Style
Home
Current
Issue
How Stylisticians Draw on Narratology: Approaches, Advantages and Disadvantages
Terence Patrick Murphy
"The Uncertainties of Conversational Exchange"
Dialogue Monitoring as a Function of the Narrative Voice
John R. Reed
The Gentleman in the White Waitcoat: Dickens and
Metonymy
Alan Palmer
Intermental Thought in the Novel: The Middlemarch
Mind
Ernest Fontana
Pre-Facing Simile Vehicles in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's
Sonnets
Susan Peck MacDonald
Chandler's American Style
Guillermo Bartelt
Hegemonic Registers in House Made of Dawn
Despite their superficial similarity, there is an essential difference between stylistics's style and narratology's discourse, and this difference underlies the necessity for stylistics to draw upon narratology, and vice versa. Stylisticians have taken three main approaches in drawing on narratology: (1) the "mild" approach, which uses narratological concepts and models as frameworks for the investigation of style; (2) the "radical" approach, which attempts to incorporate narratology into stylistics; and (3) the "parallel" approach, which carry out both stylistic and narratological investigations in the same work or in two works by the same author. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, and these lead to suggestions for future studies.
back to top
Terence Patrick Murphy. "The Uncertainties
of Conversational Exchange" Dialogue Monitoring as a Function of the Narrative
Voice" / 396
In the landmark study Introduction to Text Linguistics (1981), Robert
de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler put forward the idea of the text as
a cybernetic system that continually self-regulates the functions of its
constituent occurrences. To work efficiently, however, the cybernetic system's
functional principles must exclude whole classes of utterances from consideration,
among them ambiguities, contradictions, discrepancies, in-jokes, and paradoxes.
Since such utterances play a central role in many of the conversational
exchanges among characters in novels, it would appear that the notion of
the text as a self-regulating cybernetic system cannot be extended to works
of narrative fiction. The central problem that Beaugrande and Dressler
have identified, however, remains. How do readers process the uncertain
or ambiguous conversational exchange? Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist provides
examples for an examination of a range of ways in which the narrative voice
plays a central role as the monitor of the uncertainties involved in conversational
exchange. The examination suggests that a central function of the narrative
voice is to provide the means for the reader to process the simple conversational
exchange, mixed-form conversation, and wholly monitored speech.
back to top
John R. Reed, "The Gentleman in the White Waitcoat:
Dickens and Metonymy" / 412
Dickens used metonymy, among other figures of speech, to distinguish
his mode of writing from the realism that was coming into fashion during
his career. Metonymy is a device generally described as characteristic
of realism, but with Dickens it often ironically subverts the realistic
focus on surfaces, facts, and materiality, and instead approaches the operations
of metaphor and simile, thereby privileging fancy and evoking an almost
symbolic narrative design. The starting point of this essay is a consideration
of the obscure figure of the gentleman in the white waistcoat in Oliver
Twist, but the argument is extended to Dickens's writings as a whole.
back to top
Alan Palmer. "Intermental Thought in the
Novel: The Middlemarch Mind" / 427
This essay is about intermental thought in the novel. Such thinking
is joint, group, shared, or collective, as opposed to intramental, or individual
or private thought. It is a crucially important component of fictional
narrative because much of the mental functioning that occurs in novels
is done by large organizations, small groups, work colleagues, friends,
families, couples, and other intermental units. It has been neglected,
however, by traditional narratological approaches. One of the most important
characters in George Eliot's Middlemarch is the town of Middlemarch itself.
I call the intermental functioning of the inhabitants of the town the Middlemarch
mind. After introducing the concept of intermental thought, I discuss the
construction of the Middlemarch mind in the opening few pages of the novel.
I then try to anticipate possible objections to the idea of intermental
functioning in fictional narrative, and I finish with a few general comments
on cognitive approaches to literature.
back to top
Ernest Fontana. "Pre-Facing Simile Vehicles
in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Sonnets." / 440
One of Rossetti's distinctive stylistic mannerisms is to introduce
a sonnet with an extended simile vehicle, which often has only a tangential
relationship to the simile topic. In eight of these as/so sonnets,
the opening vehicle extends for eight lines and often has the effect of
disturbing the equilibrium between it and its topic. These simile
vehicles often become mini-narratives, many of which treat moments of perception
and discovery. Three of these "pre-facing" simile vehicles treat
perceptions of the human face. Nevertheless, beyond those narratized
prefacing vehicles, there is almost an indecipherable interiority to be
found in the sonnets' sestet or topic clause.
back to top
Susan Peck MacDonald. "Chandler's American
Style." / 448
Raymond Chandler is often acknowledged as a stylist, but further analysis
remains to be done so as to go beyond vague adjectival descriptions and
approach a more linguistically informed description of his style, its role
in the development of the American novel, and its relevance to the shape
of modern American prose style in fiction or nonfiction. This essay discusses
Chandler's sense that he was writing in a particularly American idiom.
It analyzes his sentence length and structure, use of parataxis, and use
of verbs, as well as how Chandler's style related to various characterizations
of modern American prose style.
back to top
Guillermo Bartelt. "Hegemonic Registers
in House Made of Dawn." / 469
In N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn, temporal disjunctions
are marked by sudden shifts in register toward hegemonic discursive practices.
Momaday uses register-mixing as the vehicle with which to create a dynamic
stylistic interplay that represents a clash of Native and Anglo-American
ideologies. The protagonist's involuntary memory sequences issue a heteroglossia
that contributes to a process of defamiliarization.
back to top