Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1995"

Empowerment meets narrative: listening to stories and creating settings.

Abstract: Comments on and summarizes some of the themes of a special issue on empowerment. Extends empowerment theory with the suggestion that both research and practice would benefit from a narrative approach that links process to practice and attends to the voices of the people of interest. Narrative theory and method tends to open the field to a more inclusive attitude as to what counts as data and to cross-disciplinary insights as well as citizen collaboration. Communal narratives are defined at various levels of analysis, including the community, the organizational, and the cultural. A definition of empowerment that includes a concern with resources calls attention to the fact that communal narratives and personal stories are resources. Implications for personal and social change are suggested.

Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence

Abstract: From the Publisher: How are our memories, our narratives, and our intelligence interrelated? What can artificial intelligence and narratology say to each other? In this pathbreaking study by an expert on learning and computers, Roger C Schank argues that artificial intelligence must be based on real human intelligence, which consists largely of applying old situations - and our narratives of them - to new situations in less than obvious ways To design smart machines, Schank therefore investigated how people use narratives and stories, the nature and function of those narratives, and the connection of intelligence to both telling and listening As Schank explains, "We need to tell someone else a story that describes our experiences because the process of creating the story also creates the memory structure that will contain the gist of the story for the rest of our lives Talking is remembering" This first paperback edition includes an illuminating foreword by Gary Saul Morson

Back to Reality: A Critique of Postmodern Theory in Psychotherapy

Abstract: This work provides an analysis of postmodern/narrative theory, with its underlying antirealist/constructivist philosophy that the subject makes rather than discovers reality. The author sees the ascent of this theory as a misguided attempt to solve a recalcitrant problem within psychotherapy: how to achieve a theory that attends to the uniqueness of each client and yet preserves a systematic, replicable enterprise. As an alternative she introduces readers to the integrative/eclectic therapy movement and proposes a "modest realism".

Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory

Abstract: Madonna, Murphy Brown, Thelma and Louise: These much-discussed media icons are the starting points of Suzanna Walter's brilliant, much-needed introduction to feminist cultural theory. Accessible yet theoretically sophisticated, up-to-date and entertaining, "Material Girls" acquaints readers with the major theories, debates, and concepts in this new and exciting field. With numerous case studies and illustrations, Walters situates feminist cultural theory against the background of the women's movement and media studies. Using examples from film, television, advertising, and popular discourse, she looks at topics such as the 'male gaze', narrative theory, and new work on female 'ways of seeing' and spectatorship. Throughout, Walters provides a historically grounded account of representations of women in popular culture while critiquing the dominance of psychoanalytic and postmodern analyses. The first comprehensive guide to the approaches and debates that make up this growing field, "Material Girls" belongs on the shelf of every cultural critic and savvy student today.

Narrative Theory, Redecision Therapy, and Postmodernism

Abstract: Redecision therapy needs to be considered both as a brief therapy and as a powerful postmodern narrative therapy. Conceptualizing it in this manner, we are in a better position to appreciate its re...

Universal grammar and narrative form

Abstract: In a major rethinking of the functions, methods, and aims of narrative poetics, David Herman exposes important links between modernist and postmodernist literary experimentation and contemporary language theory. Ultimately a search for new tools for narrative theory, his work clarifies complex connections between science and art, theory and culture, and philosophical analysis and narrative discourse.Following an extensive historical overview of theories about universal grammar, Herman examines Joyce's "Ulysses," Kafka's "The Trial," and Woolf's "Between the Acts" as case studies of modernist literary narratives that encode grammatical principles which were (re)fashioned in logic, linguistics, and philosophy during the same period. Herman then uses the interpretation of universal grammar developed via these modernist texts to explore later twentieth-century cultural phenomena. The problem of citation in the discourses of postmodernism, for example, is discussed with reference to syntactic theory. An analysis of Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" raises the question of cinematic meaning and draws on semantic theory. In each case, Herman shows how postmodern narratives encode ideas at work in current theories about the nature and function of language.Outlining new directions for the study of language in literature, "Universal Grammar and Narrative Form" provides a wealth of information about key literary, linguistic, and philosophical trends in the twentieth century.

Pedagogy and Social Action: A Role for Narrative in Professional Communication

Abstract: Scholars in professional communication have called for a reexamination of pedagogy, asking that it instruct students not simply in the forms of workplace discourse but also in the connections between that discourse and socially responsible communicative action. This article posits that narrative can provide a basis for a pedagogy of social action—for a pedagogy, that is, that enables students to understand the workings of power and cultural reproduction in professional settings and that fosters reflection, critique, and dialogue. The article first reviews narrative theory supporting this claim, then discusses ways that teachers can use narrative to help students critique examples of professional discourse and their own composing choices. The article closes by discussing both the concerns about and the possibilities for such a pedagogy.

Gender and Genre in Novels Without End: The British Roman-Fleuve

Abstract: "Fresh, strong, and engaging. . . . The combination of narratology, reader-response, and feminist approaches realizes the complexity and complications of characterization, narrative voice, plot, and closure in these novels and in the roman-fleuve. . . . Brings into focus the . . . sub-genre in relation to the novel in general while at the same time presenting insightful analyses of particular examples of such texts."--Kathryn N. Benzel, University of Nebraska, Kearney This is the first substantive study of the roman-fleuve--the multivolume sequence novel--as a distinctive genre. Though Lynette Felber finds these "novels without end" to be "the ultimate pleasurable text," prolonging a moment of Keatsian arrested passion, she claims they have fallen between the cracks of the popular and the canonical novel. Tracing the roman-fleuve through three periods of history, she examines three British serial works that were to some degree innovative and experimental: Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels (1864-80), Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage (1915-38), and Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75). Felber argues that the roman-fleuve has an inherent propensity for "an ecriture feminine, a writing with narrative features designated feminine." She acknowledges that the French theorists with whom she is aligned define formal features of writing in sexual terms. Certain to be controversial to some feminists, her argument places her in the heart of the essentialism-constructionism debate. While some critics might find the length of the genre an impediment to critical acceptance, Felber claims that it is the perception of this form as a feminine genre that has had a detrimental effect on its status. She finds that the massive roman-fleuve, damned by its refusal to meet conventional expectations and by its association with a feminine discourse, reveals the prejudice of the marketplace and the literary establishment. Lynette Felber is associate professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne. She is general editor of CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and Philosophy of History and the author of many book chapters and articles published in journals such as Mosaic, Genre, Frontiers, The Victorian Newsletter, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature.

The Jamesonian unconscious

Abstract: Imagine Fredric Jameson—the world’s foremost Marxist critic—kidnapped and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera, generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our post-post-contemporary landscape. In The Jamesonian Unconscious , a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham devises unexpected encounters between Jameson and alternative rock groups, new movies, and subcultures. At the same time, Burnham offers an extraordinary analysis of Jameson’s work and career that refines and extends his most important themes. In an unusual biographical move, Burnham negotiates Jameson’s major works—including Marxism and Form , The Political Unconscious , and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism —by way of his own working-class, queer-ish, Gen-X background and sensibility. Thus Burnham’s study draws upon an immense range of references familiar to the MTV generation, including Reservoir Dogs , theorists Slavoj Zizek and Pierre Bourdieu, The Satanic Verses , Language poetry, the collapse of state communism in Eastern Europe, and the indie band Killdozer. In the process, Burnham addresses such Jamesonian questions as how to imagine the future, the role of utopianism in capitalist culture, and the continuing relevance of Marxist theory. Through its redefinition of Jameson’s work and compelling reading of the political present, The Jamesonian Unconscious defines the leading edge of Marxist theory. Written in a style by turns conversational, playful, and academic, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Marxism, critical theory, aesthetics, narratology, and cultural studies, as well as the wide circle of readers who have felt and understood Jameson’s influence.

Allegories in immersion : virtual narration in postmodern fiction

Abstract: Through its insistence on the concept of virtuality, the possible-world approach has brought a new dimension to the study of narrative. The first stage in the study of the interplay between the actual and the virtual in narrative communication has focused on the level of the narrated. In Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, for instance, I proposed a concept of "virtual narrative" that referred to the as yet unrealized projections and unverified retrospective interpretations motivating the behavior of characters. But the opposition real-virtual also finds useful applications in the exploration of the discourse component of narrative. Some of the concepts recently introduced on the narratological scene have a strong flavor of virtuality: I am thinking of Gerald Prince's notion of the "disnarrated" and of David Herman's "hypothetical localization." In what follows I propose to add another element to this growing repertory: the concept of virtual narration. I regard this concept as the discourse counterpart of my earlier, story-oriented notion of virtual narrative. REAL NARRATION Under the term of "virtual narration" I understand a way of evoking events that resists the "expectation of reality" inherent in language in general and in narrative discourse in particular. Philosophy may periodically relativize, destabilize, and even reject the notion of reality, but narrative and expository language knows little of these doubts: even in an atmosphere of radical antirealism - such as the contemporary zeitgeist - it remains firmly rooted in truth and reality. The unmarked case of modality is the indicative, and to narrate in the indicative is to present events as true fact. The repertory of semantic categories at the disposal of narrators (or essayists, for that matter) often forces the writer to a firmer commitment to facts than caution would call for.(1) It is through tacked-on modal markers that language defactualizes, relativizes, or switches the reference world from the speaker's reality toward a nonactual possible world. In the type of narration I call "real," the narrator presents propositions as true of the world in which he is located, and the audience imagines the facts (states or events) represented by these propositions. If the reader has other means of access to the reference world she may, after considering the described states of affairs, evaluate the narrator's statements as true or false. She may also do so on the basis of the internal coherence of the narrative discourse. If the statements are valued as true, the expressed facts are stored as knowledge; if not, they are excluded from the reader's representation of the reference world. As long as the narrator (or implied "I") uses the indicative mode, the reference world is identified as the world in which the narrator is located. This "real" mode of narration is found in both fiction and nonfiction and is independent of the truth value of the discourse: even the false can be told as true fact; otherwise lies would never deceive and errors never mislead. But "real" narration is not the only way to evoke events to the imagination. With appropriate markers of irreality, narrated events may be ascribed to a foreign world. Counterfactuals and hypotheticals refer to another world in the realm of the possible; reports of dreams or narration in the mode of free indirect discourse conjure private mental worlds standing in opposition to the physical reality of the textual actual world. Events may even be called to the imagination as nonexistent. The processing of a negative sentence - for instance, "Mary did not kill her husband" - involves imagining the world in which Mary kills her husband. The narratological study of the modes of expression that sever the expectation of reality is only beginning. One of these modes is what I call "virtual narration." VIRTUAL NARRATION As a preliminary to the definition of virtual narration, let me review two senses of the term "virtual. …

Critics of Disenchantment

Abstract: In a recent essay devoted to "the new musicology," Charles Rosen added his voice to the swelling chorus of those decrying the presuppositions, methods, and conclusions of such socially conscious scholars as Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, and Philip Brett.(1) Though not entirely negative in his assessment, Rosen raised numerous questions about the work of these scholars. His critique merits a detailed response for two reasons. First, Rosen is one of the most distinguished scholars working today; he combines astonishing erudition with insights derived from his long career as a pianist. Second, the scholars whom Rosen discussed are among the most original and provocative of the younger generation; their approach to musicology and criticism is marked by both a strong sociological orientation and a thorough engagement with intellectual domains far beyond the reach of mainstream musicology. Rosen's essay, therefore, provides the occasion for a critical assessment of these "new musicologists," placing their work in the context of traditional musicology and the sociology of music. Before proceeding to that assessment, we must first consider Rosen's criticisms. In works such as McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality,(2) Kramer's Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900,(3) and Brett's Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (co-edited with Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas),(4) these scholars have attempted to ground musical meaning in the context of social, cultural, and political conflict. They are dragging a most lively art (and a frequently moribund scholarly discipline) kicking and screaming into the broader world of cultural discourse. From Rosen's perspective, however, these scholars do not so much drag musicology into the world as into "the other worlds of literature, history, and politics."(5) As a practicing musician of the first rank, Rosen is concerned that something irreducibly "musical" in music's meaning is lost or corrupted when methodologies from other disciplines are applied without careful consideration of categorical differences. Lawrence Kramer, for example, may draw a connection between the expressive doubling of a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Beethoven's two-movement piano sonatas, but does his invocation of literary meaning translate adequately into the realm of sound? When Rosen makes the charge that Kramer has a weak grasp of the experience of music, he is expressing his disturbance at the way in which music as a sensual experience seemingly gets shifted to the background in Kramer's criticism.(6) Kramer frequently devotes as much space to the description of a literary model and its formal structure as he does the musical object itself. Music is then brought into play with this model in such a way that (from Rosen's point of view) its musical specificity is endangered: Kramer risks reducing music to literature. When scholars attempt to draw correlations between musical structures and those of politics or literature, they inevitably exceed the limits of formal analysis and invoke metaphorical language. Rosen, however, contemptuously recalls the silly stories frequently offered to the musically illiterate to translate music's meaning into another domain, and asserts that "all metaphors oversimplify."(7) Are "the new musicologists" guilty of this error? Rosen singles out McClary for special criticism: "[McClary's] attempt to identify cadential closure in Western music with patriarchal domination in Western society is too facile to be convincing." Indeed, Rosen goes on to say, "Since the early Romantics, we have generally accepted that something as primitive as sexual desire will be reflected at all levels of culture."(8) As we shall see, the efforts of McClary to revive a musical semiotics (and of Carolyn Abbate to develop a theory of musical narratology) are fraught with peril, even as they yield valuable insights into the role of music in both shaping and reflecting cultural concepts. …

Links and their vicissitudes: essays on hypertext

Abstract: The dissertation is an application of psychoanalytic theory (Freud and Lacan) to the interfaces and narrative forms of hypertexts and other interactive digital media. It focuses primarily on the contingency of narrative in these texts, describing their structural irregularities and resistance to closure in terms of disjunctive paradigms of representation and textuality. Our responses to the refusal of closure in these texts are sustained, I propose, by a transferential relation: the presumption that there is an authority to whom the text is lucid and saturated, and for whose satisfaction we read for cues of structure and narrative resolution. I describe several etiologies of digital reading: the persistent digression of obsessional neurosis, the fetishistic utilitarianism of perversion, and the super-structural fascination of paranoia, illustrating each with readings from contemporary hypertext fictions (by Joyce, Guyer, McDaid, and Moulthrop) and interactive multimedia (The Manhole, Virtual Valerie) that elicit these modes of reading. I conclude by proposing that a digital poetics must be founded on a cautious account of the structural inconsistencies and material fragility of digital texts--precisely those traits that the aforementioned modes of reading obscure or deny.

Beyond Irony: The Unnamable's Appropriation of Its Critics in a Humorous Reading of the Text

Abstract: Follow this and additional works at: http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cleng_facpub Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Publisher's Statement This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: "Beyond Irony: The Unnamable's Appropriation of Its Critics in a Humorous Reading of the Text," The Journal of Narrative Technique (The Journal of Narrative Theory). Vol. 25, No. 1, 1995, 47-66, which has been published in final form at https://www.emich.edu/english/jnt/vol25.html.

Character invention in the letters of Maimie Pinzer

Abstract: The concept of “narrative” is becoming an avenue through which scholars can privilege nontraditional forms of communication. Communication scholars have been attempting to discover how some narratives may “ring true” with an audience by studying the strategies of the storytellers. This study brings these two impulses together through a case study of autobiographical letters written by a turn of the century prostitute to a Boston matron. In creating a narrative of her life, the author uses several rhetorical strategies to recreate her character so as to persuade her audience that she is worthy of respect. In so doing, she also persuades herself.

"When the lamp is shattered" : desire and narrative in Catullus

Abstract: The poetry of the Late Roman Republican poet Gaius Valerius Catullus, a rich document of the human heart, is the earliest-known reasonably complete body of erotic verse in the West.Though approximately 116 poems survive, uncertainties about the condition of the fragmented manuscript and the narrative order of the poems make the Catullan text unusually problematic for the modern critic. Indeed, the poems can be arranged in a number of ways, making a multitude of different plots possible and frustrating the reader s desire for narrative closure.Micaela Janan contends that since unsatisfied desire structures both the experience of reading Catullus and its subject matter, critical interpretation of the text demands a "poetics of desire." Furthermore, postmodern critical theory, narratology, and psychoanalysis suggest a flexible concept of the "subject" as a site through which a multitude of social, cultural, and unconscious forces move. Human consciousness, Janan contends, is inherently incomplete and in a continuous process of transformation. She therefore proposes an original and provocative feminist reading of Catullus, a reading informed by theories of consciousness and desire as ancient as Plato and as contemporary as Freud and Lacan.The Late Roman Republic in which Catullus lived, Janan reminds us, was a time of profound social upheaval when political and cultural institutions that had persisted for centuries were rapidly breaking downa time not unlike our own. Catullus poetry provides an unusually honest look at his culture and its contradictory representations of class, gender, and power. By bringing to the study of this major work of classical literature the themes of consciousness and desire dealt with in postmodern scholarship, Janan s book invites a new conversation among literary disciplines."

n Ondersoek na die teologiese relevansie van die metaforiese spreke in Hooglied

Abstract: An inquiry into the problem of theological relevance, posed by the metaphors in the Song of Songs. Of the six basic scholarly approaches to the Song of Songs, the literary approach is today most widely accepted. This approach still however does not give all the answers to the problem of an evasive theological relevance, posed by the metaphors in the Song of Songs. This article argues that a certain perspective on metaphors will open up new ways of understanding the Song. When this perspective is coalesced with narratology, results are reached that will certainly enhance this celebrated poem.

Storying the suicide of one's child

Abstract: Using selected concepts from Judith Herman's trauma model, psychoanalytic theory, and narrative theory, the clinical work with a griefstricken couple attempting to understand the suicide of their 26-year-old son, is presented. Within a short-term therapy, the goals were the deconstruction of a guilt-saturated narrative about the trauma, and the construction of an alternative narrative.

Comparative literature today : methods & perspectives

Abstract: Originally published as La litterature comparee, Collection Que Sais-je? in 1989 by Presses Universitaires de France. "Chevrel's best strengths as an independent, nuanced observer reside in his overview of the French and German scenes. These he integrates with the core Anglo-American developments, against the backdrop of work concerning and emanating from a diverse variety of cultures on all the continents. "It is refreshing to have a handbook that devotes the attention to the sociological dimensions of literary studies without construing these exclusively in ideological terms. Here we find a sensible mix of insights from formal and social, psychological, and anthropological analyses. Chevrel brings important approaches (e.g., genre, narratology, myth studies, relationships among the arts and media, canon formation, women's writing, and distinctive non-European poetics) to the fore with a deft touch."-from the foreword by Gerald Gillespie, Stanford University.

État présent des études sur Marivaux

Abstract: Annie Rivara : The present state of research on Marivaux. This review article, which announces the creation of a Marivaux Society and the Revue Marivaux, continues those published by F. Deloffre (1964 and 1985) and H. Coulet (1978), although it does not claim to be exhaustive. It covers the years 1987-1994 and presents books, symposia and articles (both published and forthcoming), sometimes grouped under a single heading. After an assessment of recent editions, this article is organised according to the various critical approches (history and biography ; discourse analysis ; narratology ; dramaturgy ; poetics ; structural and thematic approaches, some inspired by psychoanalysis or feminist studies ; literary history ; history of genres ; philosophical aspects ; reading, reception and translation). Special emphasis is laid on technical and philosophical analyses as well as studies of intertextual connections.

Book Reviews -- the Fictions of Language and the Langauges of Function: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness by Monika Fludernik

Abstract: Monika Fludernik. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. xvi + 536 pp. L50.00, $74.50 cloth. In the long history of reflection on the nature of narrative, narratology can best be distinguished by the privileged relation it has established between the features of narrative content and linguistically inspired theories of the mediation of such narrative content. Perhaps no one has stated this more boldly than the inventor of the term "narratology," Tzvetan Todorov, for whom character is a noun and action a verb and who suggests that noun and verb might be better understood in considering the role they play in narrative. While Todorov's analogy is guilty of the exaggeration and approximation typical of nascent disciplines, there does remain a grain of truth in his formulation, which, even with the multitude and diversity of developments in literary theory over the past thirty years, stands as a watershed in modern approaches to narrative.. This is not to say, however, that "pre-"narratological studies are to be dispensed with in the wake of scientific or critical progress, for it has become clear in recent years that narratology, which now possesses a history of its own, has entered a phase where further refinements are likely to come--at least in part--from the reconsideration of issues that were earlier seen either to lie outside the scope of narratology (e.g., fictionality) or to be incompatible with the aims and methods of narratology (e.g., style). The "crisis of narratology" that has gathered force over the past ten years or more as the Saussurean-inspired paradigms have weakened has at the same time produced new theoretical frameworks for the study of narrative, for it is now clear that today's inheritors of the earlier narratology tend either towards a narrative semantics derived from possible-worlds logic (the most comprehensive work to date being Marie-Laure Ryan's Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory 1991 ) or, with greater attention devoted to textual surface structures, towards the various modes of the inscription of subjectivity in language as a key feature of narrative fiction. With a variety of sources running back to (among others) Charles Bally's stylistics and Kate Hamburger's phenomenologically inspired Logik der Dichtung (1957; second edition 1968)--a work having provided an important theoretical basis for Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978)--this latter tendency in narratology has found in Monika Fludernik's The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction an achievement of cardinal importance. Fludernik's accomplishment is to have produced an exhaustive study of the representation of speech and consciousness in fiction through a sustained analysis of free indirect discourse and related devices, addressing numerous issues that have not been adequately resolved previously, be it due either to limitations inherent in the paradigms commonly accepted or to the failure of critical and theoretical insight. All of this, and more, is brought to bear on extracts drawn from no fewer than two-hundred and fifty English language, French, and German texts (both literary and journalistic as well as oral), backed up by extensive readings in the relevant bibliography on recent narratological and linguistic research, together with penetrating discussions of earlier studies that serve to enrich and to put into historical perspective work currently being done in the field. From the time it was first observed, free indirect discourse has remained a privileged area of linguistically informed approaches to narrative. The dominant approach over the decades--even among narratologists--has been to locate the device midway between direct speech (assumed to be the most "mimetic" form of speech representation) with its syntactic and expressive elements and indirect speech with its tense and referential shifts. …

Narrative, perspective and cultural otherness∗

Abstract: Summary The article endeavours to link two existing fields of research, namely that of narratology and that of comparative “imagogy” which is primarily concerned with experiencing the foreign. It deliberates on how the narrative perspective as a characteristic element of the text is interrelated with and interdependent on the projection of the foreign which may be ambivalently interpreted as being either hostile or congenial. Special attention is devoted to the particular function of the letter as a narratological technique for conveying that which is alien. In conclusion, the article touches on the narrators’ point of view stemming from social, cultural or historical strangeness.

Aufgaben und Probleme einer Erzählrhetorik der Frühen Neuzeit

Abstract: The article describes possible fields of investigation for rhetorics and narratology in the area of 17th-century cultural history. The combination of rhetorical and narratological strategies is particularly apt for analyses in the early modern period since basic procedures and categories of the rhetorical systems began to develop together with modern hermeneutics about 1500. Together with new technologies and means of representation (perspective) they have shaped our general interpretative horizons until recently. At the beginning of a new area of medial representation the cultural history of the early modern period can now be analysed in full view of its potentialities.