Narratology

About: Narratology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2833 publications have been published within this topic receiving 50998 citations. The topic is also known as: narrative theory.

Risk, suffering and competing narratives in the psychiatric assessment of an Iraqi refugee

Abstract: This paper highlights the problem of “place” for an Iraqi refugee who, for years, had been tortured and imprisoned in his home country. Specifically, the paper presents a case study of a clinical encounter with this refugee, who had come to the attention of an Australian Crisis Assessment and Treatment Team. Drawing from narrative theory, the paper describes the chaotic nature of the encounter to show how the diverse motives, claims and actions of those present expose the struggle involved in the emplotment of an emerging narrative. The case study is constructed and analysed to illustrate the interpretive machinery of “clinical reasoning” and, in particular, the tension and play between “paradigmatic thinking” and “narrative thinking.” More generally, this analysis follows the work of social scientists who seek to expand methodologies for writing about human suffering.

Supposing Bleak House

Abstract: Supposing ""Bleak House"" is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickens's and nineteenth-century England's greatest work of narrative fiction. Focusing on the novel's retrospective narrator, whom he identifies as Esther Woodcourt in order to distinguish her from her younger, unmarried self, John Jordan offers provocative new readings of the novel's narrative structure, its illustrations, its multiple and indeterminate endings, the role of its famous detective, Inspector Bucket, its many ghosts, and its relation to key events in Dickens's life during the years 1850 to 1853. Jordan draws on insights from narratology and psychoanalysis in order to explore multiple dimensions of Esther's complex subjectivity and fractured narrative voice. His conclusion considers Bleak House as a national allegory, situating it in the context of the troubled decade of the 1840s and in relation to Dickens's seldom-studied A Child's History of England (written during the same years as his great novel) and to Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. Supposing ""Bleak House"" claims Dickens as a powerful investigator of the unconscious mind and as a ""popular"" novelist deeply committed to social justice and a politics of inclusiveness.

The conspiracy in The Comfort of Strangers: narration in the novel and the film

Abstract: Since stories increasingly take on pictorial and mixed-medial forms, narratology needs to investigate to what extent narrative devices exceed the boundaries of a specific medium. One way to examine this issue is to focus on film adaptations of narratologically complex novels or stories. This article presents a detailed comparison of the narration in McEwan’s (1982) [1981] The Comfort of Strangers and Schrader’s (1990) film based on a scenario by Harold Pinter. It is shown how the novel creates deliberate confusion (via free indirect speech and thought) about the agency responsible for the conveyance of crucial information, and how the film finds non-verbal means to achieve the same effect.

Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative: Reading, Narrating, Scripting

Abstract: In considering Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot', a novel less easily defined in terms of plot and ideas than his other major fictional works, Sarah Young addresses problems in the novel unresolved by previous interpretations, and in doing so fills a significant gap in Dostoevsky studies.