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“Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory” / 168
Honor McKitrick Wallace
“Desire and the Female Protagonist: A Critique of
Feminist Narrative Theory” / 176
Jesse Matz
“Maurice in Time” / 188
Eyal Amiran
“After Dynamic Narratology” / 212
Danial Punday
“A Corporeal Narratology?” / 227
Philippe Carrard
“Narrative and Historiography: Writing the France
of the Occupation” / 243
H. Porter Abbott
“What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Narrative Literature’?
Looking for Answers Across Disciplinary Borders” / 260
Monika Fludernik
“Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? Narrative
Modalities and Generic Categorization” / 274
David Herman
“Lateral Reflexivity: Levels, Versions, and the Logic
of Paraphrase” / 293
Dorrit Cohn
“Discordant Narration” / 307
Gerald Prince
“Forty-One Questions on the Nature of Narrative”
/ 317
Brian Richarson and Monika Fludernik
“Bibliography of Recent Works on Narrative”
/ 319
Among the current definitions of narrative, causal and temporal conceptions continue to vie for explanatory supremacy. In contrast, nearly all standard accounts of modern criticism and theory follow a narrowly linear and relentlessly causal trajectory that reenacts the very teleology that recent theory has taught us to reject. A comprehensive account of the oblique evolution of narrative theory in this century leads to a more multiform model that can better express the recursive and deviant patterns of literary and critical history.
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Honor McKitrick Wallace. “Desire and the Female
Protagonist: A Critique of Feminist Narrative Theory” / 176
Because of its emphasis on the lyric, much feminist narrative theory
fails to address female protagonists who act and desire in modes corresponding
to masculine narrative tropes. In establishing the opposition between narrative
and lyric, theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Susan Stanford Friedman
align the lyric with feminine desire. Such theories overlook the dependence
of the lyric mode on domestic values; often the lyric is deeply implicated
in the very linear, masculine narrative structures it seeks to elude. An
examination of Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil demonstrates
how lyric conditions often trap female protagonists, necessitating the
articulation of a desire different from that specified by feminist theory.
Such texts stand in contrast to failed articulations of feminine desire
in other novels insofar as their protagonists initiate narrative on the
basis of a desire for agency and action, rather than on romantic or erotic
desire.
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Jesse Matz. “Maurice in Time” / 188
Maurice is a novel that waits for the future (for completion, publication,
and audience) but also looks nostagically to the past. This strange temporal
location reflects a temporality basic to Forster’s narrative structures
and sexual identity: like philosophers who presently ascribe to the “tenseless
theory of time,” Forster dispels identity among a tenseless order of moments,
in a narrative structure that seeks likewise to trade “becoming” for a
better order. In Maurice, such tactics as iterative seriality, overdetermined
prolepsis, nonephiphany, and other modes of “detensing” give form to a
version of homosexuality that would escape “identity,” with unusual implications
for moderist temporality and narratological criticism. Forster’s modernist
time is eccentric for its interest in logical order; and the narratological
criticism which would attend to his “tenseless” homosexual form must remember
that it is often the combination of subversion and order that encourages
the best narratological advances.
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Eyal Amiran. “After Dynamic Narratology” / 212
Dynamic narratology explains narrative in terms of its interiority
and energy, but fails because it thinks figures in the text show how the
text works. It confuses figuration wit poetics. This difficulty is found,
for example, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Brooks, and Fried. Clearly
many ways of reading do not confuse figuration with poetics, but they do
not engage the relation between narrative and textuality that defines narratology.
Textual theory, however, need not be abandoned in the analysis of narrative.
The text can be read symptomatically, as the expression of its contexts,
locating narrative power both outside and inside the text. A reading of
Kipling’s Kim exemplifies an understanding of narrative as predicated on
its symptomatic material features. narratology can succeed if it sees the
text as neither organic nor artificial, internal nor external, textual
nor figurative, but as linking the social and psychological with the textual.
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Danial Punday. “A Corporeal Narratology?” /
227
Narratology has traditionally ignored the body; our most basic terms
for discussing narrative will be enriched by attending to the
body. The body emerges as a meaningful object within narrative
as it is distinguished from other objects, is defined within a schema of
possible bodies, is positioned within an outside environment, and is granted
a particular degree of embodiment. As the body is shaped in this way, it
takes part in theories of characterization, plot, space, and narration.
Treating the body as a meaningful object within narrative has its own limitations,
however. Elizabeth Grosz's critique of the visual objectification
of the body suggests that a truly corporeal narratology needs to consider
bodies as textual objects but also as something more, as part of the atmosphere
in which the narrative places the reader.
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Philippe Carrard. “Narrative and Historiography:
Writing the France of the Occupation” / 243
In the current rhetoric and epistemology of historiography, the issue
is no longer to know whether narrative provides a legitimate mode of knowledge.
It is to determine whether historians use narrative, and—if they do not—what
alternative modes of discourse they may be employing. The examination of
a specific corpus: studies published about the period of the German occupation
in France, shows that historians now rely on different types of textual
organization. While they still use at times a straight, linear type of
narrative, they increasingly turn to genres that are low in narrativity
or even devoid of it. Eschewing narrative, however, seems reserved for
academic historians; story-telling still prevails in “popular” history.
Furthermore, the classification offered here depends on a narrow definition
of “narrative”; a more inclusive definition would admit more texts under
the category “narrative,” thus producing a different taxonomy.
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H. Porter Abbott. “What Do We Mean When We Say
‘Narrative Literature’? Looking for Answers Across Disciplinary Borders”
/ 260
Both the difficulty and the reward of crossing disciplinary borders
can be seen by applying a cognitive take to two familiar terms in literary
discourse: narrative and literature. This perspective gives new and interesting
life to these terms and at the same time reveals a wide conceptual gap
between them. Briefly, narrative operates as a platform while literature
operates as a set of toggle switches. Narrative appears to be a more deeply
embedded human response that can be turned on and left running while other
operations are performed on top of it. Literature, on the other hand, is
made up of qualities, the perception of which can be turned on and off
through suggestion or other cultural means. A final complication of this
argument is that one of these cultural toggle switches—instrumentality/non-instrumentality—can,
in one of its modes, operate as a platform. The reason for this is that,
while non-instrumentality is a widely accepted literary trait, instrumentality
is itself a narrative condition.
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Monika Fludernik. “Genres, Text Types, or
Discourse Modes? Narrative Modalities and Generic Categorization” / 274
Since Seymour Chatman narratology has started to compare narrative
with other text types like argument or description. The article first introduces
the non-linguist to a number of linguistic text type models and then draws
narratological conclusions from these models that are meant to aid narratological
research. In particular, a literary viewpoint helps to point out which
text types actually occur in separate genres and which text types merely
show up as parts of a text (especially description). The importance of
genre is emphasized throughout as is the necessity of distinguishing between
prototypical idealized text types (renamed: macro-genres) and the surface
level categories of actual texts (discourse modes). The list of three text
types which Chatman proposed is then expanded with reference to the oral
language and to poetry and a three-level model proposed to modify the original
triad. In a concluding section of the paper recent analyses of poetry and
its relation to narrative are discussed.
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David Herman. “Lateral Reflexivity: Levels,
Versions, and the Logic of Paraphrase” / 293
Narrative theorists should enrich the classical “levels” model on which
they regularly and still quite productively draw. Specifically, whereas
structuralist narratologists talked about narrative texts in terms of layers
and levels, the frame and the slot within the frame, theorists also need
to develop a “versions” model that captures how characters, situations,
and events sometimes replicate themselves across storyworlds built up during
the process of narrative comprehension. Analysts can then work toward describing
fiction not only immanently, as a network of dependency relations among
formal units, but also integratively, as a cluster of cues anchoring the
text in the cultural, interactional, linguistic, and cognitive skills that
make up narrative competence. Patrick Modiano’s 1968 novel La Place de
l’Étoile can be used, in this connection, as a tutor text; story-versions
proliferate in the novel in a manner that “lateralizes” the narrative.
Overtly displaying its own paraphrasability, the novel attaches itself
to a wider world of thought, action, and interaction—a world that people
attempt to understand by using narratives to build and exchange ever more
versions of it.
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Dorrit Cohn. “Discordant Narration” / 307
This article proposes the term “discordant narration” for the ideolological
kind of unreliability that may induce a reader to attribute to a fictional
text a different meaning from the one its narrator provides. After exemplifying
this concept in works told by a first-person narrator (Marlow in The Heart
of Darkness and Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights), it shows that discordance
also applies to certain third-person narrators, like the teller of Death
in Venice. It concludes by conceiving an ideal reader who is aware of the
choices involved in understanding this type of fiction.
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Gerald Prince. “Forty-One Questions on the Nature
of Narrative” / 317
Forty-one questions pertinent to the narratological enterpirse are
raised in an effort to clarify the nature of narrative, to explore some
of the dimensions of narratvitiy, and to interrogate the respective (dis)advantages
of a restrictive or an expansive definition of narrative(s) and narrativity.
Brian Richarson and Monika Fludernik. “Bibliography
of Recent Works on Narrative” / 319
Recent work in narrative theory comes from a variety of perspectives:
traditional approaches, postmodern narratology, ideologically-oriented
positions, and new interdisciplinary studies.
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