Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1998"

Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience

Abstract: There is a growing interest in 'therapeutic narratives' and the relation between narrative and healing. Cheryl Mattingly's ethnography of the practice of occupational therapy in a North American hospital investigates the complex interconnections between narrative and experience in clinical work. Viewing the world of disability as a socially constructed experience, it presents fascinatingly detailed case studies of clinical interactions between occupational therapists and patients, many of them severely injured and disabled, and illustrates the diverse ways in which an ordinary clinical interchange is transformed into a dramatic experience governed by a narrative plot. Drawing from a wide range of sources, including anthropological studies of narrative and ritual, literary theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics, this book develops a narrative theory of social action and experience. While most contemporary theories of narrative presume that narratives impose an artificial coherence upon lived experience, Mattingly argues for a revision of the classic mimetic position. If narrative offers a correspondence to lived experience, she contends, the dominant formal feature which connects the two is not narrative coherence but narrative drama. Moving and sophisticated, this book is an innovative contribution to the study of modern institutions and to anthropological theory.

Postmodern Narrative Theory

Abstract: This book is an accessible and stimulating summary of the often over-complex theories that have transformed the study of narrative in recent decades. It establishes direct links between the workings of fictional narratives and those of the non-fictional world, arguing that it is their inseparability which characterises postmodern fiction, criticism and culture.

The distinction of fiction

Abstract: Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 197 pp. $42.00 hardcover. Reading Dorrit Cohn's The Distinction of Fiction made me feel proud of myself. Along the way I kept thinking, "this is the best book I've read this year," only to learn, some weeks later, that The Distinction of Fiction had won the MLA's Aldo Scaglioni Prize for the best book of the year in the field of Comparative Literature. Anyone now reading Cohn's fascinating, magisterial essay on the specificity of fictional narration ("artifiction") can recover this thrill: pride in oneself and pride in one's community. "Community" is a key term: this book is the outcome of Cohn's reflection on the nature and workings of fictional discourse within the systematic knowledge elaborated by a community of narratologists, Cohn prima inter pares. Her conclusions arise from a fine assaying of the scholarship that has accumulated around such fundamental questions as: how does the (fictional) substance of the literary work come to light? With what authority? With what distinction? The matter in parenthesis is crucial because what is always at stake in Cohn's reflections is the differentiation-and, hence, the salvaging - of fictional works from those that, for Cohn, are decidedly nonfictional; works, like history and biography, that claim to refer to a pre-given world and by such conventions of claiming, do so. Not all narrative is fiction; everything is not (the same kind of) text. On this path of thinking one continually has glimpses of the depth and importance of the issues involved-glimpsed, like a wide exhilarating landscape through a precisely framed window: fundamental issues of truth, reference, authority. From the start The Distinction of Fiction argues for the existence of inalienable markers of fictional narrative and maintains continuity by returning to them. The existence of such "distinctions" flies in the face of claims held by speech-act theorists such as John Searle, who argues: "There is no textual property, syntactic or semantic, that will identify a text as a work of fiction" (20). Yet, for Cohn, various markers of fiction make themselves felt. All fiction is constituted by a preterite or by an "absolute" present that departs from ordinary conceptions of past or present. Here the past "no longer needs to refer to the speaker's own past;" for example, "it can refer to the 'now' of an individual whose plane 'left tomorrow'" (25). As in all narrative, however, the narrated event precedes the event of narration. The language of fiction cannot say what is the plot-event in the instant of its emergence; such language may be its own event but cannot coincide with the event of what is narrated-and this is true too, as Cohn shows in a tour de force, even in the first-person present-- tense "artifiction" of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The difference between the verb tense of the fiction and its peculiar disjunctive temporality is one of its eternal distinctions. Cohn's distinctions have immediate practical force. For example: from the foregoing, it would appear that Alexander Nehamas's provocative thesis in Nietzsche: Life as Literature that Nietzsche becomes in his work the literary character that he is-Nietzsche as narrator "fusing" with Nietzsche as character-must collide with the untenable supposition that the substance of the narrated could coincide with that of the narrating instance. The second feature marking the difference between fiction and factual writing is that peculiar device of extrospection which Cohn, in a previous work of narratology, has called "transparent minds" (Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978]). This is the privilege of the narrator only of fiction, who may report with authority the contents of consciousness of some person other than the narrator. The mind of the other is presented as if it were transparent. …

Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds

Abstract: "The universe of possible worlds is constantly expanding and diversifying thanks to the incessant world-constructing activity of human minds and hands. Literary fiction is probably the most active experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise."-from the author's Preface The standard contrast between fiction and reality, notes Lubomir Dolezel, obscures an array of problems that have beset philosophers and literary critics for centuries. Commentators usually admit that fiction conveys some kind of truth-the truth of the story of Faust, for instance. They acknowledge that fiction usually bears some kind of relation to reality-for example, the London of Dickens. But both the status of the truth and the nature of the relationship have baffled, frustrated, or repelled a long line of thinkers. In Heterocosmica, Lubomir Dolezel offers nothing less than a complete theory of literary fiction based on the idea of possible worlds. Beginning with a discussion of the extant semantics and pragmatics of fictionality-by Leibniz, Russell, Frege, Searle, Auerbach, and others-he relates them to literature, literary theory, and narratology. He also investigates theories of action, intention, and literary communication to develop a system of concepts that allows him to offer perceptive reinterpretations of a host of classical, modern, and postmodern fictional narratives-from Defoe through Dickens, Dostoevsky, Huysmans, Bely, and Kafka to Hemingway, Kundera, Rhys, Plenzdorf, and Coetzee. By careful attention to philosophical inquiry into possible worlds, especially Saul Kripke's and Jaakko Hintikka's, and through long familiarity with literary theory, Dolezel brings us an unprecedented examination of the notion of fictional worlds.

Biography and Education : A Reader

Abstract: 1. Research methodology for a biography Michael Erben 2. Understanding life backwards and leading it forwards: adolescent girls reflect on educational choices Christine Mann 3. Perspectives on learning difficulties through biographies Hilary Dickinson 4. The story of the self: 1ducation, experience and autobiography Robin Usher 5. Student drop-out: collecting biographies in the further education context on missing population Michelene Page 6. Voices from margins: regulation and resistance in the lives of lesbian teachers Gill Clarke 7. Narratology, reflection and individual subjectivity: inscribing of teachers in New Right discourses 1979-1997 David Scott 8. Nineteenth Century non-conformist lives, voluntarism and educational expansion Diana Jones 9. PhD students and the life of learning Zoe Parker 10. An auto/biographical account of educational experience Brian Lewis 11. Biography and slavery as a background to citizenship education Peter Figuaroa

Lived Experience and Interpretation in Narrative Theory: Experiences of Living with HIV/AIDS

Abstract: Narrative analysis builds on the strengths of qualitative research by examining the construction of meaning and symbolic systems in a framework that is explicitly temporal and that links research in the humanities with that in the social sciences. Qualitative methodologies often assume reported data accurately reflects the realities of lived experience. On the other hand some research drawing on cultural studies argues that the “facts” of a person's life are irrelevant. This paper argues for a middle way based on narrative theory that explores the interaction of “objective” events and their “subjective” interpretation. Further, narrative analysis enables exploration of the temporal structure of people's experiences focusing on both how a person's memories of the past and anticipations of the future influence their understanding and actions in the present. These points are developed drawing on the theory and methodology of both Symbolic Interactionism and Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics. The experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS are used to illustrate and explicate the usefulness of narrative analysis.

Acción, Relato, Discurso: Estructura de la ficción narrativa (Action, Story, Discourse: The Structure of Narrative Fiction)

Abstract: Spanish abstract: 'Accion, Relato, Discurso' es un tratado de teoria literaria, y mas concretamente de teoria de la narracion o narratologia objeto inmediato de este libro son las teorias de la narracion, y a traves de ellas los textos narrativos Proporciona un estudio avanzado de la estructura narrativa desde el punto de vista de la semiotica y del analisis del discurso, prestando atencion continua a las raices conceptuales de estos fenomenos en la historia de la critica y teoria literarias Con un caracter especulativo, apunta en la direccion de la semiotica y la linguistica mas que hacia la critica aplicada No se articula en torno a comentarios especificos y sigue un plan estructural En sus tres secciones examina primero los elementos de la accion narrativa (el mundo narrado y sus agentes, la narratividad, los esquemas narrativos); sigue con la estructura del relato (tiempo narrativo, perspectiva y punto de vista, aspecto narrativo, distancia narrativa), y termina con un detallado examen de los elementos discursivo-textuales de la narracion: la pragmatica literaria, la ficcionalidad, la interaccion narrativa, la voz narrativa, narradores y narratarios, autores y lectores implicitos, y el contexto interaccional de la comunicacion narrativa entre escritores y lectores English abstract: This is a treatise in literary theory, specifically on narrative theory (or narratology), focusing on narrative texts through an examination of the concepts of existing theories of narrative It is an advanced examination of narrative structure from the standpoint of semiotics and discourse analysis, with continual attention to the conceptual roots of these phenomena in the history of literary theory and criticism It is not articulated on the basis of specific commentaries of narrative texts, and it follows a conceptual plan throughout, examining in each of the three sections the elements of narrative action (the narrated world and agents, narrativity, action schemata), and story structure (narrative time, perspective and point of view, narrative aspect, narrative distance) It concludes with an extensive examination of the discursive aspects of narrative: literary pragmatics, fictionality, narrative interaction, narrative voice, narrators and narratees, implied speakers and hearers, and the interactional context of narrative communication between writers and readers

Reading by the Lines. Proposal for a Narrative Analytical Technique in Empirical Theology

Abstract: This paper proposes a method of reading narrative interviews (and other texts). The focus is on the different story lines a narrator uses and weaves together to construct his or her personal narrative. The analysis combines qualitative and quantitative elements to discover the narrative structures. The method of reading is presented and illustrated using one interview from my research project on religious dynamics in male victims of sexual abuse (see appendix for a description). Within the field of empirical theology, the narrative approach is a promising one. As I will try to show, it offers possibilities for a systematic understanding of religious dynamics, while staying close to the religious individuals we study. Far from claiming it to be the only or even the best approach, I nevertheless believe narrative theories and method offer a unique contribution to the field. Before proposing a method of reading, however, I will first highlight some advantages of a narrative approach, outline my version of narrative theory, and discuss some methodological issues.

A Postclassical Narratology

Abstract: Reply to Herman, David. “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology.” PMLA. 1997 Oct; 112(5): 1046-59.

The pyndustry in warwick

Abstract: In the academic Fall of 1995, between conferences devoted to "virtual futures" in "the arts and cyberculture" (p. 9), a number of philosophy graduate students at the University of Warwick hosted a conference on Thomas Pynchon and Gilles Deleuze, writers known to the cyberculture but not often studied together as part of it. Working "with no significant financial support from any academic or private institution" (p. 9), the Warwick group tapped into virtual energies that were already in place and gathered around Pynchon Notes, a journal that despite its high scholarly standards has always been hospitable to iconoclasts. If the Warwick conference has in fact helped to produce a "seismic shift in the Pyndustry" (p. 10), as I hope it has, this is because the industry house journal has never rested too comfortably within the apparatus of major authorship. The journal continues to do the important work of gathering hard-to-find biographical data about its reclusive subject, flagging equally elusive sources and allusions, and demonstrating his work's robustness by devising ever-new interpretations. Yet beyond these traditional tasks (which the Warwick authors continue to perform well), one senses a more pressing desire to salvage "Pynchon's anarchic materialism ... from the political correctness of the day," in the words of issue co-editor Eric Cassidy, and "to place his work in a wider historical context" (p. 107). With Walter Rathenau, the architect of the German industrial state between the world wars whose ghost speaks as a character in Gravity's Rainbow, the organizers of the Warwick conference posed two questions: "First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?" One contributor, Bernard Duyfhuizen, cautions that such leading questions are typical of the various "reader traps" in Pynchon, namely, those "stylistic and thematic techniques that unsettle the readerly desire to construct an ordered cosmos within the fictional space of the text" (p. 88). A trap that the contributors generally avoid is the automatic and often sentimental assumption, common in Pynchon's readers from the sixties and seventies, that he has to be writing against control structures, or the related assumption that any synthetic understanding must of necessity be in the service of a single "totalizing" system. The possibility of a less-repressive synthesis emerges when Pynchon's ideas and narrative structures are put into contact with some of the most resourceful, though academically marginalized, art and critical writing to have appeared in the 25 years since the publication of Gravity's Rainbow, Anti-Oedipus and cyberpunk, Ballard, Donna Haraway, Manuel DeLanda, continental media theory, narratology, and hypertext narrative theory are all points of reference that, taken together, define a cultural climate in which Pynchon scholarship is likely to thrive. The nine collected papers (and abstracts of twenty others presented at the conference) generally seek to establish more than mimetic connections between literary and cultural forms, and they would introduce more than metaphorical affinities between Pynchon's work and the scientific, technological, and irredeemably scatological subject matter he's famous for. Following Deleuze, the contributors (particularly issue co-editor Dan O'Hara) regard metaphorical readings with skepticism; essentially, these "neo-materialist" critics see metaphor as a lit-crit construction that is too often employed as a way of taming Pynchon's texts, making them representations of something else. Instead, these critics would like to "move away from mere linguistic representation" toward an understanding of literary language that is "unapologetically referential" (p. 69). This DeLeuzian disposition accounts for O'Hara's interest in Pynchon's decision to dispense with metaphor at certain key moments in the early stories. The fact that O' Hara's essay offers a strong new reading of the much-written-about story, "Entropy," suggests that such an anti-metaphorical, anti-representational approach might shed new light on Pynchon's later work as well. …

Poe's "The Black Cat" as Psychobiography: Some Reflections on the Narratological Dynamics

Abstract: Published initially in the United States Saturday Post on 19 August 1843, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" remains one of his most mystifying and horrifying tales. The narrator's motive for murdering his wife, as one might expect, has elicited much commentary and speculation from critics. Few critics seriously accept the narrator's own dubious rationalizations for the cruel murder either of his pet cat or of his wife, that being what he has done, so he confesses, he attributes to the "spirit of PERVERSENESS ..., one of the primitive impulses of the human heart ..., to do wrong for wrong's sake" (Poe 852); or his claim at the end of the tale that the cat, which he calls "a hideous beast had seduced [him] into murder" (859). In short, the retrospective narrator, who is actually two personsaethe man who killed his wife and the retrospective teller of the taleae is an untrustworthy and unreliable authority. What J. Rea has observed about Montresor, the narrator of "The Cask of Amontillado," also seems applicable to the unnamed narrator of "The Black Cat": Montresor reveals certain things to the reader, Rea states, "in order to divert attention from the real reason for the crime" (57). Kenneth Silverman has offered a similar observation, but with more psychological suggestiveness, indicating that tales like "The Black Cat" "dramatize failures of various defenses, the protagonists' futile attempts to conceal from themselves and others what they feel" (209). The narrator's motive for murdering his wife seems to be subconscious and, therefore, the crime is not consciously premeditated. Nor is the narrator able to understand rationally or to persuade convincingly why he has done this terrible deed, though he repeatedly offers explanations--actually untenable rationalizations--for his former actions. James W. Gargano, in what many Poe critics regard as the premier essay on "The Black Cat," may have been the first commentator to offer a cogently and logically convincing explanation to show that what the narrator "assigns" to the "spirit of perverseness" and the "Fiend Intemperance" (Poe 851) may, in fact, "be reduced to ordinary psychological and moral laws" ("Perverseness" 172). Viewing the narrator as a case study with an abnormal personality, Gargano perceives what he calls the narrator's "sentimental excesses, his extreme happiness in feeding and caressing his pets," as an indication of "an unhealthy overdevelopment of the voluptuary side of his nature" ("Perverseness" 173). And Poe's narrator does substitute this manner of behavior for normal relationships with human beings. Many of the subsequent critical views of "The Black Cat" have attempted to explain the narrator's bizarre behavior, especially his murder of his wife, within a psychological or psychoanalytical framework. (1) While details of Poe's life offer some fertile ground for examining probable autobiographical sources for "The Black Cat," we will heed the warning of James W. Gargano, who has cautiously advised the tale's readers to avoid the biographical pitfall of seeing Poe and the first-person narrator of "The Black Cat" as "identical literary twins" ("The Question" 165). (2) Instead, the emphasis here will be to focus on the narratological dynamics of "The Black Cat" and to apply selected methodology of French critic Gerard Genette, whose book Narrative Discourse provides an engaging systematic study of narrative theory. (3) Before proceeding to the narratological dynamics of "The Black Cat," I would like to give a brief overview, describing some of Genette's concepts that will form the basis for my examination of the narratology as it relates to the psychobiography of the narrator of Poe's tale. Drawing on a notion addressed initially by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, that narrative, in contrast to dramatic depiction, is illusory because "no narrative can `show' or `imitate' the story it tells," Genette calls narrative the "illusion of mimesis" (164). …

Therapist Role in Narrative Group Psychotherapy

Abstract: With its assumptions about the interpersonal origins of individual learning, narrative theory suggests certain leadership functions for group therapists: providing a perspective on how multiple meanings may be constructed about experience; leading the process of deconstructing individual narratives through careful questioning to distinguish persons from problems; enlisting participants in active awareness and engagement with group dynamics and group process; and enabling the co-creation of a group narrative through the development of a new “community of conversations.”

'Situated Events' in Fictional Worlds: The Reader's Role in Context Construction

Abstract: Focuses on textual strategies which become functionalized for narrative purposes when readers extrapolate contextual readings from them. Discussion on schema theory and the notion of gap-filling in context construction; Definition of text-derived knowledge; Implications for narrative theory.

Ishmael Reed's Inductive Narratology of Detection

Abstract: A Narratology of Free Voices Words walking without masters. (qtd. in Gates, Signifying 215) Pallbearers did not read like Henry James. (Chapple 18) A salient feature of Reed's chaotic-seeming narratology is the fact that he presents voices in an unmediated way, which forces upon the reader the task of performing an act of narratological induction, of recognizing "Who speaks?" This procedure, which is quite the opposite of the traditional sorting out and establishing of a hierarchical system of narratological levels, can be traced back to animistic practices of the kind Reed presents in his Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic. In Voodoo, rather than starting out from given notions of origin and authority, one is first confronted with particular cases of possession by a voice and must then infer the cause; the animistic strategy is one of recognizing the loas, the Voodoo gods. This attitude is generalized and modernized in Reed's appropriation of the genre of the detective story and in the "metaphysical detection" of his principal protagonist PaPa LaBas. As a strategy, it may actually help one to better cope with a postmodern world of simulacra. Moreover, the particular qualities of ancestor worship can explain the figurative circularity of such a non-essentialist inductive strategy of identifying forces. One of the most striking aspects of Reed's style is the complex focalization patterns of his narrative. The way in which he deals with focalizers and avoids the hierarchical straight-jacket of authorial control confronts the reader with a confusing array of "voices" that somehow speak for themselves. Reed's fictional practice goes beyond the system of definitions provided by traditional literary theories of narratology and focalization: The notion of "free indirect discourse,"(1) for example, cannot in a satisfactory way explain the way Reed combines narration and focalization. Somehow his focalizers turn from mere media or filters into independent sources of information or narrators in their own right. Actually, in many instances, focalization in the sense of mediation is abolished. This can be shown in a scene in Mumbo Jumbo in which Reed's protagonist/hero PaPa LaBas is in court, defending himself against harassment by the "Manhattan Atonists"(2): PaPa LaBas is a descendant of a long line of people who made their pact with nature long ago. He would never say, "If you've seen 1 redwood tree, you've seen them all"; rather, he would reply with the African Chieftain, "I am the elephant," said long before Liverpool went on record for this. The reply was made when a Huxley had the nerve to warn him about the impending extinction of the elephant - an extinction which Huxley's countrymen were precipitating in the 1st place. (Freud would read this as "a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole," which poor Freud "never experienced," being an Atonist, the part of Jealous Art which shut out of itself all traces of animism. When Freud came to New York in 1909 LaBas sought him out to teach him The Work; but he couldn't gain entrance to the hotel suite, which was blocked by ass-kissers, sycophants, similar to those who were to surround Hitler and Stalin later, telling the "Master" what they wanted him to hear and screening all alien material meant for their master's attention. They had told LaBas to take the back elevator even though some of them prided themselves on their liberalism. 42 Professors from New York University or people from Columbia University.) (The 1909 versions of Albert Goldman, the "pop" expert for Life magazine and The New York Times who in a review of a record made by some character who calls himself Doctor John [when the original Doctor John was described by New Orleans contemporaries as a "huge Black man . . . , a Sen[e]galese Prince . . .] made some of the most scurrilous attacks on the VooDoo religion to date - I. R.)(*) Humiliated, PaPa LaBas had left the hotel, the laughter of these men behind him. …

Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative

Abstract: Brian Richardson. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modem Narrative. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.219 pp. $30.00 cloth. In the field of narrative theory, new publications are a common occurrence, but not so for new approaches. This is not to say that recent narrative theorists do not have their own insights or observations regarding narration, or that their critical work is not valuable, but much of what has been published in the last twenty years, from Todorov's Introduction to Poetics through the seemingly endless "introductions" to narrative that have followed in Todorov's wake, has consisted primarily of (usually uncredited) rewordings of Gerard Genette's Figures (especially the section published in English as Narrative Discourse) that often do little more than offer more illustrations of Genette's theory, or argue over terminology or small 'errors' Genette made in expressing certain concepts. Yet while it may be argued that at this stage of narrative theory's development it is unlikely that a theoretical work as significant as Narrative Discourse or Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination will be forthcoming, there is still a great deal of work to be done in this field. In Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative, Brian Richardson succeeds in arguing that causality, "the single most undertheorized aspect of narrative transaction," is an important feature of narration and should be examined further by narrative theorists and critics (182). His book provides an excellent starting place for such examinations. Richardson states that the subject of his book is "the connection between multiple story lines, the interpretation of the text, the sequencing of episodes, and the casual system governing the world of fiction" (13). The text is divided into two sections, the first of which is concerned with Richardson's theoretical approach to literary narrative. In these chapters Richardson attempts to clarify and reconceptualize varied strands of causality in literature; discusses causal settings and four types of probability that govern fictional world; and moves his discussion into narrative segments, which in turn leads to the longer critical chapters. In the second section, Richardson applies his theories to a large number of literary works. He notes that "an all too common failure of literary history is a sweeping theory based ona paucity of examples" (63). This charge can certainly not be made against Richardson himself, who makes no sweeping claims, and yet gives us an impressive number of examples. In his first chapter, Richardson defines cause as the condition that occasions change in events. He adds that just as modernist and postmodernist narratives interrogate the boundary of fact and fiction, readers must use their own acumen to determine the existence and direction of causal connections (43-44). Of particular interest is his discussion of the "monistic fallacy": characters' behavior that rests on metaphysical assumptions that support a specific ideology (52). In fact, he says, free will is distinct from ontological issues. As Richardson is obviously interested in determinism and in narratology, it is perhaps curious that he does not cite Bakhtin (here or elsewhere), but despite this omission, his argument for cause and the free will of characters, and his arguments against dogma in criticism, are convincing and useful (60). In the important second chapter, we find Richardson's four types of probability settings that govern fiction: 1. the supernatural; 2. the Naturalistic, which includes recognizable and repeatable actions with plausible consequences; 3. chance worlds, in which the more unlikely the events, the more evident the author is; 4. authorial excursions into fictional worlds (metafictions) in which the characters can take control from the author (a section that would profit from a discussion of Bakhtin's dialogism). …

The narratee of two of ayi kwei armah's novels : a use of narratology

Abstract: novels were written in a modernistic Western style, while his last two use an African mode, I believe they chiefly refer to his change of narrative strategy. It is predominantly in terms of narrative form, next to a change of style, that one can talk of a progressive Africanization2 of his prose; Armah's central imagery and theme show the kind of homogeneity one usually finds in a single author's work. This paper will therefore narratologically compare his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, with The Healers. I chose only two novels so as to avoid prolixity, and these two in order to clearly illustrate Armah's narrative change. The purpose in what follows is also to indicate how useful narrative theory and method can be also to the study of the modern African novel. With a narratological approach it is possible to isolate certain features in a novel and study these in a comparative light. The feature I wish to focus on is the narratee?or: the inscribed, the encoded, or the postulated reader in the text; terms that will be used synonymously, meaning that someone whom the narrator addresses, the receiver of the narrator's narrative as found in the text. Never to be confused with the actual reader, the narratee is on the same level as the narrator, while the actual reader of course is on the level of the author. Between these levels some critics also like to find the

Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics ed. by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu and Walid Hamarneh (review)

Abstract: essays that/ unlike Hutcheon's, resist what Gerald Prince calls 'the interpretive temptation.' Certainly/ any student of narrative structure will find much of theoretical value in Uri Margolin's use of the 'original/ version relation' to produce a detailed taxonomy of characters, in Peter W. Nesslroth's exploration of proper names, and in Prince's own call (in the wake of earlier work by feminist narratologists Susan S. Lanser and Robyn 368 LETTERS IN CANADA 1997 Warhol) for a narratology that's more self-aware and more attentive to the concrete. Other readers, with different interests, will profit from other essays. In the end, then, this is a collection well worth selective attention. (PETER J. RABINOWITZ) Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin, editors. The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference Columbia University Press. xii, 350. us$57.00 cloth, us$22.00 paper The Work of Opera unites some of the most provocative and thoughtful scholars writing about opera today. In this volume, Susan McClary, who revolutionized musical studies by introducing gender to discussions of standard repertory, contributes a subtle essay on audience identification with, or resistance to, Bizet's Carmen. In an essay on 'Metropolitan Opera/ Suburban Identity,' Kevin Kopelson pushes the limits of confessional musicology by reviewing reviews of Wayne Koestenbaum's groundbreaking book The Queen's Throat. Lawrence Kramer provides a psychoanalytic reading of fire and Siegfried's sexuality in 'The. Waters of Prometheus: Nationalism and Sexuality in Wagner's Ring.' Ruth Solie compiles a remarkable number of tum-of-the-century novels with opera box scenes that iconically express the fraught intersection of capital and culture in modernist America. This is to name but a few of the invaluable contributions to The Work of Opera. Although this collection focuses on representations of gender (Death in Venice, The Marriage of Figaro) and problems of nationhood (Norma, Ai'da, Louis Riel, Samson and Dalila), it has the collateral benefit of righting the achievement of Benjamin Britten. Jim Ellis, in an examination of Britten's War Requiem, provides a savvy interpretation of Britten's homosexuality that surpasses Jeremy Tambling' s and Humphrey Carpenter's scholarly and biographical understandings of the subject. 'What if,' Ellis asks, 'the repression hypothesis [of Britten's homosexuality and his interest in innocent youths] were to be rejected and the operas were read as productive of something? What i( indeed, they were read as Britten read them, as protests against the destruction of innocence?' The relation of Britten (the pacifist) to Britain (the nation) has long required revaluation. Essays by Ellis and Daniel Fischlin go a long way towards refining the terms of that revaluation. Skilfully edited, the essays in The Work of Opera address each other. Various essayists refer to voice production -electronic, operatic, dexterous, anxious, appropriativein the tradition of the castrate, or in the disrupted and disruptive history of homosexuality, or in pop music and AIDS activism. In a superb analysis of 'The Italian (Castrato) in London/ Todd Gilman brings together a wealth of eighteenth-century poetic utterances,

Genesis and Narratology: The Challenge of Medieval Illustrated Texts

Abstract: There can be "no thought about time without narrated time," writes Paul Ricoeur, in his three-volume work, Time and Narrative (3: 241), and the converse is also true: there can be no thought about narrative without engaging issues of time. Thus while structuralists like Roland Barthes might argue that "from the point of view of narrative, what we call time does not exist, or at least exists only functionally, as an element of a semiotic system" (99), narratologists cannot avoid recourse to temporal concepts - as when Gerard Genette employs terms like "duration" and "frequency" to describe the ordering involved in "narrative discourse." The question that arises in turn is whether time functions in the same way in the pictorial arts as it does in the verbal arts, and whether current narratological theories are also applicable to visual modes of storytelling. Here the answer would seem to be "yes" if one accepts W. J. T. Mitchell's post-Lessing contention that there is semantically "no essential difference between texts and images" insofar as both function as "signs" whose representational abilities are not innate (161). Arguing, however, that there are differences "at the level of sign types, forms, materials of representation, and institutional traditions," Mitchell also finds problems with the extreme conventionalism of a semiotician like Nelson Goodman (345-62), and his own concern with collapsing differences between the arts is in the interests of exploring why and how visual and verbal signs are made to signify in different ways in different cultures and historical periods. Significantly, this kind of difference is perhaps most noticeable with respect to issues of pictorial narrativity, just as it is herein that the Middle Ages seem most to differ from our modern period. By the same token, an excellent site for testing the viability of current narratological theorizing is to explore the dynamics and implications of the medieval illustrated manuscript, where we have not only a concrete and material instance of two media operating in close proximity but presumably in which both are engaged in telling the same story. Such texts become even more provocative when their content itself is concerned with history, as in the case of the work which I want to examine: the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch. Housed in the British Museum as "Cotton Claudius B.iv," and reproduced in a 1974 facsimile version edited by C. R. Dodwell and Peter Clemoes, this manuscript provides an Old English translation of the first six books of the Old Testament and includes some 400 illustrations. The story being told here, in short, is the beginning of time and the genealogy of the human race, presented primarily through episodes of family interaction punctuated by moments of theophany. The temporal issue is also involved in the sense that this manuscript is a latter-day translation of the previous Vulgate translation, just as the manuscript itself underwent various stages of composition, including the addition of some Latin glosses in the 12th century. In examining this manuscript, however, I wish mainly to focus on the technical aspect or the issue of "narrative temporality," by which I mean not only the ways in which a narrative indicates temporal relationships between events (by showing, for example, duration, repetition, simultaneity, and causality), but also the ways in which such relationships themselves constitute a fundamental aspect of narrative. Thus, after briefly describing the physical features and general production of the manuscript, I will examine in more detail Ricoeur's notions of time and the contentions of current narrative theorists with a view to then showing how such theorizing might require adaptation in order to deal adequately with the actual practice or techniques used by the translators, scribes, and illustrators of the Old English Hexateuch. In particular, my concern is to highlight the way that narrative temporality serves to suggest causality, and thus I will conclude with an in-depth examination of how the handling of the Judah and Tamar story (Genesis 38) differs respectively in the Vulgate version, the verbal Old English translation, and the illustrations in the Hexateuch. …

Text analysis from the perspectives of narratology and expansive semiotics

Abstract: (1998). Text analysis from the perspectives of narratology and expansive semiotics. European Journal of English Studies: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 238-255.

The End of Literature: Reflections on Literature and Ethics

Abstract: Metaphysical scepticism and historical consciousness have sharpened our awareness of the limitations of language and rational discourse. This emphasis in critical theory offers a challenge to the Christian literary critic. Reflection on the nature and importance of teleology provides a way of refocusing criticism on the centrality of ethics rather than on truth claims in the study of literature. Using Ricoeur as a counter to the scepticism of Derrida, Christian literary theory can find a way to situate itse lf in the postmodern world. By understanding teleology in the context of narrative theory, as opposed to the contexts of eschatology and utopia, Christian theory can find a way of recovering the place of religion and ethics in literary criticism.

Fiction, Pretense, and Narration

Abstract: 1 It is never too late to do something good: take for example the availability, in French translation, nearly thirty years after its first publication (1957), of one of the great works of contemporary poetics. In choosing to translate the original title, Die Logik der Dichtung, as Logique des genres litteraires, the author of this excellent translation has remained faithful to the book's global orientation: the project of a general poetics that would be a poetics of genres. Yet, contrary to the German title, the French title no longer indicates that it is Dichtung in the etymological sense - that is, fiction as poiesis - which stands at the center of this theory of genres. Indeed, Hamburger's generic theory rests upon an analysis of what she thinks constitutes the irreducible specificity of literature: its fictional character. Her efforts are directed at "a theory of language, which investigates whether that language which produces the forms of literature [formen der Dichtung] . . . differs functionally from the language of thought and communication, and, if so, to what extent" (3). Now, these differences are clearer in the case of fiction. Tending thus to identify literature with fiction, she aims to replace the traditional definitions of literature - that is, aesthetic conceptions - with a logico-linguistic definition based upon traits internal to the literary utterance. At the same time she challenges the pragmatic and contextual criteria for fiction advanced most notably by Anglo-American philosophy and implicitly accepted by narratology. To the extent that Hamburger defines literature by its specific place in the general system of language, her poetics is largely dependent upon a general linguistic theory. This theory is neither syntactic, nor semantic, nor pragmatic, but gnoseologic. In effect it postulates that, in its deep structure, language is an utterance-system [systeme d'enonciation] definable as a relation between an utterance-subject - which, "being fixed in language, is therefore the . . . analogue to the cognitive subject or subject of consciousness" (39) - and an utterance-object, which is that upon which the utterance bears. This subject/object relation is not a fact of communication, but is inscribed in the very interior of the structure of language: the utterance-subject is thus distinct from the I-Producer of communication, which is purely discursive or pragmatic. Hence every utterance, whatever its mode of utterance, is the utterance of an utterance-subject, apropos an utterance-object: for Hamburger, a question, a command, a wish are all equally as much utterances apropos some object as an assertoric proposition is. The central thesis of this conception of language resides in the affirmation that "all statement is reality statement" (33). Since the utterance is defined not by its object but by its subject, this thesis does not mean that every utterance bears upon some actually existing object, but that it is produced by a real person, an utterer: "statement is constituted only through a genuine, real statement-subject" (45), that is, by a real I-Origo about which we can raise the question of its place in time (even if in certain cases the response is that this place is not important - as when we are faced with a theoretical utterance-subject such as is embodied for instance by a mathematical theorem). It is obviously this thesis that makes possible the construction of a polar opposition between fiction (which does not provide for an actual utterance-subject), and the set of actual utterances [enonces de realite, "reality statements"],(1) which is to say in fact the utterance-system as such. So it is to language as a system of actual utterances ["reality statements"] that Hamburger comes to oppose the system of literary genres. On this basis she will take account solely of discursive practices diverging in an observable way from the linguistic utterance-system: all genres, such as autobiography, history, the essay, etc. …

Narrative in the Historical Sciences: A Working Interdisciplinary Bibliography

Abstract: Models of scientific explanation derived from the physical sciences are often poorly suited to the historical sciences — to the fields William Whewell called the palaetiological sciences. A listing of 27 titles that explore the nature of narrative understanding across a range of scientific disciplines — from cosmology to paleontology to economics — attests to the importance of narrative epistemology in the sciences.

Aldous Huxley : « Nuns at luncheon » ou les jeux du Je

Abstract: Published in 1922, at the start of Huxley's career, "Nuns at Luncheon" is unique of its kind in its bold conception and faultless execution Its supreme achievement lies in the fact that it is not so much a ready-made story as a story in the making, whose point is not the what but the how, the modus operandi and its finality Significantly, the author of this challenging piece is less concerned with the narrative as finished product than with the narration as process and play activity In this sense, "Nuns at Luncheon" exemplifies Huxley's modern approach to fiction In the hands of two professionals -a writer and a journalist- who exchange roles and are alternately narrator, and narratee, the story develops as a facetious master class in narratology The to and fro of the dialogue between the two protagonists objectifies in the best comic vein the "Co-operative Principle" inherent in the narrative process While displaying his most sophisticated technique, Huxley lays bare all the tricks of the trade and ultimately questions the very value of literary art As an example of dexterous playing with his craft, an ingenious intellectual game, "Nuns at Luncheon" could hardly be better

Bionic Eye: The Resources and Limits of the Cinematic Apparatus

Abstract: In 1926, Virginia Woolf, who had been reading and contemplating Henri Bergson's theory of memory and consciousness, wrote an article titled "The Movies and Reality." In it, she described film as an art of dream in which the past can be "unrolled" and "distances annihilated" (Woolf 309-10). Cinema itself made possible The Waves (1931) with its floating consciousness and several narrators crossfading in montage. Cinema also suggested narrative techniques to Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dos Passos. Indeed, cinematic thinking has gotten thoroughly mixed up with literature, especially narrative fiction and biography To study narrative today means to confront a challenge to think cinematically. Conversely, to study cinema means also to reflect on the basic problem of narratology: how discrete elements, orfabula, become galvanized into a plot.