Ficções do feminino no romance do século XVIII Roxana (1724), de Daniel Defoe, e A nova Heloísa (1761), de Jean-Jacques Rousseau

History, a Literary Artifact? The Traveling Concept of Narrative in/on Historiographic Discourse

"I know what it was. You know what it was":Second-Person Narration in Hypertext Fiction Alice Bell (bio) and Astrid Ensslin (bio) Introduction Digital fiction is fiction, written for and read on a computer screen, that pursues its verbal, discursive, and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium (Bell et al.). Hypertext fiction is a specific form of digital fiction in which fragments of electronic text, known as lexias, are connected by hyperlinks. When reading a hypertext, the reader can click the "Enter" key on her keyboard to follow a default path through the text. Alternatively, she can follow hyperlinks that lead him or her to other parts of the text. Since the emergence of Storyspace hypertext fiction1 in the late 1980s, the study of digital fiction has undergone a significant paradigm shift. Recent research has moved from a "first wave" of pure theoretical debate to a "second wave" of narratological, stylistic, and semiotic analysis. While the theoretical intricacies of second-wave digital fiction theory have been well debated (see Ciccoricco; Ensslin; Ensslin and Bell, "Introduction"; Bell, Possible Worlds), the discipline and practice of analyzing digital fiction require a more systematic engagement and understanding than offered by much previous scholarship. With this critical need in mind, the Digital Fiction International Network (DFIN)2 has been exploring new [End Page 311] avenues of defining and implementing approaches to analyzing digital fiction, with the tripartite trajectory of: developing a range of tools and associated terminology for digital fiction analysis; providing a body of analyses based on the close reading of texts, which are substantiated by robust theoretical and terminological conclusions; and fostering a collaborative network of academics working on interrelated projects. The details of this remit have been laid down in DFIN's recent "[S]creed for Digital Fiction" (Bell et al.). In seeking to exemplify DFIN's overall agenda, this article offers an analysis of two Storyspace hypertexts, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden and Richard Holeton's Figurski at Findhorn on Acid. The article has a specific focus on how the text implements second-person narration and other forms of the textual "you" (Herman, Story Logic) in juxtaposition with other narrative perspectives. We aim to explore the extent to which print-based narratological theories of the textual "you" apply to the texts under investigation and suggest theoretical tenets and taxonomic modifications arising from the way in which the reader is involved in textual construction. More specifically we will show first how second-person narration can be used in digital fiction to endow the reader with certain properties so that she is maneuvered into the position of "you." We will then show how second-person narration can be used to presuppose knowledge about the reader so as to predict her relationship to "you." In both cases we will show that some instances of second-person narration in digital fiction require additional theoretical categories for their analysis. Of particular interest is the way in which the reader and her role in the "cybernetic feedback loop" (Aarseth) are constructed textually and interactionally. The "You" in Digital, Interactive Texts The textual "you" features widely across digital, interactive texts. Interactive Fiction (IF) perhaps constitutes the most obvious narrative form employing the second-person throughout. Using present tense and imperatives (e.g., Zork's "You are standing in an open field. . . "), they create the illusion of being present in a storyworld that is constructed by the reader in creative collaboration with the programmed text. In IFs, the textual "you" informs the reader about the basic building blocks of the game world and allows her to co-construct this domain by inputting text commands in the hope of receiving more textual information (cf. Walker). In IFs, the textual "you" is the main character, role-played by the reader (Douglass 129). As Marie-Laure Ryan puts it, "IF is one of the rare narrative forms where the use of 'you' enters into a truly dialogical rather than merely rhetorical relation with an Other, and where 'present' denotes narrow coincidence between the time of the narrated events and the time of...

The Split Subject of Narration in Elizabeth Gaskell’s First-Person Fiction analyzes a number of Elizabeth Gaskell's first-person works through a post-modern perspective employing such theoretical frameworks as psychoanalytic theory, narratology, and gender theory. It attempts to explore the problematics of Victorian subjectivity, bringing into focus the ways in which both her realistic and Gothic texts undercut and interrogate post-Romantic assumptions about an autonomous and coherent speaking and/or narrating subject. The essential argument of the book is that the mid-nineteenth-century narrating “I”, in its communal, voyeuristic, and Gothic manifestations emerges as painfully divided, lacking, unstable, ailing, and hence unreliable, pre-figuring, at the same time, later forms of self-conscious narration in fiction. Furthermore, it is also exposed as performative, one that can be seen as a simulacrum without an original, and, consequently, at odds with post-Romantic, empiricist assumptions about the factuality, centrality, and rationality of the human subject, while at the same time, clinging to illusions of autonomy. Plagued by its own self-awareness, the narrating “I” is alienated both from itself as well as from those it attempts to represent, including its own narrated counterpart. To this effect, it argues that throughout a trajectory of configurations, psychic investments and imaginary identifications, embedded in and conditioned by the workings of desire and ideology, both of which underpin discursive and representational practices, narrative subjectivity in Gaskell’s first-person fiction manifests itself as the product of a misrecognized encounter between the subject who narrates and that which is being narrated. Both are essentially unable to see their split character and the alienating chasm opened up between them, for the former, on the level of narration, and, for the latter, on a thematic level.

This article proposes a critical mapping of invisible characters in narrative fiction that accentuates the complex relationship between literary and social invisibility. It argues that the emerging field of invisibility studies needs to come to terms with the motifs and forms of invisibility as they appear in literary history before and after the critical juncture of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), also drawing on H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) as primary examples. It maintains that invisible characters emerge in a literary field structured by 1) the socio-political opposition between power and powerlessness; 2) the continuum of realist and non-realist genres; and 3) the form of narration as such, particularly in what narratologists define as focalisation. In such fashion, an analysis of literary ‘unseeing’ in the sense developed in China Miéville’s novel The City & The City (2009) will enable a deeper understanding of social invisibilisation.

Never afraid of self-promotion, the founding fathers of unnatural narratology (Alber et al., Unnatural Narratives) wrote in a 2010 manifesto: In recent years the study of unnatural narratology has developed into one of the most exciting new paradigms in narrative theory (113). What exactly should one understand by paradigm? Is unnatural narratology (henceforth UN) a field of investigation--a field constituted by the most experimental, innovative narrative forms--or is it a thorough rethinking of narrative theory? From Richardson's article, one can conclude that it has ambitions to be both; the question then becomes: why do experimental forms of narrative call for a revision of narratology, and more precisely, what is it about them that, as Richardson claims, cannot be accounted for by standard narratology? If UN is simply a field of investigation, it could be justified by a scalar conception of narrativity. As I suggested in Toward a Definition of Narrative, the set of all narratives can be conceived as a fuzzy set that encompasses both prototypical forms, in which the conditions of narrativity are fully realized, and marginal forms, in which some of these conditions are not fulfilled, or where the telling of a story is subordinated to another purpose rather than constituting a focus of attention. UN could then be conceived as the study of the marginal forms, though I doubt that its advocates would subscribe to this view: Richardson makes it clear that for him experimental forms, such as Beckett's novels, are just as narrative as the genre that UN regards as the embodiment of naturalness in narrative, and that serves, consequently, as an implicit standard. Rather than relying on a scalar conception of narrativity, UN rests on a dichotomy between natural and unnatural narratives, (1) and it designates the unnatural as its territory. But in contrast to Monika Fludernik, who has given deep thought to what it means to call a type of narrative natural, and who associates this type with spontaneous, conversational narratives (Towards), UN proponents do not take the time to define, much less to scrutinize, their implicit standard. References to linguistic/discourse analytical approaches to conversational narrative are glaringly absent from their work. Through a process of inference from what our authors label unnatural, I construct this standard as x telling y that p happened in the real world, in the hope that y will believe that p. This excludes, a priori, all forms of fiction from the domain of the natural, even though the creation of fictional worlds and stories is a universally attested and cognitively fundamental human activity. I infer, furthermore, that in order to optimize believability, the telling of p should be governed by H. Paul Grice's famous maxims of conversation: maxims such as quality (do not say what you do not believe to be true), quantity (avoid prolixity), relevance (your contribution should be related to the current topic of the conversation), and manner (make your contribution orderly). These maxims not only fail to account for literary texts, but they are also often deliberately flouted (as Grice recognizes) in conversational storytelling. Tellability often gets in the way of believability, and it is to the extent that they play freely with the maxims that conversational narrators manage to capture the interest of their audience. If there is a form of narrative that strictly follows Grice's maxims, it would be courtroom testimony, or maybe history writing, but these genres are hardly a natural, spontaneous form of narration. If UN advocates took the time to study the forms of storytelling that they regard as natural, they would discover that these forms are much richer and more sophisticated in their narrative techniques than merely informing an audience that something happened. One could admittedly argue that written forms of narrative, compared to oral ones, present medium-specific narrative devices, while fictional narratives, compared to factual ones, present genre-specific devices. …

Reviewed by: Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain by Joseph Drury Mark Blackwell Joseph Drury. Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain. Oxford: Oxford, 2017. Pp. xii + 269. $85. Novel Machines begins with a tour-de-force reading of Cervantes’s Don Quixote that sets the terms for the ensuing chapters. Drury proposes that, to a degree heretofore unacknowledged, eighteenth-century British novels are both about machines and about narrative fiction as a kind of machine. Thus his set-piece analysis of the ways in which Quixote’s encounter with such “relatively new technologies” as windmills and fulling-hammers throws a wrench in “the ‘ill-founded machine’ [la máqina mal fundado] of books of chivalry” cleverly intimates that from the very beginning the modern novel developed through a self-conscious engagement with companion technologies. After an introduction that situates the project amidst recent work on the novel, on technology, and on narrative form, the first chapter, “Narratives and Machines in Enlightenment Britain,” explores “the emergence of the eighteenth-century idea of the narrative machine.” Drury aims to reconstruct a theory of mechanical form that will counter the Romantic organicism privileged in Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp. Tracing the idea of the mechanics of narrative from Bacon, to Dryden, Dennis, and the Royal Society of the 1660s, and then to Addison’s early eighteenth-century hostility to rule-bound notions of literary form, Drury works to link developing ideas about the machinery of narrative to “the broader history of Britain’s industrial and technological development.” In a book whose richness of evidence and scrupulousness of argument are generally unimpeachable, Drury’s thin substantiation of the claim that period writers and critics increasingly viewed literary art through the lens of mechanics comes as a disappointment. The notion that, as the eighteenth century unfolds, thinking about narrative and thinking about technology are inextricably imbricated underpins Drury’s project, but the book devotes a mere four pages to canvassing the evidence that the language of mechanics infused period ideas about the work of writing, and thus does not adequately support the sweeping claim that follows: “Throughout the eighteenth century, then, narrative was often understood to be a machine [End Page 71] made up of a limited number of component parts that could be combined according to a set of established scientific rules” (my italics). Nonetheless, the rest of the chapter, especially its description of the novel as a “model of human life” (Fielding’s term) analogous to other period simulations, such as automata, is compelling, as is Drury’s discussion of the novel as a kind of tool that, like the “machinery Crusoe uses to gain control over his island,” might provide knowledge about human nature while also refining the passions. The four subsequent chapters focus on specific narrative innovations that serve as case studies illustrating Drury’s broader argument that fiction is a kind of machine constructed to address particular social, moral, and technical problems. Chapter 2, “Libertines and Machines in Love and Excess,” reads Haywood’s novel as an intervention in period debates about the human machine, arguing that she renders her female protagonists “thinking machines” whose actions are determined by external causes but whose long periods of “anguished deliberation” distinguish them from the “libertine machines” with whom they contend by demonstrating that they have—and must learn to properly exercise—will. Drury argues that Haywood articulates a “compatibilist position that the automatism of desire does not deprive the individual of either freedom of action or responsibility.” Unlike her men, Haywood’s women—and her readers—must “fram[e] their wills to the local, contingent norms which must be observed if they are to survive and flourish in their particular environment.” Drury embeds Haywood’s work in debates about the implications of mechanical materialism and then links the “pattern of arousal and deferral that structures [her] novels” to the development of domestic fiction later in the century. Chapter 3, “Realism’s Ghosts: Science and Spectacle in Tom Jones,” builds a reading of Fielding’s novel on the unlikely foundation of a few allusions to John Freke, a natural philosopher and controversialist who...

Immediacy and the lack of mediation have been treated as the central features of literary presence (German literarische Präsenz) in discussion of the concept. In medieval German studies, presence has been discussed primarily on two different heuristic levels. The first is the level of cultural history and the theory of signs. Presence is understood here as the absence of reference, as the quality of being purely here and now – as an immediacy that transcends any kind of referentiality. The example of the Eucharist is used repeatedly in the literature to illustrate this kind of presence: the consecrated Host does not refer to the body of Christ, does not symbolize it, but is Christ himself. According to the much-quoted words of Aleida Assmann, when things are present there are no signs. It has been asserted from various perspectives that medieval culture was one in which the representation of presence in cultural products and the experience of presence was particularly intense (in images representing several points in time, for example, or metonymic legal formulas). Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht has introduced the term ›culture of presence‹ (Präsenzkultur) to reflect this situation.

Science is a form of narrative that is regarded as the prime generator of knowledge. What about other forms of narratives such as novels and dramatic films? Claims this question is particularly important in organizational science because its narrative nature is easier to detect than is the case with the physical sciences. Using the metaphor of organizations as texts, contends that narrative fictions, especially films, are valuable sources in the study of organizations. What organizational researchers and film writers do are strikingly similar. For example, they enact rather than discover, test ideas against evidence, generalize, raise testable questions about the social world, and stay focused on the complexity of experience. An analysis of the filmRising Sunillustrates the use of narrative fiction as texts for organizational analysis. Discusses the implications of this approach.

discusses and uses in her critical analysis may not speak to all readers. It is not that Buss is unaware ofthis, but that it is nevertheless her experience as mother/daughter/sister that constitutes the basis of her reading. It may be that the experiential component of critical analysis needs even more mon­ itoring than that which Buss is careful to provide. Finally, compelling as the mapping metaphor is, the question arises as to whether all women get a chance to hold or make a map. Intriguing queries such as these underscore the provocative nature of Buss’s study and the degree to which it is sure to foster more work on the important fieldofCanadian women’sautobiography. christl verduyn / Trent University Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). xii, 261. $45.00 cloth. This study investigates ideological meaning in some literary texts of the First World War. Using a deconstructionist approach, Cobley contends that in contrast to the “traditional view of war narratives as a literature of protest,” authors such as Blunden, Graves, Sassoon, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Jones were deeply compromised by the prevailing values oftheir culture, and their works exhibit (often unconsciously) the ambiguities and contradictions oftheir ostensibly oppositional attitudes. Through a detailed analysis of description, narration, and plot construction, Cobley argues that the narratives of war reveal an ideological complicity with the sources of social and political power. From several perspectives, the First World War is the most significant fact ofthe twentieth century: the loss oflife was unprecedented, the conditions of trench warfare were hellish, the contrast between the efficiency of weaponry and the futility of infantry tactics was almost impossible to contemplate or rationalize. The testimony of those who fought and wrote to make sense of their personal nightmare reflects the difficulties of representing this ex­ perience: their accounts, faced with reproducing the unimaginable, retreat inevitably into varieties of irony. Realism is a difficult option; textual dis­ continuity, descriptive incoherence, or comedic strategies arebarely adequate devices to contain and distance the chaos of the event. As much for the pe­ culiar problems that this question ofrepresentation raises, as for the content of the texts themselves, the literature of the First World War continues to attract academic attention. As an exercise in applied theory, Representing War is a superior, even a distinguished work of criticism. While Cobley draws on a spread of 1 0 2 structuralist and poststructuralist theorists (from Barthes, Foucault, and Bakhtin to Peter Brooks, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton), her main focus is on narratology and deconstruction. At the centre ofher thesis is her contention that literary form is the carrier ofideological meaning; here in the untangling of descriptive and narrative imperatives her chief resources are Gérard Genette, Teresa de Lauretis, Derrida, de Man, and Hayden White. She is eclectic in her use of theoretical positions; she takes only what she needs to substantiate her arguments. Representing War is too closely argued to be easily or fairly summarized. Cobley applies her elaborate theoretical apparatus to a short list of prose narratives from Goodbye to All That to Farewell to Arms; refreshingly, these include German and French texts such as Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern, Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues, Ludwig Renn’s Krieg, Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, and Roland Dorgelès’s Les Croix de Bois. She has apersuasivechapter on David Jones’sIn Parenthesis, locatingthe ideological complicity ofthat modernist prose-poem within its nostalgia for the chivalric tradition. She begins with a detailed analysis ofdescription and the problems ofmimesis, and ends her study with a “theoretical epilogue” on twoVietnam texts, Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato. For this reader, Cobley’s most successful chapters are those on narrative situation and narrative structure. Dividing her literary texts into auto­ biographical and fictional narratives, Cobley analyzes the ideological impli­ cations of each. The narrative strategies of the autobiographies show “the erosion of the self-possessed bourgeois subject” (116), clinging desperately to values that no longer make sense. The war seems to be beyond human agency, but can be constructed optimistically in an imagery...

Consciousness and Chiasmus: Narrating Embodied Intersubjectivities Merle A. Williams George Butte. Suture & Narrative: Deep Intersubjectivity in Fiction and Film. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2017. 246 + vi pp. $29.95 (Paperback). George Butte’s Suture & Narrative offers a searching reappraisal of the diverse narrative strategies that inform both fiction and film, drawing on the established resources of film theory and particularly a creative application of phenomenological thinking. Central to the argument is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “the chiasm” or “the intertwining” between individual consciousness and the perceptual world or other embodied consciousnesses, as explored in The Visible and the Invisible (first published in French in 1964). Butte’s account is rich and challenging, despite a few conceptual lapses in his engagement with his chosen philosophical material. The book is constructed as a cumulating sequence of case studies, each of which is aptly staged and developed. Butte’s fine attention to detail adds subtlety to his readings of astutely selected filmic images or passages from literary texts. By “deep intersubjectivity” Butte means “the form in narrative of self-knowledge by way of others in an intricate set of encounters” that yield varying degrees of understanding and coherence (4). In this regard, he at once elaborates and strategically realigns the principal concerns of his earlier I Know That You Know That I Know (2004). His idea of “suture” takes its impetus from Lacanian film theory of the 1960s and 70s yet displaces that discourse in the direction of qualified presence and embodiment. The wounding of the body or the body-mind complex is anticipated by the epigraphs to chapter 1, which include a surgeon’s reflection on making his first incision as a student (1). In broad terms, “suture” is taken to involve the stitching together of human consciousnesses that are never entirely transparent to one another. This process presupposes the function of an enunciator, whose approach is more or less subtly oblique. In effect, an aspect of wounding both infuses the process of enunciation and is thematic to the literary and filmic works identified for discussion (6–9). Butte contends that his version of suture theory is equally applicable to fiction and film because certain core concerns are “fundamentally similar for print and film narrative: who controls the construction of a diegesis, who moves across a fabula to [End Page E-20] piece together a specific syuzhet from its broader canvas, who shifts from one image to another . . .” (10). The primary technique for film is shown to be the shot/reverse shot sequence, whereas free indirect discourse is characteristic of fiction. While this position is balanced and reasonable, it seems to me to foreground similarity at the expense of difference. As Butte himself acknowledges in the course of his commentary, the films of classic novels (for example) cannot be construed simply as direct translations of those literary texts, because the new medium simultaneously makes its own demands and offers its own opportunities. The very multi-modality of film as a composite of script, visual image, the spoken word, music, special effects, and the like—not to mention the technical means of production and the accompanying commercial imperatives—must set it apart from a novel that functions predominantly as a tissue of language. At least at the level of meta-theory there might have been closer investigation of the innate incommensurabilities between fictional narrative, with its burgeoning formal freedoms, and the bricolage of narrative in film, especially as Butte’s practice nimbly enacts such divergences. Butte begins to fashion his innovative orientation by taking issue with a film theory of absence, as influenced by the Lacanian perspectives of Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Pierre Oudart. Oudart’s preoccupation with the potential of montage for concealing the gap between individual shots, and especially the default of any grounding origin for the series, comes to be associated with the anxious longing of a putatively passive audience for a plenitude of viewing experience. By contrast, Butte focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s receptiveness to the Kuleshov effect, which recognizes a whole film as greater than the sum of its parts, thus facilitating a sense of intersecting lives in the representation of a common reality. This...

This volume deals with historically specific forms of factual and fictional narration within literature and various non-literary media. The contributions address the question of how and why the respective medium, the historical context, socio-cultural norms, and aesthetic conventions can (or cannot) formulate certain claims to factuality or fictionality within a given narrative. More specifically, the collected essays clarify that the validity claims of a text are equally tied to its historical framework, its particular medium, and its respective narrative practice. The discussion, analysis, and comparison of historical peculiarities on the one hand and an extended media arsenal on the other thus enables the contributors to uncover and describe narrative-specific characteristics of factual and fictional narration in their diverse forms of expression. In line with the disciplinary diversity of its contributors, the volume is aimed both at media-scientifically oriented narratologists and literary scholars as well as social scientist and scholars in the humanities who are invested in the interdisciplinarity of narrative theory.

This article investigates narrators in recent narrative fiction who display features at odds both with our "natural" way of experiencing the world and with what is generally considered the prototypical form of first-person narratives, namely the pseudo-autobiographical account of events experienced by a character in the past. Such narrators question this prototype by acting as if they were omniscient, and in so doing they raise a number of questions concerning their presumed epistemological limits, the mimetic paradigms whereby narrative fiction is usually framed, and the role of authors in literary communication. The aim of this essay is to address these questions, starting from the assumption that the increasing use of these paradoxical narrators testifies to an ongoing process of conventionalization. After considering the classical and postclassical takes on this topic, I highlight the limits of these approaches through an analysis of Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex and Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Finally, drawing on Paul Dawson's idea of first-person narrators as writers rather than reporters, I argue that one possible way to describe the narrative dynamics of recent texts featuring first-person narrators "equipped" with third-person features is to consider the influence of cinema and television on literature as well as on the reader's cognitive and experiential background.

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

This essay deals with a special text-type in postmodern Chinese fiction which radically deviates from all conventional forms of narrative. Appearing as a “short story” but in the form of a schoolboy’s spontaneous scripts and absent-minded scratches, it presents everything naturalistically in a non-fictional mode. By presenting trivial characters and uneventful happenings in random pieces that constitute a new form of narrative, its author artfully shows rather than tells that life is more realistic in the eyes of a child and is richer, more colorful and meaningful in fragments. With newness on almost all levels of linguistic and narrative presentation, the story practices eventful narration in process narration by interweaving fragments into a highly coherent discourse of fictional narrative. While there is hardly a theme or obvious message in most of the individual pieces, the story as a whole implies undertones of the satire on many aspects of school and family life. This avant-garde literary experiment not only refreshes the reader’s schema of literature and adds to their experience of literary reading, but also contributes to the making of postmodern fiction by enriching the concept of narrative, the definition of narrativity, and ultimately the notion of literature.