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English Department at NIU

Northern Illinois University

Richard Walsh
Fabula and Fictionality in Narrative Theory

Ralf Schneider
Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction

Mark Noe
LitCrit or LitLit?

Ira Clark
“Measure for Measure”: Chiasmus, Justice, and Mercy

William Solomon
Burlesque Dreams: American Amusement, Autobiography, and Henry Miller

Peter Groves
“What Music Lies in the Cold Print”: Larkin’s Experimental Metric

Richard Walsh, “Fabula and Fictionality in Narrative Theory” 
The concept of fabula, or its many near equivalents, has always been a staple of narrative theory, yet it is vulnerable to many theoretical objections. It is possible to justify a rhetorical view of the concept’s pragmatic value, and so its particular relevance to fiction, but only once various flawed notions of fabula have been eliminated. Some of these relate back quite directly to its Russian Formalist roots, but others have arisen through Structuralist mediations of the concept (in the guise of such pairs as “story” and “discourse”). The inadequacies of these models are manifest in fabula’s relationship to event, chronology, temporality, causality, perspective, medium, and the genesis of narrative. The concept remains valuable, however, in respect of its role in interpretation, especially in the case of fictional narrative. The rhetorical basis of this view of fabula and its relation to sujet effectively overturns the logical hierarchy of previous representational models. 
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Ralf Schneider, “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction” 
Understanding literary character is a dynamic process in which the reader’s knowledge structures and cognitive and emotional strategies continually interact with textual information. Dynamic effects of reading, such as inferencing or the formation and rejection of hypotheses, can only be described adequately if this interplay between top-down and bottom-up processing of information is examined. From these two sources of information, readers construct mental models not only of fictional situations, time, and space, but also of characters. Throughout the reading process, readers elaborate, modify, or revise character models to incorporate incoming information. A cognitive theory of literary character not only provides a systematic account of the constituent elements of character-reception from both text-related and reader-related sources, but it also proposes a process model that tries to capture the most important distinctive phases of mental-model construction in character-reception. The cognitive approach offers new categories for the analysis of literary character. 
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Mark Noe: “LitCrit or LitLit?” 
In 1965, Raymond Picard’s attack on structuralism, “New Criticism or New Fraud?,” launched an ongoing feud between traditional literary criticism and those varied disciplines that have been taught and studied under the umbrella term “literary theory”: structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction. An examination of three distinct moments in this feud—(1) Picard’s 1965 censure of structuralism, along with Roland Barthes’s reply, (2) M. H. Abrams and Hillis J. Miller’s 1976 MLA debate over deconstruction, and (3) two recently published journal articles, one denouncing postmodernism and the other defending poststructuralism--reveals that differences between criticism and theory have often obliquely attacked content by critiquing style. Rather than obscuring the debate, the focus on style suggests that stylistic differences between criticism and theory may point to differences between genres. Theoretical writing often crosses genres to become literature, and, in so doing, replaces critical with literary values that are expressed stylistically. A reassessment of stylistic differences between criticism and theory in turn suggests a reassessment of reading strategies. In this light, two unabashedly poststructuralist examples of theory as literature, Roland Barthes’s S/Z and Victor Vitanza’s “Electra(Trois): or, E-thics Trois,” may then be read as primary rather than secondary texts. 
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Ira Clark, “‘Measure for Measure’: Chiasmus, Justice, and Mercy”
Shakespeare employed the rhetorical scheme chiasmus throughout his career. An analytic survey of his uses draws on and extends examples and explanations from recent critics and theoretical rhetoricians. This survey shows that he employed it simply as witty, memorable language, the kind that Renaissance rhetorician Puttenham celebrates, and that he employed it as well in very complex ways, the kind Puttenham’s peer Peacham describes as requiring readers to slow down and analyze the equivalences and substitutions being weighed and traded. One interesting problem that chiasmus can accentuate involves the complex relationship of justice and mercy. In 2 Henry IV the newly crowned Henry V’s use of chiasmus reinforces his choice of regal justice instead of Falstaff’s proposed subversion of justice in his use just earlier. But in Measure for Measure the extensive employment of chiasmus consistently demands that the audience focus on the complex problems in multiple relationships and domains of interlocking interests that enter into practical examinations and applications when considering choices between meting out justice and granting mercy. The play’s chiasmic formulation of those relationships suggests that the complex connections and difficulties that link justice and mercy do more than provide compelling social concerns, for, ultimately, they prove intractable. It further suggests that we need to consider schemes  as well as images and tropes in our evaluation of literature and its figurations.
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William Solomon, “Burlesque Dreams: American Amusement, Autobiography, and Henry Miller”
The collapse of the frontier between high and low culture was underway well before World War II, as Hart Crane’s affirmation in “National Winter Garden” of burlesque as a redemptive force and Dos Passos’s critical appeal to roller-coaster riding as an analogy for aesthetic innovation demonstrate. Henry Miller’s Depression-era autobiographies, in particular the collection of short pieces entitled Black Spring, offers a superb point of access to the politicized dimensions of the exchange between literature and popular amusement in the 1930s. Modeling his aesthetic on the sensory thrills generated by modernized recreational practices, Miller discloses the use dissident artists found for carnivalized forms of mass entertainment throughout this period. In the process of tapping into nonliterary sources for artistic energy, Miller reveals as well that Deleuze and Guattari’s reconceptualization of desire along the lines of industrialized production needs to be amended in that it makes insufficient room for play as a radical force. 
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Peter Groves, “‘What Music Lies in the Cold Print’: Larkin’s Experimental Metric” 
Because of a self-proclaimed cultural conservatism and an apparent distrust of modernist experimentation, Phillip Larkin’s preference for metered verse has been seen by commentators as a kind of defiant antiquarianism, a reactionary reassertion of traditional forms. The more refined prosodic tools of modern linguistic metrics, however, reveal that Larkin, like Lowell, Wilbur, and the Australian James McAuley, sought not to return to Victorian forms but to develop and build upon the more flexible twentieth-century pentameter of Yeats and Auden. The process was taken furthest by Lowell and Larkin, but whereas Lowell ended like Pound in “break[ing] the pentameter” (Canto 81), Larkin succeeded in reinventing (or perhaps rediscovering) it for the twentieth century as an essentially oral meter, mimetic of the spoken language in a surprising variety of registers.
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