Free Indirect Style Research Articles

From Romanian Communism to Capitalism: the Representation and Ideology of Women’s Bodies

This article analyses the representation of women’s bodies in the narratives of Și se auzeau greierii (And Crickets Could Be Heard) by Corina Sabău, ca și cum nimic nu s-ar fi întâmplat (as if nothing has happened) by Alina Nelega, and Viața e a mea (The Life is Mine) by Emilia Faur. It explores how the portrayal of maternity, sexual abuse, abortion, and gender identity changes from Romanian Communism to the capitalist democracy. If the socialist women were submissive to the pronatalist desiderate, being oppressed because of the insalubrious abortions (Sabău) or because of the fear to affirm their gender identity (Nelega), the capitalist advertisement with its sexist standards of beauty, doubled by the postnatal depression, imposes the fatality of death (Faur). My objective is to connect feminist aesthetics with ideological critique by identifying the abstract model of a feminist Bildungsroman (Rita Felski) in the three novels under consideration. However, on a formal level, I will analyse how in the case of Faur's and Nelega's novels, the free indirect style, a blend of affect translated into impersonal form (Moretti), mediates a socio-political commentary for increased awareness and active engagement in dismantling the adaptable patriarchy inherent in any political system, while the first-person narrative (Sabău) shows how the social fabric is internalised by the narrator, following her inner turmoil.

Living Arrangements: Mise-en-scène and the Nouveau Roman in the Fiction of Ann Quin

Abstract Why is postwar experimental fiction so concerned with measuring and marking out scene and setting? This article analyzes the fiction of the avant-garde British novelist Ann Quin, both her short stories and her debut novel Berg, focusing on her mise-en-scène, choreography, and tableaux. It argues for a fraught relationship between twentieth-century fiction and setting, from Henry James’s “house of fiction” and Woolf’s denunciation of naturalist interiors, from the self-sufficient psyches of early modernism to the fastidious mapping of scene and place in the theory of the nouveau roman, especially that of Natalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The importance of Quin’s work for postwar fiction, the article argues, is that it suspends, periodically, the free indirect style of early modernism but also departs from the austere topography of the nouveau roman, so that her fiction furnishes an elastic, anxious, and unstable mise-en-scène.

Trans Pronouns, Transference, and The Ambassadors

Abstract: While certain discussions of trans pronouns refer to third-person “address,” for Benveniste, “address” is limited to “I” and “you”; the third person is the “non-person.” From Jean-Claude Milner’s theory of names and insults and forms of quasi-address that place one above or below the person, the article turns to three other crossings of pro-nominal “person”—psychoanalytic transference (an address to the third person hidden within an I/you address), free-indirect style (a first-person discourse in the third), and certain reversals of person in James’s ghost stories—in order to understand the ending of The Ambassadors and Strether’s realizations there.

What Bertha Knows: Proprietary Narration in Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”

How do we know what a character knows? What assumptions do we make about a character and their awareness when we read a text? How, in fact, does a text codify and construct knowledge, character, and thought? This essay addresses these questions in relation to Katherine Mansfield’s short story, “Bliss.” Most readers of “Bliss” assume that the protagonist, Bertha, knows nothing of her husband’s apparent affair with a guest at their dinner party and even that she is unaware of her own burgeoning homosexual desire for this same guest. And yet the persistent ambiguity of Mansfield’s free indirect style, at the least, allows Bertha to be read as knowing, deliberate, and complicit in her apparent ignorance. In conjunction with the text’s critique of gender roles and expectations, Mansfield’s free indirect style implicitly criticizes her reader’s willingness to sideline Bertha’s self-awareness. Mansfield’s demonstration of the fungibility of the ownership of thoughts is underscored by her critique of Bertha’s largely privileged lifestyle filled with possessions she is ultimately unable to fully possess.

Mute Peal: The Queer Sonic Dynamics of Murmurs in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract: Joyce's use of free-indirect style in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man means that the narrative is filtered and distorted through Stephen's faltering and peculiar sensory perceptions. While Stephen's sight, touch, and smell have attracted scholarly attention, little has been said about the ways through which he hears his surroundings. This essay posits that sound, with its capacity to penetrate and resonate within the subject, plays an important role in shaping Stephen's sensorium and thus the novel's atmosphere. Moreover, Joyce's exploration of different registers of sound—especially the murmur—is a vehicle for mapping the flow and repression of Stephen's muffled and muted psychosexual energies, as well as those of the society around him. Uncertain, indistinct, and transgressive murmurs echo throughout the novel, calling into question the normative stability of the self, the clarity of desire, and the revelatory power of confession. Ultimately, this reading suggests a new axis along which to analyze literary representations of sensation: that of intensity, dynamics, and register.

Suffering with Style

Suffering with Style

How You Read Madame Bovary

Prompted by the prior work of critics like Ross Chambers and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this article pursues the possibility that there would be a way of reading Madame Bovary that is not just about learning to be a sophisticated and refined enough reader of Gustave Flaubert to appreciate all that he managed to achieve in that novel. Rather, while sophistication and refinement may constitute a typical first step in becoming a reader of Flaubert’s novel, the novel also, from a different perspective, offers a critical experience of the symbolic violence of a cultural universe structured by hierarchies of sophistication, potentially leaving you wondering what your fought-for sophistication is really worth. While pursuing this possibility, I examine how Madame Bovary continually figures acts of reading such as the one it is offering its readers, how a sensibility to free indirect style can be considered an index of sophistication, and how Flaubert uses figural language and certain prosodic effects to create collisions of registers of diction that destabilize any secure sense of linguistic sophistication.

The Watermark of a Self in Narrating the Past: A Study of Autobiographical Memory in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory

Autobiographies are not merely literary productions but mental functions, stories continuously narrated, owned and believed by the self. By broadening the locus of autobiography from literary productions to mental functions, the connection between its Greek constituent parts: autos (self), bios (life), and graphe (writing), can be clarified and new vantage points become possible for studying the self and its narrative framing. In the genre of autobiography Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory stands out in unraveling the ways in which memory speaks the self. The free indirect style voice of narration and bridging the epistemic gap between the past and the present, both innate to the act of remembering, are masterly used by Nabokov. This article, following Mark Rowlands’ approach to memory, studies Speak, Memory in order to explore the narrative structure of autobiographical memory and the constitution of the autobiographical sense of self. Thisstudy argues that in Speak, Memory, the self emerges as a narrative thematic pattern across time by being purported in, and at the same time transcending clusters of first-personal narratives that reconstruct the past.

On inner voice, free indirect style, and lyric

ABSTRACT In this essay, I examine how both Claudia Rankine in Citizen and Ben Lerner in The Topeka School present innovative modes of voicing and listening by using free indirect style to relate inner voice and social discourse. Discussing these literary works is only part of my focus, though, for the following reason: theorists of free indirect style haven't tended to consider that style in terms of how a person relates to their own inner voice, nor have they related the style to lyric poetry; similarly, theorists of lyric haven't related lyric to free indirect style; therefore, innovative approaches such as Rankine's and Lerner's call for a reconsideration of the theories and criticism around inner voice, free indirect style, and lyric, and that reconsideration forms a major part of this essay.

Gender and Free Indirect Style in God’s Bits of Wood

This paper explores the stylistic binarity evident in the interplay of gender and Free Indirect Style in God’s Bits of Wood. The two inherently binary constructs appear to be implicated in such literary critical concepts as theme, characterisation, and narration and point of view in the novel. It is now clear that both men and women in the novel have similar thematic concerns, including the inhuman condition and chaotic situation under which they live; that women are perceptually more aware than men of the decay in the society; that more women than men developed in character as they became politically active; and that the author unabashedly supports only female (and male) characters who work to bring about an equitable and just society. Stylistically, both men and women co-narrate aspects of the story with the author. Thus, the paper shows that exploring the relationship between gender and free indirect style is useful in determining the stylistic inclinations of the author, discussing the resolution of the plot and understanding the participation and promotion of women in the novel.

Jane Austen's Allegories of Mind: Memory Fiction in Mansfield Park

Jane Austen's Allegories of Mind:Memory Fiction in Mansfield Park Sarah Eron (bio) In the gallery there were many family portraits, but they could have little to fix the attention of a stranger. Elizabeth walked on in quest of the only face whose features would be known to her. At last it arrested her—and she beheld a striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy, with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her. She stood several minutes before the picture in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery. Mrs. Reynolds informed them, that it had been taken in his father's life time. There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice1 In one of the most famous scenes in english literature, elizabeth Bennet enters a family picture gallery only to emerge with a mind and a life forever changed. The gallery is housed on the Pemberley estate where she has just arrived with mixed feelings. The grandeur of Pemberley impresses her almost enough to regret refusing Mr. Darcy's marriage proposal, but her worldly ambitions dissipate when she is reminded of her suitor's pride, which might forever divide her from her beloved family. Elizabeth describes this self-rebuke as a "lucky recollection" that "save[s] her" from "something like regret" (159). This seemingly pristine and moralizing memory comes under scrutiny, however, once the reader travels inside to hear the housekeeper's glowing account of Mr. Darcy. Just after hearing this praise, Elizabeth walks into the exhibit. From the start of Pride and Prejudice, Austen parodies a model of retentive memory that first represents information only to form the basis of moral judgment. Her use of the gallery draws upon an eighteenth-century [End Page 79] philosophical archetype for a kind of memory that operates as a collection. Elizabeth enters the gallery like the ideal empiricist, searching the collection (her mind) for what she already knows. But the picture gallery is an aesthetic assemblage that also reveals the powers of art to alter our original impressions. Artistry here is less about the portrait's painterly realism than it is about the literary context in which the portrait is hung. "At last … arrested" by the "striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy," Elizabeth claims that the picture jogs a memory of what she actually has never before observed in the novel. Where does this memory come from? The account slyly indicates that Mrs. Reynolds's flattering reflections on the young Fitzwilliam may be the source of Elizabeth's newfound memory. The transacted remembrance causes a new and "gentle sensation," one that supplants Elizabeth's previous anxieties to keep Darcy at bay. The novel intimates that this new "recollection" may be what truly saves Elizabeth "from something like regret" (159). As though the happy feeling produced by the altered memory is not enough, Darcy himself (rendered in a new light) magically appears at Pemberley's threshold immediately upon Elizabeth's change of mind. The passage is a literary trompe l'oeil that uses free indirect style as a vehicle for satirizing empirical assumptions about memory. For a moment, we may conflate our narrative memories with Elizabeth's, failing to see the true source of the heroine's impressions. Austen presents us with a gallery of curated memories that evolve through social networks; they are fictionalized as easily as they are penetrated by the remembrances and impressions of other persons. Most significantly, these memories have a powerful ability to soothe distress as they conjure up new feelings, circumstances, and events. One way of discovering the trick of this passage is by tracking the subtle mechanics of Austen's free indirect style. D. A. Miller has defined Austen's style as a "paradoxical form of impersonal intimacy"; it is a window into the "inner life" of a character that allows us to experience that life "in a way she never could."2 In this manner, the very idea of free indirect style always suggests...

The interaction of various temporal devices in the use of past followed by temporal nouns

Followed by a temporal noun, past can be synonymous with last, but not with non-deictically anchored previous (e.g., ‘I've not been feeling very well for the past/last/*previous few days’). Most dictionaries provide examples in which past occurs with the present perfect, giving the impression that past is incompatible with other tenses. A close examination of the token past retrieved from the Brown Corpus, the Frown Corpus, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (coca), however, has revealed that it is not uncommon for past to occur with the simple past or even with the past perfect (e.g., ‘His wife had left him the past year for a wealthy Wall Street broker’) and that past occurring with the past perfect can be explained as instances of free indirect style, discourse freezing or difference in reality (i.e., the three discourse principles allowing a shift in viewpoint with last). Research on temporal reference has thus far been ‘strongly biased towards certain devices’ such as tense, Aktionsart, and aspect ( Klein, 2009 : 41). This study shows that our understanding of how time is encoded in language can benefit from research studies dealing with the relationship between tense-aspect, temporal adverbials and discourse principles.

Corpus de Estilo Indirecto Libre en Español (CEILE)

El Corpus de Estilo Indirecto Libre en Español (CEILE) es un conjunto de seiscientos cinco ejemplos de estilo indirecto libre, extraídos de siete obras representativas de la narrativa española contemporánea. La disposición y organización del corpus responde a fines investigadores en el ámbito de la Lingüística, aunque su utilidad no es exclusiva del mismo, sino extensiva a estudios de diferente índole.

Jack and the Beanstalk: The human plot in narrative traditions and contemporary global culture

The narrative tradition, going back to the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s Odyssey, presents itself as a framework for any person faced with taking up their life and making something of it. It works with archetypes, images that seek to resonate with the human psyche. According to Christopher Booker, the central theme underlying the narratives – from quest stories through tragedy and comedy – is one that moves us from egocentricity to the achievement of an authentic and generous self. But the narrative relies on the distinction between an appearance of success or failure (“above the line”), and the personal journey that is, or is not, successfully undertaken, “below the line”. Our global commercially oriented culture has decoupled us from the traditional normative images and roles, but the danger, for example with superhero fantasies, is that the below the line plot is lost, and with it the self-referentiality that is the source of character growth. Against Booker’s negative take on post-moral fiction, I argue, finally, that a more self-conscious self-referentiality is shown in the technique of “free indirect style” discussed by James Wood, calling for a greater degree of co-authoring of the moral of the plot.

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Readers’ responses to experimental techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation in Woolf’sTo the LighthouseandMrs Dalloway

Woolf’s work has been the object of several studies concerned with her experimental use of techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation. These investigated the way in which different perspectives coexist and alternate in her writing, suggesting that the use of such techniques often results in ambiguous perspective shifts. However, there is hardly any empirical evidence as to whether readers experience difficulty while reading her narratives as a result of these narrative techniques. This article examines empirically readers’ responses to extracts from Woolf’s two major novels – To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway – to provide evidence for whether Woolf’s techniques for the presentation of characters’ voices, thoughts and perspectives represent a challenge for readers. To achieve this, a mixed-methods approach that combines a stylistic analysis with a detailed questionnaire has been employed. Selected extracts that were hypothesised to be complex due to the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue were modified by substituting these with less ambiguous modes of consciousness presentation, such as direct speech or direct thought. Readers’ responses to the modified and unmodified versions of the same extracts were compared: results show that the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue increases the number of perspectives identified by readers, suggesting that this technique increases the texts’ difficulty, laying a more solid ground for future investigations.

The Cognitive Grammar of drunkenness: Consciousness representation in Under the Volcano

Cognitive Grammar analyses the semantics of linguistic features in relation to human cognition; Free Indirect Style allows authors to represent their characters’ cognition with language. This article applies Cognitive Grammar to the analysis of a character’s mind that is represented with Free Indirect Style. In the tradition of mind style analysis, it aims to use linguistics to reveal some of the underlying cognitive processes and proclivities at work in the character’s psychology. The character in question is the protagonist in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, an alcoholic who is largely characterised by his drunken behaviour and ideation. This article therefore focuses on the linguistic features that serve to represent his inebriated state of mind. It analyses the semantic effects of those features primarily in terms of attentional focus, drawing on Cognitive Grammar concepts, such as objective construal, specificity, scope, profile and domain, and relating these to the protagonist’s cognitive proclivities for solipsism, partial awareness, delayed reaction, attenuated experience and self-delusion. The article also discusses the theoretical background for mind style analysis, arguing for the continued importance of focusing on the relationship between the text and a character’s mind, alongside the focus on the reader’s mind that has come to dominate cognitive stylistics.

The Effects of Free Indirect Style in George Eliot's ‘Middlemarch’

The Effects of Free Indirect Style in George Eliot's ‘Middlemarch’

O que querem os personagens de Alameda?

Alameda (1963), de Astrid Cabral, é um livro composto por vinte contos, nos quais os protagonistas causam certo estranhamento no leitor (um grão de feijão; a terra de uma praça; uma cerca de madeira; etc.). Os narradores dos contos, quando em primeira pessoa, pertencem ao mundo vegetal. Suas sensações, anseios e vivências nos são relatados a partir de suas próprias vozes. E, quando em terceira pessoa, eles, muitas vezes, posicionam-se no mesmo nível dos personagens, recorrendo, em alguns casos, ao estilo indireto livre, como no conto “A orquídea de exposição”, por exemplo. Neste tipo de construção, realiza-se um processo de acercamento entre o humano e o vegetal, apresentando narradores com pontos de vista que podem ser considerados como híbridos, pois transitam entre os dois mundos. Levando em conta as particularidades dos personagens, buscou-se, neste estudo, estabelecer um processo de aproximação/distanciamento entre estes e o que é tido como concernente ao humano, o qual deu origem à questão que intitula este texto: O que querem os personagens de Alameda? Uma tentativa de resposta foi elaborada a partir do conceito de concepção de um projeto de existência, presente nos escritos do filósofo francês Jean-Paul Sartre, pertencente à escola existencialista, considerando, de forma pontual, dois elementos narrativos: o tempo e o espaço.

Book Review: Eric Rundquist, Free Indirect Style in Modernism: Representations of Consciousness

Book Review: Eric Rundquist, <i>Free Indirect Style in Modernism: Representations of Consciousness</i>

Alles eine Frage der Perspektive – Zur sogenannten erlebten Rede im narrativen Text

Abstracts Erlebte Rede (free indirect style) is a narrative technique used to present reports of consciousness which to some extent blends direct and indirect speech. It is characterized by the interaction of specific linguistic markers which allow the presentation of a character’s point of view while simultaneously maintaining the narrative frame. A character’s thoughts are expressed in the third person, indicative and narrative tense giving the impression that the voice of both the narrator and the character somehow overlap. This contribution summarizes the research on erlebte Rede, focussing on German. Regarding narratological aspects, I discuss linguistic problems specific to identification and analysis of texts which employ erlebte Rede. This paper primarily addresses the use of erlebte Rede in fiction, although it is also found in non-fiction.