Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1999"

Building Process Theory with Narrative: from Description to Explanation

Abstract: Narrative is especially relevant to the analysis of organizational processes because people do not simply tell stories—they enact them. Narrative data have surface features that are useful for description, but explanatory process theories must be based on deeper structures that are not directly observable. To address this problem and to facilitate better process theory, in this article I use concepts from narrative theory to create a framework for analyzing structural features in narrative data.

Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion

Abstract: The idea of religion reductionism and research strategies phenomenology narrative theory critical theory dialogism reflexivity narrative identity epilogue - towards a critical religious studies.

Narrative in medical ethics

Abstract: This is the fourth in a series of five articles on narrative based medicine The contributions of narrative to medical ethics come primarily in two ways: firstly, from the use of stories (narratives) for their mimetic content—that is, for what they say; and secondly, from the methods of literary criticism and narrative theory for their analysis of diegetic form—that is, for their understanding of how stories are told and why it matters. Although narrative and narrative theory, like the form and content of a literary work, are inextricably bound up with each other, I will discuss them separately to help chart the evolving appreciation for the importance of narrative in the work of medical ethics. #### Summary points During the past two decades, stories have been important to medical ethics in at least three major ways: firstly, as case examples for the teaching of principle based professional ethics, which has been the dominant form of medical ethics in the Western world; secondly, as moral guides to living a good life, not just in the practice of medicine but in all aspects of one's life; and thirdly, as narratives of witness that, with their experiential truth and …

Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Abstract: Is there such a thing as a "woman's voice" in fiction? In the context of feminist criticism, this question is more problematic than critics once believed. Beyond asking whether certain themes, forms or styles are linked primarily to women writers, one can examine how womanhood is defined by a culture. The emerging field of feminist narratology builds on these two areas of enquiry, linking form and social construction and giving its practitioners a new set of terms with which to address how a woman tells a story. This work applies these tools to British novels of the 18th and 19th centuries. Alison A. Case identifies a convention of "feminist narration" characterized by the exclusion of the female narrator from shaping her experience into a coherent, meaningful and authoritative story. Instead, a male narrator steps in to shape the narrative, either within the text or in a pseudoeditorial frame. Case treats Richardson's "Pamela" and "Clarissa" as foundational texts in the establishment of this literary convention and then traces its evolution through readings of novels by Smollett, Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Barrett Browning, Dickens, Collins and Stoker. In giving female narration the status of convention, Case suggests that deviations from it create a deliberate effect. She focuses primarily on texts in which the convention is challenged, reasserted or reshaped and in which female narrative authority, or lack thereof, plays a central thematic as well as formal role. These struggles over narrative control often represent larger concerns about female power and agency.

Telling Tragedy: Narrative Technique in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

Abstract: Using recent narrative theory, this book explores the narrative strategies that sustain the complex relationship between the tragic poet and his sophisticated audience. It discusses how Aeschylus typically shaped these sprawling stories into dramatic form. Then, once established, how these patterns were successively adapted, subverted, capped or ignored by Sophocles and Euripides in the annual attempt to recreate suspense and express fresh meanings relevant to the difficult last decades of the fifth century.

The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence

Abstract: Gerard Genette The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence Translated by G M Goshgarian Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997 vii + 272 pp $4250 cloth; $1695 paper Trans of L'oeuvre de l'art [1]: Immanence et transcendence Paris: Seuil, 1994 Gerard Genette L'oeuvre de fart [2]: La relation esthetique Paris: Seuil, 1997 297 pp Those who have followed the evolution of Gerard Genette's publications may not be surprised by his two most recent books After all, Genette has demonstrated a mastery of a variety of subjects: narratology in Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited, language and linguistics in Mimologics, genres and modes in The Architext, intertextuality in Palimpsests, the margins of literary works in Paratexts, and style in the last essay of Fiction and Diction More direct precursors of Genette's two-volume study of The Work ofArt, furthermore, are evident in the earlier parts of Fiction and Diction, Esthetique et poetique, an anthology edited by Genette of what are widely regarded as standard essays on important issues in aesthetics Nevertheless, Genette must feel that he has expanded the boundaries of his considerations so much that he owes us an apologia "The reader will perhaps be surprised to find a mere specialist in literary studies setting out to explore, without having provided (much) advance notice, one or two disciiplines usually reserved for philosophers" (Immanence 1) The general discipline in question here is, of course, aesthetics, and Genette argues that to understand literature better, it is useful to know "what kind of art it is, what kind the others are, and what an art in general is" (Immanence 2) Genette's overall title, The Work ofArt (or the artwork), signifies ambiguously, either to refer to the immanent qualities in the work and how the work manifests itself (the predominant subject of Immanence), or else to mean the work performed by art, a meaning better expressed by the French title: that is, the creation of a transcendent version of the original (considered in the second part of Immanence) or the work's relations with elements outside it, including the audience (explored in Relation) At the outset, one should mention that in these two volumes, Genette progressively emphasizes the importance of the pragmatic function of art (Immanence 257) The first problem that Genette considers in Immanence is the location of the art work According to the late Nelson Goodman, whose Languages of Art provides a starting-point for Genette's argument, as immanence, art must exist either "autographically" in one object, such as a painting or a sculpture, or in "allographic" versions or copies of the object such as literature or music (immanence 16) But, Genette notes, allographic arts like the latter two, though they depend on performance or on reproduction through such things as the printing press for their execution, originate in the "ideal object of immanence," the result of the unique autographic act of writing a novel or composing a score (Immamnence 17) The essential property of the original autographic act (the words in the order they occur in a novel, for example) cannot be changed in a successful execution (printing) of the manuscript The "manifestation" of these "properties of immanence" in a text may exhibit many different irrelevant, or contingent, elements like the typeface or the quality of the paper (Immanence 86-- 90) In the case of text with different versions (The Song of Roland or even Joyce's Ulysses), each version would be considered an autographic original (Immanence 112) Genette's distinction between autographic and allographic manifestations raises questions A straightforward example of an allographic manifestation is a performance of a musical composition, which, of course, requires an artistic interpretation (Immanence 50) On the other hand, the recordings of this performance would be classed as autographic multiple objects because they are mechanically reproduced with no artistic effort as in other second-stage multiple objects like photographs, prints, and cast sculpture (Immanence 40, 45, 72) …

Parthenius of Nicaea : the poetical fragments and the Ερωτικα παθηματα

Abstract: This is the first study of all the extant remains of the important Hellenistic poet and mythographer, Parthenius of Nicaea, reputed to have been Virgil's tutor in Greek and a major literary figure in his own right. A new edition of his poetic fragments, it presents the first commentary on them since the work of August Meineke (1843); it also attempts to contextualize Parthenius within the traditions of Hellenistic poetry and within the 'neoteric revolution' of late Republican Rome. It is also the first detailed study of and commentary on the extant collection of love-stories, the Erotika Pathemata, showing their roots in Hellenistic historiography, on the one hand, and their connection to the increasingly popular genre of the novel, on the other. It uses narratology to illustrate the hitherto entirely unrecognised skill and artistry with which the stories are told, and offers a close linguistic analysis of a work of prose from a singularly badly documented period. The detailed commentary considers each story in terms of structure, literary and mythological affiliations, and parallel treatments; and a new text aims to provide an improved apparatus criticus with a good number of new suggestions. The prime importance of the work is that it aims to be a comprehensive treatment of a relatively neglected and marginalized figure; and that it sets Parthenius' poetry and prose side by side to illustrate and contextualize a literary personality who was unusual in antiquity as an accomplished writer in both genres.

Casing the Academy for Community

Abstract: One of the current topics informing a sense of academic disenchantment is the lack of community apparent in many academic settings. This personal narrative recounts my experiences searching for community in the academy and focuses on the central role of writing and speaking in that process. Five lessons about the concept of community are derived from these accumulated experiences and are offered here as a way of reformulating a narrative theory of community that is not symbolically or practically tied to commonplace ideals of place, stability, or order.

Mediapolis : aspects of texts, hypertexts, and multimedial communication

Abstract: Texts, hypertexts and narratology semiotic and philosophical approaches aspects of media and technology criticism media cultural development.

Theorizing Lawrence: Nine Meditations on Tropological Themes

Abstract: These nine meditations employ a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist critical methodologies by way of illuminating some of Lawrence's major works: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and several short stories. The main approach is tropological: that is, these works are explored in terms of their rhetorical tropes (most often in terms of metaphor and metonymy). The meditations also draw significantly on narratology, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. Lawrence has not previously attracted such contemporary approaches.

Bakhtin Revisits Deuteronomy: Narrative Theory and the Dialogical Event of Deut. 31:2 and 34:7

Abstract: In 1980 Robert Polzin engaged the narrative structure of Deuteronomy and introduced Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theory to biblical studies. Few however have carried forward the implications of this pioneering work, leaving Bakhtin and the narrator sidelined in critical Deuteronomic discussions. This paper demonstrates the unrealized potential inherent in Bakhtin's dialogic theory for the interpretation of biblical narrative. Reading with sensitivity the voice structure of Deuteronomy, it is possible to discern not only a dialogic angle between Moses and the narrator, but also a subtle polemical nuance in the narrator's superlative evaluation of Israel's first prophet.

Challenging Contemporary Narrative Theory: The Alternative Textual Strategies of Nineteenth‐Century Manuscript Cookbooks

Abstract: Cookies 2 eggs, 2 cups of Sugar, 1 cup of Milk, 1 Cup of butter[,] 1/2 nutmeg, 1 teaspoon of quick yeast[,] flour enough to make into a stiff dough, roll and cut out, dampen the top with water[,] dip into white sugar, then bake in a quick oven, From Sallie. -Mary Smith's cookbook, 1874 We cannot assume that a text.. tells no story because it does not make its story explicit, formally organized, and finished (that is, fully narrative); we cannot even assume that explicitness is universally a sign of "full" narrativity. -Marilyn Robinson Waldman, On Narrative Cookbooks, relegated to the "women's sphere" and the realm of domestic economy, have long been considered inconsequential if not altogether immaterial, and certainly have never attained the status of literary text or been considered a part of the canon of American literature. And yet while they seem, as Anne Bower notes, "innocent of narrative force" (1), they contain an implicit narrative structure and a wealth of cultural and sociohistorical material invaluable to scholars of the nineteenth century and women's history and culture. To begin to adequately define "women's culture" in the nineteenth century requires a willingness to consider a variety of texts never before contemplated as literary works-including cookbooks, quilts, account books, and other cultural artifacts.' In Mythologies, Roland Barthes examines how culture can be read as a text, and how cultural artifacts or "myths"-everything from soap powder to wrestling matches to guide books-contain a system of signs that can be interpreted and understood both semiologically and ideologically. Barthes thus enlarges the notion of text, extending semiological and narrative analyses into "nonliterary" realms. Comparable artifacts from the nineteenth century can also be read semiologically and narratively, including the more overtly literary texts accessible to women (particularly middle-class women) such as magazines, advice books, domestic manuals, pamphlets, fiction, and sermons, but also forms typically defined and designated as nonliterary such as cookbooks, diaries, quilts, fashion, pottery, tapestry weaving, and other "household arts." By extending structural, semiological, and narrative analyses into these supposedly "nonliterary" realms, contemporary scholars of nineteenth-century culture can begin to understand more fully the myriad and complex ways that women expressed themselves, created an institutionalized network of conventions, rituals, and customs based in same-sex relations, and, significantly, developed textual strategies that complicate modern notions of "narrativity." Nineteenth-century private manuscript cookbooks are explicit emblems of women's relegation to the domestic sphere, maintaining, as they did, institutionalized patriarchal systems, and serving the organizational core of that system, the family. More than just a collection of recipes or "receipts" (as they were commonly called), manuscript cookbooks comprised the literary text of the nineteenth-century housekeeper, playing a crucial role in maintaining communal structure, social ties, and cultural tradition. These cookbooks inscribe a narrative which figures household protagonists as protectors of domestic sanctity able to deliver the family from disorder, disease, and waste. Despite the cookbook's overtly collusive function, though, its makers reappropriated the cookbook form and transformed it into a locus of female artistry, empowerment, and social reform. The reappropriation of cookbooks' otherwise domestic function demonstrates not only women's efforts toward empowering themselves and the spaces they inhabited, but also reflects their development of alternative textual strategies that contest dominant conceptions of "narrative." Nineteenth-century private unpublished domestic cookbooks are an important example of a material and socioliterary form excluded from critical scholarship by rudimentary concepts of canonicity, overly literal notions of narrativity, and limited ideas about what constitutes a literary text. …

Luke's Stories of Jesus: Theological Reading of Gospel Narrative and the Legacy of Hans Frei

Abstract: The current interest in reading the Gospels as narratives has reclaimed aspects of these texts that historical-critical approaches failed to respect. The richness of these newer readings can, however, disguise their limitations as literary-critical exercises. Developing Hans Frei's concern for theological reading, David Lee reworks the narratology of the Dutch literary theorist Mieke Bal to produce a theological narrative reading practice that formally respects the text as scripture while leaving open the possible meanings that readers may construct for themselves in the act of reading. Lee demonstrates his approach through readings of the Narrator and the characters Jesus and the Demons as aspects of a composite Lukan narrative Christology.

Stage-Managing "Otherness": The Function of Narrative in 'Othello.'

Abstract: New historicist and postcolonial research has lent to narratology's concern with voice and location of voice a heightened awareness of the sociopolitical as well as ideological functions of narrative discourse and the ways that literary texts inscribe and exploit these functions In Hayden White's view, narrative is "not merely a neutral discursive form that may or may not be used to represent real eventsbut rather entails ontological and epistemic choices with distinct ideological and even specifically political implications" (ix) More concretely, Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and Said's Culture and Imperialism, draw critical attention not only to the sociopolitical and psychic dimensions of narrative discourse but to questions of power relations that inform narrative structures and practices Although Shakespeare's Othello is a dramatic rather than a narrative work - or perhaps because it is drama in which racially-turned narrative performance is conspicuously, structurally staged - the play offers a fascinating, if unusual, site for examining narrative production and use The plot in itself is simple enough: Othello, a General in the Venetian army and a Moor, secretly weds Desdemona, the young daughter of a Venetian senator Iago, Othello's ensign, beguiles him into believing that Desdemona has been adulterous with the lieutenant, Cassio, and in a jealous rage, Othello murders Desdemona The period in which the play was written-the Elizabethan age of exploration and colonial expansion, a time of shifting geographic boundaries and of unprecedented crosscultural transaction - has already attracted considerable attention on the part of theorists concerned with the constitution of institutionalized sociopolitical structures and the textualization of these structures, as well as those concerned with modes and processes of literary representation and the ideological and rhetorical tensions that it necessarily inscribes What needs more attention, however, is how these features are concretely conjoined in a work like Othello and how this play makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the politics and poetics of the Elizabethan period Thus in the following essay, I want to focus on the significance of the narrative/dramatic strategies that Shakespeare employs in Othello, arguing that these strategies subtly distinguish and operate along the geographic, political, and cultural boundaries that the play's Renaissance world stage draws With a view to showing how the contrastive interplay of these generic techniques enacts the ideological accountability of narrative functions in general as well as of Shakespeare's manipulation of these functions, I will first analyze Shakespeare's use of these formal literary devices in the play to create a thematics of absence/presence that comments tellingly on Othello's dubious identity in Renaissance society Then, I will elaborate on Shakespeare's procedure by linking it to the dynamics of fiction-making in general, going on to explore what his particular construction of Othello reveals about his poetic agenda Finally, I will expand my argument to explore relations of power in imperialist culture and the signs of this power in Shakespeare's art and canonic status In this way, I wish to demonstrate not only how Shakespeare's schizoid casting of the Moor as, at once, central subject and marginalized object reflects colonial power relations but also how the play's colonializing instrumentality extends beyond the literary text and pertains to Shakespeare scholarship and criticism of the play as well In the last scene of Othello, the protagonist, aware of how he has been duped by Iago, is confined with the corpse of his wife whom he has just murdered; the time seems to have come finally for what Othello has not yet done: self-examination in the heroic tradition of Shakespearean tragedy Though Othello's predicament is markedly different from that of Richard II, one might expect that like Richard he would study how to "compare this prison …

Out of Silence

Abstract: The author examines her uncle's life and death by using narrative and social construction theory to deconstruct both her family's and the socio-cultural stories of mental illness.