{"title":"Reading Unnaturally: A Response to Ellen Peel","authors":"Jan Alber, Brian K. Richardson","doi":"10.1353/nar.2023.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2023.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"31 1","pages":"102 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48931878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Knowing What’s Unnatural for Somebody: A Reply to Jan Alber and Brian Richardson","authors":"Ellen Peel","doi":"10.1353/nar.2023.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2023.0006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"31 1","pages":"106 - 109"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45232627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:In Morphology of the Folktale, Vladimir Propp sets out three major postulates for understanding his corpus of Russian fairy tales: the first is the concept of the character network; the second is that of the participant role; the third is the importance of character action. According to Propp, each separate character fills a particular participant role in a definite character network, where that character is defined not in terms of his or her character attributes, but rather in terms of the importance of his or her action for the outcome of the story. Nonetheless, if we attempt to apply Propp’s plot genotype analysis to a number of fairy tales, including Charles Perrault’s Cinderella, we are confronted by a number of potential anomalies, anomalies that suggest a potential contradiction between Propp’s second and third postulates. In this paper, we aim to solve these anomalies by defining two new character concepts: the first is that of the Cipher Character; the second, that of the Lost Character. These modifications have some interesting repercussions within the wider realm of narrative.
{"title":"Character Networks, the Zero Function, and the Lost Character: Solving Three Anomalies in Plot Genotype Theory","authors":"Terence Patrick Murphy, Na Zheng","doi":"10.1353/nar.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In Morphology of the Folktale, Vladimir Propp sets out three major postulates for understanding his corpus of Russian fairy tales: the first is the concept of the character network; the second is that of the participant role; the third is the importance of character action. According to Propp, each separate character fills a particular participant role in a definite character network, where that character is defined not in terms of his or her character attributes, but rather in terms of the importance of his or her action for the outcome of the story. Nonetheless, if we attempt to apply Propp’s plot genotype analysis to a number of fairy tales, including Charles Perrault’s Cinderella, we are confronted by a number of potential anomalies, anomalies that suggest a potential contradiction between Propp’s second and third postulates. In this paper, we aim to solve these anomalies by defining two new character concepts: the first is that of the Cipher Character; the second, that of the Lost Character. These modifications have some interesting repercussions within the wider realm of narrative.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"31 1","pages":"49 - 68"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44924826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:In this essay, I examine Richard Marsh’s obscure and eccentric fin-desiècle novel The Beetle (1897) and read its disturbing collusion between racial otherness and gender non-conformity as an act of colonial and narrative subjugation. I examine the ways in which the entirely white cast of narrators entrap the Egyptian beetle within their Eurocentric and cisnormative discourses of gender embodiment. As the narrators tell their stories of this mysterious, shapeshifting, gender nonconforming “Oriental” beetle, I account for their concomitant pronoun panic, and their attempts to quash the beetle through the ever-shifting narrator voices. But the titular character’s voice nonetheless irrupts within these narrator’s voices, defying the narrative parameters that they circumscribe. I explore the beetle’s incursions into the language of these narrators, arguing for their peculiar deployment of free indirect discourse as conceptually coterminous with their “transmigratory” powers. However, despite such prowess with reclaiming forms of narration, I argue that the beetle ultimately absorbs and supersedes the ability to be narrativized.
{"title":"Transmigrations: Race, Resistance, and Imperial Narrative Strategy in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle","authors":"Scarlet Luk","doi":"10.1353/nar.2022.0053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2022.0053","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In this essay, I examine Richard Marsh’s obscure and eccentric fin-desiècle novel The Beetle (1897) and read its disturbing collusion between racial otherness and gender non-conformity as an act of colonial and narrative subjugation. I examine the ways in which the entirely white cast of narrators entrap the Egyptian beetle within their Eurocentric and cisnormative discourses of gender embodiment. As the narrators tell their stories of this mysterious, shapeshifting, gender nonconforming “Oriental” beetle, I account for their concomitant pronoun panic, and their attempts to quash the beetle through the ever-shifting narrator voices. But the titular character’s voice nonetheless irrupts within these narrator’s voices, defying the narrative parameters that they circumscribe. I explore the beetle’s incursions into the language of these narrators, arguing for their peculiar deployment of free indirect discourse as conceptually coterminous with their “transmigratory” powers. However, despite such prowess with reclaiming forms of narration, I argue that the beetle ultimately absorbs and supersedes the ability to be narrativized.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"30 1","pages":"388 - 407"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47708492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This essay focuses on the construction of unconscious processes of the mind in narrative fiction, particularly in the work of modernist women writers. Bringing together Dorrit Cohn’s insights on the presentation of the unconscious, cognitive narratology, and phenomenological and feminist perspectives, we propose an approach for the narratological study of the unconscious that centers not on the “hidden depths” of fictional minds but rather on the way the unconscious “spreads out” into the social and material dimensions of storyworlds. Our method of reading highlights the techniques through which the modernist texts guide their readers to pay attention to the enactment of the unconscious in the characters’ bodily and intersubjective engagements and action, and in the spaces constructed in the stories. Moreover, we show the ways the modernist writers’ explorations of the unconscious reflect and challenge the restrictive socio-cultural environments in which the stories are situated.
{"title":"Explorations of the Unconscious in Modernist Women’s Works","authors":"E. Nykänen, Laura-Amalia Oulanne, Anna Ovaska","doi":"10.1353/nar.2022.0049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2022.0049","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay focuses on the construction of unconscious processes of the mind in narrative fiction, particularly in the work of modernist women writers. Bringing together Dorrit Cohn’s insights on the presentation of the unconscious, cognitive narratology, and phenomenological and feminist perspectives, we propose an approach for the narratological study of the unconscious that centers not on the “hidden depths” of fictional minds but rather on the way the unconscious “spreads out” into the social and material dimensions of storyworlds. Our method of reading highlights the techniques through which the modernist texts guide their readers to pay attention to the enactment of the unconscious in the characters’ bodily and intersubjective engagements and action, and in the spaces constructed in the stories. Moreover, we show the ways the modernist writers’ explorations of the unconscious reflect and challenge the restrictive socio-cultural environments in which the stories are situated.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"30 1","pages":"304 - 321"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46556665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This essay queries the identification of modernist fiction with the development of formal strategies of interiority. Returning to the novel that Auerbach singles out as exemplary of the inward turn, I read To the Lighthouse as a work that does not engage exclusively with problematics of consciousness and memory but is also concerned with the ontological precarity of the object-world. I argue that in the aberrant middle section of the novel, titled “Time Passes,” Woolf develops a practice of writing in absentia—a form of narration that evacuates consciousness, without rising to omniscience. Within this section, Woolf represents a world in which the anthropocentric premises that elsewhere govern the text are suddenly suspended: the active, self-determining, subject and the inert, affectable object cease momentarily to be the primary points of reference for parsing existence. The spectral quality of this narration, which is neither “objective” nor mediated through character, de-stabilizes conventional wisdom about focalization, insofar as the latter relies on distinctions between interiority and exteriority that are organized with reference to the human and its variable epistemological positioning. Inquiring more broadly into the place of things in modern fiction, the essay situates Woolf ’s experiment in relation to contemporaneous developments in philosophy and psychoanalysis. I focus first on how she revises a central conceit of Cambridge Realism—namely, hypothesizing the absence of the perceiver in order to establish objects as “real”; and second, on Walter Benjamin’s evocation of a “language of things,” which illuminates Woolf ’s effort to cultivate a new form of elegy.
{"title":"Writing in Absentia: Woolf and the Language of Things","authors":"M. Ty","doi":"10.1353/nar.2022.0050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2022.0050","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay queries the identification of modernist fiction with the development of formal strategies of interiority. Returning to the novel that Auerbach singles out as exemplary of the inward turn, I read To the Lighthouse as a work that does not engage exclusively with problematics of consciousness and memory but is also concerned with the ontological precarity of the object-world. I argue that in the aberrant middle section of the novel, titled “Time Passes,” Woolf develops a practice of writing in absentia—a form of narration that evacuates consciousness, without rising to omniscience. Within this section, Woolf represents a world in which the anthropocentric premises that elsewhere govern the text are suddenly suspended: the active, self-determining, subject and the inert, affectable object cease momentarily to be the primary points of reference for parsing existence. The spectral quality of this narration, which is neither “objective” nor mediated through character, de-stabilizes conventional wisdom about focalization, insofar as the latter relies on distinctions between interiority and exteriority that are organized with reference to the human and its variable epistemological positioning. Inquiring more broadly into the place of things in modern fiction, the essay situates Woolf ’s experiment in relation to contemporaneous developments in philosophy and psychoanalysis. I focus first on how she revises a central conceit of Cambridge Realism—namely, hypothesizing the absence of the perceiver in order to establish objects as “real”; and second, on Walter Benjamin’s evocation of a “language of things,” which illuminates Woolf ’s effort to cultivate a new form of elegy.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"30 1","pages":"322 - 343"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42500846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This essay seizes upon the tension between two senses of “eventuality,” as concerning the staple of narrative, events, and as concerning the kind of contingency that remains unassimilated by narrative sense. Contingency is a manifestation of the gap between the systemic complexity of temporal phenomena and the reductive heuristic of narrative as a mode of cognition. Sophisticated forms of narrative, however, may choose to confront this gap rather than merely exhibit it, as part of their continual effort to refine narrative and finesse its limitations. The possibility of doing so arises because of two features inherent in narrative form itself, which are its latent reflexiveness and its dependence upon the implicit. “One of the Missing,” by Ambrose Bierce, serves as the means through which these ideas are elaborated in more concrete terms, exhibiting as it does both a self-conscious concern with contingency and narrative, and an implicit potentiality beyond its imposition of narrative logic.
摘要:本文探讨了“偶然性”的两种意义之间的张力，即关于叙事的主体——事件，以及关于未被叙事意义同化的偶然性。偶然性是时间现象的系统复杂性与叙事作为一种认知方式的还原启发式之间的差距的表现。然而，复杂的叙事形式可能会选择面对这一差距，而不仅仅是展示它，作为他们不断努力完善叙事和巧妙处理其局限性的一部分。这种可能性的产生是由于叙事形式本身固有的两个特征，即其潜在的反身性和对隐含的依赖。安布罗斯·比尔斯(Ambrose Bierce)的《失踪者之一》(One of the Missing)作为一种手段，通过更具体的术语来阐述这些想法，它既表现出对偶然性和叙事的自觉关注，也表现出超越叙事逻辑强加的隐含潜力。
{"title":"Eventuality in Fiction: Contingency, Complexity and Narrative","authors":"Richard G. Walsh","doi":"10.1353/nar.2022.0048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2022.0048","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay seizes upon the tension between two senses of “eventuality,” as concerning the staple of narrative, events, and as concerning the kind of contingency that remains unassimilated by narrative sense. Contingency is a manifestation of the gap between the systemic complexity of temporal phenomena and the reductive heuristic of narrative as a mode of cognition. Sophisticated forms of narrative, however, may choose to confront this gap rather than merely exhibit it, as part of their continual effort to refine narrative and finesse its limitations. The possibility of doing so arises because of two features inherent in narrative form itself, which are its latent reflexiveness and its dependence upon the implicit. “One of the Missing,” by Ambrose Bierce, serves as the means through which these ideas are elaborated in more concrete terms, exhibiting as it does both a self-conscious concern with contingency and narrative, and an implicit potentiality beyond its imposition of narrative logic.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"30 1","pages":"287 - 303"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42651081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This essay aims to reimagine our narrative and queer theories by speculating on possible queer narrative forms. I start from three facets of this problem: the literary archive that has shaped queer theory, the narratological archive that has lately started grappling with its intersection with queer theory, and new queer narrative, via Gregory Bredbeck’s discussion of New Narrative and the distinctions between gay and queer narrative, narrative and antinarrative. From the theoretical frameworks, I turn to a close reading of the remarkable experimental narratives of Renee Gladman’s The Ravickians and Ben Marcus’s Age of Wire and String to show how not all experimental narratives are queer, or even New Narrative, but some open up remarkably queer possibilities.
{"title":"Thinking through Queer Narrative Forms with Ben Marcus and Renee Gladman","authors":"E. Mccallum","doi":"10.1353/nar.2022.0052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2022.0052","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay aims to reimagine our narrative and queer theories by speculating on possible queer narrative forms. I start from three facets of this problem: the literary archive that has shaped queer theory, the narratological archive that has lately started grappling with its intersection with queer theory, and new queer narrative, via Gregory Bredbeck’s discussion of New Narrative and the distinctions between gay and queer narrative, narrative and antinarrative. From the theoretical frameworks, I turn to a close reading of the remarkable experimental narratives of Renee Gladman’s The Ravickians and Ben Marcus’s Age of Wire and String to show how not all experimental narratives are queer, or even New Narrative, but some open up remarkably queer possibilities.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"30 1","pages":"364 - 387"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45545088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This essay builds upon Joshua Pederson’s article, “Speak Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory,” published in Narrative in 2014. While Pederson’s three dicta for analyzing trauma are useful, his exclusive use of war-related trauma literature ignores the way in which hegemonic masculinity and public and private memory influence victims’ ability to tell their stories. Scholars also need to examine what the body “speaks” and the use of figurative language. If trauma is public, figurative language is used to describe an internal conflict and signals transformation. If trauma is private, figurative language is not transformative. Instead, it moves from ambiguity to silence, and the body becomes the only form of speech others can hear. Judith Herman proposes that psychological advances on trauma are dependent on political movements. She outlines three key movements: the study of hysteria at the end of the 19th century, the response to shell shock in World War I, and the women’s rights movement in the 1970s. I use two of Pat Barker’s novels—Regeneration and Union Street—because they mirror two of the movements Herman identifies: World War 1 and the 1970s. This essay illustrates the problems in assuming that victims have a choice in speaking about their trauma when it is private while also highlighting how the body speaks when language is limited or absent.
{"title":"Bearing Witnessing with What We Cannot Speak: The Use of the Abject and Figurative Language in Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Union Street","authors":"Carol Erwin","doi":"10.1353/nar.2022.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2022.0051","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay builds upon Joshua Pederson’s article, “Speak Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory,” published in Narrative in 2014. While Pederson’s three dicta for analyzing trauma are useful, his exclusive use of war-related trauma literature ignores the way in which hegemonic masculinity and public and private memory influence victims’ ability to tell their stories. Scholars also need to examine what the body “speaks” and the use of figurative language. If trauma is public, figurative language is used to describe an internal conflict and signals transformation. If trauma is private, figurative language is not transformative. Instead, it moves from ambiguity to silence, and the body becomes the only form of speech others can hear. Judith Herman proposes that psychological advances on trauma are dependent on political movements. She outlines three key movements: the study of hysteria at the end of the 19th century, the response to shell shock in World War I, and the women’s rights movement in the 1970s. I use two of Pat Barker’s novels—Regeneration and Union Street—because they mirror two of the movements Herman identifies: World War 1 and the 1970s. This essay illustrates the problems in assuming that victims have a choice in speaking about their trauma when it is private while also highlighting how the body speaks when language is limited or absent.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"30 1","pages":"344 - 363"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46547817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Five Features in the Search of a Character Theory","authors":"Espen Aarseth","doi":"10.1353/nar.2022.0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2022.0039","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":"30 1","pages":"284 - 285"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44089992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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