Free Indirect Discourse Research Articles

Where is Frances Burney? Irony, Free Indirect Discourse, and the Cultural Critic in Cecilia

ABSTRACT While recent studies often praise Frances Burney’s novels for their irreverent social criticism, many see Burney’s second novel Cecilia as a more perplexing work. Although its eponymous protagonist seems to embody Burney’s intellectual and moral independence, Burney submits Cecilia to humiliation and dispossession, leading some critics to view the novel as ambiguous or flawed. Such readings mistakenly assume that Cecilia really is the model of independence and sensibility that she takes herself to be. Instead of simply depicting her protagonist as a moral paragon, Burney uses irony and free indirect discourse to layer seeming praise for Cecilia with subtle critiques of Cecilia’s cultural escapism. The novel’s narration reveals Cecilia’s affection for sentimental literature, philanthropy, and music to be ironically paradoxical, as it is often tainted by the very consumerism and artifice that sentimentality was supposed to avoid. Simultaneously, Burney’s narrative techniques allow readers to engage the novel with a level of critical reflection that Cecilia often lacks. Cecilia marks the beginning of Burney’s move away from sentimental tropes and toward more modern techniques of engaging readers and eliciting their responses.

Stage Directions and the Insistent Narrator in Brian Friel

ABSTRACT This is a study of the covert narrator in Brian Friel’s plays and is part of a growing interest in narratology in theater. The covert narrator is revealed to readers by means of stage directions, divided into two types: those that can reach the audience and those that must stay with the reader. The character of the covert narrator is revealed principally in directions that are impossible to carry out, which contain free indirect discourse and which editorialize—things only readers can fully appreciate but which are still relevant to the production of the play since the covert narrator is in effect a character in the play. The article presents a close reading of plays from virtually all stages of Friel’s career to demonstrate that it is at those points when communication between on-stage characters breaks down that the covert narrator comes closest to revealing his hand.

:Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism

:<i>Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism</i>

The translator’s presence in (re)translations ofTo the Lighthouseinto Italian: a corpus-driven study

In a corpus approach to empirical translation study, I compare three re-translations of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse into Italian by Nadia Fusini in the 1990s and 2012 with the first translation by Giulia Celenza, published in 1934. The focus is on how and to what degree those translations render the modernist characteristics of the source text. The adopted method is implemented using suitable annotations of the digital texts. All the occurrences of linguistic and extra-linguistic features, including the stream of consciousness, indirect interior monologue and free indirect discourse, are identified and manually tagged in xml/tei code throughout the texts examined. A bespoke computer program is used to extract, align and compare the literary features. The results show the translators’ target-culture orientation in both ‘distant’ and ‘close reading’, with interesting instances of source text-orientation in the later re-translations.

The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope, edited by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton, and Ortwin de Graef

Reviewed by: The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope ed. by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton, and Ortwin de Graef Deborah Denenholz Morse (bio) The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope, edited by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton, and Ortwin de Graef; pp. xii + 396. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $200.00. There are many fine essays in The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope, some of which I heard in earlier versions at the 2015 Trollope bicentenary in Leuven, Belgium. All of the contributors are accomplished Victorianists. However, unlike the volume's editors—Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton, and Ortwin de Graef—few of them are known primarily as Trollope scholars, although some—Helen Blythe, Sophie Gilmartin, and Lauren Goodlad, among others—have written brilliantly on Trollope for years. Few contributors have written a major study on Trollope; John McCourt is a luminous exception, with his essential book on Trollope and Ireland. This editorial choice is both a strength and a weakness of the volume—a strength with regard to the scope of inquiry and the [End Page 463] wonderful minds thinking about Trollope; a weakness because capacious knowledge of Trollope's fiction is requisite to full interpretation of his novels, as the great Trollopian James Kincaid once claimed. There is at times a related tendency not to acknowledge important scholarship on the very subject at hand that I fear will seem ungenerous to scholars steeped in Trollope. That said, there is a plethora of exciting scholarship here. Claire Jarvis's compelling "Almost Trollope" opens the volume's first section, "Style," arguing that Trollope's "hesitant" style, marked by his pervasive use of "almost," is intentional rather than a sign of haste. Trollope's "almostness," in which the narrator enters only partially into characters' minds, issues in a new realism in which there is both sympathy and separation between narrator and character (22). Patrick Fessenbecker is concerned with the intersection of narration and morality, as he plumbs Trollope's language in light of moral philosophy. There is much to admire in his readings of The Small House at Allington (1862) and The Claverings (1866), and in his determination "to treat Trollope as substantively engaging philosophical questions" (41). Gilmartin's "The Physiology of the Everyday" adds to her distinguished work on Trollope and the body. Gilmartin analyzes Trollope's mastery of free indirect discourse as it represents everyday sensory responses in novels from Framley Parsonage (1861) to The Way We Live Now (1875). Blythe's impressive essay centering on An Old Man's Love (1884) extends her work on Trollope's style in lesser-known works. Blythe argues that Trollope's allusions to his own earlier work and to Latin tags demonstrate his sophistication in interrogating Victorian historical and cultural as well as readerly expectation and experience. Eminent Trollopian Skilton reads An Autobiography (1883) as advice literature, interpreting Trollope's infamous accounting of monies earned as "a faithful servant's report to that Great Office in the sky" (89). Goodlad's original essay considers Trollope's novel chronicles in relation to contemporary serial television. Goodlad's previous innovative work enriches this consideration of transtemporal and transnational Trollope. Her erudite historical, critical, and theoretical contexts focus here on speculative financial conditions that encourage "Bigger Stories"—an infinitely expanding genre (107). Section 2, "Circulation," opens with distinguished Trollope editor Steve Amarnick's engaging critique of Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874) as revising the Dickensian Christmas genre in a dark Australian mode. Readers of An Autobiography and Trollope's letters will know of Trollope's Australian sheepfarmer son Fred's influence upon the character of Harry. John Bowen's brilliant essay focuses upon Elizabeth Bishop's dramatic monologue "From Trollope's Journal" (1965) and its relation to the travel book North America (1859), while also exploring Trollope's influence upon Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series (1951–75). The range of this essay—from Charles Darwin to Wilfred Owen—is impressive. Luca Caddia has written incisively on Trollope for many years. Here he trenchantly explores Trollope's interiority, using Philip Roth's term "counterlife" to consider twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that reference and critique Trollope's work (143). Caddia...

Free Indirect Discourse in Court: An Overview of Contemporary Jurisprudence in French Press Law

This article analyzes two French court decisions which deal with fictionality and free indirect discourse. Two novelists, Mathieu Lindon and Eric Bénie-Bürckel, have been sued for contentious statements made by fictional characters: the former on the basis of defamation and the latter for racial hatred against Jews. The article shows that the criteria used by judges to evaluate the “narrative distance” between the author and his characters are very variable. In the case of the correctional court that arbitrated the Lindon case, the reasoning behind the judges' decision dismissed the question of reported speech, which, according to them, changed nothing in the representation of the real person defamed. In the Bénier-Bürckel case, on the other hand, the criminal court considered that because the statements were pronounced by a fictitious speaker, there was a distance between the author and the remarks at issue. In that case, the judges thus gave a central place to the criterion of fictionality. However, a linguistic analysis makes it possible to identify the use of free indirect discourse and devices of aphorization in the controversial statements which reduce the distance between the character and the author. The criterion of fictionality cannot therefore resolve the question on its own.

One Year of School and The Island

One Year of School and The Island

한중 소설 번역에서의 서술 방식 연구 - ｢삼포 가는 길｣의 네 가지 중국어 번역본을 중심으로 -

What distinguishes novel from drama and poem is that the story is conveyed to the reader by the narrator. Therefore, the aesthetic effect of a novel is hugely influenced by its point of view and the narrative style. This thesis sorts out the concept and characteristics of the point of view and narrative style of the novel and discusses their influences on narrative distance. Then it compares and analyzes Hwang Sukyoung's The Road to Sampo and its four Chinese translations on the changes of narrative style in different points of view and how they influence the effects to the readers. The results of this analysis show that, when adopting the character-focalizer, Hwang uses words and expressions of personal speech style or narrative styles that emphasize the characters’ voices including free indirect discourse. However, the styles are altered frequently in the translations, which weakens the characters’ voices. Therefore, translators should carefully analyze the original texts when translating such kind of narratives.

외상, 기억, 애도: 조이스의 죽은 사람들 경우

This study, as an interdisciplinary approach, examines how James Joyce’s “The Dead” foregrounds issues of memory, trauma, and mourning in the context of Ireland. Those concepts this study draws on in understanding memory and trauma are voluntary memory and autobiographical memory as well as nachträglichkeit. This study also draws, in order to understand traumatic emotion, on the concept of past-directed emotion. Mourning might be inexpressible, if we accept a psychoanalyst’s saying that ‘inexpressible’ mourning builds a secret tomb inside the patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. But this study examines how mourning can be effectively expressible in Joyce’s work, chasing not only his effective style including free indirect discourse, but also a chief female character’s emotion. This study ends with a comment that in Joyce’s work, expressible mourning requires a sphere of social life, where the unrequited past is opened up, leading a life to the future.

A Study of Authorial Voice in To the Lighthouse from the Perspective of Feminist Narratology

The history of Western literature since the 18th century has witnessed some excellent works by women writers, however, due to stereotypes and the authority of male discourse, these writers still endured great pressure from society in the creative process. To break the authority and gain recognition, female writers gradually formed a narrative voice belonging to themselves. In her novel To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf uses a great deal of interior monologue and free indirect discourse to cleverly construct her narrative authority. This adequately denotes the essence of feminist narratology, which is the combination of feminism and classical structuralist narratology, and a way to study feminist works as well. Concerning feminist narratology, this paper investigates the concept of feminist narrative voice, three types of which are personal voice, authorial voice, and communal voice. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf mostly employs authorial voice. To gain a further insight into this, the paper discusses the origin and concept of feminist narrative voice, and then examines Woolf's writing techniques adopted in To the Lighthouse, the use of authorial voice and the construction of female narrative authority in the novel. The study concludes that the use of authorial voice in To the Lighthouse contributes to a shift in women's marginalization and the struggle for male dominance narratives, and demonstrates fully Woolf's feminist thinking throughout the work.

George Eliot’s Visual Moments: The Construction of Character in Daniel Deronda

George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, is insistently concerned with the visual and with the problematics of looking. Like many of Eliot’s novels, it examines the visual in relation to notions of reliability, perspective, interpretation, representation, the subjective versus the objective, and the relation between observation and imagination. This paper is concerned with the creation and development of character as unveiled through visual moments within the diegesis. Focus is on the function of the visual between characters and the study proposes that visual moments – understood as the combination of looker, “lookee”, the manner of looking or seeing, the context of looking and the form of narration – significantly contribute to the development of characterisation. Furthermore, it suggests that George Eliot, to a large extent, locates characters’ personal beliefs and ideologies in visual exchanges. Visual moments in Daniel Deronda are identified with the aid of corpus linguistic methods. Corpora aid to pinpoint the frequency and range of lexical items related to the visual and this study examines the lexeme look, specifically, in order to trace and unravel character construction and development. By so doing, it aims to complement or qualify the composition of character as presented through the combination of direct speech, free indirect discourse and the agency of a reflective and analytical narrative voice.

Selfies with Emma: Jane Austen’s Social Media

This essay identifies a series of shared media—drawings, riddles, alphabets, etc.—in Jane Austen’s Emma that generate social networks by establishing public forums for intersubjectivity. These narrative media allow characters to broadcast their own fantasies about the community while refracting the interiorities of others. Observing this trend, I suggest that narrative media in the novel enable characters to participate in something like free indirect discourse (FID) alongside Austen’s narrator, making authorship an extension of sociability. My claim is that social media in the novel both represent and stage the struggle for voice and narrative power between Emma and the novel’s minor characters. Bringing together narrative theory, network theory, and contemporary writings about social media, I propose that we are now in a better position to sharpen our understanding of FID in Austen’s late fiction because of our literacy in social media technologies and our increasing sensitivity to virtual storytelling.

We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction

We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction

Образ П. А. Столыпина у А. И. Солженицына

In the article the image of P. A. Stolypin is analyzed on the material of The Red Wheel, Diary R-17, memoires and essays by A. I. Solzhenitsyn. The authors trace the course the writer took while working on the artistic presentation of the image of one of the most prominent Russian state figures of the 20th century; they show Solzhenitsyn’s artistry in endeavoring to reveal to the reader all the “prominence”, “expressiveness” of this great person, as well as the significance of Stolypin’s destiny for the future of Russia. The authors of the research observe how in The Red Wheel Stolypin’s destiny is linked to that of Russia, following Solzhenitsyn in comprehending Stolypin as a “doer” responsible to Russia. In the course of the research Stolypin’s chapter with reviews in August 1914, has been analyzed in detail. This enabled the authors to grasp Stolypin’s image as the focal one in The Red Wheel, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, as Solzhenitsyn’s favourite character, conveyed realistically, and, at the same time, personally, compassionately, through “the dialectic of the soul”. The reader perceives a straightforward, strong-willed, dynamic, determined and ethically wholesome politician. The storylines of Guchkov, Bogrov, Nikolas II are essential to understanding Stolypin’s image. Focusing on these characters, the authors of the article show Stolypin’s role in their destinies. In The Red Wheel the artistic image of Stolypin is created by complex forms of inner monologues, quotes, free indirect discourse, the alternation of scenes and reports (summaries of events), by the abundance of the author’s “insertions”, by the multiple functions of irony. In the process of research the texts of P. A. Stolypin’s speeches were drawn upon, his children’s reminiscences, his biography, historians’ opinions. The chosen historical context provided a valuable insight into Solzhenitsyn’s historical method and the writer’s historiosophic reasoning.

Juxtaposition and Asynchronicity as Postcolonial Poetics in Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart

ABSTRACT Literary studies, with the influence of critical theory inspired by Marxism and the Frankfurt School, have sidestepped concerns on aesthetics and poetics. Using Elleke Boehmer’s postcolonial poetics, this study aims to explore juxtaposition and asynchronicity in Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart. It discusses how juxtaposition and asynchronicity as postcolonial poetics interrogate the postcolonial politics in the novel and explains the novel’s contribution to enriching Filipinos’ counter-memory and in enabling resistance. The poetics of second-person narrator point of view, flashbacks, free indirect discourse, and elliptical narrative are ways through which the text has explored migrants’ efforts of forging and linking social relations in the interstitial spaces between homeland and host land. At the same time, the novel goes beyond essentialist contours of migrant experience such as heteronormative nationalism and nostalgia for lost origins. The paper demonstrates not only a critical reckoning with power structures but also renewed attempts and continued struggle, which lead to radical hope.

Suffering with Style

Suffering with Style

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies

Гендерные перспективы представления пространства в романе Вирджинии Вулф «Миссис Дэллоуэй»

Gender aspects of Virginia Woolf’s writings have become an immensely expanded field of interdisciplinary research in the West. In Russia, however, they remain quite little known. The article focuses on the gender-spatial division of space in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs Dalloway”. Drawing from a number of Marxist philosophical and literary conceptions of modernist space and, mostly, from the literary narrative methodology, the authors present a model of interrelations between the narrative social and personal spaces from the perspectives of the two protagonists and of the collective character, that is, various minor characters sharing post-Edwardian societal norms. Literary narrative approach makes it possible to characterize the modernist traits of Virginia Woolf’s novel which she shared with the contemporary writers and her individual, specifically Woolfian literary inventions. One of them consists in a specific use of free indirect discourse imitating the perceptions of the two gender-opposite realities, namely, the “material” reality of the actual story world and the mental reality of the subjective experiences from the protagonists’ pasts. The other is Woolf’s innovative contribution to feminist writing. It may be described as a representation of the female “modernist body” via the female protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness saturated with meaningful gaps. The obtained results include specifying Woolf’s gender principle of structuring her narrative space and the alternations of the female protagonist’s two bodies, which are her gender body “for others” and her mental “modernist” body freed from social limitations.

애트우드의 매드아담 3부작에 나타난 포스트휴먼 유스토피아

Differentiated from traditional dystopias, this paper analyzes the ways Margaret Atwood imagines and formalizes humankind’s transformation into post-human ustopian forms. Discontent with the traditional notion of dystopia as a mode of anti-utopia, Atwood coins “ustopia,” a concept this paper reads as tantamount to immanent dystopia. Her ustopia is not entirely imaginary nor displaced into a distant future, but is revealed within real and relatable places where multinational corporations have taken control of every social and subjective dimension. The first installment of Atwood’s trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2003), narrates the pre- and post-apocalyptic world from the perspective of Jimmy. The second, The Year of the Flood (2009), returns to the plot in the first, but from the perspective of the two female protagonists. The narrators and the characters in this set of assembled texts do not function simply as narrators or characters, but instead can be read as a collective, assembled together through Atwood’s extensive use of free indirect discourse. The third novel, MaddAddam (2013), reveals a post-apocalyptic community consisting of humans, posthumans, hybridized animals, and sundry other creatures: in sum, a kind of post-human ustopia where species not only co-exist but outlast and live beyond the anthropocene.

『더블린 사람들』 중 「진흙」에 나타나는 이중 목소리와 이중 패러디

This study suggests that a double narrative voice in “Clay” from Dubliners can be analyzed as a narrative strategy for a double-parody. “Clay” is well-known for a double narrative voice: one is the voice of Maria and the other is that of the third-person narrator. At the beginning of this work, recognizing that Maria’s self-narration sounds like fairy tales, the reader can evoke the schema for Cinderella. This is where Maria’s self-narration is a parody of Cinderella in a positive way, which misleads the reader to think of Maria as a heroine in a canonized happy-ending fairy tale. However, in the help of the third narrator, the reader gradually realizes that Maria is nothing but a poor old unmarriable woman without getting respect or love from others. Considering that the meaning of parody is constructed in the mental process of searching for relationships between the parodied text and the original one, this study suggests that Maria’s self-narration can serve as the original text and the third-narration can be regarded as the parodied text. This is ironic parody because Maria is a parody of herself and this study illustrates how Joyce the author harnesses free indirect discourse and self-narration. It also shows how the reader identifies the double-parody and realizes Maria’s reality.