Free Indirect Discourse Research Articles

The Narrative Technique of Free Indirect Discourse in Mrs. Dalloway: ‘Tunnelling Process’ and ‘Narrativization of Characters by Characters’

이 연구는 버지니아 울프의 『댈러웨이 부인』에 구사된 자유간접화법의 양상과 효과를 분석하였다. 울프는 이 작품에서 ‘터널 만들기’라고 명명한 자신만의 독특하고 실험적인 글쓰기 기법을 표현하기 위해 모더니즘 소설의 주요 서술기법 중 하나인 자유간접화법을 채용하였다. 3인칭 대명사와 과거 시제를 사용하면서 시간적으로는 현재, 공간적으로는 ‘이곳’을 나타내는 시공간의 직시소를 함께 구사하는 이 화법은 직접화법과 간접화법의 절충적 형태를 띠고 있다. 울프는 자유간접화법과 ‘터널 만들기’라는 서술기법을 통해 한 인물의 내부와 외부에서 의식이 이동하는 양상, 그리고 과거와 현재의 경험을 공유하는 서로 다른 인물들 사이에서 의식이 이동하고 공유되는 양상을 보여준다. 자유간접화법을 사용한 울프의 서술기법상의 또 다른 특징은 ‘인물에 의한 인물 의 서사화’로 확장되어 드러난다. 인물에 의한 인물의 서사화를 통해 울프는 한 등장인물의 의식과 내면을 다른 등장인물의 의식을 통해 설명하고 표현한다. 이때 한 인물의 행동은 다른 인물이 그의 의식을 설명하는 근거로 작용하는데, 울프는 인물들의 말과 행동을 근거로 한 인물의 의식과 마음을 다른 인물이 설명하는 과정을 보여주고자 한다. ‘터널 만들기’와 ‘인물에 의한 인물의 서사’는 울프가 구사하는 자유간접화법의 주요한 양상이자 특징이다. 이 소설에 드러난 ‘의식의 흐름’은 한 개인의 고립된 내면을 탐색하는 것이 아니라, 서로 연결되고 교차하면서 마침내 하나로 통합되는 ‘집적된 의식’의 내러티브를 탄생시킨다.In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf creates a remarkable writing method, what she calls a “tunnelling process.” To express this method, Woolf employs the style of Free Indirect Discourse(FID), one of the main narrative forms she uses to show that she has successfully established a unique, experimental writing style. FID is mixed in between Direct Discourse and Indirect Discourse, using the third-person pronoun and past tense with deictics indicating the present. With this method of “tunnelling process” using the narrative form of FID, Woolf shows how transitions can take place between different characters’ consciousnesses via experiences of the past and the present that they share. “The narrativization of characters by characters” is another stylistic feature characteristic of Woolf’s writing style using FID. With the narrativization of characters by characters, Woolf accounts for a mind by another mind, attributing mental causes to the actions of her characters. Woof is deeply interested in presenting the process of how a mind accounts for other minds based on external, behavioral evidence, that is, what these other minds say and do. ‘Tunnelling process’and ‘narrativization of characters by characters’ constitute Woolf s main characteristic use of FID. It is also pointed out that in the novel Woolf searches for not the isolated consciousness of an individual but the narrative of the ‘collective discursive continuum’ among a large set of characters.

‘Without you, I am nothing’: on the counterfactual imagination in Emma

ABSTRACTPositioning Austen's Emma in relation to a number of other nineteenth-century novels, this essay proposes that the novel's strategic restraint of its readers’ counterfactual imagining, enacted through repeat reading, affords a minor countermeasure to the contingencies of readership. By staging the counterfactual imagination as the impossible, that is, Austen's narrative strategies in Emma attempt to rein in the reader's imagination of the counterfactual, acknowledging at the same time the uncertainties of the narrative's future once committed to print and as a book in the hands of unpredictable readers. While critics have observed the geographical and social claustrophobia of the novel, and traced that sense of closing in as well in the extensive use of free indirect discourse, this essay extends our understanding of the novel's tight setting of limits to its handling of narrative contingency and of the counterfactual imagination, enacted especially in the experience of repeat reading.

Free Indirect Discourse and the Problem of the Will in Two Novels by William Godwin

Free Indirect Discourse and the Problem of the Will in Two Novels by William Godwin Thomas Salem Manganaro (bio) In his discussion of emma (1815) in jane austen; or, the secret of Style, D. A. Miller draws our attention to an essential quality of free indirect discourse. By focusing on a single sentence repeated before and after the chapter break of volume 2, chapters 2 and 3—“She could not forgive her”1—Miller observes that the repetition of this sentence allows us to see the two ways in which it may be read: as “the indirect and impersonal performance of Emma’s consciousness” and as “the mere matter-of-fact notation of that thought.”2 It is able to “perform” what Emma would think about Jane Fairfax, in the sense that she might say “I cannot forgive her,” and is also able to denote a fact about Emma’s state of mind as part of a third-person omniscient narrative. This is possible because the sentence emulates the character’s “direct speech” without leaving the perspective of the narrator, and so it can also be read as the narrator’s simple description of the character’s mind or plain “indirect speech.”3 Miller’s observation draws from standard accounts of narrative perspective in Emma; as Wayne C. Booth has written, there is a “double vision that operates throughout the book: our inside view of Emma’s worth and our objective view of her great faults.”4 In its “double vision,” or what Roy Pascal later called “the [End Page 301] dual voice,”5 free indirect discourse then stands out as a privileged strategy in allowing us momentarily to embody the protagonist’s consciousness as well as stand apart from it and judge it. However, there is an added dimension to this sentence from Emma that has received less attention in standard accounts of free indirect discourse. This becomes apparent when we focus in closer detail on the words “She could not,” and the difference in meaning they convey when considered from an “inside” and from an “outside” perspective. These words attract our attention because they express something peculiar about Emma’s volition and her capacity to exert herself: when we read them as vocalized by Emma herself on the one hand and as third-person matter-of-fact notation on the other, we simultaneously register two very different conceptions of the will. This becomes clearer when we consider a separate but similar example from Emma. Here, immediately before Emma lets loose her infamous unkind remark to Miss Bates in the company of Mr. and Mrs. Weston, Mr. and Mrs. Elton, Harriet Smith, Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax, and Mr. Knightley, we are given a paragraph break comprising a single sentence: “Emma could not resist.”6 Unlike the previous example, this sentence is not delivered in the midst of a narrator’s discussion of Emma’s train of thought, but rather in an extended quoted conversation. For this reason, we are not likely to read it as free indirect discourse, but strictly as a notation of Emma’s mind. Yet if we pause over the sentence, we can recognize that it can also be read, like “She could not forgive her,” in two different ways: as a “performance of Emma’s consciousness” and as a “matter-of-fact notation of the thought,” and the difference is significant. If we read the sentence as a mere notation, we understand Emma as being sincerely unable to act any differently, taking the words “could not” literally: it was not within the range of available possibilities for her mental capacity at that point and time. Alternatively, when we read the sentence as a “performance of her consciousness,” we discover quite the opposite: if “I cannot resist” were a sentence spoken privately in Emma’s mind, we would understand instantly that Emma can resist. It is as though one were to say in passing, “I cannot resist having one more chocolate,” meaning something more like “it is very hard for me to resist”: the implication would be exactly that “I can resist,” with the added qualifier that I say I cannot resist so as to...

Consciousness and Chiasmus: Narrating Embodied Intersubjectivities

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...

Free Indirect Discourse

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Foreground and Background in a Narrative: Trends in Foreign Linguistic and Translation Studies

The review accumulates the information on the Theory of Grounding and Saliency Hierarchy (based on publications that have not been translated into Russian) and describes the main modern trends in the study of grounding. The Theory of Grounding, designed in the last quarter of the 20th century, has since then been developing within linguistic, narratological, cognitive and translation studies, being applied to texts of various genres in many languages. Early works in this sphere elaborated the criteria characterizing the relative grounding of the clauses in the narrative (based on temporal sequentiality and transitivity), while later research, focusing on the wider range of texts including free indirect discourse and non-sequential prose, highlighted the subjectivity of grounding, including criteria of human importance and unpredictability into the analysis of the salient clauses. As a result the Theory of Grounding has contributed to various coexisting trends in the scientific research concerning subordination of clauses and anaphoric relations in texts on the one hand, and deixis, evaluation and perspective on the other. Touching upon these trends in the review, we pay special attention to the analysis of grounding within translation studies: the researchers focus on transitivity in translation, revealing and explaining the cases of non-intentional and purposeful changes in transitivity made by translators. The analysis of the deictic center shifts in original texts and their translations also contributes to our knowledge of grounding devices. Out of all publications, our special attention is drawn to the studies of grounding that employ Russian-language narrative materials.

The Political Experiment of “Pot-Boylers”: Thinking, Feeling, and Romance in Kay Boyle’s Resistance Thriller Avalanche

The Political Experiment of “Pot-Boylers”: Thinking, Feeling, and Romance in Kay Boyle’s Resistance Thriller Avalanche Eric Keenaghan (bio) Introduction: On Selling Out “Kay Boyle has sold the Left Bank down the river” (“Pot-Boyler” 97). So opens a brief, unattributed review in Time Magazine of Avalanche: A Novel of Love and Espionage, a thriller by the American-born modernist Kay Boyle. Serialized, initially, in The Saturday Evening Post, the novel was published in 1944 as a standalone title and became Boyle’s only bestseller. Over a decade earlier, she had been affiliated with the Left Bank avant-garde magazine transition and was a signatory of its “The Revolution of the Word” (1929)—a manifesto asserting experimentalism as an author’s right. Later, she maintained she had endorsed the document, not to support stylistic innovation for its own sake, but to insist on writers’ freedom from market pressures. “The tradition of the artist, the creator,” should “outweigh” and “prevail” over a “materialistic, bourgeois tradition,” Boyle argued (qtd. in McAlmon 269). Despite appearances, then, her commercial turn during the Second World War was not simply a matter of abandoning previously held principles, as the review implies, but was tied to Boyle’s evolution as a committed writer. When Boyle moved from bohemian Paris to politically fraught Austria in 1933, her work began to reflect her strengthening social and political conscience as she witnessed the events leading up to the Anschluss. More [End Page 339] than a marker of aesthetic individualism, her linguistic experimentation in the thirties was a facet of how her fiction thematically addressed sociopolitical issues, by dismantling the usual distinctions between internal psychological and external social realities (Spanier 92–124). Beginning with Avalanche, she extended how her fiction addressed world events by also reassessing literary markets’ usefulness for reaching broader readerships. Having written this genre novel to make Americans conscious of conditions in occupied Europe, Boyle also knowingly appealed to the sensibilities of popular magazines’ acquisitions editors and audiences. Modernist narrative techniques do not just guarantee the author’s creative freedom; they also are the means for generating American readers’ sympathy with an oppressed foreign population. In Avalanche, Boyle’s protagonist is Fenton Ravel, a young half-American, half-French woman who returns to her family’s chalet in the fictional village of Truex, a thinly veiled version of the Alpine resort town Chamonix-Mont Blanc.1 Her family had fled to the United States following the outbreak of the European war in 1939. During the Nazi Occupation, Fenton returns to France three years later as part of a relief effort in Lyon, in the Zone Libre. The novel opens with her train ride from Lyon to the Haute-Savoie region, where she hopes to search out an adolescent crush, a ski guide named Gabriel Bastineau. Fenton refuses to believe reports that he died a year earlier in an avalanche, especially since two other guides’ names, not his, are engraved on the village memorial. Eventually she happens upon Bastineau in the mountains, and learns that he is “the leader of frontier resistance,” a member of the Maquis (Avalanche 164).2 Together, they thwart the machinations of de Vaudois, a Nazi agent who arrives on the same train as Fenton and presents himself as a Swiss businessman intending to retrieve the body of a young compatriot killed in another avalanche. Vaudois’s primary mission, though, is not to retrieve the fallen youth, later revealed also to have been a foreign agent, but to ferret out information about the Maquis and its legendary leader Bastineau. A tale of espionage, adventure, and romance, Avalanche, as the Time review’s title pithily puts it, does seem a “Pot-Boyler,” a “spectacular melodrama, sometimes tautened into Hitchcocky thrills” (97). But it has another dimension. Boyle liberally intersperses free indirect discourse in the generic storyline, giving readers access to Fenton’s thoughts, feelings, and memories. Her protagonist’s impressionistic, often affective, thinking renders her more [End Page 340] than a guide through the thriller’s mystery. As the focalizing agent, she also models the development of a kind of thinking and feeling—mature and selfless—that the author hoped American readers would cultivate to...

Vidas secas: as percepções de Fabiano e o estado ausente

<p>Much has been researched about Graciliano Ramos’work. Vidas secas had numerous studies devoted to its analysis. The position of the criticism about the brutalized characters has changed.The first reviews dealt with the animalization of Fabiano and his family, seeing them as non psychologically complex After this first interpretation, criticism proposed a reinterpretation of Graciliano’s stylistic resources, through which is possible to comprehend the characters in a different way. This study proposes a second look at two distinct moments of the novel in which Fabiano has contact with the State: through his confrontation with the yellow soldier in chapters Cadeia and O soldado amarelo. The questions and perceptions of Fabiano, brought to light by Ramos’ free indirect discourse help us to reflect on his psychological complexity denied by early reviews. In this paper, we investigate how the historical moment passes through the narrative,which is used as raw material for the character’s constitution.</p>

Prominent protagonists

In this paper, I investigate the influence that the prominence status of a protagonist has on its availability as an anchor for Free Indirect Discourse in narrative texts. I will show that not all protagonists which are prominent enough to be taken up by personal pronouns are available as anchors for Free Indirect Discourse, even if interpreting a sentence or stretch of discourse as expressing the utterances, thoughts or feelings of the respective protagonist is the most plausible option in terms of content. Rather, only protagonists that function as topics with respect to larger text segments or are sentient with respect to the eventuality introduced by the verb of the immediately preceding sentence are licit perspective takers.

La sceneggiatura teatrale inedita di “La Virtù di Checchina”

Sommario This article deals with a comparison between Matilde Serao’s short story “Checchina’s Virtue” (1884) and the homonymous unpublished theatrical script written by Massimo Franciosa (1995), of which a summary is provided. The comparison between the source text and the adaptation draws on the debate about the narrativity of drama in which many scholars have engaged in the last decades: Richardson (1987), Chatman (1990), Jahn (2001), Fludernik (2008) and Nünning & Sommer (2008). The analysis focuses on two forms of diegetic narrativity that appear in the short story, i. e. free indirect discourse and the iterative mode, in order to see how the theatrical script deals with them. The analysis shows that the script preserves the narrative contents of the source text and highlights how diegetic and mimetic narrativity collaborate to the reworking and redistribution of those contents.

Character and Person. John Frow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi+331.

<i>Character and Person</i>. John Frow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi+331.

Two kinds of perspective taking in narrative texts

In this paper, I argue for the existence of two distinct kinds of protagonists’ perspective taking in narrative texts. The first, Free Indirect Discourse, represents conscious thoughts or utterances of protagonists and involves context shifting: All context-sensitive expressions with the exception of pronouns and tenses are interpreted with respect to the fictional context of some salient protagonist (Schlenker 2004; Sharvit 2008; Eckardt 2014, Maier 2015). The second, which I dub viewpoint shifting, does not necessarily represent conscious thoughts or utterances and it does not involve context shifting. Rather, a situation is described as it is perceived by a salient protagonist or in a way that reflects the doxastic state of such a protagonist, not with respect to the Common Ground (CG) of narrator and reader. While FID is only available at the root level, i.e. at the speech act level, viewpoint shifting is available at the level of finite matrix clauses.

Cinematic Free Indirect Discourse in the Age of Machinic Enslavement

Cinematic Free Indirect Discourse in the Age of Machinic Enslavement

Does narrative perspective influence readers’ perspective-taking? An empirical study on free indirect discourse, psycho-narration and first-person narration

It is often assumed that narrating a story from the protagonist’s perspective increases the readers’ inclination to take over this perspective. In a questionnaire study, we examined to which degree different textual modes of narration (a) increase the degree to which the reader can generally relate to the protagonist (what we will call relatedness), (b) make the reader prone to imagine the scene from the spatial point-of-view of the protagonist, and (c) enhance the psychological perspective-taking of the reader, measured as identification with the protagonist. We employed two different types of texts—one literary and one non-literary—and tested them in four different modes of narration: free indirect discourse, psycho-narration, first-person narration and external focalization. In terms of the relatedness between the reader and protagonist and spatial perspective-taking the largest differences (descriptively) occurred between external focalization and psycho-narration (p &amp;lt; .05 for relatedness, p &amp;lt; .05 for spatial perspective-taking) and between external focalization and first-person narration (p &amp;lt; .05 for relatedness, for spatial perspective-taking p &amp;lt; .1). Identification, measured with items from a questionnaire on reading experience (Appel et al. 2002), was highest for first-person narration. Here, the difference between first-person narration and external focalization turned out significant only after including dispositional empathy, thematic interest for the text and attention during reading as covariates. Results for the other two perspective-taking measures were unaffected by the inclusion of the same covariates. In conclusion, our data show that first-person and psycho-narration increased the tendency to take over the perspective of the protagonist, but FID did not. This article is part of the special collection: Perspective Taking

Precedent Names in the Text Field of Marina Tsvetaeva from the Perspective of Free Indirect Discourse

The present study is complied with the topical theme “name in the text” and devoted to the problems of how precedent names as the text-forming elements function in the poems and prose works of Marina Tsvetaeva within the framework of free indirect discourse. The authors study various methods and functions of personal names. The authors make conclusions concerning the frequency of precedent names and the specific character of intertextual elements in Tsvetaeva’s text, which, on the one hand, complicates the perception of the text, but on the other hand, promotes including both the poet and the reader into the world-wide cultural and spiritual environment. The ways of introducing the name and the persona, especially within free indirect discourse, specifies the further existence of the name / or its absence in the text.

Analysis of Free Indirect Discourse Narratives in the Works of Austen, Joyce, and Kingston

Language, with the complexity of its structure, can be problematic in terms of interpreting works of literature. This essay discusses the problems perceived in the process of interpretation of free indirect discourse narratives in Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice and Emma, James Joyces A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and The Dead, and Maxine Hong Kingstons Tripmaster Monkey. Narratives with free indirect discourse opens up possibility of misinterpretation caused by the misconception of whose point of view the story is told. By looking at the works within the concept of narratology by Chatman (1978) and Prince (2003), such narrativeswhich apply the viewpoint of omniscient narratorscause ambiguity to the voice of external and internal focalisers. This is due to the fact that the use of such narratives blends the two types of focalisations. The findings of this research lead to an argument that through external focalisation, the view becomes objective. Yet through internal focalisation, the view tends to become subjective as it is infiltrated by the characters view. Such an argument then gives way to a conclusion that narratives with free indirect discourse gives effect to irony in the story-telling process of the works discussed. Keywords: free indirect discourse, narratology, focalisation

The World of Relative Values in Jane Austen’s Persuasion

This paper investigates the language of relative economic values represented in Jane Austen’s last novel Persuasion. A series of socio-economic changes occurred at the turn of the 18SUPth/SUP century, the Franco-British Wars, the Restriction Act of 1797, and the unexpected prosperity of agricultural industry, had led to unprecedented instability and uncertainty in the structure of value. While such traditional standards of measurement as gold or land had lost their function as liable media, public concern and conflicts about the value system radically increased. This paper asserts that Austen had full awareness of contemporary socio-economic changes and further argues that Persuasion represents this issue of uncertain, relative values through the figure of Anne Elliot. The first part charts Anne’s journey from Kellynch through Uppercross to Bath, analyzing how other characters relatively estimates her value. Located at the boundary of the Elliot circle, her minor social position results in differed evaluations of her worth in terms of relationships. Representations of situational measurement in this novel evoke economic, political, and epistemological uncertainties of contemporary Britain, which are resolved within the narrative structure through the domesticity of private interiority. Austen deploys literary techniques such as free indirect discourse and third-person effects, depicting the realm of Anne’s inner world as non-negotiable standard of value. The private domain of interiority coincides with the impersonality of third-person narration, through which a new structure of literary value begins to reign at the end of Persuasion.

The protagonist projection hypothesis

Abstract The protagonist projection hypothesis was formulated by Holton (1997) in order to account for cases where the speaker seems to utter contradictory statements. Holton argues that in these cases the speaker projects herself into the mind of someone else. Three different sentence-types have been classified as examples of protagonist projection: (i) sentences with factive verbs (tell+wh, know), (ii) sentences that realize free indirect discourse, and (iii) sentences that do not realize free indirect discourse, but are still assumed to be instances of speaking from someone else’s perspective. Regarding the sentences in (i), I argue, following Tsohatzidis (1993, 1997, 2012), that neither tell+wh nor know must be considered as factive predicates. As for the sentences of type (ii), I conclude that free indirect discourse is an instance of protagonist projection. Finally, the sentences of type (iii) are accounted for as cases of utterances whose syntax is partially unpronounced.

Literature and Film, Dispositioned: Thought, Location, World by Alice Gavin

Reviewed by: Literature and Film, Dispositioned: Thought, Location, World by Alice Gavin Patrick O’Donnell Alice Gavin. Literature and Film, Dispositioned: Thought, Location, World. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xi + 180 pp. $100 (Hardback). In Literature and Film, Dispositioned, Alice Gavin wishes to offer a counter-narrative to that “optimistic” narrative of modernity that claims that modernist narrative and aesthetic techniques can expose a world of interiority that may be said to exist by virtue of the invention of those very techniques. Instead, Gavin argues that the poster child for modernist narrative strategies—free indirect discourse—when deployed scriptively in fiction and visually in film, renders a paradox, as it “involves both a disposition (a subjective temperament) and a dispositioning (subjectivity’s displacement)” (7). For Gavin, the venerable technique of free indirect discourse in its modernist versions results in a recognition that subjectivity is the “silence” of silent film and the inarticulate “stuff” of consciousness in twentieth century literature. While the concept may not be news in the wake of those theorists upon whom Gavin relies—Barthes, Agamben, Deleuze, Rancière, etc.—the ways in which Gavin brings modernist literary and cinematic sensibilities into alignment as discursive entities equally enthused and troubled by the comparable techniques that enable the invention of modernist subjectivities are compelling. Putting Henry James’s “pre-cinematic” imaginary and Woolf and Beckett’s discernments of the cinematic aspects of their fictions alongside Buster Keaton’s silents and Deleuze’s theory of the movement-image effectively reveals the interdiscursivity of modernism in its ongoing conversation about its own capacities and limits. Suggesting the ways in which the free indirect discourse of modernist writing (often inaccurately described as “stream-of-consciousness”) is paralleled in Deleuze’s notion that the camera’s movements yield a form of perception neither identical with that of a character nor with objective reality, Gavin observes an important trajectory in modernism from James to Beckett that manifests what lies outside communication, both verbal and visual. This “excommunicative” limit, she argues, can be said to limn the “dispositioned,” uninhabitable space paradoxically inhabited by modernist subjectivities. [End Page E-9] Literature and Film, Dispositioned is above all a discussion of the intermedial poetics of film and literature, and it is structured accordingly. An opening chapter on literature provides the theoretical framework for the consideration of free indirect discourse in its linguistic, stylistic, and narratological registers while touching upon a diverse array of literary works by James, Woolf, and Joyce (especially Joyce’s “The Dead”) that convey the ways in which literary free indirect discourse anticipates or parallels silent film’s visualization of “dispositioned” subjectivities. Two chapters entitled “Intermedium” and “Intramedium” follow. The first of these focuses on Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” and The Portrait of a Lady and brother William James’s studies of cognition and perception in order to demonstrate that the vaunted “inward turn” instigated for modernism by Henry’s narratives does not result in an exposure of the putative riches of consciousness so much as reveal the “anxiety of mediation” (65) that occurs when the newly discovered “inside” necessarily configures an “outside.” “Stream of consciousness,” in this perspective, becomes centrifugal, a flight outwards as the exteriorization of thought manifests a blank or absent center. In “Intramedium,” the focus is on Virginia Woolf, primarily The Years and A Room of One’s Own. In this chapter, Gavin suggests the ways in which Woolf’s portrayal of consciousness as a receptive vehicle parallels developments in radio technology and cinema that illuminate the ways in which, for Woolf, “the animation of the interior [as it receives sounds, voices, images] is the dissipation of interiority” (93). In my view, these two chapters are the most compelling of Literature and Film, Dispositioned: they contain full, intensive readings of the works under discussion that provide convincing evidence of James’s and Woolf’s intermediality as they configure what consciousness is for them, thus preparing the ground for the book’s final chapters on cinema. In those chapters—both entitled “Film”—Gavin traverses a host of film theorists and several silent films to describe how early film visually manages free indirect discourse as it “inscribes the streaming of a...

Some Stylistic Considerations of Free Indirect Discourse in Film Adaptations of Flaubert's &lt;em&gt;Madame Bovary&lt;/em&gt;

Some Stylistic Considerations of Free Indirect Discourse in Film Adaptations of Flaubert's Madame Bovary Colin Gardner (bio) Variously known as style indirect libre or erlebte Rede, free indirect discourse has always been of particular interest to both literary and film theorists because of its identification with the modernist innovations of Gustave Flaubert and the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel as well as the narrative properties of traditional Hollywood cinema. Gilles Deleuze, for example, ties it directly to his discussion of what he calls the "perception-image." In film, a perception has two poles, subjective and objective. Thus, "a subjective perception is one in which the images vary in relation to a central and privileged image; an objective perception is one where, as in things, all the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all their parts."1 However, it is important to note that the narrative film's scopic economy is not a simple binarism between subjective point of view and objective rendering on-screen (expressed most economically, for example, in shot-reverse-shot editing), but also behaves in accordance with a free indirect discourse that is able to express characters' inner states via the mise-en-scène, while the character is also present within the mise-en-scène. The free indirect discourse therefore suggests the possibility of expressing a first-person focalization (inside), while continuing to present the character in the third person (outside). This complication of the subjective-objective duality is acknowledged by Deleuze in his analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Cinema of Poetry"2 and its relation to the free indirect in Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Here, Deleuze argues that the perception-image is often able to override the intentionality of bodily motility (the vectorial space of Deleuze's "action-image") via a form of camera self-consciousness. "We are no longer faced with subjective or objective images," notes Deleuze; "we are caught in a correlation between a perception-image and a camera-consciousness which transforms it (the question of knowing whether the image was objective or subjective is no longer raised)."3 Deleuze calls this "a very [End Page 587] special kind of cinema" because it makes the presence of the camera both felt and palpable.4 In this way, the perception-image takes on the guise of a free indirect subjectivity as soon as it manifests itself through an autonomous camera-consciousness. Consequently, the free indirect allows us to get a clearer idea of how a pure perception-image—with its specific roots in bodily affect—might work when freed from the subjective baggage of suturing film language. Earmarked as a direct advance on, and contrast to, the all-seeing, God's-eye objectivist realist novels of Balzac and Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) is often cited specifically as the prototypical text of this hybrid subjective / objective style, although Pasolini has traced a variation of its use as far back as Dante.5 Given this general hermeneutic regard for the free indirect as a historicizing, ideologically motivated textual practice, the paucity of discussion concerning its application to film is all the more surprising, especially given the import of Deleuze's analysis in both Cinema 1 and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. With that in mind, this essay thus posits the following questions: What is free indirect discourse? How does it work in the literary context of Flaubert in general and Madame Bovary in particular? Does it translate directly into cinematic terms? If so, how has this affected film adaptations of Madame Bovary, specifically those of Jean Renoir, Vincente Minnelli, and Claude Chabrol? If not, and this constitutes the crux of this essay's thesis, is there an indirect filmic substitute that can generate equivalent stylistic effects? The short answer to the last question is yes, and it lies, as we shall see, in film's ability to foreground the body's performative ability to express inner states as an outward form of affect or gest. First, let us clear some semantic ground and try to establish a terminological consensus via some specific definitions. In A Dictionary of Narratology, Gerald Prince defines "direct discourse...