Showing papers on "Narratology published in 2000"

Overhearing Film Dialogue

Abstract: Since the birth of cinema, film has been lauded as a visual rather than a verbal medium; this sentiment was epitomized by John Ford's assertion in 1964 that, 'When a motion picture is at its best, it is long on action and short on dialogue'. Little serious work has been done on the subject of film dialogue, yet what characters say and how they say it has been crucial to our experience and understanding of every film since the coming of sound. Through informative discussions of dozens of classic and contemporary films - from "Bringing Up Baby" to "Terms of Endearment", from "Stagecoach" to "Reservoir Dogs" - this lively book provides the first full-length study of the use of dialogue in American film. Sarah Kozloff shows why dialogue has been neglected in the analysis of narrative film and uncovers the essential contributions dialogue makes to a film's development and impact. She uses narrative theory and drama theory to analyze the functions that dialogue typically serves in a film. The second part of the book is a comprehensive discussion of the role and nature of dialogue in four film genres: westerns, screwball comedies, gangster films, and melodramas. Focusing on topics such as class and ethnic dialects, censorship, and the effect of dramatic irony, Kozloff provides an illuminating new perspective on film genres.

On the use of narratives in nursing research

Abstract: On the use of narratives in nursing research Narratives have always been a path to knowledge in nursing care but are a recent element within nursing research. Therefore, this article deals with the narrative and its use within nursing research. First, the use of narratives in nursing care and nursing research is examined. Second, Paul Ricoeur's narrative theory with its dimensions of interpretation, time, action and ethics is presented as a possible methodological basis. Third, the use of Ricoeur's narrative theory in nursing research is examined, showing that, at present, support mainly comes from Ricoeur's text interpretation theory. Finally, a nursing research approach to the narrative, based on the life-world, is suggested.

On the use of narratives in nursing research.

Abstract: On the use of narratives in nursing research Narratives have always been a path to knowledge in nursing care but are a recent element within nursing research. Therefore, this article deals with the narrative and its use within nursing research. First, the use of narratives in nursing care and nursing research is examined. Second, Paul Ricoeur's narrative theory with its dimensions of interpretation, time, action and ethics is presented as a possible methodological basis. Third, the use of Ricoeur's narrative theory in nursing research is examined, showing that, at present, support mainly comes from Ricoeur's text interpretation theory. Finally, a nursing research approach to the narrative, based on the life-world, is suggested.

Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies

Abstract: Introduction Introduction to Narrative Theory A History of Narrative Theory of Narrative 2 Theory of Genre 1 Theory of Genre 2 Appendix 1 Appendix 2

Merely Telling Stories? Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences

Abstract: This essay is part of a long-term cross-disciplinary research project, entitled “Narrative between the Disciplines,” which looks at the way narrative is used within and between different disciplinary formations. Its goal is to say something about narrative itself as a form of redescription, a mode of knowledge, and how the claims made for it by the various disciplines say something about their own operations, limitations, and presuppositions. By examining the diverse ways narrative is inflected in different institutional settings, we might also discover something about our concern for narrative now and our notions of disciplinarity and the compartmentalization of knowledge. Elsewhere, I have already sketched out some of the basic questions regarding the recent explosion of interest in narrative and in theorizing about narrative across the disciplines: Why narrative? And why narrative now? Why have we decided to trust the tale? This essay develops some of the questions that my earlier work left open; more specifically, it deals with the inherent “bivalency” of narrative—its dependency on the temporalities both of the telling and of the told—and charts the history of the recent “narrativist turn.” It attempts to present a genealogy of the different ways in which disciplines in the human sciences have formulated and employed narrative and narrative theory, particularly in those fields that make truth claims: history or political science, for example. Why have political scientists now decided to “trust the tale”? Is their sense of narrative the same as say, literary theorists’? And what might these things say about their own discipline and the relations between it and other disciplines in the human sciences?

Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory

Abstract: Now, narrative is everywhere. The study of narrative continues to grow more nuanced, capacious, and extensive as it is applied to an ever greater range of fields and disciplines, appearing more prominently in areas from philosophy and law to studies of performance art and hypertexts. Nor is there any end in sight: the most important new movement in religious studies is narrative theology, and there is even a new kind of psychological treatment called "narrative therapy." Cognitive science offers experimental evidence for a claim that only recently was the hyperbolic boast of a practitioner of the nouveau roman: that narrative is the basic vehicle of human knowledge. Or in the words of Mark Turner: "Narrative imagining-story--is the fundamental instrument of thought. [...] It is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition generally" (4-5). In literary, cultural, and performance studies, narrative theory continues to expand, whether in the burgeoning field of life writing or in the analysis of drama or film. It is no exaggeration to say that the last ten years have seen a renaissance in narrative theory and analysis. Feminism, arguably the most significant intellectual force of the second half of the twentieth century, has (as should be expected) utterly and fruitfully transformed narrative theory and analysis in many ways. Virtually every component of or agent in the narrative transaction has been subjected to sustained examination, including space, closure, character, narration, reader response, linearity and narrative sequence, and even the phenomenon of narrative itself. Some of these reconceptualizations, as Honor Wallace's article in this issue demonstrates, continue to be debated and refined. Broader-based gender criticism and queer studies steadily followed the rise of feminism, some results of which are likewise evident in this issue. Though rather less work has appeared from other marginalized or "minority" perspectives so far, these are certainly areas that can be expected to provide significant contributions in the near future. Already, several important studies are available, including work on narrative and race, and in postcolonial studies much attention has been devoted to the construction of imperial and national narratives. Other movements in critical theory from Lacanian analysis to "nomadology" to new historicism have been readily applied to narrative study and have often produced impressive results. Elsewhere in the field, a new kind of interdisciplinarity is quietly emerging, as developments in artificial-intelligence theory, hypertext studies, the concept of "possible worlds" in analytical philosophy, and advances in cognitive science are applied to narrative theory. Narrative thus seems to be a kind of vortex around which other discourses orbit in ever closer proximity. Another interesting development is represented by the work of a number of younger scholars who retain the analytical rigor of traditional or "classical" approaches while moving far beyond the relatively limited theoretical parameters of structuralism to address new questions posed by postmodern texts and positionalities. These theorists (including Ruth Ronen, Tamar Yacobi, Brian McHale, Monika Fludernik, Emma Kafalenos, and Patrick O'Neill) have produced a number of groundbreaking studies that are necessitating a radical rethinking of concepts that hitherto have been foundational to narrative theory: the distinction between fabula and syuzhet, the nature of narrative time, the concept of plot, the notion of voice, and the concept of "the" reader. They have applied analytical methods to irreverent postmodern narrative practices and formulated a number of original positions. Though I suspect that some will reject the name (and perhaps the company) I am constructing for them, I will nevertheless refer to these works as gesturing toward a "Postmodern Narratology." What is Narrative? Currently, four basic approaches to the definition of narrative are in use; we may designate these as temporal, causal, minimal, and transactional. …

Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? Narrative Modalities and Generic Categorization

Abstract: In Coming to Terms (1990), Seymour Chatman initiated an enquiry into the delimitation of the narrative text type as against the text types of argument and description. This revolutionary step was a major landmark for literary scholars; linguists, by contrast, had been battling with the same problems for two decades, trying to distinguish between, on the one hand, the larger text types that are constitutive of our understanding of narrative versus expository or exhortative discourse (in oral or written formats), and, on the other hand, the surface textual sequences of report, dialogue, argument, descriptipn, and so on. In narrative studies, too, there arose some recognition that a narrative text does not exclusively consist in narrative sentences but includes a large number of supposedly nonnarrative items (the speech and thought representation of the characters, for instance) as well as metanarrative features (e.g., the narrator's evaluation, reader address) and some strictly speaking nonnarrative elements, s uch as description, that are, however, constitutive of how most narratives handle the setting. All of these supposedly nonnarrative elements are basic ingredients of any narrative surface structure. From the classic definition of narrative as a "mixed" genre (combining mimesis and diegesis) to Helmut Bonheim's The Narrative Modes (1982), which analyses narrative texts as sequences of report, speech, description, and comment, narratologists and literary scholars have been keenly aware of the fact that novels or short stories or even historical works are not uniformly "narrative." Not every sentence in a narrative text, that is, qualifies as "narrative" by the standards of narratological narrativity. It was Chatman's unique achievement to focus on this impurity of the narrative surface structure with renewed critical attention and to tackle the problem in a manner anticipated by text linguistics. I would like to return to the problem of narrative's variegated textual surface structure, picking up where I left this issue of generic classification and text types in Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (1996). In a very brief section of chapter 8 of that book (section 8.4, esp. 356-58), I had proposed a revision and extension of Chatman's triad which I modelled on textlinguistic work found in Longacre's The Grammar of Discourse. I would now like to expand this proposal even further, linking it more comprehensively with the structure of natural narratology. In particular, I wish to discuss some of the theoretical implications of a text-type approach to the definition of narrative. I will start by introducing a few models from text linguistics, especially the model of Virtanen and Warvik with which I was not familiar when writing Towards a 'Natural' Narratology. 1. Text Types Linguists have realized for some time that textual surface structures display a wide spectrum of forms that vary with the respective type of discourse. Since text linguistics, unlike literary scholarship, does not focus primarily on literary or even on written texts, linguists have had to develop a great number of concepts to account for variety in language use (register e.g.) or for the use of language in specific situations (e.g. telephone conversations; natural narrative; doctor-patient discourse; instruction manuals; cookbooks, etc.). The term "text type" in text linguistics refers to a number of quite distinct phenomena on a variety of different levels. In "Text-Type as a Linguistic Unit," for instance, Esser defines text type as "language variation according to use as opposed to variation according to user" (142). [1] He distinguishes between extensional definitions (text types as genres); definitions based on external criteria of production; on structurally defined schemata or superstructures (cf. van Dijk); and definitions deriving from "abstracted corpus norms" established by means of statistical analysis (e.g., in the work of Biber). …

Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations

Abstract: Texts come in parts; they come apart. In reading, readers somehow make sense of the parts and of the whole. This book seeks to examine the various ways in which ancient authors and modern readers negotiate the interrelations of whole and part, and construct and respond to perceived designs in the world of text. The c0ontributors develop the well-established reading strategies of intertextuality, narratology, and various forms of reader-response criticism, while appreciating and questioning the aesthetic quality of the text. The texts studied in individual chapters vary widely in genre and historical period, with Plato and Cicero taking their places alongside Homer and Catullus. Approaches range from the formally narratological to the philosophical and the politically engaged. They are all driven by the desire to look closely at the texts, often directing the reader's eye from a slightly unusual viewpoint.

A Biblical Text and its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture

Abstract: A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture, by Yvonne Sherwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 321. $65.00/$25.00. It was not long ago that one could be considered widely read and even cutting edge in biblical studies by rounding out one's form criticism (or tradition history or rhetorical criticism) with a smattering of narrative theory or folklore studies or what-have-you. But in the wake of Sherwood's most recent book (she is author also of the very fine study of Hosea 1-3, The Prostitute and the Prophet [Sheffield, 1996]), that will no longer do. In this cultural history of Jonah one finds not only a close engagement with other biblical scholarship and with contemporary literary theory, but also with literature, art, and popular culture. Thus, Jack Sasson, Phyllis Trible, and Hans-Walter Wolff rub elbows with Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Roland Barthes, but also with novelists such as Paul Auster and Julian Barnes (and of course Herman Melville), with poets such as Hart Crane and Zbigniew Herbert, with artists such as Maarten van Heemskerk and Eugene Abeshaus, and with some who straddle disciplinary boundaries such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Norma Rosen. Throw in a healthy dose of premodern interpretation (not only Luther and Calvin, but the Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer and the Mekilta de Rabbi Ishmael, the early Latin poem Carmen de Jona de Ninive and the Middle English poem Patience), and one could be forgiven for thinking that Sherwood has read everything. The result is an almost impossibly rich book, which for all its great learning is never anything but compellingly readable. The volume is guided by the premise, stated early in the Introduction, that "biblical texts are literally sustained by interpretation, and the volume, ubiquity, and tenacity of interpretation make it impossible to dream that we can take the text back, through some kind of seductive academic striptease, to a pure and naked original state" (p. 2). While the title of the book places "a biblical text" before "its afterlife," Sherwood is actually much more interested in the afterlife of the book of Jonah--that is, the way it manages to "survive" (as the subtitle puts it) in myriad historical and cultural contexts, all the while adapting itself to various ideological postures as needed. It is no accident if this way of formulating the issues seems to ascribe an intentionality--in the form of a desire to live on--to the text itself, for as Sherwood puts it, drawing on the work of both evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and biblical scholar Hugh Pyper, certain texts might well be understood as "memes," the cultural equivalent of genes. The meme propagates by insinuating itself into a host community, replicating itself as it passes from individual to individual and from generation to generation, and mutating when necessary. For a biblical text such as Jonah, the replication takes the form of canonization and faithful copying and the invitations take place in the book's seemingly endless interpretability. The concept of the meme--a sort of textual "selfish gene"--works astonishingly well in getting at the rich and varied afterlife of Jonah. As Sherwood puts it, "though measuring no more than forty inches square in my edition, the book of Jonah has generated literally acres of visual and verbal glosses, and has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for cultural survival" (p. 3). It is these acres and this capacity to which the author devotes most of her attention, returning to the forty square inches of the book of Jonah itself only at the end of her study. The book is divided, following a brief introduction, into three large sections. …

The Dream as Text, The Dream as Narrative

Abstract: The concepts of “text” and “narrative” are reviewed in terms of their appropriate application to the study of dreams. It is proposed that, once experienced, all dreams are texts, but that not all of these texts are narratives. Blending Jung's proposal for the form of the average dream with basic terms from narratology, dream data are employed in order to examine the narrativity of dreams, and by way of inquiring into cognitive aspects of narrative structure. Questions about the relation between language and narrative structure on the one hand, and between dreaming and language on the other are also briefly taken up.

The Cultural Labyrinth of Maria De Zayas

Abstract: A seventeenth-century writer of sensationalist short stories, Maria de Zayas was a bestselling author, steeped in the novella traditions of Italy and France as well as her native Spain. At the same time, she was an important player in the tabloid craze sweeping over the Europe of her day. Marina S. Brownlee recontextualizes Maria de Zayas and provides a reading of Zayas's work from the double perspective of narratology and feminism. In doing so Brownlee explores the complexities of human subjectivity and its representation in the writings of Zayas, who offers provocative assessments of the modern subject and its relationship to gender, and of the woman writer's negotiations with authority and authorship. Zayas's stories question the validity of hegemonic discourses pertaining to public expectations for the citizen, to his or her intimate life, and to the intricacies resulting from any attempt to reconcile the two. Her writing is both daring and original as it reflects developments in contemporary fiction elsewhere in Europe. Brownlee shows that Zayas exploits existing fiction models in highly literary ways and in ways that cash in on the new phenomenon of tabloid publishing, arguing that Zayas is keenly aware of the new readership that resulted from the mass-production revolution in the printing industry and of the private readers' taste for scandal. Finally, Zayas dramatizes the rethinking of the Renaissance exemplum, replacing easy interpretations with Baroque excess-in a text which, like society itself, is an intricate labyrinth that resists easy solutions and limited forms of literary and cultural representation.

Joseph and Aseneth

Abstract: This volume is a comprehensive but accessible guide to the major questions raised by the Hellenistic Jewish work, Joseph and Aseneth. Joseph and Aseneth is an excellent example of the controverted issues of text, dating and Sitz im Leben, when such decisions must be largely based on internal evidence. It provides an entre into the vexed question of genre, given the numerous literary links that have been suggested for it. Its mysterious but engaging plot, and its female protagonist, evoke ongoing sociological and feminist debate. It is thus strongly commended for careful study to students and scholars of Judaism, New Testament, sociology and narratology. Intended as a sound basis for such exploration, this guide also offers a fresh narrative reading in which the revelatory character of Joseph and Aseneth is brought to the forefront.

Oedipus in the Welfare Office

Abstract: In an earlier publication (Wagenaar, 1997), Wagenaar demonstrated that the way administrators talk about their work is narratively structured. Interviews with welfare officers displayed the structural characteristics, and were organized in ways, as was suggested by narrative theory. He further argued in that paper that administrators use narrative to solve the everyday problems and challenges that confront them in the course of their work. These problems and challenges derive from the everyday, practical nature of administrative work. In an impressionistic way the author delineated, what he thought were the main characteristics of everyday administrative practice. Administrative practice, he argued, was action-oriented, subjective, open-ended, concrete, and beset with moral conflict. Stories somehow helped administrators deal with administrative practice

Bibliography of Recent Works on Narrative

Abstract: The following list of significant titles in narrative theory is intended to cover work published during the last dozen years or so. Omissions, though inevitable, are regretted. The items below can be further divided by approach or emphasis into the following groups: 1) Structuralist and Linguistic Approaches: Bal, Bonheim, Chatman, Cohn, Coste, Dallenbach, Fleischman, Fludernik, Genette, Herman, de Jong, Margolin, Nelles, Nelson, Nunning, Riffaterre, Rimmon-Kenan, Shen, Sternberg, Toker, Wolf 2) Rhetorical, Bakhtinian, and Phenomenological Accounts: Aczel, Bauer, Boardman, Calinescu, Cave, Hale, Messent, Morson, Phelan, Ricoeur 3) New Interdisciplinary Approaches: Artificial Intelligence: Cook, Hayles, Ryan Possible Worlds Theory: G. Currie, Do1eze1, Ronen, Ryan Cognitive Science: Herman, Jahn, Spolsky, Turner Hypertext Studies: Hayles 4) Postmodern Narratology: Brooke-Rose, Fludernik, Heise, Kafalenos, McHale, Moraru, O'Neill, Richardson, Ronen, Yacobi 5) Ideological Approaches: Feminism and Gender Theory: Barwell, Bauer, Boone, Booth, Case, Cave, Casey, Doherty, Felski, Frye, Friedman, Henke, Hirsch, Hite, Homans, Lanser, Mezei, Robinson, Singley and Sweeney, Walker, Winnett. Gay, Lesbian and Queer Theory: Bersani, Boone, Farwell, Lanser 1995, Roof Race and Ethnicity: Beavers, Doyle, Duncan, Gates, Jablon, Stepto, Warhol 1995 Marxism, Historical Approaches, and New Historicism: Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Bender, Casey, Chambers, Ginsburg, D. A. Miller, Quint Postcolonial: Bhabha, Fletcher, Spurr 6) Psychological Approaches: Bronfen, Hirsch, Henke, Kahane, Kofman, Mellard, Mellard and Mortimer, Tilley, van Boheemen 7) Poststructuralist Approaches: Amman, Clayton, Cornis-Pope, M. Curnie, Fried, Gelley, Gibson, Mellard, J. H. Miller, Rabinowitz, Roof, van Boheemen, J. Williams 8) Popular Culture: Beissinger et al; Smith and Watson; Warhol 2001 9) Asian Poetics: Beissinger et al; Miner, Mori 10) Important Anthologies: Fehn et al; Grunzweig and Solbach; Herman 1999; Mihailescu and Hamarneh; Phelan 1989a, 1994 Journal special issues: Poetics Today 11.1 and 11.4 (1990); Style 22.1 (1988) and 26.3 (1992); Studies in the Literary Imagination 25.1 (1992); Narrative 9.2 (2001) forthcoming; New Literary History 32.2 (2001) forthcoming. Works Aczel, Richard. "Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts." New Literary History 29 (1998): 467-500. Amiran, Eyal. "Against Narratology: Postmodern Narrative Returns." SubStance 81 (1996): 90-109. Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse. "History, Poststructuralism, and the Question of Narrative." Narrative 1 (1993): 45-58. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Barwell, Ismay. "Feminine Perspectives and Narrative Points of View." Aesthetics in Feminist Perspectives. Eds. Hilda Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. 93-104 Bauer, Dale. Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community. Albany: State U of New York P, 1988. Beavers, Herman. Wrestling the Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995. ___. ed. "Multiculturalism and Narrative." Special issue. Narrative 7.2 (1999). Beissinger, Margaret, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford, eds. Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary. Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. ___. "Impersonal Violence: The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams." Vision and Textuality. Ed. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. …

A Corporeal Narratology

Abstract: Despite its signal importance to so many schools of contemporary criticism, the human body has largely failed to garner a significant place in narratology. This neglect results from narratology's traditional focus on what Gerald Prince has called questions of "how" over questions of "what." An overview like Mieke Bal's influential Narratology breaks narratology down into the study of "elements" and "aspects." The former are the actual events, actors, and places that make up the story, and the latter are the ways that the text manipulates the presentation of those elements. A narrative cannot exist if it lacks both elements and aspects, but, as Prince notes, narratology has traditionally been interested in the latter: in the most common type of narrative criticism "the narratologist pays little or no attention to the story as such, the narrated, the what that is represented, and concentrates instead on the discourse, the narrating, the way in which the 'what' is represented" (75). One reason for this focus on the manipulation of story elements rather than on the elements themselves is narratology's emphasis, growing out of modern fiction, on consciousness and perception. Our most flexible and enduring narrative concepts--"stream of consciousness," "point of view," and "free indirect discourse"--all describe the authorial attempt to get down on paper a character's way of thinking. The human body has rarely been an explicit part of these modernist aesthetics. Another reason that narratology has focused on story aspects rather than elements is that it is far less clear how we are to study such elements. While students at the undergraduate level can usually grasp with relatively little difficulty the idea that a narrative is a series of choices made by an author to achieve a certain effect and meaning, we have considerably more difficulty explaining how the objects represented shape the narratives that represent them. The human body, consequently, has rarely been studied as a narratological object. I am not, of course, suggesting that critics have not discussed the human body in individual narratives, hut rather that such discussions rarely are used as an occasion to raise fundamentally narratological issues. The 1985 issue of Poetics Today on the female body edited by Susan Suleiman is typical of the way that narratology has failed to integrate the body into its core interests. This volume certainly talks a great deal about narrative and about issues arising from the body, but the two rarely come together to produce what we could call a corporeal narratology. Suleiman's own essay on alternatives to traditional ways of representing the female body is a case in point. Suleiman first discusses the reaction to recently popular female erotic texts, like Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, and concludes, "If the popularity of these books is, on the one hand, a positive sign, suggesting that the American public is ready to admit some real changes in what is considered an accept able story or an acceptable use of language by women, it may also be a sign that neither book is felt to imply a genuine threat to existing ways of seeing and being between the sexes" (47). Suleiman then goes on to consider the alternatives to traditional representations of gender, concluding with Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, in which "it is impossible to say who is woman and who is man, where one sex or one self begins and the other ends" (63). Despite her interest in how narrative represents gender, Suleiman does not ask the question that seems to me the central one of a corporeal narratology: how do certain ways of thinking about the body shape the plot, characterization, setting, and other aspects of narrative? [1] In reviewing the recent history of narratology, Mieke Bal cites this Poetics Today volume as an instance of how recent criticism has drifted away from core narratological issues: "although this volume is definitely not devoid of narratological concerns, these certainly do not predomi nate" ("The Point" 728). …

Reading Time in Serial Fiction before Dickens

Abstract: It is fifty years since Gunter Muller's essay on the distinction between erzahlte Zeit (the narrated time) and Erzahlzeit (the time of narrating),[1] and in the intervening period narrative theory has preoccupied itself fruitfully with relations between the two. Yet the latter category has in general been seen as an awkward fiction, existing only as some vague extrapolation to be made from a measurable quantity of text. Gerard Genette devotes three chapters of his Discours du Recit to analysing 'relations between the time of the story and the (pseudo-) time of the narrative', but he signals his anxiety in the parenthesis: the second feature is no more than a convenient inference, mere '(pseudo-) time' as opposed to the real thing, because 'written narrative exists in space and as space', and 'has no other temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading'.[2] He develops this reservation when insisting that the real duration of a narrative, as opposed to the space it occupies on paper, is necessarily unquantifiable: 'What we spontaneously call [the duration of a narrative] can be nothing more [. . .] than the time needed for reading; but it is too obvious that reading time varies according to particular circumstances, and that, unlike what happens in movies, or even in music, nothing here allows us to determine a "normal" speed of execution' (p. 86). In this Genette gains the agreement of Paul Ricoeur. 'What we are measuring, under the name of Erzahlzeit, is, as a matter of convention, a chronological time, equivalent to the number of pages and lines in the published work', writes Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, and he finds consensus between both Muller and Genette in their use of this term 'to be the equivalent of and the substitute for the time of reading, that is, the time it takes to cover or traverse the space of the text'. Indeed, the major revisions proposed by Ricoeur to the positions of both these predecessors begin from the same assumption: 'I shall not go back over the impossibility of measuring the duration of the narrative, if by this is meant the time of reading. Let us admit with Genette that we can only compare the respective speeds of the narrative and of the story, the speed always being defined by a relation between a temporal measure and a spatial one.'[3] There can be no doubting the theoretical power of these studies, and no doubting the light they cast on the complex temporal relations between narrative and story in particular texts (A la recherche du temps perdu in Genette's case, to which Ricoeur adds Mrs Dalloway and Der Zauberberg). Yet by using such terms as 'reading time' or 'the time of reading' in this imprecise way, or by subsuming these terms within the category of Erzahlzeit or the time of narrating, they miss a further distinction available only to a narratology that looks beyond the text to consider its conditions of publication and reception. Rigorous scrutiny is turned by Genette on the relations (and specifically the variations and distortions) of order, duration, and frequency that exist between narrated story and narrative discourse in his chosen example, without significant reference being made to the way in which the elaborate interplay between these categories is complicated, at least for Proust's original audience, by a third temporal feature: the progressiveness of the work's disclosure between publication of Du cote de chez Swann in 1913 and that of Le temps retrouve fourteen years later. Yet publication over time is not a phenomenon confined to the exceptional category of the roman fleuve, and in Britain the serialization of individual novels (either in independent numbers or magazine instalments), though far from universal, is among the defining features of the genre in its classic (Victorian) period. When in this context we consider a category such as Genette's duration (which measures the acceleration or deceleration of the narrative text in relation to the events narrated), it becomes clear that in many cases the schedule of first publication, and thus the time of reading for the original audience, is a distinct feature that further complicates the experience of temporality in a narrative text. …

Desire and the Female Protagonist: A Critique of Feminist Narrative Theory

Abstract: When, at the beginning of Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), Ruth decides she can no longer endure her husband's infidelity and emotional abuse, she articulates her desires and forms a plan of action to fulfill them. "I want revenge," she states, "I want power. I want money. I want to be loved and not love in return" (43). In moving from passive acquiescence to active desire, Ruth breaks several rules. First, and most obviously, she breaks the rules of feminine behavior, what she herself describes as "The Litany of the Good Housewife." Secondly, she alters a fundamental tenet of traditional narrative: that the female principle be passive, rather than active. And, finally, her behavior breaks with feminist theories of narrative that see in Ruth's aggressive, even destructive activity a repetition of patriarchal norms as they are traditionally articulated by narrative. Stories such as Ruth's, in which the female protagonist emulates masculine narrative tropes, pose serious problems for femi nist narrative theories. In this article, I will trace such theories, exploring their rationale but arguing that they prescribe a narrative form that precludes female desire and action. The story of Weldon's she-devil has been read as a reworking of the Faust legend, [1] and, indeed, that narrative, particularly in Goethe's Romantic version, provides a rich contrast between how masculine desire and activity relate to narrative and how Ruth's claim to desire and activity initiate narrative. [2] Faust, like Ruth, lays claim to desire and in fact predicates his life narrative on the ability to desire endlessly. As Peter Brooks points out, Freud refers to Faust in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as "pre-eminently the representation of man's unquenchable striving" (54). According to Brooks's theories of narrative, this Faustian striving creates narrative; as he explains, "desire is always there at the start of narrative, often in a state of initial arousal, often having reached a state of intensity such that movement must be created, action undertaken, change begun" (38). Faust's articulation of his desires and of his will to desire translates into narrative action, the striving forward according to a linear, teleological movement. If Ruth shares with Faust this intensity of, and commitment to, desire, should her story not take on the same qualities--an active striving towards a goal? Unfortunately for Ruth the association of desire and action with masculinity (in the linear model Brooks describes) means that narrative movement is suspect--doubly so, insofar as it defies both conventional assumptions of how female protagonists behave and certain feminist assumptions of how women's stories should be structured. According to such assumptions, conventional narratives such as the Faust legend, and indeed, narrative itself, are incapable of expressing feminine desire and thus must be rejected in favor of other forms, most specifically, the lyric. In contrast to the masculine, linear narrative desire Brooks describes as "the arousal that creates the narratable as a condition of tumescence, appetency, ambition, quest, and gives narrative a forward-looking intention" (103), feminist theory posits a lyric timelessness connected to women's bodies and feminine desire. For example, Julia Kristeva suggests that "there are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality whose stereotyping may shock, but whose regularity and unison with what is experienced as extra-subjective time, cosmic time, occasion vertiginous vision and unnameable jouissance" (191). The derivation of lyric desire from the pre-Oedipal, that is, from before the subject's entry into the linear time of history and narrative further emphasizes lyric "timelessness." Thus, as Susan Stanford Friedman explains, lyric discourse replicates the desire for the imagined early mother-child bond while narrative discourse reflects the later story dominated by the father. …

What do lesbians do in the daytime? Recover

Abstract: This paper examines a narrative taken from an ethnographic interview, for the speaker's conversational construction of lesbian and other identities along with ideologized personal history. To tell her story, Marge shifts to the discourse style used in the meetings of addiction recovery groups. She prioritizes the recovery (twelve-step) program's coherence system, structuring her life story in conformity with its terms while narrating a complexly queered identity. Four analyses are given, beginning with a Labovian formal examination and proceeding with a consideration of three types of discourse echoing: inter-discursivity, intratextuality, and manifest intertextuality. This study demonstrates the analytical linking of nonpublic linguistic discourse to social discourses; individual identity construction to social construction (and its coherence systems); and personal history to historical eras. The paper adds the concept of a metalevel complicating action to narrative theory and develops a means of examining intratextuality for critical discourse analysis. It presents a revised view of essentialism for the sociolinguistic study of gender and sexuality

Effects of Garden-Pathing in Martin amis's novels "Time Arrow" and "Night Train"

Abstract: Critics often describe the novels of British writer Martin Amis as prankish artifacts that neglect story and plot for a highly misleading set of postmodern pyrotechnics. In this article I attempt to explore a literary phenomenon that is often paraphrased as "teasing the reader", arguing that one of the chief glories of Amis's prose lies quite paradoxically, in the ambiguous narrative sctructures and in the ways readers are "led up a garden path" in the course of his fictional worlds. Drawing on a selection of recent criticism from Artificial Intelligence (Minsky), cognitive narratology (Jahn) and general reader reception theory, I will analyse Amis's novels Time's Arrow and Night Trains and propose that the narrative traps employed are highly functional. Rather than just Hanoi readers, they actually lead "somewhere", producing various aesthetical effects and ultimately turning the novels into what Roland Barthes has termed "writerly" texts.

Existentialist Roots of Narrative Actants

Abstract: It is time to rethink the history of narratology, a field of study that is undergoing a recontextualization and renaissance. Examining ways in which classical narrative theory was embedded in its cultural milieux, this paper reconsiders one chapter in the history of structuralist narrative analysis as it emerges in France in the 1960s. The paper focuses on the genesis—and the genealogy—of the concept of narrative "actants." Actants were originally construed as names for the basic and general roles that can be assumed by characters in the unfolding of a narrative. Structuralist theories owed much to Vladimir Propp's actantial typology, which included the villain, the donor, the helper, the sought-for-person and her father, the dispatcher, the hero, and the false hero. But existentialist theories of the self may also have inflected the way structuralist narratologists drew on linguistic theory to redescribe characters in stories as actants. Further, a more historically particularized account of actants may have significant methodological consequences for present-day analysts interested in using actantial models to study narrative. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol24/iss2/5 Existentialist Roots of Narrative Actants David Herman North Carolina State University It seems that rumors of the death of narratology have been greatly exaggerated. Recently we have witnessed a small but unmistakable explosion of activity in the field of narrative studies; signs of this minor narratological renaissance include the publication of a spate of articles, special issues, and books that rethink and recontextualize classical models for narratological research;' the evident success of the journal Narrative (not founded until 1993); and the establishment of a book series devoted specifically to "The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative" at the Ohio State University Press. Thus a full account of narratologya complete story of our ongoing rapprochement with storiesremains yet to be written. By the same token, narratology's history sometimes gets told in ways that flatten it out into a monolithically (if not monomaniacally) scientistic endeavor. Recounted too rapidly, the history of narratology can work to decontextualize a method of analysis that is itself sometimes charged with a lack of concern for context. In particular, it is important not to sever links between models for narrative analysis and surrounding critico-theoretical trends. Here, in order to indicate ways in which classical narrative theory was embedded in its cultural milieux, I should like to reconsider one chapter in the history of structuralist narrative analysis as it emerged in France in the 1960s. My concern is with the genesis-and the genealogy-of the concept of narrative "actants." In the narratological tradition, actants represent a new, linguistically informed approach to the very old problem of lit1 Herman: Existentialist Roots of Narrative Actants Published by New Prairie Press 258 STCL, Volume 24, No.2 (Summer, 2000) erary character. Actants are typically defined as "fundamental role [s] at the level of narrative deep structure" (Prince 1). In other words, "actants are general categories [of behavior or doing] underlying all narratives (and not only narratives) while [actors] are invested with specific qualities in different narratives" (Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative 34).2 After investigating the lineage of this key narratological concept, I shall go on to examine some philosophical contexts for the actantial model that first appeared in its canonical form in 1966 in A. J. Greimas's Simantique structurale (Structural Semantics). Refined by Greimas in his 1973 essay on "Actants, Actors, and Figures," the model was widely influential, adopted (and adapted) in much subsequent narratological work. My claim is that, in what amounts to a series of disciplinary displacements, existentialist theories of the self may have inflected the way structuralist narratologists drew on linguistic theory to redescribe characters in stories as actants. Further, a more historically particularized account of actants may have significant methodological consequences for present-day analysts interested in using actantial models to study narrative. In a certain sense, structuralist narratology began with the attempt to create a systematic framework for describing how characters participate in the narrated action. In his Morphology of the Folktale-a text first published in 1928 and one of the works associated with Russian Formalism that would exercise such a profound influence on Francophone narratology3-Vladimir Propp followed Aristotle in subordinating character to action or plot." Articulating a descriptive vocabulary based on the "functions" performed by characters in stories, Propp conceived of the function as "an act of character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action" (21). A function is thus a participatory slot in the syntagmatic unfolding of a narrative, and "character" is a relatively loose (if traditional) way of talking about kinds of slots and the relational networks linking them together. Arguing that many seemingly diverse functions join together to create a few, typifiable "spheres of action," Propp developed a typology of seven general roles (the villain, the donor, the helper, the sought-for-person and her father, the dispatcher, the hero, and the false hero) that correspond to the ways in which 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 24, Iss. 2 [2000], Art. 5 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol24/iss2/5 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1484

Letters to Children in Family Therapy: A Narrative Approach

Abstract: Introduction. Part One: My Point of Departure: The Works of Michael White and David Epston. Theory of Narrative Therapy. 1. Source of inspiration: Gregory Bateson. 2. Source of inspiration: Michel Foucault. 3. Source of inspiration: Narratology. Part Two: The Practice of Narrative Therapy. 4. Guidelines for the initial externalising dialogue. 5. Recruiting allies. 6. Registration of victories and defeats. 7. Celebration of success and advice to other children. Part Three: Letter-writing in Therapy. 8. The making of therapeutic letters. 9. Letters to, from and between children in family therapy. 10. My Epstonian letter. Part Four: Case Histories Told through Sequences of Letters. References.

Lateral Reflexivity: Levels, Versions, and the Logic of Paraphrase [1]

Abstract: Narratology was born along with the rise of self-reflexivity in modernist and postmodernist fiction. Thus, when he sought to justify the application of Saussurean language theory to narrative discourse in his "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," published in 1966, Roland Barthes argued that "literature, particularly today, make[s] a language of the very conditions for language." "Language never ceases to accompany [literary] discourse," wrote Barthes, "holding up to it the mirror of its own structure" (85). For the Russian Formalists a hallmark of literariness, reflexivity in literary discourse became, in turn, a structuralist desideratum. By deautomatizing the experience of stories--by exposing the conventions that prompt readers to interpret certain modes of discourse as narrative--contemporary writing enables the analyst to map narrative structures more explicitly and exhaustively than ever before (cf. Lodge 24). Narratology and narrative experimentation go, in this sense, hand-in-hand. Both work to displace the myth that certain stories are simply-unanalyzably--good or bad; both promote, instead, reasoned analysis of storytelling as the strategic manipulation of symbols arranged in time. In what Barthes described as a broadly structuralist activity that spanned poets as well as poeticians, both analysts and artists focused attention on the basic units, combinatorial mechanisms, and communicative functions of narratives. As a result, stories could be viewed as the product of core cognitive principles--fundamental dispositions and capabilities--at work in all our speech, thought, and behavior. So far, so good. Yet to these methodological assumptions Barthes added another, much more difficult to justify and deleterious, I would argue, in its consequences. The additional assumption is that today's literature is not merely reflexive but metalinguistic, in the technical sense of that term. Thus, in "Literature and Metalanguage," included in his Critical Essays of 1964, Barthes drew on modern logic's distinction between metalanguages and object-languages to contextualize (post)modernist reflexivity and--by extension--the new science of narrative that it had made possible. Echoing arguments that were published the same year in his book Elements of Semiology (89-94), Barthes noted that The [object-language] is the very matter subject to logical investigation; metalanguage is the necessarily artificial language in which we conduct this investigation. Thus [...] I can express in a symbolic language (metalanguage) the relations, the structure of a real language [i.e., object-language]. (97) By the same token, says Barthes, although at one time "literature never reflected upon itself" and "never divided itself into an object at once scrutinizing and scrutinized," more recently, through the efforts of stylistic innovators such as Flaubert, Mallarme, Proust, and Robbe-Grillet, literary discourse has by degrees assumed an essentially metalinguistic function (97). It has itself begun to ask the question: "What is literature?" (98). Barthes's argumentation here travels down a slippery slope. On the basis of the claim that artists have started to write literature that is in some sense reflexively about literature, Barthes then makes the further claim that today's literary language is in fact a language about language--a metalanguage in terms of which other, older literary discourse is describable as an object-language (98). Given the conditions that have to be met for a language to qualify as a metalanguage, however, this second claim is much stronger than the first. It is not, I submit, a defensible c laim. And, as part of the genealogy of the meta- metaphor in recent critico-theoretical discourse, Barthes's running together of the reflexive with the metalinguistic helped create a whole way of seeing that now needs to be reexamined and recontextualized. This way of seeing produced in its turn a way of talking about texts in terms of layers and levels, the higher and the lower, the embedding and the embedded, the frame and the slot within the frame. …

The Narrative of Ethics and the Ethics of Narrative: The Implications of Ricoeur's Narrative Model for Family Therapy

Abstract: In this article, we explore Paul Ricoeur's meditations on language, memory, and forgiveness as a means to better understanding ethical concerns of narrative construction in family therapy. These meditations highlight that narrative construction is fundamentally a relational process and therefore encourages a relationally responsible form of liberating narrative. The article includes a review of current perspectives on ethics in narrative therapy, an overview of Ricoeur's narrative theory, and a discussion of the implications of Ricoeur's theory for family therapists.

Entre Nous, Female Eroticism, and the Narrative of Jewish Erasure

Abstract: Although grounded in wartime and immediate postwar contexts, Entre Nous has been critiqued primarily for its portrayal of ambiguous female eroticism to the exclusion of how such eroticism is linked via the film's narrative structure to the Jewish Holocaust, the French collaboration, and U.S. transnationalist hegemony. This paper takes up an examination and explication of this narratological linkage as well as theorizes the determinants of its persistent critical ignoring.

The voice of the text in selected prose works of Reinaldo Arenas

Abstract: In approaching the voice of the text in the prose works of Reinaldo Arenas, I have selected seven texts for analysis: El mundo alucinante, the five novels which conform the Pentagoma quintet (Celestino antes del alba, El palacio de las blanqmsimas mofetas, Otra vez el mar, El color del verano, and El asalto), and Viaje a La Habana. Studies on Arenas's prose work to date have largely concentrated on parallels between Arenas's biography and aspects of his fiction, with emphasis on questions of fantasy and the carnivalesque. I explore the works from a purely textual perspective, taking as my theoretical framework the interplay between three approaches to the text; transtextuality (according to the theories proposed by Gerard Genette), narratology and focalization (Eduardo Serrano Orejuela and Mieke Bal). Through an examination of the structure and narrative voices in this body of prose works, I confront the symbolic and ideological voice of the text. A thematic function is evident behind the structural complexity of the works and the vertiginous reading experience created by the texts, along with the relationship the novels sustain with "history" and other external texts. My consideration of the voices which narrate the pieces and the perceptions through which events are depicted exposes close relationships between sections of the same text and between the prose works I explore. In turn, the characterisation of the narrators, heroes and protagonists of the works centres very acutely around the individual's Other, and reveals ideological and thematic implications that are consistent between the works. The treatment of these aspects in the seven texts engenders the reading process I describe as "vertigo"; it is through this process that the ideological notions regarding testimony and the subjectivity of history are revealed.

The God of the Book of Acts

Abstract: (Resume de l'ouvrage) Seventeen innovative studies are collected in this volume which has been produced under the aegis of the Centre for Biblical Studies, University of Manchester, and L'Institut des sciences bibliques, Universite de Lausanne. The majority of the studies engage with narrative through providing insightful working examples. Building on the many contributions of recent narratological research, for the most part the studies in this collection avoid the technical language of narratology as they present fresh insights at many levels. Some essays focus more on the implied author, some on the implied reader or hearer, and some on the way particular messages are constructed; some of the studies consider how author, message and reader are all interconnected. There are several creative proposals for refining genre definition, from law and wisdom to gospel and apocryphal writings. Some studies highlight the way in which narratives can contain ethical, religious, and cultural messages. Sensitivity to narrative is also shown by some contributors to expose in intruing ways the redactional processes behind the final form of texts. Students of narrative in the ancient world will find much to consider in this book, and others engaged with literary studies more generally will discover that scholars of the worlds of the Bible and Late Antiquity have much to offer them.

After Dynamic Narratology

Abstract: Since Barthes's S/Z, in effect, theories of narrative have had uneasy relations with textual theory. Structuralist narratology attempts to explain narrative figuration, or thematics, in terms of a perceived textual grammar. This position assumes that narrative expresses a generic logic (poetics), a genetic code. In an effort to preserve narratological discourse, late structuralists like Seymour Chatman replace the claim to deep structure in favor of something like "description," and attempt to abandon the relation between figuration and poetics. [1] Dynamic theories of narrative, some versions of which I discuss here, step into the vacancy created by the retreat of structuralist narratology. Where structuralist theories produced static, often grammatical models based on levels of the text, dynamic theories would like to explain narratives in terms of their own interiority and energy. Despite their claims to the contrary, however, the dynamic theories I discuss also see figures in the text--images produced by the text--as a code, a key that shows how the text itself works. A code here is a privileged construct in a text, like Paul de Man's "allegory," that is supposed to open up or reveal the workings of the text or of a portion of the text. But it makes little sense to believe that linguistic operation itself depends on the images shown in the text. Textual analysis appeals to a formal and logical stratum of language that is in principle independent of the specific images produced by a given text. While narratology usually speaks, reasonably, of narrative figurations as themes, as the text's thematic understanding of itself, in doing so it absorbs textual assumptions with greater or lesser degrees of consciousness, assumptions about the nature of textual operations that are rarely addressed outside the realm of these figurations. The code, the figure which represents the narrative, appears to represent the inner workings of the text, but to do so is to figure the text and so to become again its represented conte nt or theme. The code cannot reveal the workings of narrative; it can only express an idea of these workings that cannot bridge the gap to the textual operation it itself posits. While many approaches to narrative (historicist, Marxist, and others) do not confuse figuration with poetics, they do not engage the relation between narrative and textuality that defines narratology. Exploring this logical difficulty in dynamic narratology, I offer an alternative for narratology proceeding from the assumption that texts are symptomatic of their personal and cultural contexts. I am interested in writers who see the danger of reading the textual in the figurative, of reading what the text shows as an explanation of how it works, but who end up despite themselves in that trap. Consider, for instance, how Deleuze and Guattari discuss method in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. They propose to study the nature of the text, not its figurations of itself, but eventually rely on figures for it: "How can we enter into Kafka's work? This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The castle has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren't very well known" (3). The various doors, and kinds of doors (a burrow has only one), in Kafka's work, they say, are a "trap" set up by Kafka: "the whole description of the burrow functions to trick the enemy. We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever" (3). The description of the burrow is a trap because description in the text does not explain the workings of the text, but only leads the hermeneut ("the enemy") to think that it does. It is inte resting that Deleuze and Guattari opt to "enter" the text (3), to speak of the "Kafka-machine" that produces desire (as, in their vocabulary, any text does) as having an inside and an outside (7-8). They do what they had just said they would not do. To acknowledge this difficulty, they immediately deny that they do any such thing: "We aren't trying to interpret, to say that this means that. …

‘I wobble’. Narrative Strategies: Public and Private Voices

Abstract: The terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ are useful in discussing Woolf’s use of narrative voices: how she utilizes, combines and moves between public and private voices in her fiction. Her extensive use of free indirect discourse is an area of her narrative strategy where the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ can be illuminating. Most of the work on Woolf and free indirect discourse was written between 1945 and 1975, when her narrative techniques, particularly her use of point of view, were of primary interest to critics. Consequently, discussions of her use of free indirect discourse rarely consider the political implications of her most widely used narrative method. It is important that narrative voice, such an integral part of Woolf’s writing, is not ignored in favour of her politics, but is seen as essential to that debate: as William R. Handley writes, ‘her narrative experiments are in their effects and functions discernibly political’.1 Narratology is one of the areas of Woolf’s writing where qualities which have come to be called ‘postmodern’ are most prevalent: the style and structure of her writing are therefore integral to any political reading.