Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Liisa Steinby and Aino Mäkikalli.

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

A Tale of Two Theories

Time Structure in the Story (Narrative Theory, 3)

Free indirect discourse (FID) is a widely studied mode of speech and consciousness representation in narratives. One aspect of analysis and debate is the combination of the characters' stream of consciousness and the narrator's voice. Various ideas about the effects FID might have on readers have been formulated. Some of these hypotheses are contradictory, which makes them an excellent starting point for reader response studies. More in particular, there seems to be disagreement whether FID increases or decreases readers' empathy for story characters. Also, there is no consensus concerning the effect on the transparency of the narrator's stance toward the story character, nor on the clarity of the implied author's intentions. Rather than adding theoretical arguments, historical evidence, or exegeses of textual examples, the present contribution attempts to explore the empirical validity of FID hypotheses in a series of reading experiments.

REVIEWS

The changing role of “the public” figures prominently in both legal and literary studies of the eighteenth century. Trevor Ross’s Writing in Public (2018) demonstrates how legal changes relating to copyright, defamation, and seditious libel shaped the emergence of a new category of literature in the later eighteenth century. The work develops a schematic and idealist account of the changing relationship between norms of law and literature as mediated by the idea of “the public” that might be enhanced by further attention to the continued diversity of literary expression and literary sociability that has characterized a substantial amount of recent scholarship on the eighteenth century. It also remains unclear as to whether the eighteenth-century notions of publicity were really novel, especially in the light of work on medieval and renaissance era notions of public opinion that demonstrate that the concept has a long history that is not unique to the modern era.

Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory ed. by Matthew Garrett Brian McHale (bio) Matthew Garrett, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory. Cambridge UP, 2018. xvii + 268 pp. isbn 978-1-108-42847-7. Hardcover, $89.99. There is a canonical story about the history of narrative theory that, in the barest of bare outlines, runs something like this: back in the 1960s and 1970s narrative theory entered its “classical” phase under the tutelage of structuralism, boasting a freshly-minted neologism for its name—narratologie. Rooted in the Russian Formalist poetics of the 1920s, and with significant input from German and Anglophone scholarship, classical narratology was nevertheless largely a Parisian affair, and its grand masters were all Francophone: Lévi-Strauss, Greimas, Todorov, Bremond, Barthes, Genette. Then, beginning in the late 1980s and the 1990s, and accelerating in the new century, narratology diversified into narratologies, swerving this way and that away from its French structuralist foundations, toward the cognitive sciences, rhetorical theory, feminist theory, media studies, and the wilder reaches of anti-mimetic (unnatural) narrative. In short, classical structuralist narratology morphed into postclassical narratology. David Herman is credited with articulating this narrative of narrative theory, and in particular with distinguishing between its classical and postclassical phases, first in a PMLA article (“Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology,” 1997), then in his introduction to an influential edited volume, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (1999). The story would be reiterated and fleshed out in subsequent collections, such as A Companion to Narrative Theory (2005), edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, and Postclassical Narratology (2010), edited by Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, and in the pages of journals like Narrative, Poetics Today, and, yes, Style. It would attain something like its canonical form in the collaborative volume, Narrative Theory: Core [End Page 531] Concepts and Critical Debates (2012), with contributions by Herman, Phelan, Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol. It is no coincidence that all but one of the books I have just named are published by the Ohio State University Press, as is the journal Narrative, and that almost all of the editors are, or have been, affiliated one way or another with Ohio State. There is something distinctly Ohio-State-centric about the canonical story; it expresses, you might say, the view from Columbus. Strikingly, this is not the story told by The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory. With one exception (to which I will return in a moment), the sixteen essays collected here simply ignore the canonical story—unless they actually propose counter-narratives to it. This seems to be by design. It does not take much reading between the lines of the introduction by Matthew Garrett, the volume’s editor, to detect a revisionist impulse. For instance, he commends the first chapter, Kent Puckett’s long view of narrative theory’s history, for its “generous opening of the house of narrative theory, a letting-in of air and history” (2); what airless spaces are being ventilated here, if not those of the canonical story? It is with manifest reluctance that Garrett deploys the terms “classical” and “postclassical,” and even then he does so gingerly, placing them between scare quotes; most of the contributors to the volume do not use them at all. It is not as though the classical grand masters are slighted here—on the contrary, they figure conspicuously in many of these essays, especially Barthes and Genette (discussed at some length in chapters by Yoon Sun Lee, Hannah Freed-Thall, and David Kurnick, and more briefly elsewhere), as well as the Russian Formalists (Shklovsky in a chapter by Ilya Kalinin, Propp in Judith Roof’s chapter, and Propp, Tomashevsky, and Eichenbaum in Lee’s). By contrast, postclassical trends in narrative theory, and the figures associated with them, are almost entirely absent; David Wittenberg, in his chapter on time, cites Herman on “fuzzy temporality,” John Frow cites the cognitive narrative theorist Lisa Zunshine on theory of mind, and Jonathan Culler, in a chapter on lyric and narrative, paraphrases Phelan—and that is about it. The term “unnatural” narrative appears once, in Valerie Rohy’s chapter on queer narrative theory, but with...

Despite the increasing interest in textual structure and the specific use of linguistic means in narratives, the concept of Narration has so far not been an issue of theoretical concern within linguistics but has rather been used than defined or problematized. In this respect, the chapter takes a closer look at the concept of Narration itself. The starting point is the basic assumption that the analysis of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) – a phenomenon which seems to be restricted to Narration only – will offer crucial insights with respect to characteristics of the underlying narrative structure when read “against the grain”. In this regard, the alignment of formal approaches of context shift and cognitive approaches of perspectivization leads to the conclusion that the narratological differentiation between narrator and character can be seen as a projection of the grammatical differentiation between speaker vs. observer, which is reflected on the different linguistic levels in a recursive manner. Consequently, I argue that the complex unfolding of different layers of discourse allows for poly-perspectival resp. metarepresentational effects on the textual macro-structure and hence constitutes a core characteristic of Narration. Against this background, the proposed model is not only able to align micro- and macro-structural accounts of Narration but also allows for a new perspective on the specific use of grammatical means in narrative discourse. In this respect, the paper argues that Narration does indeed matter for linguistics.

'Narrative Theory' is an online introduction to classical structuralist narratological analysis. The sixth section deals with the structural positioning of narrators with respect to the narrative act and the fictional world(s) contained by the narrative. Contents: 1. Author, narrator, and narrative person; 2. Kinds of narrative positions; 3. Intradiegetic narratives; 4. Crossing the Limits; 5. Narrative person.

REVIEWS

Reviewed by: Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture ed. by Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall Caroline Gonda Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall, eds., Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). Pp. 219. £60.00. “Remember: As far as anyone knows we’re a nice normal family.” Doubtless hilarious to some, the bumper stickers and wall plaques on eBay are not so funny to the queer children excluded, silenced, or sacrificed in order to preserve the so-called normal family’s image of itself. It’s in the nature of ideology that those processes of exclusion, silencing, and sacrifice are so often themselves invisible or denied. The appearance of obviousness, naturalness, this-is-just-how-things-are, is what gives particular forms of being their power to control—or, at their most extreme, to destroy—the lives of others. In a world where, as the Scottish lesbian novelist Iona Macgregor says, “the dominant class never sees its own boundaries,” the work of a collection such as Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture is an important intervention, making critically visible both “the heteronormative legacy of the eighteenth century as a historical period” and the continuing presence of heteronormativity in eighteenth-century studies. As the editors note, the chapters in this volume “set out to reconfigure our sense of how gender and sexuality have become mapped onto space; how public and private have been carved up, and gendered and sexual bodies socially sanctioned; and how narrative conventions have been put in the service of affirming or subverting cultural orthodoxies about sex, gender, and sexuality. They also spotlight the literary traditions, scholarly criticisms, and pedagogical practices that buttress or subvert heteronormativity both in the past and in the present” (15). Whether or not one subscribes to Karma Lochrie’s argument in Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (2005)—that only the emergence of statistics as a science in the late eighteenth century makes it possible to speak meaningfully about norms and the normal (including in sexuality)—this collection makes the case for the eighteenth century as a crucial period in the formation of heteronormativity. By the end of the century, the editors argue, heteronormativity “congeals into a fully fomented hegemony,” although “alternate sex/gender configurations” continue to materialize (14–15). The chapters here explore heteronormativity across a wide range of areas and subjects: for example, the history of shopping and its impact on the sexual geography of the city (O’Driscoll); changes in French wedding-night customs (Roulston); the use of heteroerotic pornography as an element in male homosocial bonding (Kavanagh); moral panic, sexual assault, and protective masculinity in late eighteenth-century London (Braunschneider); Gothic fiction’s resistance to heteronormative closure (Haggerty); and the racial and sexual politics of colonialism (de Freitas Boe). In addition to Coykendall’s chapter on the critical and historical reception of Gray and Walpole, the two chapters that frame the volume address themselves to eighteenth-century studies, examining the workings of heteronormativity in scholarly research (Lanser) and the pedagogic practices and new readings of texts that result from attending to transgender issues in the classroom (Saxton, Mance, and Edwards). As powerful and pervasive a force as heteronormativity becomes, it is not monolithic, but is enmeshed with other structures of power. Ana de Freitas Boe’s [End Page 427] chapter on John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) makes this particularly clear: “Stedman’s depiction of the erotic life of the colony forces us to reconsider how concerns about race and miscegenation shaped emergent heteronormative conceptions of sexuality in the eighteenth century. The monogamous couple—and monogamy as a concept—looks different from the vantage point of the colonial periphery” (165). Questions of class as well as of race are important in this volume, as seen particularly in Sally O’Driscoll’s chapter “Conjugal Capitalism,” which focuses on the figure of the domestic woman as “mulier mercans,” defined no longer by her sexual desires but by the fetishistic transfer of those desires onto material goods and purchasable commodities. The city in which she wanders is transformed, gentrified by the...

Philosophy of action and theory of narrative

Over the past few decades, a number of philosophers, psychologists, and other scholars have used the concept of narrative as a basis for thinking about personal identity and ethical responsibility. It has been argued that, ethically, we should strive to achieve the unity that we discover in creating narratives about our lives. More recently, critical reactions to narrative theories have taken the form of a specific anti-narrative discourse. This article presents arguments in defense of the theory of narrative identity, based on the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, in whose thinking narrative is a central concept. The presented study defends the thesis that narrative identity is not an arbitrary contingent mental construct, but is necessarily present in human existence and is associated with the hermeneutic understanding of man as a temporary being capable of reflexive activity, constructing meanings, assessments, and goals. It is argued that narrative identity theory successfully addresses the problem of personal identity and the related question of the ethical responsibility of the subject by creating a narrative unity of the life project of an individual, in which the interrelationship between the concepts of personal identity, narration and evaluation is built. Section 1 analyses MacIntyre's concept of narrative and explains its significance for solving the problem of personal identity. Section 2 explicates the key characteristics of narrative identity: holisticity, intelligibility, teleology and the principle of self-care; it also provides responses to the criticisms of opponents who oppose the narrative concept of personal identity. Section 3 presents arguments in defence of Taylor's assertion that the ethical horizon of our existence presupposes the desire for narrative unity of the individual.

The fictions of language and the languages of fiction: The linguistic representation of speech and consciousness: Monika Fludernik, London and New York: Routledge, 1993. xviii + 536 pp., £50.00