative Theory and Picture Books for Children

Abstract: Narrative is the most vital element in literature for children, not only in the novel, but also in the modern picture book. Yet critical theory dealing with the narrative function of illustrations, as distinct from narrative elements in the text, is sadly lacking. It needs to be expanded if we, as adult readers of literature for children, want to understand the semantic structure of picture books. This paper will demonstrate the application of narrative theory to a seminal book in the genre, Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak.1

Point of View and Narrative Technique in the Fiction of Edith Wharton in Narratology.

Abstract: La polyphonie narrative et le tissu social chez E. W. a partir de "Roman Fever" et The House of Mirth.

Text and Ideology: For a Poetics of the Norm in Narratology.

Abstract: Les normes litteraires sont les vehicules des jugements de valeur dans le champ du texte de fiction, champ de mediations et de relations des personnages qui soutiennent l'ideologie d'un savoir par leurs pratiques d'evaluation.