NARRATIVE最新文献

In the surviving literature of the Roman Republic, the galli are near-universal objects of repulsion, with their gender presentation being constantly derided. The fragments of Varro’s Eumenides, however, offer an opportunity to consider repulsion alongside desire and how the two are often closer than we think. I begin this essay by contextualizing the galli within Roman society and broader trans history; I then employ a trans narratological reading to consider how the narrator attempts to construct different positive images of the galli and how they in turn refuse his categorizations regardless. As the genre of this text is satire, we might initially understand the galli as targets of mockery for Varro; however, the fragmentation of the text, alongside the narrator’s consciously unstable viewpoint, allow this group the opportunity to step outside of the conventional depiction of them, and even construct themselves beyond the normative bounds expected of them, by the narrator or the audience. Reading the galli through a lens of desire allows us to recognize the multiplicity of emotional responses that they would have elicited in the Roman world and expand our understanding beyond the reductive image usually presented by their authors. As well as opening up new lines of conversation around the galli themselves, this essay also offers a broader opportunity to consider how trans experiences can be narrated, even at the expense of the narrator, the author, or their own wider society.

Transgender autobiographies have been a subject of narratology since the 1990s. Most of these studies have focused predominantly on twentieth- and, later, twenty-first-century texts, guided by the increasing availability of primary sources and the temporal limitations of transgender history. And yet, as Jay Prosser argued in his influential 1998 work Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Sexuality, “even without the official discourse of sex change, the plot lines of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transgendered subjects are remarkably consistent with those of contemporary transsexuals” (133). This article expands the chronology and geography of narrato-logical analysis of this genre through reading Notes of a Cavalry Maiden [Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy] (1836) by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova) (1783–1866), a Russian-Ukrainian hero of the Napoleonic wars, as a transgender autobiography. This reading brings into consideration new forms, affects, and narrative structures as constituent elements of trans narratives and has the potential to expand anglophone trans imaginaries past the confines of their current locations and temporalities.

Non-human metaphors, including animal metaphors, are widely used to evoke trans experiences, but the blooming flowers and hatching butterflies are often reduced to mere tropes or clichés. This article investigates what a narrative approach to these non-human metaphors can offer us to reconceptualize trans existence. I employ Benjamin Biebuyck and Gunther Martens’s concept of the ‘paranarrative,’ which allows us to look at metaphors as creating an additional narrative layer where aspects of the main narrative can be deepened, nuanced, or even contested. In two case studies, I unearth hidden sides of trans experience evoked through non-human metaphors on a paranarrative level. In Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s novel Mijn lieve gunsteling, animal metaphors ranging from otters to birds bring to the surface a view of transness not limited to gender, but one that entails feelings of isolation and even uncontrollable desires. The metaphors in the novel Wormmaan by Mariken Heitman likewise raise attention to the connectedness between human, plants, and matter that society has tried to contain in limiting categorizations, such as gender divisions. By broadening the scope of trans as an embodied experience across various boundaries, this article calls for an expansive approach to trans narratology that reaches beyond gender towards the variety of affects that trans is capable of exposing.

From the vantagepoint of a feminist/queer/cisgender narratologist, “Trans-forming Narratology” asks which aspects of narrative practice might be particularly salient to developing a fruitful trans narratology while also calling our attention to elements of narrative that conventional (cis)narratology has undervalued or ignored. Keeping in mind matters that might be particularly relevant to trans narratives, this speculative essay explores aspects of voice, embodiment, character space, plotting, and closure in a set of recent American and British novels. It considers ways in which trans narratives can exploit the gender freedom of the first-person English pronoun or, conversely, signal temporally dual identities through heterodiegetic naming practices. It addresses tensions between a character’s proclaimed gender and their assigned sex and the differing implications of texts with narratees who are also textual actors and those whose narratees serve as external confidantes. Through brief forays into multiple aspects of narrative form, this essay argues for a narratology that can show the rich and varied capacities of trans writings past and present, with the hope that attention to trans narratives will both deepen our understanding of trans literature and advance the larger project of a comprehensive, situated narratology.

This paper examines the overlaps between a fictional paratext and a fictional personal narrative, as framed within Jordy Rosenberg’s 2018 novel Confessions of the Fox. The novel’s primary narrative, a “manuscript” of the metafictional biography of eighteenth-century transgender criminal célèbre Jack Sheppard, is encased in multiple layers of heavy footnoting by the novel’s narrator, Dr. Voth, a trans scholar himself. Rosenberg manipulates the novel form with insertions of substantial paratextual narrative, crossing over and at times mirroring Sheppard’s story, blending queer theorizations of temporality with narrative structural innovations to explore a trans “touch across time.” Rosenberg thus queers the nature and function of the paratext, reimagining and complicating its centrality to both the narrative “presenting” and the temporal “making present” of an individual narrative.

Discussing similarities between antimimetic and queer/trans narratives, as well as interlacing subjects of interest in the respective fields of unnatural and queer/trans narratology, this article suggests the importance of experimental texts for theorizing trans narratives. It presents its arguments by focusing on one case study, a mixed genre manuscript written in 2004 and published in 2015, succubus in my pocket by the late trans poet kari edwards (1954–2006). My approach mines queer narratology (Susan Lanser), trans poetics (Trace Peterson), unnatural narratology (Brian Richardson), and the study of narrative poetry (Brian McHale) for conceptual tools to discuss how an extremely antimimetic narrative entwines transgressions of narrative expectations with transgressions of expectations about sex and gender. The work invites narrative interpretations of sequential events based on causal expectations while consistently refuting default interpretive strategies. This article shows how weak narrativity can be deployed as a critique of narrative sense-making processes in general and, more particularly, of conventional progression in narratives about trans lives.