Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1994"

Using a Narrative Metaphor: Implications for Theory and Clinical Practice

Abstract: The evolution of family therapy from a cybernetic metaphor to a narrative metaphor has led us to think differently about therapy, about clients, and about ourselves as therapists. In this article we pursue how this different way of thinking has informed a theoretical understanding of a narrative therapy approach and consequently has opened space for different ways of working clinically. We begin by tracing the evolution to narrative; we consider the implications of social constructionism and its political effects; and we complete the discussion by focusing on narrative theory. We then show how the clinical work follows logically and is coherent with the theoretical considerations. We describe, and illustrate with clinical examples, an innovative approach to working with couples and families with adolescents. In this work we pay attention to the larger cultural stories, including gender constructions, and to personal stories that persons have created to make meaning out of their experience as they interact with one another in a reciprocal meaning-making process. Interventions focus on externalizing the problem narrative that is influencing the client(s), mapping the effects of the problem pattern and/or the totalizing view persons might have of others, and creating space for client(s) to notice preferred actions and intentions. Finally, we close the loop by asking questions of ourselves and others about the effects of working from a narrative metaphor.

Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory

Abstract: The fundamental principle upon which contemporary narratology is constructed is that narrative is an essentially divided endeavour, involving the story ('what really happened') and the discourse ('how what happened is presented'). For traditional criticism, the primary task of narrative discourse is essentially to convey the story as transparently as possible. Patrick O'Neill investigates the extent to which narrative discourse also contains the counter-tendency not to tell the story, indeed to subvert the story it tells in foregrounding its own performance. The systemic implications of this perspective for narrative and for narrative theory are examined within the conceptual framework provided by classical French narratology. O'Neill ultimately attempts both to expand and to problematize the structural model of narrative proposed by this centrally important tradition of narrative theory. O'Neill describes narrative as functioning in terms of four interacting levels: story, narrative text, narration, and textuality. Using a range of examples from Homer to modern European fiction, he discusses traditional narrative categories such as voice, focalization, character, and setting, and reinscribes them within the contextual space of author and reader to bring out narrative's potential for ambiguity and unreliability. He also discusses the implications of translation for narrative theory.

The culture of literacy

Abstract: At the onset of modernity in the sixteenth century, literature and history were wrenched apart. Wlad Godzich, one of the animators of the turn toward literary theory, seeks to restore historical consciousness to criticism after a period of painful depression. In this sweeping study, he considers the emergence of the modern state, the institutions and disciplines of culture and learning, as well as the history of philosophy, the history of historiography, and literary history itself. He offers a powerful account of semiotics; an important critical perspective on narratology; a profound discussion of deconstruction; and many brief, practical demonstrations of why Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger remain essential resources for contemporary critical thought. The culture of literacy is on the wane, Godzich argues. Throughout the modern period, language has been the institution that provided the condition of possibility for all other institutions, from university to church to state. But the pervasive crisis of meaning we now experience is the result of a shift in the modes of production of knowledge. The culture of literacy has been faced with transformations it cannot accommodate, and the existing organization of knowledge has been challenged. By wedding literature to a reflective practice of history, Godzich leads us toward a critique of political reason, and a profound sense of how postmodernity can overcome by deftly sidestepping the modern. This book will bring to a wider audience the work of a writer who is recognized as one of the most commanding figures of his generation for range, learning, and capacity for innovation.

Textual 'You' and Double Deixis in Edna O'Brien's 'A Pagan Place.' (Second-Person Narrative)

Abstract: 1. DISCOURSE MODELS AND THE ONTOLOGY OF YOUBruce Morrissette, in his groundbreaking investigation of "Narrative 'You' in Contemporary Literature," opens his analysis by citing the Sartrean dictum "that every novelistic technique implies a metaphysical attitude on the part of the author" (1). Arguably, the same proposition applies, at one remove, to the various descriptions put forth by Morrissette himself and by other later students of second-person narration.(1) That said, we need further specification of the metaphysics--more precisely, the ontology--of narrative you in both fictional and critico-theoretical contexts. At issue, more precisely still, is the ontological status of the entity or entities to which we ascribe certain properties when, in constructing a discourse model corresponding to some emergent (portion of a) narrative text, we come upon the lexical item you in that textual domain (cf. Webber, "Structure" 11O-11).A principled account of the discourse functions of the second-person pronoun in narrative contexts can help us specify, in turn, the structure and ontology of the entities invoked by textual you, yielding new tools for the poetics of second-person fiction. To this end, I propose to examine Edna O'Brien's 1970 novel A Pagan Place in light of linguistic theories of (person) deixis, those theories having emerged historically from more broadly pragmatic theories concerning the situatedness of utterances in contexts. By sketching the forms and functions of textual you in O'Brien's novel--a narrative told entirely in the second person and anchored in the world of a (nameless) preadolescent girl coming of age in rural Ireland during World War II--we can at the same time work towards an enriched poetics of second-person narratives. My hypothesis is that in second-person fictions like O'Brien's, the deictic force of textual you helps decenter what Marie-Laure Ryan would term the modal structure of the narrative universes built up by those fictions (Ryan 109-23; cf. Pavel 43-113). Narrative you produces an ontological hesitation between the virtual and the actual by constantly repositioning readers, to a fundamentally indeterminate degree, within the emergent spatiotemporal parameters of one or more alternative possible worlds. As I shall go on to argue (sec. 3 and 4.5), such fictional play both illuminates and is illuminated by recent reconceptions of deixis itself: notably, the theories about participant roles and frames and about culturally saturated deictic fields developed by William Hanks in his book Referential Practice. If, therefore, second-person fictions like A Pagan Place engage in what Brian McHale would describe as the quintessentially postmodernist foregrounding of ontological issues (3-40; but contrast Herman, "Modernism"), my chief concern here is with the nature of the conceptual tools required to account for that foregrounding. The requisite tools, arguably, pertain to a narratology after structuralism: that is, a postclassical, though not necessarily a poststructuralist, narratology.Along with an introductory survey of some of the effects of textual you in A Pagan Place, I offer below (sec. 2.1 and 2.2) a brief synopsis of existing narratological-accounts of you in second-person narratives like O'Brien's. Subtending these accounts are two broad types of discourse models, distinguishable in terms of the modes and degrees of virtuality or actuality they assign to entities referenced by you. At the very least, the ontological axioms at the basis of the two kinds of models warrant closer consideration than has been devoted to them up to now. Note that by "discourse models," in this connection, I mean those emergent, dynamic interpretive frames which producers (tellers, writers) and receivers (listeners, readers) of narrative discourse collaboratively construct and that Deborah Schiffrin describes in more general terms thus: "both users and analysts of language build models which are based on a patterned integration of units from different levels of analysis. …

Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction

Abstract: Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Note on Texts Introduction 1. The Healthy Text: Scott, the Monsters, and the Critics 2. Gothic: The Passages That Lead to Nothing 3. Fictions of Authenticity: The Frame Narratives and Notes on the Waverley Novels 4. Secrecy, Silence, and Anxiety: Gothic Narratology and the Waverley Novels 5. Phantoms of Revolution: Five Case-Studies of Literary Convention and Social Analysis 6. 'Ripping Up Auld Stories: Exhumation and the Gothic Imagination in Redgauntlet conclusion: Labyrinth, Origin, and the Gothic House of Mystery: Woodstock Bibliography Index

Second-Person Narrative as a Test Case for Narratology: The Limits of Realism

Abstract: This essay will concentrate on three related issues that connect with second-person fiction. I will start by reprinting and (re)analyzing the narrative typology presented in my "Second Person Fiction," which attempts to revise and mediate between the Genettean and Stanzelian models. The diversity and indeterminacy of second-person writing will be illustrated by a number of examples from very different sectors of the typology. I shall argue that second-person fiction does not correlate with a specific "narrative situation," and that the category "person" does not constitute a theoretically meaningful concept. A second area for investigation will be the typical ways in which second-person fiction can be said to undermine realist narrative parameters and frames. As a consequence second-person fiction helps to deconstruct standard categories of narratological enquiry. Illustrations of this point will be taken from Gabriel Josipovici's novel Contre-jour (1986) and from selected short stories. The third topic that I will treat here relates to the function of second-person story telling, particularly as regards the historical situating of second-person discourse as a typically postmodernist kind of ecriture. The transgressive and subversive aspects of second-person texts as outlined in the second section seem to identify second-person fiction as a predominantly "postmodernist" mode of writing, yet - depending on one's definition of (post)modernism - more traditionally modernist aspects of second-person fiction and perhaps more radical indications of an ideological appropriation of the second-person technique suggest a much wider frame of application. It is in this context that one will have to reconsider the all-important question of what difference it makes, a question that will, by a "vicus of recirculation," take us back to the starting point of this issue, to Brian Richardson's attempts to grapple with the incidence of grammatical person in its combinatory diversity. 1. In "Second Person Fiction" I proposed a revision [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] of Franz K. Stanzel's category "person" (first versus third) and of Gerard Genette's dichotomy of hetero- versus homodiegesis. Stanzel's category, it will be remembered, is based on a binary opposition of the (non)coincidence of "realms of existence," whereas in Genette's model the defining criterion is whether or not the narrator is an actant on the story level of the narrative. My revision was designed to accommodate the full range of observable varieties of second-person texts. Genette (Nouveau discours du recit 92-93; Narrative Discourse Revisited 133-34) had suggested that second-person writing was part of heterodiegesis, a claim which ignores the overwhelming number of second-person texts in which the narrator as well as the narratee participate in the actions recounted on the histoire level. Nor can Stanzel's model deal with the occurrence of second-person texts in the teller-mode(1) half of the typological circle although he provides an invaluable suggestion about the unmarkedness of the category "person" within reflector-mode narrative where s/he and I can be observed to alternate without serious disruption of the ontological frame.(2) In my own model I proposed that the use of the second-person pronoun in reflector-mode texts (in "noncommunicative narrative," as I call it) likewise operates in an unmarked (adeictic) fashion whereas in teller-mode texts the deictic properties of person remain in full force. For the teller-mode realm (which I have dubbed "communicative narrative") I then expanded Genette's terminology to distinguish, primarily, between narratives in which participants on the communicative level (narrators, narratees) also function as protagonists (the homocommunicative realm) and those in which the world of the narration is disjoined from that of the fictional world (the heterocommunicative realm). Like Stanzel, however, I conceptualize these categories as scales or clines with possible intermediate both-and areas such as peripheral second-person texts (in which the protagonist is the character referred to by means of the second-person pronoun, and the narrator - designated by a first-person pronoun - functions as an uncomprehending witness of the events) or "we" narratives (in which narrator and narratee coparticipate in the story). …

Modern critical theory & classical literature

Abstract: In recent decades the study of literature in Europe and the Americas has been profoundly influenced by modern critical theory in its various forms, whether Structuralism or Deconstructionism, Hermeneutics, Reader-Response Theory or Rezeptionsasthetik, Semiotics or Narratology, Marxist, feminist, neo-historical, psychoanalytical or other perspectives. Whilst the value and validity of such approaches to literature is still a matter of some dispute, not least among classical scholars, they have had a substantial impact on the study both of classical literatures and of the mentalite of Greece and Rome. In an attempt to clarify issues in the debate, the eleven contributors to this volume were asked to produce a representative collection of essays to illustrate the applicability of some of the new approaches to Greek and Latin authors or literary forms and problems. The scope of the volume was deliberately limited to literary investigation, broadly construed, of Greek and Roman authors. Broader areas of the history and culture of the ancient world impinge in the essays, but are not their central focus. The volume also contains a separate bibliography, offering for the first time a complete bibliography of classical studies which incorporate modern critical theory.

Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel

Abstract: Analyzing works by George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, the author offers a new approach to narrative theory by showing how successive generations of novelists have used ever more powerful concepts of chance even though, he argues, chance is precisely what narrative cannot represent, since when it tries to do so it slips into the fated. He also relates the novelistic treatment of chance to important historical currents in the philosophical and scientific understanding of chance, and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the representation of chance in any narrative. The author asks three central questions: Why did British novelists become intensely interested in chance in the late nineteenth century? Why and how did they thematize it in their fiction? How did the novelistic treatment of chance contribute to innovations in narrative form?

I Etcetera: On the Poetics and Ideology of Multipersoned Narratives

Abstract: you have to say, It's I who am doing this to me, I who am talking about me to me. Then the breath fails, the end begins, you go silent, it's the end, short-lived, you begin again, you had forgotten, there's someone there, someone talking to you, about you, about him ... all I have to do is listen, then they depart, one by one, and the voice goes on, it's not theirs, they were never there, there was never anyone but you, talking to you about you, the breath fails (Beckett, The Unnamable 394) One of the most significant omissions in contemporary narrative theory is the absence of sustained accounts of multiple narration. For the most part, narrative theory generally proceeds as if all novels were written entirely in the first person or third person, heterodiegetic or homodiegetic. One understands the desire for unambiguous foundations and paradigmatic examples, and naturally all theorists go on to identify more complex and ambiguous strategies of narration, but this situation leads to a conceptual framework in which the univocal practice is set forth as a (perhaps unintentional) norm while more heterodox experiments are consequently treated as secondary, peripheral, or even perverse literary gamesmanship. In this way, models of narrative ultimately derived from linguistics take precedence over Bakhtinian claims of the fundamentally polymorphous nature of the novel. Thus, while many typologies contain a space for both Bloom's subvocal speech and Molly's internal monologue, there is usually no place in such schemas for Ulysses as a whole as if the conjunction of different narrators and modes of narration were not itself of primary theoretical importance.(1) This gap is all the more unfortunate when one considers a work like The Sound and the Fury, in which the first-person "memory monologues," as Dorrit Cohn calls them (247-55), are starkly juxtaposed to the resolutely third-person segment that concludes the novel. In what follows I will examine a number of different texts that employ multipersoned narration. Four major kinds of multipersoned texts may be identified at the outset: works that systematically oscillate between different narrative positions, those that collapse apparently different types of narration into a single voice, works whose narration remains fundamentally ambiguous, and texts that employ narrational stances that would be impossible in nonfictional discourse. Since many of the authors and critics of the works I will be discussing frequently invoke ideological reasons to explain their chosen narrative practice, a short excursus on the politics of narrative person will also be set forth. Throughout, I will pay particular attention to texts which employ second-person narration. It is no exaggeration to state that the emergence of second-person narration is precisely what makes speculation on multipersoned fiction inevitable. In a frequently quoted aside, Wayne Booth remarked in 1961 that perhaps the most overworked distinction in the theory of fiction is that of person (150). I believe we will find instead that person remains one of the most undertheorized distinctions in the field. Alternating narration between different grammatical persons is not an exclusively modern phenomenon. As Stanzel has pointed out, Thackeray's narrator employs both "I" and "he" to describe his life in Henry Esmond. In Bleak House, an omniscient third-person narrative is juxtaposed to the first-person account of one of the characters. Stanzel explains that the "two narrative situations represent two different perspectives, namely, the panoramic one of the authorial narrator who is critical of the times and the naive but sympathetic viewpoint of the first-person narrator, Esther Summerson, circumscribed by her domestic horizons" (71). Even in this description, it might be noted, we get a sense of the ideological valences present in such a gendered division of knowledge and narration. As Susan Sniader Lanser points out, by "replicating the ideology of separate spheres," Bleak House sets "the omniscient and implicitly male voice of the authorial narrator next to the personal voice of the female character Esther Summerson without acknowledging this duality" (239-40). …

Writing Theory and Critical Theory

Abstract: Writing Theory and Critical Theory discusses the growing body of work linking composition studies and literary studies. Enlisting the strategies of deconstruction, hermeneutics, post-modernism, feminism, neo-Marxism, neopragmatism, psychoanalysis, reader-response criticism, and cultural studies, the twenty-seven contributors investigate the resources that critical theory can bring to an examination of discourse. Part 1, "Refiguring Traditions, " contains six essays that use critical theory to illuminate the history and orthodoxies of writing instruction. The four essays in part 2, "The Language and Authority of Theory, " analyze recent clashes between theorists and empirical researchers. Part 3, "Narrative Theory and Narratives, " addresses issues ranging from the significance of narrative as a defining feature of human nature to the problems -- both political and pedagogical -- with a writing course based on "difference." In the final section, a symposium, five contributors evaluate their roles in past an future developments in composition. Composition teachers, critical theorists, and writing program administrators will find this Collection a provocative and insightful overview of the field of composition studies.

Hyper-Embedded Narration in Gravity's Rainbow

Abstract: Among the many possible approaches to Gravity's Rainbow, two are remarkable because they remain, twenty-plus years after the book's publication, untravelled roads The first approach would entail using current narratology to open analyses of this novel's difficult joyride It would take us well beyond studies of the novel's cinematic features or the tropics of its narrative discourse; in sum, this approach would open up Pynchon's narrative poetics in ways only promised by the titles of various essays and books The second approach would entail readings of the novel by way of Deleuze and Guattari The general absence of work along this path is simply unaccountable because, as I suggest later, the correlations of Deleuzian theory with Pynchon's fiction are powerful and crucial In what follows I explore how the two neglected approaches complement each other This analysis isolates for study a specific feature of Pynchon's writing, yet one that always marks a zone where narrative poetics may be seen converting into a Deleuzian schizophrenia, and vice versa

Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing

Abstract: Immensely popular during her lifetime, the Ango-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) has since been treated as a peripheral figure on the literary map. If only in view of her prolific outputten novels, nearly eighty short stories, and a substantial body of non- fictionBowen is a noteworthy novelist. The radical quality of her work, however, renders her an exceptional one. Surfacing in both subject matter and style, her fictions harbor a subversive potential which has hitherto gone unnoticed. Using a wide range of critical theories-from semiotics to psychoanalysis, from narratology to deconstruction-this book presents a radical re-reading of a selection of Bowen's novels from a lesbian feminist perspective. Taking into account both cultural contexts and the author's non-fictional writings, the book's main focus is on configurations of gender and sexuality. Bowen's fiction constitutes an exploration of the unstable and destabilizing effects of sexuality in the interdependent processes of subjectivity and what she herself referred to as so-called reality.

Group Therapy Using a Narrative Theory Framework: Application to Treatment of Depression

Abstract: The use of a narrative framework in group treatment of depression makes the therapy process understandable and accessible to the participants. Use of orienting questions for new members, invitations, a recorded narrative, and a segmented time frame engages the participants and therapists in a collaborative and creative process.

The narrative act: wittgenstein and narratology

Abstract: This essay uses the late work of Ludwig Wittgenstein to reformulate the traditional distinction between story and narrative discourse, or diegetic and extra-diegetic levels of narrative, as a distinction between story and narrative act. In describing the transformations performed by the narrative act, the author elaborates the principle of narrative uncertainty, which dictates that the more definite the account of story or plot, the more indefinite the account of the narrative act — and vice versa. In this conceptual framework, the essay then characterizes the narrative act as the differential, within a given fictional text, of two of more types of stories (or plots), and articulates the relationship between narrative act, narrator, and cultural context.

Narrating the Unnarratable: Gender and Metonymy in the Victorian Novel

Abstract: I FEMINIST NARRATOLOGY: WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE? Do male and female novelists write differently? The feminist narratologist woul (cautiously) answer "yes, if the novelists in question are Victorian" In a tim and place where the specificity of femininity was as strictly confining and prominently displayed as tight-laced corsets and voluminous hoopskirts could suggest, gender affiliations left their traces everywhere in middle-class culture, including the style of a text signed by a woman or by a man Writing a a feminist narratologist, then, I look for signs of gendered difference in Victorian novels: signs that are culturally constructed by the historical experience of living and writing under the system of "separate spheres" but tha are not in any way essentially dictated by the writer's sex I would not expect to find the same gendered differences in Victorian and modern texts, nor would expect the signs of gendered writing in the products of a less rigidly gender-bound culture to be as distinct as they are in Victorian writing Narratology provides a vocabulary for describing those differences, which I believe are discernible at the "surface" level of texts, although they are anything but "superficial": indeed, gendered textual differences can have a profound impact on a text's reception both on the personal level of actual readers' responses and on the professional level, where unspoken decisions abou aesthetic value and canonicity get made(1) The point of lingering in this way at the surface of a text is to take note of details that can be seen as falling into gendered patterns Indeed, to attend t details is, according to Naomi Schor, particularly appropriate for feminist critics interested in recuperating the feminine: To focus on the place and function of the detail since the mid-eighteenth century [in French literature] is to become aware that the normative aesthetics elaborated and disseminated by the [French] Academy and its members is not sexually neutral; it is an axiology carrying into the field of representation the sexual hierarchies of the phallocentric cultural order The detail does not occupy a conceptual space beyond the laws of sexual difference: the detail is gendered and doubly gendered as feminine (4) My goal here is to conduct a close examination of the details of a few passages of narrative discourse written by Victorian men and women in order to point to difference I perceive in the kinds of metonymy they employ in their realist prose Patterns that surface among texts written by women I label "feminine" an those I perceive in texts written by men I call "masculine," but these terms ar meant to be descriptive rather than normative I offer this foray into a feminist poetics of detail as a contribution to the larger project of feminist narratology: specifying how gendered differences can surface in texts at particular historical moments As I have explained in Gendered Interventions, the feminist narratologist tries especially to identify those gendered textual strategies that have come to hold aesthetic significance for critics Often, that which is coded "feminine," that which is typical for female novelists' narrative discourse, is judged to be les aesthetically valuable than its masculine counterpart Metonymy--which seems historically to have occupied the disadvantaged, and therefore feminine, position in the binary opposition "metaphor/metonymy"--would seem to be a likel location for signs of gendered differences in Victorian narrative discourse Th lowly status of metonymy has recently come into question among rhetorical theorists: even though Roman Jakobson identified metonymy as the central trope for realism, metonymy has traditionally been considered an inferior trope to metaphor, relying as it does on conventional associations between objects and concepts rather than on "originally" observed similarities Of course, as Barbara Johnson reminds us, the opposition between metaphor and metonymy--and therefore the hierarchical relation between them--has been thoroughly dismantle by, for instance, Paul DeMan, who summarizes the preference for metaphor over metonymy by aligning analogy with necessity and contiguity with chance: "The inference of identity and totality that is constitutive of metaphor is lacking in the purely relational metonymic contact …

The Narrative Secret of Flannery O'Connor: The Trickster as Interpreter

Abstract: The Narrative Secret of Flannery O'Connor provides new insights into the full corpus of O'Connors fiction by exploring the intersection of O'Connor's artistic intentions and her religions preoccupations. Johansen looks first at how the stories create meaning in order to explain what they mean. Drawing on a variety of critical methods from narratology, anthropology, mythology, and reader response criticism, this study invites us to reconsider O'Connor's complex and enigmatic texts through their structures and actions. By focusing on the interplay of O'Connor's narrative structures, the human psyche, and the institutions and traditions of our collective history - particularly ancient myths and legends - Johansen illuminates the relation between narration, the self, and spiritual transformation. O'Connor's narratives employ figures, gestures, and actions that work to deceive or disorient the reader. These havoc-wreaking forces in and among the stories most resemble the archetypal trickster. Johansen demonstrates that, through such tricksteresque activity, O'Connor's narratives push the reader to acknowledge the perverse, violent, and often disorderly aspects of human and divine behavior. The religious secret of O'Connor narratives - revealed in shimmering environments where narration and incarnation meet - is that both evil and good, the grotesque and the ideal, violence and peace, Satan and God, the human and the divine exist together in sacred unity. O'Connor's literary secret, through which she discloses the religious one, is to tell stories that return human beings to original mythic events. By recasting these events in contemporary fiction, with the assistance of the trickster, sheperforms a ritual function that is as necessary in an individualistic, technological age as it is in a communitarian, primitive one. With its emphasis on narrative structures, this investigation of O'Connor's writing holds significance for other literature studies because it enable

Trial Advocacy Handbooks: Narratology and Opening Statements

Abstract: In the past fifteen years, scholars from various disciplines have become increasingly aware of the social construction of the law and, especially, of the discursive strategies used within the courtroom to persuade juries. Legal persuasion, it has been argued, is intimately tied to the legal inscription of social narratives. Courtroom narratives are legally inscribed insofar as they must conform to the rules and procedure governing the trial and its participants. Giving testimony, for example, recounts "one's side of the story," but the story must be told in a certain way at a certain time; examining or cross examining a witness elicits or discredits the witness's account of the events, but the questions must be carefully formulated and monitored; deliberating a verdict involves weighing the relative merits of different storytellers and their tales, but juries do so guided by the judge's charge to them. These courtroom narratives, moreover, are social, insofar as they derive their force--their power to affect or persuade juries--from a shared and lived sense of what constitutes narrative plausibility. The disciplines with a stake in understanding and analyzing courtroom persuasion are varied and many. Speech communication, rhetoric, political science, sociology, linguistics, anthropology and women's studies have all addressed how trial advocacy might intersect with their disciplinary concerns (for a bibliography of this scholarship see Elkins). Of these, I wish to single out two book-length works: W. Lance Bennett and Martha Feldman's Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom and Gregory Matoesian's Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom, the first published in the early years of this extra-disciplinary examination of legal advocacy (1981), the other, more recently (1993). Both are written by scholars outside the discipline of law (two political scientists, one sociologist), both focus on the courtroom strategies of lawyers, and both use methodologies borrowed from disciplines other than their own: Bennett and Feldman, from narrative studies, rhetoric and sociology; Matoesian, from critical discourse analysis, feminist theory and conversational analysis. In this essay, I propose to combine aspects of these two interdisciplinary studies--particularly, narrative as legal persuasion and language as institutional power--to demonstrate how lawyers employ strategic narratives during opening statements to consolidate their power over, as well as defer power to, jurors. By doing so, I also propose to fill in some gaps left by these studies. Bennett and Feldman's study, for example, focuses on the entire trial and on broad narrative elements, and therefore lacks a method for producing a close reading of particular stages in a trial. Matoesian's study focuses strictly on cross-examination, on the questioning strategies of the defense lawyer for one witness (the rape victim), and therefore lacks an account of the general persuasive strategies employed by lawyers for both sides. Taken alone, neither approach can account for the peculiarities of structure and strategy in opening statements. This essay, then, attempts to fill these gaps by using narratological theory to elucidate the rhetoric employed by lawyers in the first stage of a trial: the crucial opening statement. My specific focus is on a pair of model opening statements taken from a murder trial, People v. Sylvester Strong, and found in Thomas Mauet's Fundamentals of Trial Techniques (67-70). I chose this text for several reasons. First, these opening statements are published in a trial advocacy handbook, and are meant to serve as models for imitation and analysis by lawyers and law students. As models, then, they have a representative quality: they are thought to embody important legal paradigms of practice. Second, unlike most, Mauet's handbook publishes the full text of the opening statements for examination, rather than just a few sentences or excerpts. …

The Other Case: Gender and Narration in Charlotte Bronte's 'The Professor.'

Abstract: Male novelists who use female narrators have been praised for their insights into "feminine psychology," yet we seldom expect women writers to represent masculinity from a male point of view. In her recent work on feminism and narratology, Susan Lanser considers "the social properties and political implications of narrative voice," claiming that "female voice"--the grammatical gender of the narrator--"is a site of ideological tension made visible in textual practice" (4-5). This tension is conspicuous in novels published in the nineteenth century: a strict literary double-standard reflects a cultural double-standard that devalues feminine discourse in the public sphere. Like everything else, narrative voice corresponds to the cultural needs of Victorian society, and so an age comparatively rich in literary heroines (and in women writers) still finds the masculine voice more representative, and, supposedly, more rational, more "objective." Because narrative voice carries the burdens of Victorian gender polarization--in its representation of male or female language and the expectations it raises about masculine or feminine plots(1)--grammatical gender in a Victorian novel is as ideologically constructed as the gendered body inhabited by the author. If narrative voice is a site of ideological tension, it is even more difficult to construe when a male voice is adapted self-consciously by women writers who call themselves "Currer Bell" or "George Eliot." Indeed, because narrative authority conforms to rather than challenges "hierarchical, patriarchal norms" (Cohan & Shires 146) we can gain insight into the ways women who use male narrators understand gender relations, and how they reproduce masculinity--and with it, dominant discourse--in the choice of male language, preoccupations, and pursuits. In her first novel, The Professor, Charlotte Bronte uses a first-person male narrator, and, as I will discuss, critics have tended to see this as both an artistic error and an elision of her feminist voice. But whether she takes a male or female narrator, Bronte is no less intent on examining the encoding of gender in nineteenth-century discourse. Specifically, the male voice provides an opening to confront a central issue for Bronte--power--which is different from her explorations of powerlessness in her later heroine-centered novels. In The Professor, she is learning what it is to have the power of authorship, and therefore it is consistent that she should go inside the system to attempt to represent the source of that power.(2) Many psychoanalytic approaches to The Professor accept the "feminization" of the male narrator as the woman writer's personal experience of subordination translated into a pseudomale voice. Though this helps in understanding biographical issues and the so-called "female imagination," such readings tend to overlook how the appropriation of the male voice may challenge a tradition of androcentric narrative and Victorian patriarchal hegemony. As Terry Eagleton explains, one interpretation of feminism "is not just that women should have equality of power and status with men; it is a questioning of all such power and status. It is not just that the world will be better off with more female participation in it; it is that without the 'feminization' of human history, the world is unlikely to survive" (150). Bronte engages this concern by using an intrinsically authoritative male voice to tell a story that is not about a heroine's traditional growth into power, but instead authorizes a masculine growth out of power by asserting the need to temper male authority with "feminine" social virtues, usefully defined by Susan Morgan as "gentleness, flexibility, openness to others, friendship, and love" (19). At the same time, however, Bronte describes the practical and psychological obstacles to this "feminization" for men who are subject to ideological constraints, particularly the insistence on sexual difference. …

Films As Critiques of Novels: Transformational Criticism

Abstract: This text shows how films are useful as literary criticism. From an examination of what will and will not "translate" into film from print, one learns much about a novel's structure and methodology, its themes, narratology, and other aspects of fictions. Novels/films covered include "The French Lieutenant's Woman", "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", "The Sterile Cuckoo", "Catch-22", "Bang the Drum Slowly", "A Room With a View", "Ordinary People", more.

Enunciación, ficción y niveles semióticos en el texto narrativo

Abstract: This paper examines some conceptual connections between the areas of narratology and pragmalinguistics, with a specific focus on the enunciative peculiarities of fictional discourse. A descriptive model for semiotic analysis is proposed, taking into account the complex and stratified structure of narrative fiction and the difference between levels of enunciation and levels of fictionality.

Resente Matteusnavorsing in Suid-Afrika

Abstract: Recent Matthean-research in South Africa This article deals with recent developments in Matthean research, mostly by members of the New Testament Society of South Africa. Initially, research on Matthew was influenced to a large degree by discourse analysis. Literary criticism and narratology also made an impact on this research, as well as speech-act theory, pragmatics and rhetoric. Social-scientific criticism also played a role, and the Sermon on the Mount has also been read as litterature engagee. Recently, the specific contribution of Matthew to the subjects of Theology and Ethics has also received attention. A growing sensitivity to the South African and the broader African context is also currently being seen..

Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove: desire and the fragmenting of character

Abstract: This article is an attempt at analysing several aspects of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove from a point of view which includes concepts of both narratology and post-structuralist analysis. I study the level of the fabula and the characters (at the level of the story) in order to prove the existence in the film of a tendency to discard its apparently satiric aim and privilege a logic of spectacle. The contents of the fabula reveal that the film introduces fantasy to satisfy the audience's desire for identification and creates a self-conscious film which dismatles the satiric text. The study of the characters lays bare the existence of a complex web of signification around each one of them, produced by their being impersonated by well-known stars. The several interactions among the characters in the film, previous characters played by the actors and the actors as personae bring about a dissemination of meaning which deprives the characters of any satiric claim. They are transformed into mere objects to be enjoyed and incorporated to the pervading logic of spectacle, therefore pointing to the ever-present tendency of cinema to present itself as a product to be consumed rather than a text to be analysed.