Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1993"

The fictions of language and the languages of fiction

Abstract: Monika Fludernik presents a detailed analysis of free indirect discourse as it relates to narrative theory, and the crucial problematic of how speech and thought are represented in fiction.Building on the insights of Ann Banfield's Unspeakable Sentences, Fludernik radically extends Banfield's model to accommodate evidence from conversational narrative, non-fictional prose and literary works from Chaucer to the present.Fludernik's model subsumes earlier insights into the forms and functions of quotation and aligns them with discourse strategies observable in the oral language. Drawing on a vast range of literature, she provides an invaluable resource for researchers in the field and introduces English readers to extensive work on the subject in German as well as comparing the free indirect discourse features of German, French and English.This study effectively repositions the whole area between literature and linguistics, opening up a new set of questions in narrative theory.

Medical Interpretation: Implications of Literary Theory of Narrative for Clinical Work

Abstract: Literary narrative theory offers robust conceptual frameworks for understand-ing the act of writing, the act of reading, the configuration of plot, and the narrative contract that binds writer and reader together. This article applies some current theoretical approaches used in studying literary storytelling to the storytelling that takes place in the doctor's office, conceptualizing the patient as the writer or teller and the doctor as the reader or listener. By inspecting clinical medicine as a narrative enterprise, shot through with the ambiguities and language-borne allusiveness of the fictional text, this study demonstrates ways in which patients and doctors may better understand their complex and often unsuccessful attempts to hear one another to the end. (General Internal Medicine and Literature)

The return of thematic criticism

Abstract: Once it was anathema to speak about the content of a work of art in the wake of high modernism and formalism. Critical practice has moved beyond such limits, and today the focus on themes is the hallmark of feminist, new historicist, ethnic, and even deconstructionist approaches, though that focus may not always be openly declared. This manifesto reasserts the validity of the thematic approach to criticism in our day, bringing together for the first time an international group of critics and theoreticians who have thought deeply about literary motifs and themes. How can we determine the theme of a given text? May the focus on form be the theme of a certain moment? Can the motif be understood as a "formal" category? What operations permit us to say that three or four texts constitute variants of the same theme? The contributors challenge the conventional dismissal of "merely" thematic approaches and offer the reader different ways of tacking the issues of what a piece of writing is "about". The work here comes out of such diverse intellectual traditions as Russian film theory, French phenomenology, Foucault, narratology, the Frankfurt School, intellectual history (Geistesgeschichte), psychoanalytic criticism, linguistics, ideological criticism, Proppian folklore studies, and computerized plot summary models. In addition to a collection of aphorisms from Plato to Robert Coover, and a group of general and theoretical essays, this volume contains examples of practical engagement with such topics as literary history, Shakespeare, autumn poetry, anti-Semitism, fading colours, bachelors, Richard Wagner, and the Mexican Revolution. Contributors include Nancy Armstrong, Claude Bremond, Menachem Brinker, Juan Bruce-Novoa, J.M. Coetzee, Leslie Fielder, Sander L. Gilman, Holger Klein, Harry Levin, Francesco Orlando, Thomas Pavel, David Perkins, Marie-Laure Ryan, Yuri K. Shcheglov, Leon Somville, George Steiner, Raymond Trousson, Michel Vanhelleputte, Lynn Wardley, Theodor Wolpers, Alexander Zholkovsky, and Theodore Ziolkowski.

First person, second person, same person: narrative as epistemology

Abstract: Rapports entre narratologie et paradigmes de la connaissance analyses par la presentation de trois etudes dans les domaines de l'anthropologie, l'histoire de l'art et la theorie feministe: narration et epistemologie, semiotique de la pratique pronominale (1 e , 2 e , 3 e personnes), seduction du mimetisme.

The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne’s Provincial Tales

Abstract: The critical literary world has spent a wealth of thought and words on the question of Hawthorne himself: Where does he stand in his works? In history? In literary tradition? In this major new study, G. R. Thompson recasts the "Hawthorne question" to show how authorial presence in the writer's works is as much a matter of art as the writing itself. The Hawthorne who emerges from this masterful analysis is not, as has been supposed, identical to the provincial narrator of his early tales; instead he is revealed to be the skillful manipulator of that narrative voice, an author at an ironic distance from the tales he tells. By focusing on the provincial tales as they were originally conceived--as a narrative cycle--Thompson is able to recover intertextual references that reveal Hawthorne's preoccupation with framing strategies and variations on authorial presence. The author shows how Hawthorne deliberately constructs sentimental narratives, only to deconstruct them. Thompson's analysis provides a new aesthetic context for understanding the whole shape of Hawthorne's career as well as the narrative, ethical, and historical issues within individual works. Revisionary in its view of one of America's greatest authors, The Art of Authorial Presence also offers invaluable insight into the problems of narratology and historiography, ethics and psychology, romanticism and idealism, and the cultural myths of America.

Wise Economies: Storytelling, Narrative Authority, and Brevity in the American Short Story, 1819-1980.

Abstract: This study proposes a new way of measuring brevity in the American short story. Since Edgar Allan Poe's 1847 definition of the tale, literary criticism has looked to various structural features within the text to define the elements that distinguish the short story from other prose genres like the novel. I argue that brevity is an essential feature of storytelling and suggest that its perception is molded and shaped by several historical factors. The phrase "wise economy" offers two ways of thinking about the conciseness of the form: it evokes a history of rhetorical economy central to the formation of a distinctly American English and, more broadly, the exchange that takes place between a storyteller and his/her audience in the narrative act. These meanings work at crosspurposes: rhetorical economy results in the disappearance of the storyteller whose presence is the most visible marker of exchange. I trace how the general elision of the narrative act shapes the reader's perception of the meaning in a text in four different modes of storytelling (romanticism, realism, modernism, and minimalism) by proposing an interpretive model grounded in speech-act theoiy. This model is in turn applied to works by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Ome Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Richard Wright, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Raymond Carver.

The reframing of realism : Galdós and the discourses of the nineteenth-century Spanish novel

Abstract: In virtually every aspect of human behavior, ritual, language, and art, perceptions are organized through the act of framing. In the writing of Benito Perez Galdos, Spain's most prolific and innovative nineteenth-century novelist, Hazel Gold finds this principle insistently at work. By exploring Galdos's methods of structuring and evaluating literary and historical experience, Gold illuminates the novelist's art and uncovers the far-reaching narratological, social, and epistemological implications of his framing strategies.A close look at Galdos's novels reveals the artist at pains to contain and interpret what he perceived to be the distinctive and often disheartening experience of bourgeois liberalism of his day. At the same time, he can be seen here undermining or negating the accepted conventions of realist fiction. Looking beyond text to context, Gold examines the ways in which Galdos's work itself has been framed by readers and critics in accordance with changing allegiances to contemporary literary theory and the canon. The highly ambiguous status of the frame in Galdos's fictions confirms the author's own signal position as a writer poised at the limits between realism and modernity. Gold's work will command the interest of students of Spanish and comparative literature, narrative theory, and the novel, as well as all those for whom realism and representation are at issue.

Telling Silence: Russian Frame Narratives of Renunciation

Abstract: Isenberg discusses frame narrative and its relation to genre in one set of Russian short classics on the theme of erotic renunciation. Drawing on rich critical tradition and on contemporary work in narratology, Isenberg analyzes Turgenev's "First Love," Dostoevsky's "gentle Creature, " Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata," and works by Chekhov, Kharms, and Makanin to provide new insight into the frame narrative of passion.

The Narrative Jesus: A Semiotic Reading of Mark's Gospel

Abstract: Introduction: Bible and semiotics history and semiotics exegesis and semiotics content of the study. Part 1 Narrative exegesis: narratology - communication and narration, narrativity and narrative text and narrative - the Gospel text, the Gospel narrative narrative method - narrative utterances, the pivot point, the subject of being, the subject of doing. Part 2 The wonder worker: story and narrative - the miracle story, the wonder narrative the roles of the wonder narrative - genre and role configuration, the discursive role configuration, actor and role, excursus - the basic semiotic model. Part 3 The Proclaimer: the heirarchy of proclaiming - the thematic proclaimer-roles, the hierarchy of narration the Gospel of God - the narrative proclaimer-roles A, the content of the proclaiming, the narrative proclaimer-roles B, God's messenger the Gospel of Jesus Christ - the content of the Gospel, the foundation of the proclaiming, from disciple to apostle. Part 4 The Saviour: salvation - saviour - designation and role, the content of salvation the project of salvation - the death of the Cross, the Resurrection, the Baptism/the Annointment soteriology - the local soteriology, the global soteriology. Part 5 The Christ myth: narrative christology - processual christology, thematic christology narrative typology - the Fall myth, the Adam/Christ-myth narrative unity - the three arches of tension, the two processes of event narrative evangelium - narrative Kerygma, Kerygmatic narration narrativity and historicity - historical truth, narrative truth.

The Subject As Action: Transformation and Totality in Narrative Aesthetics

Abstract: In this original and groundbreaking study, Alan Singer posits "narrative aesthetics" as a link between philosophical skepticism about the status of human subjectivity and literary theoretical skepticism about the autonomy of the text. By observing the complementarity between narrative and the aesthetic, Singer argues for the relevance of narrative logic to the critique of post-Cartesian subjectivity.Each chapter juxtaposes a set of philosophical arguments about the dynamics of human agency with a close reading of stylistic innovations in narrative literature. The author focuses on formal innovations that give a strong theoretical warrant for linking narrative to the realm of human action. The book demonstrates aesthetic theory in the works of Aristotle, Baumgarten, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Sartre, Adorno, and Goodman to be convergent with the goals of social theory espoused in the works of Schutz, Lukacs, Althusser, Foucault, and Giddens. This philosophical tradition is traced in texts by Thomas Nashe, Laurence Stern, Henry James, Maurice Blanchot, William Gaddis, and John Ashbery."The Subject as Action "concludes by asserting the usefulness of narrative aesthetics in resolving the current conflict between postmodern aestheticists like Jean-Francois Lyotard and anti-aesthetic communitarian ethicists like Jurgen Habermas, for whom the realms of the aesthetic and the political otherwise remain mutually exclusive possibilities."Singer's work at one stroke stops and reverses narratology's drift of decades away from truly searching inquiry into the place of actions and events in narrative. . . . a rare academic book because it does not cheapen either the demands or the dignity of intellectual labor, and because it fully rewards both." --Robert Caserio, University of UtahAlan Singer is Professor of English, Temple University."

The Video in the Classroom: Agatha Christie's "Evil Under the Sun" and the Teaching of Narratology through Film.

Abstract: This paper suggests ways in which video can be used in teaching college literature and cinema courses in order to promote audiovisual literacy. The method proposed presupposes an approach to narrative through narratology, the discipline that examines texts of narrative fiction as narratives, irrespective of their mode of manifestation (verbal, visual, or other). Narratologists posit three terms for the textual analysis of narratives: story and narration, which are conceived in abstract terms, and text, which is the only concrete entity available to the reader. By employing a film narrative, such as Guy Hamilton's "Evil Under the Sun" (a detective story film based on Agatha Christie's classic of the same title) as a case study, the instructor can take advantage of the concreteness and immediacy of cinematic image, as well as the versatility of video, to make abstract notions more understandable. In practice, the method of video application to the teaching of narrative theory is the following: a single session is devoted to the uninterrupted viewing of the entire film so as not to spoil the pleasure of the first reading. In the next session, an analysis of the film's structure is attempted, introducing certain aspects of theory, such as plot structure and design, narrative strategies and modes of narration, the role of the narrator, and textual relationships. Selected excerpts from the film text are provided to illustrate theoretical concepts. (Contains 19 references.) (AEF) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * from the original document. *********************************************************************** THE VIDEO IN THE CLASSROOM: AGATHA CHRISTIE'S "EVIL UNDER THE SUN" AND THE TEACHING OF NARRATOLOGY THROUGH FILM U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality CI

The Politics of Piety: manuscript Illumination and Narration in the "Cantigas de Santa Maria"

Abstract: ,i,@NALYZING narrative technique in medieval Smanuscript miniatures and their accompanying texts and achieving some sort of synoptic vision A sof the two was thought unproblematic only a few * * years ago. Despite strong contributions toward S'a theory of narratology in medieval studies,1 many researchers are no longer sure that we can believe in the stability of narrative in either text or images, let alone hope to make the two genuinely congruent. My own attempt here to justify a joint reading of the supposedly linear verbal narratives in the Cantigas of Alfonso X (1221-84) with the manuscript miniatures he commissioned and supervised is meant to suggest the possibility of a match-up, at least in this case, for somewhat curious reasons. Against expectations, it is the narrative discourse in the miniatures of the c6dice rico copy of the Cantigas that is apparently progressive and linear, while the lyrics with which the images are teamed loop back on themselves in a non-linear way.2

The Crisis of Narrative in the Postnarratological Era: Paul Goodman's The Empire City as (Post)Modern Intervention

Abstract: investigation of narrative is in a state of crisis: the waves of theoretical thought produced since the Second World War have resulted in what is, for many today, an uncertain situation. Just as the New Critical presumption about the individual work of art's autonomy was shattered by the development of structuralism, the latter's presumption about theory's autonomy was itself displaced by the onslaught of (post)structuralism. At the present time, the strongest sign of (post)structuralism's success is, in fact, the widespread acceptance of uncertainty itself as the contemporary "ludic" academy's most cherished axiom: the desire for undecidability currently rampant in academic and intellectual circles is, however, not a "natural" condition but a historical need which itself requires explanation.2 These vast shifts in the struggle between discursivity/ textuality, on the one hand, and conceptuality/theory, on the other, are manifested in the study of narrative as three distinct phases. Chronologically, these three postwar stages may be demarcated in the following manner: the first is the stage of narrative theory (which lasted up to the publication in 1958 of Levi-Strauss's Strucutral Anthropology),3 a period governed by the reign of New Criticism, aestheticism, and the concept of the text's autonomy, and for which the paradigmatic narrative was the Jamesian well-made novel. The second stage is that of classic narratology, when the study of narrative was raised to the level of a "science," when conceptuality was priv

Narratology in Kenneth Fearing's Big clock

Abstract: Structure cinematographique (notion de suture filmique) et subjectivite lacanienne dans le thriller de K. Fearing et ses adaptations

Stops on the Way to "Shiloh": A Special Case for Literary Empiricism

Abstract: One of literature's memorable semiotic moments occurs in Stephen Crane's classic short story "The Open Boat." The desperate men in the lifeboat see a speck on the distant shore. Eventually, the speck becomes a man. He is waving his arms at the crew. Relief! Rescue at last? No, it appears that the man is only giving them a friendly hail, misreading their condition as they misread his signal. This essay is about other semiotic moments, some of them in a short story by Bobbie Ann Mason, some of them in the history of short-fiction theory. I will be waving my arms too, but let me begin by listing my premises: 1) storying is a primary mode of cognition (counting, for example, is another); 2) the short story--that singly authored, culturally specific, densely signifying art form--is a primary site for literary investigation; it cannot be explained by an aesthetics based on poetry or a narratology based on the folktale or a script based on cultural studies although each of these approaches has contributed to short-fiction theory. These premises have led to a kind of literary empiricism. This is not the same thing as an empirical approach to literature, a growing area of interest for many scholars in other disciplines. It does, however, mean an openness toward the findings of other people who do research on storying: namely, psychologists, discourse theorists, and cognitive scientists. This kind of literary empiricism is descended from three very central traditions in short-fiction studies: genre criticism, reader-response theory, and formalism. I will begin with a little of this family history, and then move on to a discussion of Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh." "But genre criticism. isn't it--dead?" I often hear those words (or get that look) when I say I am interested in the short story. Perhaps it is too late in the day to ask, "What is a short story?" We can, however, ask a more primary question: "What is storyness?" In the 1970s, psychologists working with memory looked at regularities in what subjects recalled from the stories they had read and found that texts with a normative event structure were most easily remembered (Mandler and Johnson 111-15). In other words, storyness is a condition of narrative that fulfills a story grammar. In the 1980s there were many challenges to these story grammars, and the emphasis shifted from a linguistic to a cognitive model or schema. According to many psychologists, stories are about people trying to solve problems or achieve goals; thus, a model for comprehending plan-based behavior should explain how readers or listeners comprehend stories. A variety of models was developed and, of course, allowed for subgoals, thwarted goals, and even negative or absent goals. Then, in 1982, the same year Bobbie Ann Mason published "Shiloh" in book form, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, William F. Brewer, challenged both the story grammars and the plan-based comprehension models, saying that neither was truly specific to the experience of reading "stories." He had an understanding of both literary and rhetorical theory and knew that discourse has to be understood in the context of its function or purpose. So he claimed that stories are a class of narratives meant to entertain, and he developed experiments for testing the arousal, intensification, and release (or resolution) of three affects within readers: surprise, suspense, and curiosity (473). For many reasons, his "structural-affect" theory, as he called it, is alien to the literary scholar. Still it warrants attention. Brewer was trying to anatomize story processing, trying to determine its stages: the sequence of its cognitive strategies and affective states. He was interested in the way readers determine the "storyness" of stories and wanted to test empirically for this intuition. I shared his goal, though not his method. My working assumption was as follows: storyness inheres in any narrative segment that tells about a significant risk to some form of human wellbeing that is subsequently either lost or gained/regained. …

Preaching the Gospel in Barlaam and Blanquerna: Pious Narrative and Parable in Medieval Spain

Abstract: "Preaching the Gospel in Barlaam and Blanquerna: Pious Narrative and Parable in Medieval Spain." This study focuses on the ascetic typology of holiness and the apostolic narratology of parables as key aspects of sacred narrative manifested in two fictional hagiographies that appear in late thirteenth-century Spain: Barlaam e Josafat, a Castilian translation of the Christianized life of Buddha, and Blanquerna, a religious utopia written in Catalan by the missionary and mystic Ramon Llull. In the first part, the eremitical type is examined in relation to (1) the Christian's spiritual home as pilgrim and hermit; (2) the double conversion to the life of devotion and way of perfection; and (3) the apostolic contexts of exemplary forms of asceticism for all Christian society. In the second pan, the function of parables is analyzed according to (1) the ideology of "classical" asceticism vs. urban apostolate; (2) the scriptural intertexts and contexts of Buddhist/Christian "prophecy" in the world vs. apostolic ac...

Reading the Akedah narrative (Genesis 22:1-19) in the context of modern hermeneutics

Abstract: (This thesis is an attempt to apply literary criticism, specifically a narratological approach, to the reading of the biblical text.) There is an incongruity in the story of Isaac's (near) sacrifice by Abraham insofar as it is too economical with language in what is otherwise a complex set of important issues about obedience and sacrifice. Interpreters throughout the centuries have tried to resolve the textual difficulties created by the incongruity. Yet the variety of their conclusions are evidence of the impossibility of overcoming the ambiguities of the story. But these ambiguities are scarcely given any thorough investigation by the interpreters, whose assumed duties are commonly to clarify the story either for the sake of religious or moral obligation or, in the pursuit of intellectual satisfaction, as is apparent in many historical readings of the text. A closer look at the story reveals that there are many ambiguities that can be grasped from many angles. By using the focalization theory of narratology one can illuminate differing points of view involved in the process of narration. The narrator's voice should not be regarded as the only representation of the events as there are also the characters' ways of looking and the related events. One should be careful so as not to follow slavishly the narrator's voice while neglecting others' standpoints in the narrative which may contradict the narrator's voice. There should be communicative links seen amongst the voices or focalizations in the narrative which may or may not be verbally said. Here, it is proposed that reading is experiencing the multilayered world of the narrative. Reading is not necessarily and ultimately bound with the task of producing meaning, although it may mean a threat towards rational objectivity.

Introduction to Special Number: Narrative Theory

Abstract: THIS SPECIAL NUMBER of Issues in Integrative Studies provides a clear and authentically interdisciplinary look at the phenomenon of narrative theory in contemporary thought. In doing so, a conversation already well begun in the Association for Integrative Studies gains new momentum. Many readers will recall Richard Harvey Brown’s keynote address at the 1988 annual meeting in Arlington, Texas. Published in this journal in 1989 under the title “Textuality, Social Science, and Society,” Professor Brown’s work sought to challenge the “capture of rationality by positive science and its technical extensions” (Brown, 12). Civic discourse, Brown claimed, now seeks legitimacy by borrowing a rhetoric of objectivity and a social scientific vocabulary. This tendency impoverishes moral discourse, which—because it invokes purposes, ends and collective intentions —must operate narratively. “The polity in general has lost a reasoned narrative form,” Brown lamented. “Reason in narrative discourse is being replaced in civic culture by scientific-technical calculation on the one hand, and by irrational stories on the other.” Brown does not seek the elimination of technical discourse but rather the cessation of its legitimizing function. What we need, he avers, is a “technically informed civic narrative discourse” which could “humanize technicians and . . . enlighten and empower citizens” (Brown, 12, 14). That “narration” and “reason” need not be regarded as antagonistic processes is the central conviction that binds the contributors in this volume. With Richard Harvey Brown, they insist phrases like “narrative truth,” “reasoned public narration,” and “reasoned narratives in moral discourse” are far from oxymoronic. Not surprisingly, the articles (with the exception of Howard Nixon’s) are the work of “antifoundationalists” who reject positivist accounts of rationality. In their view, even the work of natural scientists must be viewed contextually, in terms of the historical preoccupations of particular scientific communities. This means that what counts as “data” or “facts” is determined by the theories which motivate investigations. Theories, in turn, are inseparable from larger cultural preoccupations. Further, natural science is far more playful, metaphorical, and inexact than its positivist defenders claim (Bernstein, 33). In short, scientific communities are both energized and constrained by narratives and narrativist impulses. Readers challenged by such assertions will be especially drawn to L. Gregory Jones’ opening discussion of the epistemological significance of narrative as well as J. Linn Mackey’s “Narrative and the Physical Sciences.” Like Richard Harvey Brown, Jones holds that “there is no ‘neutral’ realm of objective, public facts over against subjective, private values.” Such a bifurcation rests on the assumption that a reliable picture of a lawful external reality can be gradually established by ever-improving empirical and deductive methodologies. This assumption itself clearly is not narratively innocent but rather rests on an implied Baconian story about the goodness and inevitability of progress. Moreover, it regards the selecting of research “phenomena” as relatively unimportant, whereas to define something as constituting an “object” for study is inherently problematic and theory-laden. In the words of John Milbank (favorably quoted by Jones), “Objects and subjects are, as they are narrated in a story. Outside a plot, which has its own unique unfounded reasons, one cannot conceive how objects and subjects would be or even that they would be at all.” What replaces the old dichotomies of public-private/fact-value is a complex pluralism of narratives. Explains Jones:

Die ondraaglike groenheid van teorie 1

Abstract: This article is a demonstration of the unbearable greenness of theory. The first part explores the meaning of green (in Afrikaans) as a demonstration of what intertextuality means. The second part outlines the resistance to theory. Against this resistance it is argued that theory is engaged (inter alia) in reading and interpreting difficult texts and contributing to solving the universal problem of interpretation. As an example the controversial singing of "Die Stem" at a rugby test is analyzed. The third part argues for the fecundity of theory by outlining the value of narrative theory for other disciplines and by a literary analysis of the science policy and the motto of the PU for CHE and a love poem by B. Breytenbach. A short programmatic view of the future of literary theory at the PU for CHE concludes the article.