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.

Narrative and Rhetoric in Odysseus' Tales to the Phaeacians

Abstract: As Odysseus cautiously prepares to enter the straits plagued by Charyb- dis and Scylla, he encourages his crew by referring to his earlier success against the Cyclops (Od 12208-12) This article argues that the Odyssey constructs the Scylla adventure as a tale of heroic failure in contrast with the Cyclops episode Special attention is paid to narrative paradigms that underlie the Scylla episode and emphasize Odysseus' inability to defeat the monster I further show that the Cyclops/Scylla contrast serves both as an argument presented to Odysseus' internal Phaeacian audience and an interpretive key for the external audience in tHe last twenty years, the scholarship on the wanderings of Odysseus—arguably the most famous and beloved section of the Odyssey —has undergone a remarkable shift Ever since antiquity, an important exegetic tradition, ranging from Heraclitus the Allegorist to Charles Segal, has analyzed the apologoi as a moral or psychological journey, a return to humanity metaphorically shaped as an experience of death and rebirth 1 By contrast, recent studies implicitly or explicitly influenced by theoretical developments in narratology, pragmatics, and performativity have highlighted the fact that the apologoi are a speech act uttered by the secondary narrator Odysseus to an audience of Phaeacians on whom he depends to escort him home It is now well established that the apologoi stylistically differ from the main narrative (Goldhill 1991; de Jong 1992; 2001; Beck 2005) and that their emphasis on hospitality

The Narratology of Lay Ethics

Abstract: The five narratives identified by the DEEPEN-project are interpreted in terms of the ancient story of desire, evil, and the sacred, and the modern narratives of alienation and exploitation. The first three narratives of lay ethics do not take stock of what has radically changed in the modern world under the triple and joint evolution of science, religion, and philosophy. The modern narratives, in turn, are in serious need of a post-modern deconstruction. Both critiques express the limits of humanism. They do not imply, however, that these narratives should not be taken seriously. In particular, the enduring presence of three ancient narratives in laypeople’s symbolic thought is highly significant in terms of the role that the logic of the sacred keeps playing in the workings of modern societies. Lay people’s implicit understanding of how modern technology tends towards catastrophe and apocalypse provides the strongest argument for taking these narratives seriously.

The Appropriated Voice: Narrative Authority in Conrad, Forster, and Woolf

Abstract: Uses feminist theory, cultural criticism, cultural ethnography, and narrative theory in critiquing traditional and revisionist criticism

Affective Disorders: Emotion in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

Abstract: An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website andthrough Knowledge Unlatched.Situated at the intersection of postcolonial studies, affect studies, and narratology, Affective Disorders explores the significance of emotion in a range of colonial and postcolonial narratives. Through close readings of Naguib Mahfouz, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Upamanyu Chatterjee, among others, Bede Scott argues that literary representations of emotion need not be interpreted solely at the level of character, individual psychology, or the contingencies of plotting, but could also be related to broader sociopolitical forces. We thus find episodes of anger that serve as a collective response to the 'modernity' of wartime Cairo, feelings of jealousy that are inspired by the slave economy of imperial Brazil, and an overwhelming sense of boredom that emerges, in the late eighties, out of the bureaucratic procedures of the Indian Administrative Service. Affective Disorders also explores in some detail the formal consequences of these feelings – the way in which affective states such as anger or jealousy can often destabilize narratives, provoking crises of representation, generic ambivalence, and discursive rupture. By emphasizing the social origin of these emotions, and by analysing their influence on literary discourse, this study provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between various sociopolitical forces and the affective and aesthetic 'disorders' to which they give rise.