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Narrative, vol. 16, no 2 (mai 2008)

Narrative, vol. 16, no 2 (mai 2008)

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Projet Muse)

Narrative is the official journal of The Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, the association for scholars interested in narrative. Narrative's broad range of scholarship includes the English, American, and European novel, nonfiction narrative, film, and narrative as used in performance art.


Vol. 16, no 2 (mai 2008)


Michael Toolan
Narrative Progression in the Short Story : First Steps in a Corpus Stylistic Approach
I am interested in the putative textual signalings of narrative progression, and thereafter the reader expectations that these foster; I am trying to identify such signalings (or narrative prospection, as it is also called) with new research methods, namely those of corpus linguistics. Research of this kind, blending a literary interest with use of corpus tools, is coming to be known as corpus stylistics (or more narrowly, corpus narratology). For readers of this journal I assume that neither explaining nor justifying an interest in narrative progression is necessary, so I will discuss this relatively briefly. I will spend a little more time outlining what corpus stylistics entails and what its limitations are; and then I will share some ways in which I have tried to...
(Extrait)

Sarah Copland
Reading in the Blend : Collaborative Conceptual Blending in the Silent Traveller Narratives
In The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner argue that a single cognitive operation may underlie "diverse human accomplishments," be "responsible for the origins of language, art, religion, science, and other singular human feats," and be "as indispensable for basic everyday thought as it is for artistic and scientific abilities" (vi).1 Beginning with the premise that the mind is made up of interconnected conceptual domains or mental spaces, Fauconnier and Turner posit that this fundamental cognitive operation is a process of domain mapping best understood as "conceptual blending."2 In conceptual blending, elements and vital relations from two or more input...
(Extrait)

Sue J. Kim
Narrator, Author, Reader : Equivocation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 1980 experimental text, Dictee, has garnered a great deal of critical attention. In Asian American studies in particular, analyses of the text have gone hand in hand with efforts to theorize poststructuralist subjectivity and postnationalism in the critical turn against unified subjectivity and reactionary nationalisms, and towards fragmented, heterogeneous, multiple subject formations.1 But despite critics' theoretical orientation towards heterogeneity and the impossibility of final articulation, readers of Dictee nearly unanimously speak of a narrator and/or acting subject, and moreover, identify that narrator as Cha. For example, critics have read the narrator of the following passage, which appears early in Dictee, as Cha: C'était le premier jour point Elle venait de loin...
(Extrait)


Lucy Ferriss
Uncle Charles Repairs to the A&P: Changes in Voice in the Recent American Short Story
That the craft and effect of the mainstream American short story evolved rapidly during the latter half of the 20th century is beyond dispute. Still problematic, however, are the theoretical underpinnings of widespread shifts in narrative technique, especially as they involve vision and voice. Efforts to theorize the short story have focused overwhelmingly on a turn from omniscient narration and a necessary sense of unity in the story to "the familiarity of an individual point of view" (Miller 35) and "fragmentation as an accurate model of the world" (Ferguson 191). Equally salient to the actual narrative discourse of the contemporary short story, however, may be the relative disappearance of the technique known as the Uncle Charles Principle. By pinpointing...
(Extrait)

Jean Wyatt
Love's Time and the Reader: Ethical Effects of Nachträglichkeit in Toni Morrison's Love
Temporal discontinuities and nonlinear narrative structures characterize many of Toni Morrison's novels. Morrison's fictions, taken as a whole, rewrite African American history - a history of disruption, dispossession, and displacement; in her later novels especially, formal breaks in chronological sequence reflect these upheavals and the psychic dislocations that accompany them. In Beloved, for example, disturbances of temporal sequence reflect, among other things, the traumatic displacements of the Middle Passage, which severed the enslaved Africans from their land, their culture, their ancestors, and their past.1 In Love the characters' severance from their past is a personal, not a world-historical event, an individual rather than a...
(Extrait)