Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1991"

Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader

Abstract: (Contents arranged thematically) Foreword Acknowledgements 1. Formalist, structuralist and post-structuralist poetics, linguistics and narratology 2. Deconstruction 3. Psychoanalysis 4. Poetics, ideology, cultural history 5. Feminism 6. Hermeneutics, reception theory, reader-reponse 7. Cognitive literary scholarship Contents are arranged: a. historically b. thematically

Who Talks Advertising? Literary Theory and Narrative “Point of View”

Abstract: This paper analyzes the presenter in advertisements by means of a theoretical framework drawn from literary criticism. The paper adapts literary theory to explore the advertising “who” — the presenter of a message. It turns to dramaturgy and narratology theory to formulate a trichotomy of advertising “points of view” — first-person narrator, third-person narrator, and dramatic character. The formal and functional properties of each are discussed with advertising examples. Advertising consequences are illustrated with examples taken from Advertising Age's “Best Advertising of 1989” compilation. These are discussed in terms of media patterns, message strategy, and overall communication objectives. The discussion also suggests the need for additional research to understand hybrid and parody forms.

Telling it Like it Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms

Abstract: Something is rotten in state-of-the-art narrative theory. Time has done nothing to correct it, and philosophers have managed even less. At issue is the epistemic legitimacy of the historical narrative, and the debates it generates are as protracted as they are confounding. What epistemic status do the kind of stories historians tell claim, and what have they any right to claim, in virtue of their narrative form? -that is the question. Both positive and negative answers have been backed by arguments that can seem quite compelling, at least for a time. Stepping back a bit, however, can make both positions appear strange and unnatural. Sweeping denials of the story's capacity to reflect the past accurately are ever catalyzing equally misleading global affirmations, which in turn and again make the more skeptical stance appear quite attractive. The contortions that both critics and defenders of narrative go through, and the instability of the convictions they generate, should in the end, I believe, make us suspicious of the question. Narrative histories should be taken on their own terms, and their epistemic adequacy assessed on a case-by-case basis. The issue arises because the constructive activity of the narrator is seen to be in tension with history's professed aim to tell truths about the past. Louis Mink put the problem well: "So we have a ... dilemma about the historical narrative: as historical it claims to represent, through its form, part of the real complexity of the past, but as narrative it is a product of imaginative construction, which cannot defend its claim to truth by any accepted procedure of argument or authentication."' Mink's doubts about the possibility of such a defense have of course not deterred philosophers from trying to provide them. Recent years have seen some rather sophisticated dialectical defenses of the narrative mode. I intend to examine these arguments in some detail, and try to make both their virtues and their shortcomings stand out clearly. More importantly, however, I aim to question the skepticism that inspires such attempts. Thus recent efforts to defend the epistemic honor of the story should be

Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience

Abstract: In traditional narrative theory, the term "omniscience" refers to a narrator's absolute knowledge and authority. Narrative theory provides no social, historical, or psychological context for omniscience, nor does it attempt to explain the predominance of omniscient narration in nineteenth-century British fiction. Audrey Jaffe uses Dickens's novels and sketches to redefine narrative omniscience as a problematic that has implications for the construction of Victorian subjectivity, giving us new insights into Dickens and into other fiction as well. Jaffe demonstrates that omniscience is the effect of a series of oppositionsbetween narrator and character, knowledge and its absence, sympathy and irony, privacy and publicity. Showing how these oppositions participate in and enforce Victorian ideas about family, the subject, and private life, this study illuminates connections between ideology and narrative form."

Beyond Reductionism: Narrative Genres in Divorce Accounts

Abstract: There is an inevitable connection between reduction-our need to simplify and order-and representation-our dependence on words and images to stand for what we see and feel. Using divorce as an example, I examine the consequences of three forms of representation and compare what we learn from symptom counts, from lists of marital complaints, and from narrative accounts of mar-riage. All three forms involve reduction and selection, but narratives privilege the teller's language and way of organizing experience into talk. Yet narrative theory has been constrained by its primary focus on the story. Drawing on research interviews, I display various genres within the narrative medium: habit-ual and hypothetical narratives and an approach-avoidance narrative, in addi-tion to stories. Each has a distinctive style and structure and each persuades differently. As a way of dealing with the reductionism of narrative theory, we need to open up our definitions of narrative to include these and other forms. (Qualitative Sociology)

Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception

Abstract: This is an examination of the descriptive art found in four medieval poems: "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", "Pearl", "Purity" and "Patience". Generally accepted as being the work of a single author, alternately known as the "Pearl" or the "Gawain-Poet", these 14th-century poems are bound together in British Museum Cotton Nero A.x. Readers of the poems rarely fail to admire their descriptive art - the minutely detailed and precisely visualized depictions of costume, landscape, interior funishings or storms at sea. Sarah Stanbury examines the "Gawain-Poet"'s powers of physical description and the ways in which the poems focus upon the moment and act of vision. The text grounds its discussion in medieval aesthetics, contemporary narrative theory and iconographic study to explore the ways in which the poet consistently uses description as a narrative tool for dramatizing the limitations of human experience and knowledge.

Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction

Abstract: Acknowledgments I. Worlds Apart A Theory of Science Fiction II. SF and the Reader III. A Typology of SF IV. Science Fantasy V. Looking Backward and Forward at Worlds Apart Notes Bibliography Index

On Story-Telling: Essays in Narratology

Abstract: A readable and absorbing volume of annotated essays illustrating the approach of Mieke Bal to story-telling. Essays include reflections and background on methodology, theory of narrative, and examples of how narratology unmasks the meaning behind texts from the world's great story-tellers

Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline

Abstract: Interestingly, Byron tells this anecdote to make a point, not about sex, but about narrative-though the overlap of terms is no accident. Narrative, he suggests, begins in infidelity; narrative abrogates form, social or esthetic, to accommodate experience. And, in so doing, it simultaneously claims truth and produces pleasure. Byron's anecdote is worth keeping in mind when confronting the recent flurry of narratological activity among musical critics and

Neverending Stories: Toward a Critical Narratology

Abstract: In these compelling new essays, leading critics sharpen our understanding of the narrative structures that convey meaning in fiction, taking as their point of departure the narratological positions of Dorrit Cohn, Grard Genette, and Franz Stanzel. This collection demonstrates how narratology, with its attention to the modalities of presenting consciousness, offers a point of entry for scholars investigating the socio-cultural dimensions of literary representations. Drawing from a wide range of literary texts, the essays explore the borderline between fiction and history; explain how characters are constructed by both author and reader through the narration of consciousness; show how gender shapes narrative strategies ranging from the depiction of consciousness through intertextuality to the representation of the body; address issues of contingency in narrative; and present a debate on the crucial function of person in the literary text. The contributors are Stanley Corngold, Gail Finney, Kte Hamburger, Paul Michael Ltzeler, David Mickelsen, John Neubauer, Thomas Pavel, Jens Rieckmann, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Judith Ryan, Franz Stanzel, Susan Suleiman, Maria Tatar, David Wellbery, and Larry Wolff.

Emplotting the Reader: Motivation and Technical Documentation

Abstract: Technical documents implicitly require readers to play out textually constructed roles in order to create meanings. Good technical writers create texts that motivate their readers by emplotting them in an attractive fabula, and, especially, in a role that not only achieves the ostensible purposes of the documentation but also allows the reader to function as the hero in a narrative of progress and improvement. Drawing on reader-response criticism and narratology, this article shows how a particular instructional software manual, the VP-Expert™ guide, instructs and motivates readers by using devices which resemble the conventions of heroic narrative.

Toward a Poetics of "Descriptized" Narration

Abstract: Description, especially detailed description, has been considered a distinguishing element of realism in narrative since the movement's beginnings in the nineteenth century (Auerbach 1953: 413, 417), and the question of description in narrative theory and practice was an important consideration (Stang 1959). Somewhat less than a century later, description had fallen out of favor, at least with some theorists. In the 1960s, some structuralists neglected description because it was thought to be alien to narrative and of little signifying purpose (for example, Barthes 1968: 85-87). More recently, many narratologists have rejected this position, including Barthes himself, whose idea of the plurality of the text, as developed in S/Z, potentially assigns several functions to any given statement in narrative, including descriptive ones (see, for example, his commentary on lexie 8 [1970: 30-31]). Other theorists have studied many different functions of description: characterization, prediction (Bal 1977: 96, 98, 104-5), delay, development of theme (Jacques 1975: 173-77, 180-85, 196-97), parody (Culler 1974: 108), and even self-contradiction, as in the French new novel, depending on the explicitness and placement of the explanation of the description's meaning (Ricardou 1967: 92-95, 109-11). Whether descriptive passages are full or devoid of thematic meaning, it has become generally recognized that they often fulfill several functions, one of which can be the communication of theme. As Michael Riffaterre puts it, description's "primary purpose is not to offer a representation, but to dictate an interpretation" (1981: 125).

Narratology, Narrative, and Meaning

Abstract: What I intend to do, in the main, is to retrace a journey, but first I will mention an old joke-that of the madman reading the telephone directory and thinking that it is a rather mediocre novel: too many characters and too little action. If I find it relatively easy to read the directory as a novel (and a set of directories as a saga), I find it more difficult to use a novel as a directory. But not impossible: a code would suffice.

Narratology and oral poetry: the case of Homer

Abstract: Headed by Barthes ("Innombrables sont les recits du monde"), narratologists claim as the object of their study a vast and heterogeneous corpus of texts: "newspaper reports, history books, novels, films, comic strips, pantomime, dance, gossip, psychoanalytic sessions," etc. (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 31).1 However, the theoretical apparatus of narratology has mainly been developed on the basis of one specimen of narrative text: the novel. This is understandable from both a histori-

Reading the Miller's Tale

Abstract: Modern narrative theory has provided new ways of analysing stories and a new critical vocabulary for discussing narratives. Some such theories emphasise the way in which the reader is involved in the act of reading a narrative, bringing skills and assumptions to the text which enable him to interpret the words which make up the story. Traditionally we have tended to confine literary analysis to the words on the page; narratologists and structuralists invite us to examine also what the reader brings to the text. Such an analysis not only interprets the texts under discussion but also helsps to lay bare the assumptions of the reader. This paper will provide an analysis of Chaucer's Miller's Tale using a heory of narrative analogous with transformation! grammar.

Curing the Blues: W. E. B. Du Bois, Fashionable Diseases, and Degraded Music

Abstract: Literary theory is an odd field, and, within literary studies at large, it is as often vilified as respected, as often dismissed as celebrated. The very word "theory" is enough to raise the hackles of half the people in my English department, and I still remember, sometimes with chuckles and sometimes with flashbacks of fear and loathing, how one member of my Ph.D. committee angrily blurted out that the theoretical discourse in my dissertation proposal was "barbaric." People in literary studies have an understandable tendency to discriminate among various kinds of language use, and the various languages in which theory takes place (from the technical to the politicized to the arcane) are found by many in the antitheory camp to be abominations. The threat that some theoretical enterprises pose to business-as-usual in literary departments has also aroused responses ranging from indignation to despair. But since literary theory has slowly become institutionalized over the last decade or so, much of the early anger at its savage threat to civilized conversation seems to have gone underground, surfacing only during searches for new faculty, for instance, or in meetings on curricula. Music theory, on the other hand, incurs little antagonism, and its validity as an academic specialty is not a subject of controversy. Few musicologists would suggest that music theory is a vulgar, flash-in-the-pan backslide from proper academic concerns. Literary theory, however, is simply not theory of literature in the same way that music theory is theory of music. Literary theory is a collection of theories, most in competition rather than cooperation with each other, not about literature per se, but about the study or the reading of literature. There is a technical language of poetic form and meter that has the classificatory specificity of musical theories of form, and there is a set of narrative theories, often known (by those who do not do it) as high-tech narratology, RING THE BLUES: W E.B. DU BOIS, SHIONABLE DISEASES, AND DEGRADED MUSIC

Notes on Metafiction

Abstract: This paper consists in lecture notes and materials for a postgraduate course on metafiction at the University of Zaragoza (1991). Contents include: 1. Introduction; 2. Reflexivity and Metafiction: Some Related Concepts; 3. The Reflexive Novel; 4. Reflexive Devices in Fiction; 5. Theory of Reflexive Fiction; 6. Metafiction as Thought; 7. Postmodernism and Reflexivity, appendixes and a bibliography of criticism on metafiction up to 1990.

Die kreatiewe gebruik van die narratologie in die literatuuronderrig

Abstract: Summary In this article an attempt is made to illustrate the creative possibilities of basic narratological concepts. Narratology is generally regarded as a rather rigid approach to narrative texts because of the structuralist base of the discipline. On account of the fact that narratology does describe the most important narrative categories adequately, the point is made that the discipline is very useful in teaching a reading strategy for narrative texts to inexperienced students. The results of the narratological analysis of a text can, however, be interpreted in a number of ways, and this is where creativity in reading and interpretation can be very prominent. In conclusion a reading of a short story is done to illustrate and test the theoretical argumentation.

Speech Acts and Violence in the Sagas

Abstract: The American sociolinguist William Labov, who has been collecting and studying anecdotal narratives of street life among gangs of black youths in Harlem and the Philadelphia slums, also published a short paper (Labov, 1981) on the interaction of verbal behavior and violence in the experiences of white informants of his from other areas. As I have pointed out once before (Amory, 1980), but without denting the surface of Old Norse narratology,1 both the materials and the methods of Labov are highly relevant to the Icelandic sagas and their folk narratives. In this paper Labov has addressed himself to the very contemporary social problem of “senseless violence” in American life, in the hopes of pinning down wherever he can some of the verbal clues to its psychological causes in the story-telling of his white informants above all, in any of the spoken words between them and their assailants that might have led to blows. Such an approach to violent actions through narrative and dialogue would miss of its mark were the words that led to blows not “loaded” , i.e., possessed of the social or psychological force to make certain things happen under appropriate conditions. Words that “do things” this way are in the category of speech acts,2 and Labov’s paper draws

Teniers, Flemish Art, and the Natural School Debate

Abstract: Horace's dictum, Ut pictura poesis, might appear anachronistic today in light of modern literary theory, which has tended to view literature as a distinctly verbal form of art and has preferred lately (especially during the current craze for Mikhail Bakhtin) to examine such decidedly nongraphic aspects of prose fiction as narratology, dialogicality, and polyphony. Although neoclassicists throughout the eighteenth century treated poetry as a form of painting (the poem was considered a "speaking picture"), this interart analogy, M. H. Abrams argues, begins to disappear as early as the romantic period at the beginning of the nineteenth century. "In place of painting," he asserts, "music becomes the art frequently pointed to as having a profound affinity with poetry."' Nonetheless, modern literature over the past two centuries has given us "many descriptions at least suggesting the effects of painting and inciting us to visualize scenes in terms frequently evocative of contemporary paintings.") 2Moreover, critics themselves have for a long time viewed artistic literature largely according to the standards of the fine arts. Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1946), for example, traces the development of western literature in part by examining

Where To Begin and How: Narrative Openings in Donald Creighton's Historiography

Abstract: WAS DONALD CREIGHTON A NARRATIVE HISTORIAN? The question might be thought purely rhetorical, for surely it is a commonplace among historians not only that he was but that he was a master of narrative historiography. It is worth asking, nevertheless, in view of the renewed interest among philosophers and literary theorists in narrative as a form of prose discourse and of recent claims that contemporary historical writing is experiencing a'revival of narrative.' In the former case, discussion has focused particularly on the epistem0logical import of narrative, in the latter on the practical implications of certain innovations observed in current historical study.' A reconsideration of Creighton's work in light of the new 'narratology' may help to illuminate his historiographical practice and enhance our appreciation of his mastery. It may also assist in clarifying some of the issues with which all historians must deal in choosing the way the), write their histories.

Introduction:Narrative, Narrative Theory, Drama: the Renaissance

Abstract: Presentation des articles contenus dans ce fascicule qui appliquent largement a l'etude du drame de la Renaissance les recherches contemporaines des theoriciens du recit et de la fiction

Metaleptical Hijinks in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories

Abstract: Writers as varied as Roland Barthes, Keith Cohen, Christian Metz, and Robert Scholes have observed that film resembles prose Fiction not only in the thematic sense that many novels and short stories have been turned into motion pictures, but also in the sense that the two media share several stylistic elements. Metz in particular has explained in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema that the separate shots in a film, recorded at different times and out of causal sequence, are spliced together syntagmatically as sentences are in a piece of prose fiction. In this light, Film and fiction both can be understood structurally as forms of narrative. That is to say, both forms of mimesis depend on the Aristotelian skeleton of organic causation and on the corresponding illusion of narrative time. For these reasons, it is possible and useful to discuss film in terms of its diegetic narrative levels, much as Gerard Genette has discussed prose fiction in his Narrative Discourse (1980) and Figures of Literary Discourse (1982). Although Genette's treatments of diegesis are invaluable in themselves, many readers may find welcome commentary in the work of critical intermediaries such as Wallace Martin and Gerald Prince. Prince's A Dictionary of Narratology, for example, provides the helpful explanation that diegesis should be understood as "The (fictional) world in which the situations and events narrated occur." He adds that the term diegetic thus logically means "pertaining to or part of a given diegesis," but that it may be used more precisely to signify "that diegesis represented by the (primary) narrative" (20). Narratives at a greater authoritative or "fictional" remove from the primary diegesis-tales within tales-may, in consequence, be called metadiegetic. Those narratives purporting to proceed from a less "fictional" relation to the author are called extradiegetic. Prince also follows Genettc in defining metalepsis as "the mingling of two distinct diegetic levels" (50). A writer seeking to test the utility of such terms could turn almost at random to the history of film for specific examples. However, another resemblance between film and prose fiction makes an arbitrary choice unnecessary. Just as the most provocative analyses of diegesis treat prose works such as those by Laurence Steme, Edgar Allan Poe, and Donald Barthelme involving metaleptical shifts among diegetic levels, so films that openly acknowledge their "filmness" best repay analysis as narratives. An especially rewarding example is Woody Alien's highly self-referential Stardust Memories (1980). As a self-confessed epigone of lngmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, Allen might naturally be expected to consider films about making films to be legitimate projects. As the creator of such experimental films as What's Up. Tiger Lily?, Zelig, and The Purple Rose of Cairo, furthermore. Alien might be expected to consider all the technical elements of film-making to be available to him not only as narrative devices but also as thematic materials. Stardust Memories fulfills such expectations by brilliantly exploiting all the diegetic levels available to film narrative. On the basic diegetic level, the film presents the story of Sandy Bates, a Jewish, balding, highly acclaimed maker of comic films, whose romantic life is turbulent, whose professional life is unsettled, and whose current film cannot reach satisfactory closure. The diegetic narrative develops as Sandy, played by Woody Alien, agrees to attend a film festival gotten up in his honor at a seaside resort. He must be cajoled because, as was also the case with Woody Alien in 1980, Sandy seems torn between his own desire to make lugubrious, significant films in the manner of Bergman and his fans' desire that he repeat the comic formulas that he has grown bored with. Sandy's professional crisis is compounded romantically when his lover, Isobel, played by Marie-Christine Barrault, arrives and announces that she has left her husband. …

Narratology, myth and dissolution in William Faulkner's "The sound and the fury"

Abstract: In contemporary critical theory, narratology has become of late one of those tools which, despite its apparent simplicity, may prove to be quite useful for a better reading — and understanding— of literary texts. This critical method had its beginning and most substantial developments in the writings of Gerard Genette who, starting from a structuralist stance, attempted the listing and analysis of the essential formal aspects which make out a narrative text'. Genette's studies were later corrunented and extended by some other critics, such as Mieke Bal, Slomith Rimmon-Kenan, and F.K. Stanzel, who came to pinpoint and improve — at times— some of the arguments defended by the French critic. Genette's importance and insight, however, still confirm his outstanding position in the studies of narratology. In a general sense, narratology can be defined as a structured and logical method to approach narrative texts: the events and the ways in which they happen come to be the core of these studies. In a combined interpretation Genette-Bal the text is understood as the written —or oral— manifestation of a second level, the story, where events and time have already been selected and ordered. This second level of the story is also based on a third level of simply the «raw material» called the fabula in Bal' s terminology. The participants or characters; time; space; focalization, and the act of narrating itself are some of the most relevant factors to be analysed by the narratological critic. Also very relevant in this textual analysis is the difference which exists between the time in which the story —a series of events— «happened», and the time in which the narrator is telling it: the analysis of the relationships between the time of the story and the time of the narrating is essential to understand, for instance, the narrator s attempts to involve the reader into the narrative, or the way in which the free indirect discourse works3. A narratological analysis also highlights the logical —although rather complex— line of communication which takes place in any given narrative. The real author is conceived —so as to avoid the «authorial fallacy» —as an entity totally extemal to the text once he or she has finished the writing of it. In effect we can say, for instance, that William Faulk-

Teorie en praktyk in die onderrigsituasie: Chris Barnard se kortverhaal “Vrydag”∗

Abstract: Summary C. Barnard's short story “Vrydag” is analysed in this article to illustrate how narratology may be of use in the teaching situation to identify and describe the required reading strategy for the stream‐of‐consciousness story.