Fictional Modes Research Articles

Towards a narrative definition of the American political thriller film

The Hollywood political thriller is a film genre of unique relevance in the United States, often acting as a reflection of the fears and anxieties of its historical times. At the same time, however, the definition of its identity and boundaries still leaves room for further specification, perhaps due to the frequent consideration of the political thriller as part of the broader categories of either thriller narratives or political films. By revising the available literature and filmography and analyzing the narrative features of the classical political thriller, this article proposes a deeper definition of the genre that takes into account the nature of the broader ‘thriller’ category of films springing from a specific mode of crime fiction that focuses on a victim or threatened individual as its protagonist, depicts and conveys intense emotional states, portrays an unbalanced and highly existentialist worldview, and travels into the extraordinary while at the same time holding on to very concrete expectations of verisimilitude. The political thriller specifies this broader form of narration and links it to dramatic conflicts of political nature, investigative plots, reactive characters, historically grounded antagonists, a proximity to the sociopolitical history of the United States, and a certain iconography relating to institutional power. By establishing the main narrative traits of the political thriller, this definition hopes to lay the foundations for a better understanding of the genre, its history, and its seeming renaissance at the onset of the 21st Century

Item of Mortality: Lives Led and Unled in Oliver Twist

This essay engages with recent scholarly debates in Victorian studies focused, first, on narrative’s relationship to the optative mood, and, second, on the status of minor characters in fiction. Its reading of Oliver Twist both extends and challenges prior work by Andrew Miller and Alex Woloch, among others. With particular emphasis on the protagonist’s minor alter-ego, Dick, the essay considers what difference fictional mode makes to the possibility of anything else’s happening to a character than what we read about him or her.

Staging the spectral: The border, haunting and politics in Mekong Hotel

Abstract Mekong Hotel (2012) is an hour-long experimental film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Set in an old hotel overlooking the Mekong, and melding documentary and fictional modes, it interweaves a ghost story, a romance, memories of the region’s troubled history and discussions on its present-day state. The film is characterized by elements of fluidity and transgression that appear in its use of the supernatural, its setting near a border river, and its oscillating modes of film style and narration, while its ghost characters transgress the border between the living and the (un-)dead. This article explores the role of haunting in Mekong Hotel, in particular its connection with the setting of the Mekong region and the memory of its history. It argues that the ghosts in the film function as carriers of the memory of the region; they also reference older forms of cinema, namely, the vernacular horror genre of the Thai classical era and thus transport media history. Through analysis of several scenes of the film, I demonstrate that these spectral figures express repressed traumas and non-official, silenced witnessing of sensitive political issues, such as conflict along the Thai-Lao border, the 2011 floods and the construction of dams along the Mekong. By reflecting on their medial origin, they lay emphasis on a vernacular discourse and a regional point of view. The analysis is supported by allusion to other short films by the director that also centre on similar topics.

No Happy Loves: Desire, Nostalgia, and Failure in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind

In Love in Western World, Denis de Rougemont claims love has no (15). This essay seeks to explore converse: why do fictional portrayals of history seem to include no happy loves? Writing about past and seeking to retrieve it through mode of historical fiction is essentially always an act of desire, reflective of longing to take emptiness created by of a time and place and fill it with an imaginative reconstruction. In reconstruction, for past often becomes emblematized as for another individual. Affection for a lost world becomes true object of textual desire, a lover figure for whom actual lovers stand as shadowy substitutes. As such, intersubjective becomes marked by ambivalence and, ultimately, futility, with impossibility of reclaiming past forestalling hope of any satisfying resolution. Fiction is always invoking desire. Peter Brooks notes narratives both tell of desire--typically present story of desire--and arouse and make use of as a dynamic of signification (37). The desires inscribed in texts an extend to any number of objects: they need [about] sexual desire; Odysseus wanted to get home; Captain Ahab wanted whale (Belsey 208). In historical fiction, chief object of is lost past. Always irretrievable, it remains generative of longing: both in direct form of nostalgia and in representations of desires experienced by characters. In fact, status of past as that which is not or that which has ceased to be only strengthens its facility for producing desire. Catherine Belsey suggests desire is predicated on lack, and even its apparent fulfilment is also a moment of loss (38-39) while Deborah Lutz notes lives in emptiness at back of being: it points to essential openness at heart of (ix). Susan Stewart argues is, in fact, generative mechanism of desire, such the place of origin must remain unavailable in order for to generated (151). Roland Barthes links and specific to its use in fiction, noting when absence becomes an active practice ... there is a creation of a fiction which has many roles (doubts, reproaches, desires, melancholies) (16). Historical fiction, born out a to recreate a lost past, tends toward multiple, and multiplying, representations of in an effort to accommodate these roles. This shadowy presence of hovers around all historical fiction operates with a particular poignancy in cases where yearning is more than for a specific fragment of time, but, rather, an entire world and system of meaning now seems irrevocably lost. The clan-ruled Highlands of Sir Walter Scott's Waverly novels, antebellum American South of Margaret Mitchells Gone with Wind, and Old New York haunts novels of Edith Wharton--all embody entire orders of existence transcend specific geographic and temporal boundaries defined them, so that, in these fictions, the home we miss is no longer a geographically defined place, but rather a state of mind (Chase and Shaw 1). At least sixty years removed from Scott's foundational text, (1) these novels recall, desire, and mourn times, places, and, more importantly, practices of living. Mitchell succinctly elegizes a lost worldview of planter aristocracy when she writes that, in South, prior to Civil War, raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring ladies with elegance and carrying one's liquor like a gentleman were things mattered (26). The impulse to document this problematic and intricately ordered system of existence has been seen as giving rise to some of best historical fiction South has produced ... rich in evocation of quality of a way of life (Holman 45). In its status as an irrevocably absent object, past generates longing, and depth of this nostalgia in which nothing is forgotten or abandoned requires a suitable vehicle by which it can conveyed. …

Comparing Socialist and Post-Socialist Television Culture

This article builds a theoretical model for comparative analysis of media culture based on the notion of genre, and applies it to a comparative analysis of television as a cultural form in socialist and post-socialist Croatia. The paper explores how the shares and generic composition of program modes of information, entertainment and fiction change in time, and how the contribution of different genres to program flow and modes varies with the changes of political, economic and technological context. Longitudinal trends in television flows are comparatively evaluated in relation to trends in genre developments in Europe and their relationship to the changes in the cultural role of television. The results show a decrease in the information and an increase in the fiction mode between socialism and democracy, with some similarities of the Croatian and western television culture in relation to genre and mode composition and flow, albeit with a belated introduction of neo television genres. Notwithstanding the limited freedom of expression and ideological content, which necessarily influenced socialist media culture, television as a cultural form in Croatia developed in concert with the global program flows. The article is based on original content analysis of television schedules where the unit of analysis is a televisions program listing. The analogue television universe is represented by longitudinal data for 1959, 1969, 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009. The stratified systematic sample (N=3934) for each chosen year consists of two constructed weeks from a universe of all listed programs broadcast on all free to air television channels with a national reach license.

Engaging Foundational Narratives in Morrison’s Paradise and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

This essay examines how Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon construct foundational narratives as critiques of national imaginings. Setting up the idea of the nation as imagined communities coming together through shared narratives, Morrison and Pynchon probe the possibility of future national imaginings through narratives which continually breakdown in establishing the past. In the seeming paradox of narrating pasts that destroy and delimit the future, their novels display the disjuncture between the need to narrate the nation and the collective narratives that often emerge to define national boundaries. Their texts point toward the limits of national imaginings and spaces that unsuccessfully map onto the populations they purport to represent. In the context of the transnational turn in American studies, foundational narratives signal national narratives as self-destructive operations of power that can compel a populace to construct space–less histories and obscure social relations. Simultaneously, foundational narratives can also signal spaces beyond national boundaries, understandings of the nation as transnational and reliant on fictional modes in order to reestablish historical and social links.

Mad Translation in Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Douglas Glover’s Elle

This essay discusses Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Douglas Glover’s Elle, two postmodern Canadian novels whose subversions and parodies of conventional realism, still the dominant mode of historical fiction in Canada and elsewhere, are intimately connected with their exploration of the foundations and limits of modern historical conscious ness. More specifically, my argument arises out of what I perceive to be some crucial similarities between the two texts. Both address the early stages of the European colonization of North America and the concomitant mutual exposure to the other of radically alien cosmologies: one oral, polytheistic, and tribal; the other literate, monotheistic, and nationalist. Both feature protagonists whose attempts to understand this otherness in its own terms—or to inhabit the reality of the other—leads to a radical destabilization of personal and cultural identity, resulting in a state akin to

“So Unlucky a Perspective”: The Critique of Moral Sentimentalism in The Man of Feeling

Abstract Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is commonly described as a typical sentimental novel, yet the work has many aspects that a straightforward sentimentalist interpretation cannot possibly account for. I argue in this paper that The Man of Feeling, far from being a straightforward sentimental novel, encapsulates a profound critique of both moral sentimentalism and the genre of sentimental fiction. This critical stance is established in the first instance, I claim, by the ironic distance to the sentimental material in the novel, which results from the complex, multilevel narrative structure, and is further reinforced by numerous satirical elements in the text. As I demonstrate, reading Mackenzie’s work as an antithesis of the sentimental novel that parodies the sentimentalist moral epistemology underlying this mode of fiction does a much better job at explaining several crucial aspects of the novel than the sentimentalist interpretation.

Hot Sparks and Cold Devils: Katherine Mansfield and Modernist Thermodynamics

In the writings of Katherine Mansfield, metaphors of temperature are connected to modernist technique. Her letters and book reviews reveal a tendency to conceive of the difference between established modes of fiction and more experimental works in terms of light and heat. I analyze this correlation and consider the ways in which it applies to Mansfield’s own fiction. Thermal tropes in stories such as “Bliss” and “At the Bay” work towards a “warm modernism,” a modernist strategy that Mansfield perceives as being necessary both for representing reality in a postwar environment, and for staving off the emotional and spiritual dislocation that the war produced.

To Cry from Within or Without? Pynchon and the Modern – Postmodern Divide.

This article interrogates the demarcation of modern and postmodern literature within the context of a critical and inter-textual reading of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 . Approaching Pynchon’s text from what is essentially a formalist perspective, this reading readdresses the question as to whether or not The Crying of Lot 49 breaks through to a mode of fiction beyond modernism itself. Critics such as Brain McHale have forwarded The Crying of Lot 49 as a paradigmatic late modernist work; a work that does not break through to a mode of fiction beyond underlying epistemological presuppositions. Via a comparative reading that draws on the work of Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis et al , it is argued herein that McHale’s otherwise scholarly reading is somewhat myopic. In short, it is argued that although Pynchon’s heroine is driven by an epistemological agenda, the text-scape she inhabits is postmodern.

Heroine, Reformer, Citizen: Novelistic Conventions in Antin's The Promised Land

In 1891, when Mary Antin immigrated from Polotsk, Russia, to Boston, “a number of eastern [US] intellectuals” had begun “to argue that the southern and eastern Europeans were not only socially dangerous, but also racially unassimilable” (Higham 40). By the time Antin published her autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), these xenophobic beliefs had gained further political influence in legislative debates. In The Promised Land, Antin challenges contemporary anti-immigration arguments so forcefully that some critics have misread her autobiography as idealizing America and assimilation. Even as she asserts that Russian Jewish immigrants can become valuable US citizens, though, she also represents immigration and naturalization as profoundly unsettling processes. Antin’s ability to celebrate immigration and critique acculturation at a moment of national anxiety over these issues depends upon her skillful manipulation of literary genres. Michael P. Kramer, among other critics, has noted the significance of the various generic conventions Antin deploys in her autobiography, claiming that she draws on a broader tradition of American autobiographies and essays to represent her Americanization as “unproblematic” (128). This essay argues that a close attention to Antin’s engagement with fiction helps us to see that while she portrays herself as an Americanized woman, she nonetheless depicts her experience of immigration as fraught with conflict. Antin’s turn to multiple genres, including various types of novels, evinces the difficulty of her search for a form that will convey the complexities of her identity, as well as her need to fictionalize her life in order to render it legibly American. In particular, The Promised Land draws on the productive tension between two popular modes of fiction—sentimentalism and realism—to depict Antin’s development from Russian Jew to patriotic American and immigrant reformer. She modifies both modes and her own history to make them align more closely with one another; as she represents herself, Antin is both a participant in sentimental benevolence and a New Woman in a thickly described modern culture. Her largely unexamined engagement with the conventions of fiction allows her to rewrite familiar genres or modes of fiction that are both interrelated and defined against one another. Thus, Antin’s autobiography offers an illuminating example of how minority writers could revise dominant literary modes so as to make them more inclusive. Sentimentalism and realism prove important to Antin’s narrative because they sanction her exceptional transformation from a working-class immigrant to a middle-class woman and writer. Broadly speaking, antebellum sentimental novels center on the reform of an individual’s character. Over the course of such novels, the protagonist’s development of self-control and newfound commitment to the good of her community come to influence her country, and she is rewarded with a loving home. Though Antin acknowledges that these conventions can

Writing the Company: From VOC Daghregister to Sleigh's Eilande

This piece explores recent literary re-creations of the early Dutch East India Company (VOC) years at the Cape of Good Hope, concentrating on Dan Sleigh's Eilande (2002, trans. André Brink, 2005) to examine how an archivist turned novelist uses the textual ‘islands’ provided by official documentation to create a huge prose work that is remarkable for placing the seventeenth-century settlement in its properly global colonial context. Surely this region's most exhaustive rendering of the genre known problematically as ‘the historical novel’, it ranges from Germany and Holland via St Helena and the Cape to Madagascar, Mauritius and Batavia. And if for Brink ‘the lacunae in the archives are most usefully filled through magical realism, metaphor and fantasy’, (Coetzee and Nuttall, Negotiating the Past, 3), I suggest that Sleigh's work forms an opposite pole, offering an example of a much slower, lonelier genesis and a more cautious recovery of historical specificity. I hope to discern the possibilities and constraints of these very different fictional modes as they engage a vast, trans-continental archive. ‘Writing the Company’, then, refers not only to contemporary literary re-presentations of the VOC period, but also to the massive project of trans-oceanic correspondence through which this early ‘multinational’ constituted itself: a mass of journals, company reports and judicial records that constitute a vast textual exchange not only with the Heeren XVII (Lords Seventeen) in Amsterdam and the Council of India in Batavia, but also between the buitenposte (outposts) of the VOC at the Cape, and the forgotten posvolk who inhabited them.

Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel by Nicholas D Paige (review)

PAIGE, NICHOLAS D. Before Fiction: The Ancien Regime of the Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.312 pp. $59.95. There is a growing body of criticism that seeks to reexamine the rise of the novel, moving away from the focus on realism and considering instead the development of fictionality. Before Fiction is an exciting addition to this line of thought: a series of close readings of early French novels in terms of their understandings of the space of fiction. But it is much more than that. On a broader level, the book is a reflection on how we understand innovation and development in literature, and the way that literary history is written. Paige begins by distinguishing between what he dubs three different of fiction (being careful to clarify that by regimes he is not referring to Foucauldian epistemes or Thomas Kuhn's paradigms): the Aristotelian, the pseudofactual, and the fictional. In the Aristotelian model, which takes as its starting point Aristotle's distinction between poetry and history, authors adapt history and known characters into stories with 'good,' or unified, plots. The second regime, which dates from around 1670 to the early nineteenth century, is the pseudofactual (a term he takes from Barbara Foley's work of 1986, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction), in which authors pose as editors who present 'found' manuscripts to the public. The third phase could be considered modern fiction as we know it, in which authors expect that readers will take their works not as literally true, but as representative of reality despite being invented. Although this is often seen by critics as the moment of realism's triumph, where novels could purport to describe real life without pretending to be literally true--what Paige calls the 'more and more real' narrative (20) of theorists such as Dorrit Cohn--it can more appropriately be seen as the rise of an openly fictional mode, the acceptance that a novel is not real. It is the transition between the pseudofactual and the fictional that Paige focuses on, as have many critics working on the idea of fictionality. Paige provides an overview of these approaches, focusing particularly on the works of Lennard Davis, Barbara Foley, and Catherine Gallagher. The problem with their accounts, he writes, is that the transition between the two modes becomes increasingly unclear, as modern fictionality comes to be seen as already present within the pseudofactual. What is more, the insistence on a noticeable shift between the two forms fails to account for the longevity of the pseudofactual pretense: if the idea of a wholly invented story became acceptable, why did authors continue to insist that their stories were true well into the nineteenth century? Here the broader project of the book becomes clear. Paige is writing against what one might call the 'paradigm-shifting masterpiece' version of literary evolution, our view that certain novels revolutionize literary form, inventing new techniques that redefine the literary field: We see our canonical novels of the past as an archipelago connected to the mainland of now, whereas they may be only a series of data points acting as hosts for our perception of patterns--patterns we perceive based on our knowledge of what is to come (25). Instead, he suggests that fiction be considered as nebula of writing practices and ideas about writing--techniques invented and modified, sometimes quickly and sometimes not, through a difficult-to-specify dialectical relationship with what people think literature can and should do (205). This means that Paige does not see novels as necessarily symptomatic of broader social anxieties or trends, though he does not deny their relation to the cultures and historical moments from which they emerge, or the possibility of links between discourses of fiction and those of law, science, or economics. He remains focused, however, on the mechanics of form, considering it, in a sense, as a set of technological developments, devices that need to be invented and then worked on by their inventor and the inventor's competition (33). …

“The true and stirring stuff of which Romance is born”: <em>Dark Princess</em> and the revolutionary potential of literary form

Rather than functioning as propaganda or pastiche, W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1928 novel Dark Princess actively engages with issues of form and literary tradition in order to question the relationship between fictional modes and social and racial progress. In this novel, Du Bois uses the different literary modes available at the time — most particularly social realism, modernism, and romance. In particular, Dark Princess’s engagement with the romantic tradition indicates a deliberate and sustained effort to theorize romance as integral to the novel’s utopian future and to enact that theory through the novel’s formal structures.

Seriality and Storytelling in Social Media

Seriality and Storytelling in Social Media Ruth Page (bio) Serial form has long been of interest to narrative scholars, but the characteristics of serial narrative identified thus far have been derived primarily from fictional examples in older media forms such as print texts and television. The key characteristics of serial form (e.g., part-whole segmentation and sequenced installments) can also be found in other storytelling modes, including stories that emerge from contemporary social-media contexts. In this article, using nonfictional as well as fictional narrative examples taken from social-network sites (YouTube), microblogging (Twitter), and wikis (Wikipedia), I identify both familiar and new patterns of seriality. Alongside recognized, familiar kinds of serial narratives, the new forms of seriality include non-teleological storytelling, reverse-order archiving, and the sequenced deletion (rather than addition) of material. Overall, the social-media serial forms I discuss highlight the way seriality is often a matter of degree and emphasize the importance of attending to the relationship between narrative process and product. The [End Page 31] relative nature of seriality reinforces the need for a contextualized approach to narrative criticism, one that takes account of the perspectives of narrators and audiences, along with the sociohistorical situation of stories that emerge in serial form. Serial Form and Narrativity Narrative analysts have explored serial forms in discussions of nineteenth-century literature (Hayward 1997; Hughes and Lund 1991), television narrative (Mittell 2007), comic books, and film serials (Barefoot 2011), and they are beginning to engage with newer media such as computer games (Newman and Simon 2011), fandoms (Thomas 2010), and web-disseminated narratives (Lang 2010). These serial forms have provided vital stimulus for exploring narratological issues such as plot dynamics, suspense, and teleological resolution; for contrasting episodic and serial genres; and for tracing the evolution of particular serial forms from conventional to more complex modes (Mittell 2006). Despite the transmedial, broadly historical scope of these discussions, the focus has almost exclusively rested on fictional genres (but see Kelleter forthcoming as an exception to this trend). What is more, in identifying core attributes of serial narratives, analysts have tended to rely on a specific subcorpus of largely plot-driven, fictional modes. To come to terms with the full range of serial storytelling, theorists need to consider other varieties of serial narration, including those found in contemporary social-media contexts. The examples I focus on in this article suggest an alternative subcorpus that affords new insights into serial form. In particular, the social-media storytelling brought under scrutiny here—storytelling in wikis, social-network sites, and microblogging sites—highlights the importance of considering modes of production and reception in studies of seriality. These modes may be set alongside those found in offline forms of narration and in other online narrative environments that would not be classed as social media (e.g., hypertext fiction or e-mail novels). The social-media focus of this article thus extends the range of serial examples used as a basis for theory building while also underscoring the potential for seriality to be reconfigured in novel communicative contexts. [End Page 32] In much of the previous scholarship on serial narratives, the qualities of seriality are assumed rather than clearly defined. Hayward (1997), though, provides a starting point with her description of the serial as “an ongoing narrative released in successive parts” (3). Jones (2005) further suggests that there is usually a gap between one serial installment and the next and that the installments are often disseminated on a regular basis (e.g., publication may occur on repeated daily or weekly occasions). As Hayward’s description implies, in contrast with wider-scope discussions of the history of serial publication (Amiran 1997; Brake 2010), analyses of serial form mainly concern themselves with narrative examples rather than with other genres (such as expository discourse). Yet not all serial publication involves narratives. Simply producing a text in segments over time does not a narrative make: the content of that text must demonstrate narrativity. At its simplest, a narrative must report a temporally ordered sequence of events; however, as Ryan (2007) points out, a number of additional factors are oft en invoked as markers of narrativity, that is, the qualities that...

Georges Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi; or, How to Take on Painting and Win

Notes by Perec on his reaction to paintings and on his collaboration with painters suggest a complex, but potentially conflictual relationship. In his fictional masterpiece La Vie mode d'emploi (1978) he pursues an elaborate confrontation on many levels with paintings and painters, whose prestige he recognizes as a rival to writing, which is thus challenged to reassert its primacy. Intradiegetically, the narrative turns centrally on accounts of failed projects related to painting. Extradiegetically, ‘Old Master’ paintings are dismantled to provide details for insertion into quite alien contexts in Perec's textual construction, and the aspect of framing central to traditional canvas painting is consistently challenged. Strategically, Perec's whole project in this work can be read as a calculated invasion, by the writer, of the domain of spatial representation seen since Lessing as proper to painting, and as an assertion of the supremacy of the textual.

What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology?: A Response to Monika Fludernik

What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology? A Response to Monika Fludernik1 Jan Alber (bio), Stefan Iversen (bio), Henrik Skov Nielsen (bio), and Brian Richardson (bio) In the following response to Monika Fludernik’s “How Natural Is ‘Unnatural Narratology’” we will identify Fludernik’s main observations concerning our joint article from 2010 and respond to them individually. Her perspicacious account brings to the fore several important issues; some point toward fruitful unexplored territory, while others address ongoing discussions in our essay “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology” and in more recent articles by unnatural narratologists. In her essay, Fludernik discusses some core ideas of unnatural narrative theory, demonstrating in the process the proximity of several of our major ideas to those presented in her own work from 1996, 2001, 2003, and 2010. Unnatural narrative theory is partially inspired by and indebted to Fludernik’s approach and we agree with her statement that “Alber et al. are conducting research much in the spirit of Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology” (358). Fludernik’s response confirms once more that unnatural narrative theory is a “timely and significant” (364) approach in the current narratological [End Page 371] landscape. Since our joint article was published in 2010 there have been several responses to our proposals and of course we have debated both those proposals and the responses among ourselves. A dialogue with Fludernik will help clarify many of the issues under debate. Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Terminology and Dichotomies Fludernik defines the term “unnatural narrative” as denoting “the fabulous, the magical, and the supernatural besides the logically or cognitively impossible” (362). Furthermore, from her perspective, unnatural narratology combines two different discourses: “the discourse of fable, romance, before-the-novel narrative; and the discourse of postmodernist anti-illusionism, transgression and metafiction” (363). We have different responses to this statement and need to provide some additional clarification. Brian Richardson, for example, defines the term “unnatural narrative” as “one that conspicuously violates conventions of standard narrative forms, in particular the conventions of nonfictional narratives, oral or written, and fictional modes like realism that model themselves on nonfictional narratives. Unnatural narratives furthermore follow fluid, changing conventions and create new narratological patterns in each work. In a phrase, unnatural narratives produce a defamiliarization of the basic elements of narrative” (“What Is” 34). Furthermore, Richardson differentiates between what he calls nonmimetic or nonrealistic poetics that govern traditional nonrealistic works such as fairy tales, ghost stories, etc., and the antimimetic work of an author like Beckett that defies the principles of realism. He limits the unnatural to anti-mimetic and defamiliarizing scenes, entities, and events such as impossible [End Page 372] spaces, reversed causal progressions, and acts of narration that defy the parameters of natural conversational narratives. Richardson’s idea of the unnatural is thus more limited than that articulated by Fludernik. Jan Alber, on the other hand, defines the term “unnatural” as denoting physically, logically, or humanly impossible scenarios or events (Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds” 80) and discriminates between the unnatural in postmodernism, which still strikes us as disorienting or defamiliarizing, and conventionalized instances of the unnatural in other genres, which have become important features of certain generic conventions (see Alber, “The Diachronic”). What Fludernik calls “the fabulous, the magical, the fantastic, and the supernatural” (363) are examples of what he classifies as the conventionalized unnatural, and there are numerous further instances. Among other things, Alber is interested in the history of the unnatural and tries to demonstrate that the conventionalization of the unnatural is a hitherto neglected driving force behind the creation of new generic configurations and thus the development of literary history (see Alber, “Unnatural”). Stefan Iversen ties the notion of the “unnatural” to narratives that present the reader with clashes between the rules governing a storyworld and scenarios or events producing or taking place inside this storyworld, clashes that defy easy explanations. While many of these phenomena (such as the ones mentioned by Fludernik) become conventionalized over time, some remain resistant to familiarization. The transformation in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (1915) is such an example because it presents the reader with an unresolvable combination of a bug and a human mind, which is situated in an otherwise conventionally realist storyworld. Iversen...

The Founders: Can Times Past Meet Times Present?

The Founders: Can Times Past Meet Times Present? Cushing Strout (bio) The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History by Jill Lepore (Princeton University Press, 2010. 224 pages. $19.95) Jill Lepore is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a Harvard professor of American history. Her combination of scholarship and lively wit is on view in The Whites of Their Eyes. It is an odd title, however, as it derives from Israel Putnam’s alleged command to his troops in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It has nothing to do with the tea-dumping action of 1773. It is even odder that her keenest historical look is not at the tea-party action of 1773 but rather at the current political tea party, “which had very little to do with anything that happened in the 1770s.” For her the actual tea party “wasn’t such a big deal” after all, and was not even called the tea party in print until 1834. In her book the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Boston Massacre are much more influential, going by her measure of how soon and how often the events were commemorated. [End Page xxx] To give up the tea-party movement of 1773, however, to the current right-wing polemicists would be a strategic and historical error. She is not only writing her own historian’s version of the colonial struggle for independence but also is writing a history of the modern use of the tea-party image on behalf of “originalism, evangelicalism, and heritage tourism,” all of which amount to “a variety of fundamentalism.” Structurally this complexity requires her to shuttle back and forth between the eighteenth century and modern times, especially since the bicentennial, when it was clear there was no consensus on how to celebrate it. Lepore sees the writing of history as intrinsically controversial and contentious: “It advances by debate.” But, in a time dominated by what Richard Hofstadter rightly calls a conspiratorial and paranoid style of political rhetoric, there is not the mutual respect and common ground that could make debate either possible or useful. Lepore is more sensitive to literary history than most social historians, but even she does not mention Hawthorne’s great short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832), published two years before George R. T. Hewes’s A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party, the first time that name was mentioned in print. Hawthorne’s story exemplifies his artistic method of creating a “neutral territory” in which the actual and the imaginary meet and are influenced by each other. Young Robin is swept up in the tea-party action and finds a path to independence, no longer dependent on his Tory uncle, who is tarred and feathered by a mob. Hawthorne’s surreal mode of narration, mixing fact and fiction, has allowed his story to transcend its time and attract much attention from modern critics. The experience of marriage is common to our time and the American Revolution, though the frequency of the divorce rate is not. William Gibson’s docudrama, American Primitive (1972), which stages a public reading of the wartime letters between John and Abigail Adams, marks both the difference and the connection. It is a drama of enforced separation, celebrating their sober civic fidelity to the Revolution and their sustained tender love for each other under stressful circumstances. Lepore is wise to see that history is not just a matter of scholarly analysis: “it has a civic role to play.” Our nation born out of revolution looks for something stable and has a constitution that is meant to hold us together at a more profound level than baseball and Coca-Cola. “No history can easily or always bear that weight,” as she says, feeling it on herself. Historians “mocked the Bicentennial as schlock” but didn’t “offer a story to a nation that needed one.” My colleague Michael Kammen in A Season of Youth (1978) writes extensively about uses of the Revolution by Americans. He demystifies much that has been made out of the Revolution, particularly the common metaphor of a national growing up, yet in the...

“Go by Appearances at Your Peril”: The Raina Kama Writers' Association in Kano, Nigeria, Carving out a Place for the “Popular” in the Hausa Literary Landscape

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Although sacred narratives are thought to have lost their numinous aura for secular receivers (readers/listeners), their presence is evident whenever mythology, usually taken to reflect a mode of thinking typical of primeval cultures, and its associated themes are used in fictional works. This study aims at elucidating sacred narratives for people who do not subscribe to their sacredness. It attempts to show (1) that myths reflect a fictional mode of thinking; (2) that meaningful myths map the unconscious drives of secular readers/listeners, enabling them to confront them in terms of their own culture; and (3) that fictional thinking thus operates as a psychical laboratory. I illustrate these claims through myths that feature animosity between parents and children, such as the stories of Oedipus, Isaac, and Jesus.