Narrative: The Nice Conference

Marie-Laure Ryan, “The Modes of Narrativity and Their Visual Metaphors."

Barry Stampf, “Filtering Rimmon-Kenan,Chatman, Black, Freud, and James: Focalization and the Divided Self in ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’” 

Scott Simpkins, "They Do the Men in Different Voices: Narrative Cross Dressing in Sand and Shelley."

William Marling, "The Parable of the Prodigal Son: An Economic Reading."

Ruth Ginsburg, "In Pursuit of Self: Theme, Narration, and Focalization in Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood."

Arlette Bouloumié, "Writing and Modernism: Michel Tournier's Friday."

Jean Ricardou, "Immersing the Narrative in the Text."

Philippe Hamon, “Narratology: Status and Outlook.” 

Where we were, where we are, where we seem to be heading is a question for narratology in its third decade. The key word for the future seems to be evolution: the discipline is undergoing mutations to adapt to a scholarly environment that reflects, on the one hand, the progress of ideas that have cast the spotlight on literary genetics, cognitive theories, feminist approaches, or social semiotics and, on the other, galloping dissemination and unsettling ambivalence about an unprecedented popularity that is transforming the very definition of narrative itself. 

Marie-Laure Ryan, “The Modes of Narrativity and Their Visual Metaphors.” 

Narratology has explored in depth the modes of narration, but it has left largely untouched the question of the modes of narrativity. This term designates the various ways in which narrative structures are realized in texts. To call a novel or short story narrative is an entirely different matter from that of applying the same term to a lyric poem or a drama. The study of the modes of narrativity attempts to answer the question: what does it mean to say “this text is narrative”? As a cognitive category necessary to the proper understanding of a work, the narrative structure of a text may be compared to the identifiable shape of an object in a visual artwork. Thus, various modes of narrative may be compared to a type of picture or visual phenomenon.# 

Barry Stampf, “Filtering Rimmon-Kenan,Chatman, Black, Freud, and James: Focalization and the Divided Self in ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’” 

Narratology may be thought of as a complicated system of conceptual filters that enact a severe formalist reduction upon the corpus of what may be thought and said about storytelling. According to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, this reductiveness needs to be expanded in order to attend more to language. One way of answering to her reformist prescription is a turn to the study of linguistic surface structure organized as a meditation on the metaphor of the filter. For Seymour Chatman this metaphor designates a character through whom a narrator elects to tell a story. For Max Black, "filter" is a trope for metaphoric process. Examining these senses of the filter in Henry James's short story "The Beast in the Jungle" leads to emphasis upon negations and belief qualifiers. In James's story, both turn out to be invaded by the logic of Freudian negation, itself a type of intrapsychic filtration.

Scott Simpkins, "They Do the Men in Different Voices: Narrative Cross Dressing in Sand and Shelley."

Female authors who employ male narrators seemingly reinforce male ideology despite their presumed concern with empowering members of their own gender. However, it is possible that a hidden agenda is at work in these texts as well, one that strives for the opposite effect by fostering a substantial critique of the economic force of the male narrative. In part, this agenda would be accomplished through the use of male characters who experience a new orientation toward women by altering their attitudes toward others (again, usually women) in relation to themselves. In this manner, women writers can draw upon--rather than radically challenge--phallocentric narrative relations of power designated by gender. Romantic women writers such as Mary Shelley and George Sand apparently hoped to generate such a response through subtle manipulations of the reader's gender-oriented expectations that, on the surface, support male-oriented values but, below that surface, effectively undermine them.

William Marling, "The Parable of the Prodigal Son: An Economic Reading."

The Parable of the Prodigal Son, told by Jesus in the book of Luke, has inspired much art, but interpretations of it have been conventionally pious. Recent biblical scholarship and narratological analysis suggest that the elder brother is at least as important to the underlying narrative as the prodigal son. Through him may be uncovered an older fabula, whose ideological operations present a different dynamic about psychological maturity, social reciprocity, genetic descent, and economic power. This older pattern organizes giving, spending, and saving in a dynamic cycle, termed by Northrop Fry "a do ut des bargain: I give that you may give." This basic patriarchal paradigm, once glimpsed, may also be seen in such texts as King Lear and Paradise Lost. 

Ruth Ginsburg, "In Pursuit of Self: Theme, Narration, and Focalization in Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood."

The narratological concepts of narration and focalization refer to different but interrelated aspects of narrative texts. Similarly, theme and narrative techniques belong to different but mutually dependent categories. As all are inferred from the language of the text, narration of nonverbal experience is an intriguing question. The complex relationship between theme, narration, and focalization is nowhere more apparent than in texts of retrospective self-narration. It is particularly problematic where a "reluctant autobiography" is concerned. Christa Wolf's conflict-ridden Patterns of Childhood is an example of the latter. In it an intricate mutual dependence and interference of theme, narration, and focalization is at work. The opposing tendencies of memory versus repression, acknowledgment of a Nazi past versus ignorance, self-integration versus disintegration are structured in this relationship. Speech and silence compete in a narrative whose theme and narrative techniques are in constant conflict.

Arlette Bouloumié, "Writing and Modernism: Michel Tournier's Friday."

Michel Tournier claims he has rejected the experimentation that typifies the nouveau roman in favor of traditional forms. In Friday, however, the author exploits all three categories of mise en abyme studied by Lucien Dällenbach in The Mirror in the Text; this technique brings to the fore the conditions that produce the text, a salient feature of the nouveau roman. By splitting the book into a past-tense, third-person narrative and a present-tense, first-person logbook, Tournier makes his text structurally reflect the thematic partition between the old Robinson and the new man he has become. Similarly, the explosion of the cave symbolizes the interior explosion that resolves the growing tension between the two narrative forms and establishes a superior unity. Friday thus appears to be a parable on writing implying that the conventional self must be destroyed so that truths from the depths of the soul may be expressed. 

Jean Ricardou, "Immersing the Narrative in the Text."

"Textics," a new critical approach, defamiliarizes old territory and opens it up for fresh conquest.  It is applied to José-Maria de Hérédia's poem "Nemea" and compared to other pedagogical and scholarly approaches to demonstrate this latest "revolution" against the critical establishment.