Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology ed. by John Pier

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology ed. by John Pier Maria Mäkelä Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology, ed. John Pier. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020. 237 pp. John Pier has taken on the challenging and important role of a transparadigmatic and transcultural mediator in literary narratology, a task typically falling on the shoulders of most well-versed and meticulous scholars. The value of this work is emblemized in the recent volume titled Contemporary French and Franco-phone Narratology, edited by Pier and featuring some of the most interesting and prominent scholars of narrative working in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada, all of them mostly publishing in French. The volume comes across as a counter-narrative to contemporary Anglophone narratology and particularly its master narrative of the triumph of context-sensitive English-language (post-classical) theories over the technical, detached French (classical) structuralism. Not only Pier’s Introduction but also many of the chapters construct French and francophone narratology as the often misunderstood Other, while English-language postclassical narratologies, practiced not only by Anglo-American colleagues but also non-English-speaking narratologists in, for example, Germany and the Nordic countries, are positioned as the dominant practice. Interestingly, Pier even writes that “few French-speaking researchers would describe themselves as feminist, postcolonial, rhetorical, cognitivist, or unnatural narratologists . . . it would be difficult to conclude that the postclassical narratologies have decisively taken root in francophone narrative theory” (3). By constructing this compelling counter-narrative of francophone scholars as free spirits who refuse to conform to the paradigms set by the US-dominated international scholarly community, Pier and his colleagues are well positioned to retell the history of French narratology from Greimas, Barthes, Todorov, and Genette to 21st century optional-narrator theories. The volume succeeds in [End Page 182] challenging such entrenched disciplinary ideas as stark dichotomies between text-centeredness and theories of readerly dynamics. Moreover, the retelling of disciplinary history from the francophone perspective deepens one’s understanding of the myriad ways in which non-literary, and especially linguistic and hermeneutic, narrative theories have shaped and challenged very basic narrato-logical categories, such as voice, narrator, and the story/discourse distinction. The volume attests that one of the strong points of narratology could in fact be this kind of metatheoretical and diachronic self-reflection, a practice that leads to a more fine-grained and adaptive understanding of our key concepts and scholarly practices. It must be said, however, that while the general outlook of the volume is highly metatheoretical, self-reflexive, and even self-critical, fertile comparisons between Anglophone and French theories of literary narratology that would have highlighted the added value of French theories for those currently ignorant are not sufficiently followed through. A case in point is the volume editor John Pier’s own chapter on French discourse analysis as a poorly recognized forerunner of postclassical “contextual-ist” narratologies. The key concept here is enunciation, originating in the work of linguist and semiotician Émile Benveniste and successfully imported into literary studies by Dominique Maingueneau and Ruth Amossy. French discourse analysts have a strong tradition of focusing either on the occasion of uttering (enunciation) or on its linguistic, stylistic and generic traces in discourse. Pier makes a convincing case for this tradition’s methodologically rigorous take on context as both social and generic; yet little is said on the particular role of narrative in this tradition. Following Maingueneau, Pier makes a distinction between routine genres and auctorial, self-constituting genres of discourse: whereas routine genres are regulated by institutional settings, auctorial genres rest on their own self-constituting power. Narratives feature in both. Among auctorial genres, literature is listed along with science, religion, and philosophy. Yet the analytical consequences of the discourse-analytical approach for narrative fiction remain vague, which is mostly due to the lack of sustained case studies in Pier’s chapter. Moreover, a more elaborate comparison between, say, recent Anglophone theories of the rhetoric of fictionality would have concretized the benefits of a discourse-analytical approach to narrative fiction. When the alleged master narrative of Anglophone postclassical narratology is evoked, the result is sometimes confusing. Sylvie Patron’s chapter on pannarrator and optional-narrator theories...