This special issue of Style investigates how writers present interior spaces (houses, drawing rooms, halls, offices, closets, etc.) in narrative literature. (1) A much greater variety of interiors could be focused on, for instance, prisons, covered markets, yacht cabins, or train compartments. The question of visual representation in narrative has been revived by recent research into readers' cognitive mapping activities and their participation in co-creation of storyworlds. Marie-Laure Ryan commented in 2003 that while it seems evident that narrative comprehension requires some kind of mental model of space--how else could readers imagine character movements?--the issue of form and content of this model remains to be explored (Ryan 216; original emphasis). According to Ryan, drawing on Linde and Labov as well as Tversky, spatial description can convey objects' intrinsic orientations relative to one another from stable viewpoint (gaze perspective), or it can suggest bird's-eye view that presents totalized mental image of specific setting in shape of map (216). A third possibility, one that bridges temporal demands of narrative form and spatial logic of map, is tour, which represents space dynamically from perspective internal to territory to be surveyed, namely perspective of moving object. The tour thus simulates embodied experience of traveler (Ryan 218). Though this strategy seems especially appropriate to chronotopes associated with novel, demands of description antedate novel as genre. The rhetoric of catalog, discourse of tour-guide or guidebook, conventions of ekphrasis, and other strategies may be deployed in interior descriptions with or without situated focalizer, most common technique in modernist narrative. Perspectival rendering of space makes it possible for reader to visualize in relation to one another, even to map room and its contents. In response to figural narrative situations rigorously employing focalizer whose perspective provides consistent center of consciousness, tacit rule holds that the description has to be felt by reader to depend on vision of character who is responsible for it, on his ability to see, and not on knowledge of novelist, on contents of his files (Hamon 149). If character's perceptions do not govern representation of space he or she enters or moves in, what does? In addition to enriching evidence for developmental account of perspectivism, arising out of earlier aperspectival techniques, this special issue contributes to understanding of description as component of narrative fiction. Description has been neglected stepchild in very large family of narratological concepts. Traditional narrative theory of mid-twentieth century often employed description as other against which narrative proper was defined by juxtaposition. For example, Felix Martmez-Bonati--in opening gambit of his Fictive Discourse, dedicated to describing stylistic features of literary language--writes: Narration is purely linguistic representation of change in particular persons, states of affairs, and circumstances. Description, on other hand, is representation of permanent, momentary, or recurring things, or events of short duration, in their unchanging aspects (Martinez-Bonati 22). Description thus comes to occupy space between events that constitute story, and as an element of discourse it is perceived to delay or even halt action: retardatory structure (Sternberg 161) or relatively autonomous expansion, characteristically referential (Hamon 148). In her 1985 original Narratology Mieke Bal charily defined description as a textual fragment in which features are attributed to objects (Bal 130), acknowledging that these marginally important passages are practically and logically necessary (129) and linking them to motivation (130-34). …
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