Gerard Genette is the final critic of Narratology and perhaps the greatest influence on the study of narratives, he asserted that narratives like the plot of story are utilized, the concepts of mimesis and diegesis, focalization, the importance of time, the frame of the story and the language utilized by the characters. He labeled the forms of narrative and expanded upon their purpose, he stated that mimesis or the“parts of a narrative which are presented in a mimetic manner are ‘dramatised’...making use of dialogue which contains direct speech”Barry. Mimesis creates the illusion of a narrative in which the reader can experience the story through the narration step by step in a dramatic fashion. Conversely, diegesis describes the act of “ …show more content…
The study of narratology encapsulates the efforts of theorists like Cleanth Brooks, Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud to draw criticism away from traditional concepts of a singular narrative and transform them with theories surrounding the ‘real’ meaning of a story and expand the types of recognized literature. As well as the theory of structuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism and new historicism with each transformation the culture changed to discover a commonality in literature and a link in the narrative. Narratology established that there were different categories and types of narrators, the unreliable narrator was able to flourish in this environment. Gerard Genette the literary critic established that narratives were comprised of different components within the story to direct the reader and manipulate the plot and tone by altering the pace and the setting. The unreliable narrator became popular in the realm of fiction, as a result of the posthumanist movement. Posthumanist critics stem from four shifts in the thought process: first, that identity is fluid, shifting and reshaping itself to match the time period; second, the notion that literary text after theory is unstable because theory itself is changing. Third, aware of the instability of language and fourth the unwelcome influence of theory itself, that no matter the location or time period you are affected by the outside culture. It was during this movement that fiction proliferated as a genre. Due to the posthumanist movement a greater focus is placed on discovering which characteristics constitute a human, however to analyze this a critic
I frankly confess that I have, as a general thing, but little enjoyment of it, and that it has never seemed to me to be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. . . . But it is apt to spoil two good things – a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible-feeding writing that has been inflicted upon the world. The only cases in whi...
Narrative, it seems banal to observe, opens a space. This space is not so much a place of play for unlimited possibilities (although in the best of possible worlds it might yet be) as somewhere determined, always, in advance, by the future anterior: what will have happened and how it will already have taken place lure us through stories to their ends, become the end that shines through from the very start. Reading for the ending: in narrative, the end justifies the means; the end is the means.
In ‘unreliable narration’ the narrator’s account is at odds with the implied reader's surmises about the story’s real intentions. The story und...
The purpose of this essay is to analyse and compare the narrative situations proposed by Franz Stanzel in the dystopian novels Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. For this aim, I am going to focus on the aspects focalization (reflection), relationship reader-narrator, narrative distance, knowledge, and reliability and demonstrate that they affect the interpretation of the novel by readers in a significant way. In the end, I will draw conclusions on how these techniques serve to alienate the narratives from their science fiction setting to set even more disconcerting issues about human’s existence.
“But what is an author?”- a question posed by philosophers, literary critics, English teachers, and the general public since the author-figure became widely used. A hot topic of debate is never easy to find a simple answer for, and the query of authorship is no different. Luckily, hot topics of debate also happen to have many harmonious and clashing opinions surrounding them, free for an individual to agree or to disagree with. This is but one: to be an author is to be a conduit for ideas; a conduit’s significance to a work depends on the content of the work and the readers’ intentions with it- a juxtaposition with narrative technique, which should never be analyzed in regard to the author.
A narrative is constructed to elicit a particular response from its audience. In the form of a written story, authors use specific narrative strategies to position the ‘ideal reader’ to attain the intended understanding of the meanings in the text. Oliver Sacks’ short story The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is an unusual short story because it does not display conventional plot development; the story does not contain conflict or resolution of conflict. The genre of the story is also difficult to define because it reads as an autobiographical account of an experience Sacks had with a patient while working as a neurologist. Although it is arguable that the narrative is a work of non-fiction, it is nevertheless a representation, distinct from a reflection of the real events. It is a construction, Sacks chose the elements that were included and omitted in the narrative and used narrative strategies to position readers to process the signs in the text and produce reach the dominant understanding. This blurring of truth and fiction is similar to that in the genre of ‘new journalism’. Although, rather than being a journalist writing a fictional piece of journalism, Sacks is a doctor writing a fictional medical analysis. To influence readers’ comprehension of the narrative, Sacks utilised the point of view strategy of subjective narration, atypical in this short story in that a characterisation or representation of Oliver Sacks is the narrator and Oliver Sacks the person is the real author. The story is character-driven rather than plot-driven and regardless of how accurate a depiction of the real people the characters are, they are constructions. Sacks gave the characters of Doctor P. and his namesake admirable and sympathetic trait...
The Chicago critic Wayne Booth in his book Rhetoric of Fiction first coined the terms reliable and unreliable narrator. These terms have been of notable importance in narratological (analysis of narratives) studies ever since Booth’s book was first published in 1961. Booth defines the reliable and unreliable narrator in the following way: “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (Booth 158-59). In other words, when a narrator expresses values and perceptions that strikingly diverge from those of the author, he is deemed to be an unreliable narrator (Olson 93). Once the narrator has been deemed unreliable, then the narrator’s unreliability will be consistent throughout the rest of the work (Booth 158).
In his essay dated 1968, Roland Barthes sought to convince the individual reader that the author is obsolete; writers only have the capacity to draw upon existing themes (or structures) and reassemble them in a different order. This typically structuralist view completely defies a writer's ability to express himself through unique, individual stories leading many to term the approach as 'anti-humanistic'. Barthes clearly drew influence from Northrop Frye, author of 'Anatomy of Criticism', who outlined these repeated narratives as the comic, romantic, tragic and ironic. In turn these corresponded respectively to the four seasons, compiling what Terry Eagleton refers to as 'a cyclical theory of literary history'. It would seem through this that Frye achieved his ultimate aim, by creating a critical theory that was objective and systematic. To summarise, Frye and most structuralists soug...
Now, one might argue that because the narrator thinks this story “is worth a book in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men”, then he is biased: ergo, he’s an unreliable narrator (1940). However, being biased in and of itself is not the sole criterion for a narrator be...
A narrative is specified to amuse, to attract, and grasp a reader’s attention. The types of narratives are fictitious, real or unification or both. However, they may consist of folk tale stories, mysteries, science fiction; romances, horror stories, adventure stories, fables, myths and legends, historical narratives, ballads, slice of life, and personal experience (“Narrative,” 2008). Therefore, narrative text has five shared elements. These are setting, characters, plot, theme, and vocabulary (“Narrative and Informational Text,” 2008). Narrative literature is originally written to communicate a story. Therefore, narrative literature that is written in an excellent way will have conflicts and can discuss shared aspects of human occurrence.
Some of the characteristics of Modernism are: a desire to break conventions and established traditions, reject history, experiment, remove relativity, remove any literal meaning, and create an identity that is fluid. The rejection of history sought to provide a narrative that could be completely up for interpretation. Any literal meaning no longer existed nor was it easily given; essence became synonymous. Narrative was transformed. Epic stories, like “Hills Like White Elephants”, could occur in the sequence of a day. Stories became pushed by a flow of thoughts. The narrative became skeptical of linear plots, preferring to function in fragments. These fragments often led to open unresolved inconclusive endings. This echoes in the short story’s format. The short story functions in fragmented dialogue. Focusing on subjectivity rather than objectivity. Creating characters with unfixed, mixed views to challenge readers.
In the simplest form, there is a basic structural pattern to narratives, as expressed through Tzvetan Todorov’s explanation of narrative movement between two equilibriums. A narrative begins in a stable position until something causes disequilibrium, however, by the end of the story, the equilibrium is re-established, though it is different than the beginning (O’Shaughnessy 1999: 268). Joseph Cam...
Of the many literary conventions used to describe JM Coetzee's Foe, one of the more commonly written about is metafiction. Since about 1970, the term metafiction has been used widely to discuss works of post-modern fiction and has been the source of heated debate on whether its employ marks the death or the rebirth of the novel. A dominant theme in post-modern fiction, the term "metafiction" has been defined by literary critics in multiple ways. John Barth offers perhaps the most simplified definition: metafiction is "a novel that imitates a novel rather than the real world." Patricia Waugh extends our understanding to add that it is "fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to itself as an artifact to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality." According to these definitions, metafiction concerns itself not with the creation of a new narra...
This paper will present briefly Henry James and his thoughts about the art of fiction that is presented by his same titled essay before thoroughly analyzing his novel: The Wings of the Dove. James’ ideas on his article The Art of Fiction will be applied to The Wings of the Dove and the narrative style that he uses will be indicated by certain quotations taken from the novel.
Wong, Ning. “Introduction: Historicizing Postmodernist Fiction.” Narrative 21.3 (2013): 263-270. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Oct. 2013.