Poetic Narrative Research Articles

Divine Tyrannical Power and Joban Use of Irony to Resolve Conflict

Sara Cobb begins her book, Speaking of Violence by stating that “stories matter. They have gravitas; they are grave. They have weight. They are concrete. They materialize policies, institutions, relationships, and identities.”[1] Applied to the book of Job 1—2, one can ask, how grave is the story of Job? What conflict does it create? What is at stake in this conflict? What does the story concretize? In this paper I point out that there are two narrative approaches to reading Job's conflict with God. One is that Job does not resist divine power and the other is that he does. If we take it that job does not resist divine power, we implicitly begin fostering stories that can create docility/passivity in the face of imperial power. If we argue that he resists divine power, we create stories that enable people to stand up for their freedoms/rights, hence fostering the idea that conflict cannot be solved by docility but by confronting the powers-that-be, which create conflicts in the first place. In this paper, I argue for the later position.[1] Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative in Conflict Resolution (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3.

La dette insolvable de la mort du Père dans Aurélia de G. de Nerval : plainte romantique ou mélancolique ?

Context and objectivesGérard de Nerval spread in Aurélia an unpublished autobiographical approach, which tells this tragic adventure of its spirit in which the borders of the dream and the life are abolished. In this oscillating text between pathographic and poetic narrative, the deep echoes between the individual and collective convulsions reveal the first wavering of our modernity: the moral and personal drama is jointly historic and cultural drama. We contribute here to the understanding of certain historic reports between psychopathology and social by the analysis of this inmost correlation between the psychic symptomatic “déliaison” and certain lines of historic transfer of the social links during the (post-)revolutionary period. ThemesAurélia, started by Nerval in 1853 then its first stay in private psychiatric hospital, tries to register a crisis of civilization: “The chaos pulled by the fall of the throne, and God's death, is just like the mental disorder which Aurélia tries to report” (G. Macé). The deep proven disillusionment in front of the collapse of the former world and in the rising industrial revolution is one example of the second romantic generation, the complaint of which regrets bitterly a certain “decay of civilization”. It is by the motive for the fault, and the associated sense of guilty that emerges a catastrophic real-life experience. Its importance progresses of an initially personal fault, in a loving register, in an existential guilt. In the first case, this fault organizes the inaccessibility of the object, and in the second case, it coincides with the impossibility to live. This fault appears ultimately as that of the Father, marked by a triple failure: failure of the real father, always too distant; failure then in the order of the world by the fall of sacred King-father of the nation, doubled by that of Napoleon, this other father who failed; failure finally of the religious order because of the dismissal of God the Father after the attack stirred up by the spirit of the Lights. By the fall of King and the break of the symbolic filiation, the event of the collapse of the filial link doubles and overlaps in that of the social link. ConclusionThe fault and the guilty are a matter of a debt, left by his ancestors, family and homeland, a debt at the same time of life and dead, impossible to settle, which eventually destroys the link of which it is essential. This omnipresent fault always seems to relate, directly or indirectly, to a content, which we can summarize by the decay of the Father, and the indifference of a guilty world towards this dismissal. The writer tries then to build an image of the Third on a delirious mode. If the collective tragedy consists in this decay of the figure of the Father, the tragic staff is to have “wanted” desperately to make the Father resuscitate as first cause, divine whole lot causes of causes, creator of the world and original point of a universal filiation.

Cantatas in Honor of San Gennaro

No saint in the Catholic hagiographic tradition has served as a more vivid symbol of martyrdom, veneration, or of God’s profound grace toward a community than San Gennaro (Saint Januarius), the patron saint of the Kingdom of Naples. This essay studies the history and culture surrounding the veneration of San Gennaro. I focus on the longstanding cultivation of cantatas as a vehicle for veneration and for the promotion of catechism and post-Tridentine ideology. The first part of the essay traces political, social, and religious currents that contributed to the growth of the cult. The second part considers late eighteenth-century cantatas by Giovanni Paisiello and Domenico Cimarosa that were created for the Feast of the Traslazione. These works adopt strategies of poetic narrative and musical expression that reflect thematic elements associated with the annual feast. They also represent a musical turning point, incorporating innovative aria types, a widespread use of accompanied recitative and large choral ensembles, and distinctive instrumental sonorities. The Traslazione cantatas thus offer an opportunity not only to examine contemporary cultural currents in early modern Naples, but also to broaden our understanding of the cantata genre and of two leading operatic innovators of the late eighteenth century.

Рассказ А.П. Чехова «Ванька»: оборотность мира. Вопрос о фольклорной традиции

Galieva Marianna Andreevna The paper considers the chrestomathy work of Russian literature - the story by A.P. Chekhov «Van’ka». On the one hand the story preserves the definition of «Christmas». Attention was drawn to the festival motive itself for the events that occurred in the sacred ritual hour. On the other hand, the archetypal patterns that are organically included in the poetics of narrative, require a certain folklore comment. So, archetype window hides transitional ritual, switching the reader’s eye to the domestic space into existential, Otherworldly. Also the fact of writing the letter «to nowhere», the problem lies drawn by the Russian people, «limit», an unknown land that genetically traced back to folk aesthetics, poetics of the fairy tale. The question of Chekhov’s folklorism is debatable, but it is worth noting that the folk tradition in poetics can manifest itself both overtly and latently. The most important are the forms of «hidden» folklorism, since they are organically integrated into the artistic fabric of the work. Key words : folklore, literature, Chekhov, “another kingdom”, archetype.

Critical Discourse Analysis of Bulhe Shah’s and Mast’s poetry

This study attempts to capture the essence of two Sufi poets hailing from divergent origins, Baba Bulhe Shah from Punjab and Mast Twakalli from Balochistan to see their ways of preaching Sufism through their idiosyncratic ways. It also looks into their poetic narratives and underlying discourse embedded in them by analytically investigating the phenomena under study. The study is secondary in nature, so the data was collected from their books and then thorough study of their poetry was undertaken. The study in the process searched for common emerging patterns appearing in the poetry and their Sufi expressions.

On the Theoretical Construction of the Structural System of Semiotic Atoms in the Semantic Signs of Poetic Narrative Texts

<p>The studies of poetic narratology has been extended to the macro-studies of the narrative language of poetic narrative texts ranging from narrative grammar to narrative model with a special attention paid to the exploration of the semiotic atoms of its semantic narration and the semiotic atoms of its pragmatic narration in poetic narrative texts as well as their interrelationships. What hasn’t been paid attention to in this area is the atomic structural system of the semiotic atoms of the narrative signs in poetic narrative texts. Grounded on the absence of studies in this regard, this essay aims to deal with the theoretical construction of the structure of the semiotic atoms of the semantic signs in the narrative language in the narrative poetic texts in terms of the semiotic atoms of the phonetic narration, the semiotic atoms of its semantic narration, the semiotic atoms of its pragmatic narration, the semiotic atoms of its grammatical narration as much as the semiotic atoms of its spatial narration in poetic narrative texts to develop and improve the theories of poetic narratology and expand its studies from macro-studies to micro-studies.</p>

A Reading of Maud: From the Perspective of Pathological Narcissism

이 논문은 병리적 나르시시즘의 관점에서 『모드』의 화자에 나타나는 심리를 고찰한다. 정신분석에서 나르시시즘은 정상적 심리 발달에서 나타나는 한 단계로 건강한 나르시시즘은 건강한 심리구조의 형성에 필요한 것으로 여겨진다. 그러나 개 인의 내면에 건강한 심리구조의 형성이 제대로 진행되지 않을 경우 자기애적 고착상태, 즉 거대화된 자기와 이상적 부모 원상에 병적인 고착 상태를 보이는데 이를 병리적 나르시시즘이라 부른다. 병리적 나르시시즘의 두드러진 증세로 극단적 자기 중심성, 부풀려진 자아상을 들 수 있는데 그러한 성향은 자아붕괴의 염려에 대한 일종의 방어기제들이며 그러한 사람들에게 나타나는 부풀려진 자아상의 기저에는 공허, 우울, 죽음에 대한 희구가 도사린다. 『모드』는 그 부제 “일인극”이 암시하듯이 화자가 일방적으로 자신의 이야기를들려주는 시적 서사이다. 화자의 비극은 아버지의 죽음으로부터 시작되는데 그의 아버지에 대한 화자의 기억은 “핏빛 히쓰,” “끔찍한 공동,” “산산 조각 난 팔다리” 라는 표현이 드러내듯이 그에게 극심한 트라우마가 된다. 그에게 있어서 아버지는 이상적 자아-대상이라 볼 수 있고 그러한 존재로서의 아버지의 죽음은 그의 삶에 심각한 영향을 끼친다. 내면에 건강한 심리구조가 형성되기 전에 일어난 부친의 갑 작스런 죽음은 건강한 자아를 형성시키는 기회를 몰수하고 그를 이상화 자아-대상에 대한 고착을 통해 나르시시즘에 침잠하게 한다. 그는 세상으로부터 자신을 소외시키고, 그러면서도 자기와 아버지를 이상화하며, 그 반대급부로 사회와 그 사회에 몸담고 있는 인간들의 악을 부풀려 바라보고, 자기의 나르시시즘에 위협이 되는 존재들에 대해서는 질투와 노여움을 품는다. 그러나 그러한 감정의 다른 한편에는 자신에 대한 열등의식, 자신에 대한 비하의 감정들이 함께 한다. 이러한 성향들은 병 리적 나르시시즘의 그것들과 부합되는 것으로 보인다. 즉, 그것은 이상화 자기-대상의 죽음으로 인한 트라우마, 그 영향으로 인해 그 자신 속으로의 후퇴, 붕괴된 자아나 우울, 공허감에 대한 방어기제로서의 부풀려진 이상화 자기-대상의 형성, 그리고 죽음에의 희구 같은 증세들이다. 화자는 모드와의 사랑에 빠졌고 그를 구원해줄 이상적 여인으로 그녀를 그리고 있지만 그녀는 화자의 아버지를 대신하는 또 다른 이상화된 자아-대상으로 보인다. 모드가 죽은 후 그가 겪는 절망, 광기, 그리고 죽음의 희구는 그의 아버지가 죽은후 그가 겪은 것과 동일한 패턴을 형성한다. 그리고 모드의 유령을 본 후 그가 정신병에서 회복되고 크림전쟁에 기꺼이 동참하려는 것은 문제에 대한 해결이나 시 의 낙관적 결말이기보다는 그의 아버지나 모드와 같이 화자가 자신의 나르시시즘을 위해 투사하는 또 다른 이상화라 볼 수 있다.This essay examines the speaker’s psychology of Maud from the perspective of pathological narcissism. As the initial title of the poem as Maud or The Madness suggests quite a few researchers analyzing Maud have focused on the mental disease of the speaker. This mainly occurred by examining the speaker’s abnormalities and self-absorbing propensities or by considering thematic implications of madness, i.e., socially or politically extended meanings implied by a personal madness. This essay, however, offers a possible interpretation of the speaker’s mentality from the perspective of pathological narcissism. Pathological narcissism is a type of mental disorder displayed by a person who is pathologically attached to the grandiose self and their idealized parent imago without its integration into the rest of their personality as an integrated healthy self. Its prominent symptoms are extreme self-centeredness, and a grandiosely expanded image of the self, all of which are actually defensive mechanisms against the anxiety of self-disintegration. For a person such as this, underneath his or her sense of grandiosity lie a sense of emptiness, melancholy, and the pursuit of death. Maud with its subtitle “a monodrama” is a poetic narrative where the speaker unfolds his own story unilaterally. The speaker’s reverie of his father’s death haunted by “the bloody heath,” “the dreadful hollow” or “shattered limbs” reveals the extent of the trauma the speaker suffered because of his father’s death. The aftermath of the death of his father as an ideal self-object entails his withdrawal from the world, his own idealized image of his father and himself, the swollen notion of human and social evils, the jealousy, and intense anger against anti-narcissistic figures, but at the same time, a sense of inferiority and nothingness of his self underneath the feelings. These kinds of propensities accord to the symptoms of pathological narcissism; that is, the death of the ideal self-object, the withdrawal within himself and the forming of the swollen image of the idealized object as defensive mechanisms against the disintegrated self, depression and emptiness, and the pursuit of death beneath them, etc. Maud, whom the speaker falls in love with, and expects to be a salvation for him, is likely to be another idealized self-object replacing his father. The despair, madness, and the pursuit of death after the death of Maud shows the same pattern of the symptoms he suffered caused by his father’s death. His recovery after he saw Maud’s ghost and his willing participation in the Crimean war seems to be another replacement that plays a role equivalent to his father or Maud, rather than a substantial solution to his life-long problems.

Applesauce Weather by Helen Frost

Reviewed by: Applesauce Weather by Helen Frost Jeannette Hulick Frost, Helen Applesauce Weather; illus. by Amy June Bates. Candlewick, 2016 [112p] ISBN 978-0-7636-7576-9 $14.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 2-4 The first fallen apple of the season heralds the beginning of “applesauce weather” and Uncle Arthur’s usual visit to Faith and Peter’s family. However, the passing of Aunt Lucy (the family’s applesauce maker) could mean the family’s best storyteller will not be up to spinning his usual entertaining yarns. No worries, though, as he comes up with the finest version yet of his perennial story of how he lost part of one finger: missing-fingered peddler gives him a pocketknife with instructions to sleep with it open under his pillow: “When I woke up/ the next morning—would you believe it?/ My finger looked/ like it looks today.” When Faith wonders about the truth of the tale, Uncle Arthur encourages her to come up with her own explanation for what really happened, thus sparking the beginnings of a new family storyteller. Young Faith’s voice alternates with those of older brother Peter and Uncle Arthur; the late Aunt Lucy’s voice is included as well, in a song that stitches together the eight short parts, or chapters, of the book. Frost’s poetry—both free verse and rhyming—is warm and specific, as crisp as the crunch of a ripe apple. Romance, grief, and growing up are also expressed through the various characters’ narratives [End Page 23] and provide pauses for reflection without disrupting the flow. The frequent monochromatic illustrations are sketchy and vigorous yet structured, and they add cozy charm and texture to the story. Folks looking for poetic narratives or rich family drama for the middle-grade set will find this book to be in apple-pie order. Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

HERMES, MASTER OF THE ROADS

4 6 Y H E R M E S , M A S T E R O F T H E R O A D S B O N N I E C O S T E L L O During a stay in Padua, Italy, at the end of June, I witnessed a centuries-old annual ritual in the main square. Graduation in Padua is carnivalesque, at least for those receiving advanced degrees , and involves a lot of high-spirited humiliation of the new master or doctor. Friends and family of the new graduate prepare a papiro, or scroll, a poetic narrative of the graduate’s life. But this is no eulogy, no catalogue of the young person’s accomplishments and promising future. Quite the opposite. It’s a bawdy narrative with scandalous illustrations that begins with the graduate’s conception and recounts in burlesque detail a variety of childhood, adolescent, and college misadventures up to the present. After a formal and solemn public thesis defense, the young person is marched to the town square, often dressed in little more than a diaper or some obscene, flesh-colored suit with exaggerated body parts, and required to read the scroll aloud, o√ering embellishments . The text of the scroll (according to the linguist Noelle J. Mole) is a mixture of English, standard Italian, and Veneto dialect, so that the inductee inevitably trips up and is subject to further mockery and festive punishment. Liquids – the slimy, the potable, and the intoxicating – are abundantly applied to or hurled at the 4 7 R graduate. The scroll is posted on a wall in the square for all to see. Finally the initiate is paraded out to a chorus singing a slogan that I will not repeat here, even in Italian. You can go to YouTube if you want more information. It’s hilarious, Dionysian fun, but what is it all about? I’m no ethnographer, but it seems to me there are two messages in this tradition, and they are related: First, You are not a god. Your head is attached to a body. And now that you have passed all your tests and performed all the o≈cial tasks, you should let your riotous side out. And second, You have been in the ivory tower, but now you must come out into the town square. You are still part of ordinary life and the ordinary people who raised you. You must rejoin the community, not just as a ‘‘leader’’ who owes ‘‘service,’’ but also as someone sharing the limits and impulses and language of the people. The poet W. H. Auden never observed this ceremony, so far as I know, but he shared these values and would have appreciated the spirit of the event. The high achiever, Auden knew, can become addicted to approval and thus overly cautious intellectually; he or she can mistake o≈cial knowledge for truth, conventionality for wisdom, mastery of forms for superiority of mind. But we harbor an imp that troubles our vanity, thumbs its nose at authority, and prods our intellect. For Auden, traveler and cosmopolitan, it is less Dionysus than Hermes, the one who sheltered and reared Dionysus when Hera was after him, who presides over the future. Hermes is on the move; he is ‘‘master of the roads.’’ When Auden was invited to deliver an address at an elite university ’s Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises, he brought along his imp and played Falsta√ to all the newly crowned Prince Hals. In 1946 Auden was, after T. S. Eliot, the most celebrated poet in the English language. But it’s unlikely that the dons at Oxford twenty years earlier would have bet on his career. He had spent most of his university days avoiding his academic responsibilities and had performed unimpressively on exams. He was not a slacker, though he followed the Lord of Misrule as ardently as any other undergraduate . But his young mind was mercurial and passionate, full of unrealistic notions discarded as quickly as they were embraced, all feeding his vitality, which he poured into poetry. He read recklessly and without a plan, not according to the syllabus. The 4 8 C...

What Are Unnatural Narratives? What Are Unnatural Elements?

What Are Unnatural Narratives? What Are Unnatural Elements? Dan Shen (bio) The research on unnatural narrative theory as represented by Brian Richardson’s work over the past two or three decades has greatly expanded the scope of narrative studies, covering various phenomena neglected in previous investigations of narrative poetics. The works by Richardson and other scholars have devoted much space to explaining and defining what is unnatural. However, the picture is still not that clear. This article tries to [End Page 483] help clarify the issue by revealing the difference between the unnatural in Shakespeare/realist fiction and postmodernist fiction and by classifying different kinds of unnatural elements that break mimetic conventions without breaking the mimetic illusion. shakespeare, realism versus postmodernism In Unnatural Narrative (henceforth UN), Richardson observes that “the key criterion [for the unnatural] will always be the breaking of the mimetic illusion, in whatever form that may take” (93). Since different theorists have come up with different definitions of the unnatural, Richardson says in the Target Essay (henceforth TE): “In our practice, we often find it most useful to point to paradigmatic instances of the unnatural” (394). Here are two such cases offered in the TE: (1) “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining” (387); (2) “He’s got a car bomb. He puts the keys in the ignition and turns it—the car blows up. He gets out. He opens the hood and makes a cursory inspection. He closes the hood and gets back in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up. He gets out and slams the door shut disgustedly” (Leyner 59). Significantly, the works by writers in the realist tradition, like Cervantes through Fielding and on through Austen and Trollope, preclude such impossible fictional events, which totally violate our understanding of the world. Such events can only appear in avant-garde, experimental fiction, like post-modernism, with essentially different conventions and licenses. In discussing unreliable narration, Tamar Yacobi observes that “the genetic mechanism relegates fictive oddities and inconsistencies to the production of the text; above all, where unresolved otherwise, they are blamed on the (e.g., wavering, negligent, or ideologically fanatic) author. [. . .] Just consider ‘one inconsistency [that] seems like a slip on Tolstoy’s part: in chap. 14, Pozdnysheva is said to have borne six children, while elsewhere it is five’ [Isenberg 167n29]” (111). Such mismatched narration is likely to be taken as a purposefully “unnatural” technique in postmodernist fiction, but tends to be regarded as a careless “slip” when found in a realist text.1 Similarly, no matter whether it is Fielding or Austen or Trollope, had he or she penned “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining,” we would not be in a position to take it as the unnatural technique of “denarration,” but have to treat it as a puzzling slip in an essentially realist narrative. Realist [End Page 484] fiction does enjoy certain licenses to break the mimetic illusion occasionally, such as a dramatized hetero-extradiegetic narrator’s entering the storyworld or such a narrator’s referring to his/her own narrating power. But usually these occasional elements are not significant enough to subvert the mimetic nature of the whole narrative. Then how about Shakespeare? In UN, Richardson defines Shakespeare as “one of the greatest fabricators of unnatural places, events, and sequences in the history of literature before postmodernism” (102). But we would not expect to find instances like “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining” in Shakespeare. In the first place, it is impossible to enact such denarration on the stage (if the two sentences concerned are enacted, they would be taken as being sequential: it first rains, then the rain stops). Secondly and more importantly, Shakespeare’s drama still aims at maintaining the mimetic illusion. One example of the unnatural chosen by Richardson is “the play with time” in Hamlet (UN 103–4). When Hamlet sees the ghost just after midnight, he asks, “What art thou that usurp’st this time of night?” (quoted in Richardson, UN 104). A few minutes later “the dawn starts to break and the ghost leaves, as the time of night does indeed seem...

Luiz Gama and the racial satire as the transgression poetry: diasporic poetry as counter-narrative to the idea of race

Abstract This article interprets and analyzes the cultural production of the poet, journalist, mason, abolitionist, lawyer and political leader Luiz Gama. The city of São Paulo was the area of his accomplishments, best location for the emergence of a diasporic identity politics. Prioritized, the analysis of his poetic narratives, how Luiz Gama wore race, identity, modernity and memory of slavery to mediate social reality and ethno-racial relations.

Bodies Like Rivers: Seeking for a Space for Body Memory in the Discourse of Trauma

The article questions trauma theory’s fixation on anti-narrative techniques of aporia and fragmentation as the only appropriate means of encapsulating and transmitting trauma, since such a tendency largely marginalises alternative ways of exploring trauma. The author discusses Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) to illustrate that literary writing conforming to a narrative poetics endorsed by trauma theory can indeed be powerful. Nevertheless, in an endeavour to highlight the need for seeking other poetics and modes of remembering, the author concentrates on the analysis of two short stories by Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, included in a collection entitled Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition (1997), and on Canadian novelist Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (1999). Although all three authors engage with the way texts and bodies infiltrate each other’s porous boundaries, it is only in Manto’s and Baldwin’s type of embodied narrative that corporeal experience and memory are depicted as thoroughly intertwined in the way individuals and societies remember. Their stories reveal subjectivity as a complex biological, historical and social amalgam that seeks narration, but not necessarily through telling.

Memory, Trauma, and Phantasmagoria in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada

The film La teta asustada (Claudia Llosa, 2009) was inspired by the text titled Entre prójimos: El conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú by the medical anthropologist Kimberly Theidon. In this study, Theidon compiles the testimonies of a group of indigenous women who were sexually assaulted by members of revolutionary groups and the Peruvian army during a period of intense political and economic turmoil in the country. Llosa reinterprets the essence of the testimonies and the imprint of trauma in the film without depicting explicit violence, but rather through a highly poetic narrative and aesthetics. This study highlights the significance of breast milk in the film, the fear that invades the protagonist’s body, and the use of singing as a catalyst of oppression. Walter Benjamin’s “phantasmagoria” is the central theoretical concept used to examine physical patterns associated with the distress hidden in the individual and collective unconscious. The potato plant, the arid landscape, and the old aristocracy relics that carry high metaphorical signification are discussed using this theoretical framework, while also emphasizing the effectiveness of Llosa’s visual subtleness in depicting the essence of trauma as a shocking consequence of violence against civilians in a state of war.

Nem Tui, nem Gibraltar: Óláfr Haraldsson e a Península Ibérica

According to Heimskringla, Olafr Haraldsson, king and patron saint of Norway, sailed to the Straits of Gibraltar. It is told that he won several battles along the journey, some of which have been placed in Galicia. There are even those who say that Olafr was responsible for the looting of Tui, which appears in a Galician document from 1024. But how much truth is there in that theory? And how far can one trust the narrative on the journey of the Norwegian saint? The following article focuses on these questions, proposing an answer based in the analysis of the Norse sources, namely the process and context of transmission of the poem Vikingarvisur. It highlights the need for the poetic and prose narratives to be read separately, the silence of the Iberian texts and the ideological dimension found in the kings’ sagas, leading to the conclusion that Olafr may not have travelled beyond the Pyrenees.

From Homer’s Odyssey to Joyce’s Ulysses: Theory and Practice of an Ethical Narratology

Homer’s Odyssey is, with its alternation of authorial and I-narration, a highly intriguing narrative; moreover, with its constant inquiry into the nature and function of narration, it also proves to be a narrative poetics of great importance. The article presents a new departure by elaborating a theory of ethics from the metanarrative dimension of the Odyssey. Significant ideas are in this context the notions that narrative gives structure and meaning to life and experience, that narrative involves a conflict between good and evil and a tension between truth and lying and that in narrative the ethical interacts with the aesthetic. The article links insights gained from the study of Homer’s epic to modern theoretical approaches to the problem of an ethics of narration. Particular emphasis is given to the concept of narrative self-constitution, as formulated in Paul Ricœur’s work Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another). After a discussion of extant positions in theory and criticism, the study elaborates a concept of ethical narratology, which is based on the theory that in narration there is an interdependence of ethics and aesthetics. In the course of the discussion, distinctions are drawn between ethics and morality and between ethics as part of philosophy and ethics as part of narratology. In the article’s final section, the applicability of the theory is demonstrated via analysis of passages from Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Reevaluating Narration, Negotiation, and Exchange in the Old Occitan Frayre de Joy e Sor de Plaser

Reevaluating Narration, Negotiation, and Exchange in the Old Occitan Frayre de Joy e Sor de Plaser Rachel D. Gibson Most likely written in southern France in the late thirteenth-century, the Old Occitan-Catalan Frayre de Joy e Sor de Plaser was authored after the highpoint in the development of the troubadour lyric.1 Yet the nova rimada still echoed the courtly lyric tradition, emerging at a time when the lyric poet continued to enjoy a certain regional prestige as yet unknown to the narrative writer in the langue d’oc. Using the poetic narrative in the lyrically saturated culture of Occitania, the anonymous author of the tale opts for a medium which was most likely better known and more frequently used by those writing in the langue d’oïl, introducing a gai as the main messenger within the text.2 Among the major characters of the tale, the gai, or parrot, is by far the most active and talkative, second only to the narrator himself in its skillful ability to move the plot forward through retellings of events as they happen.3 As the reader eventually discovers, the parrot is extraordinary in both its magical abilities and its use of rhetoric, and, from its initial appearance as a gift from Virgil to Frayre de Joy, the bird sets to work to reverse the tale’s unfortunate turns of fate through magic, or appeals to piety and logic, that successfully persuade any listener it encounters. The tale opens with the death of Sor de Plaser, the daughter of the emperor of Gint-Senay, who is mourned throughout the empire and entombed in an impenetrable moated tower. With the help of magic skills learned from Virgil, the enamored young prince Frayre de Joy manages to reach her, and once inside, the youth exchanges rings with her, has sex with her body, and impregnates her. Through prayer and the help of a parrot gifted to Frayre de Joy by Virgil, the girl is magically brought back to life only to discover she has not only lost her virginity, she now has an illegitimate son. The parrot thus becomes pivotal in retroactively acquiring her consent before falling briefly into the hands of another pair of lovers, where the bird once again uses rhetoric to negotiate [End Page 48] its own release and finally facilitate the marriage between Frayre de Joy and Sor de Plaser. The choice to use the parrot as the tale’s intermediary was most likely in response to the troubadour affinity for the nightingale, the lark, and other song birds as symbols of the lyrical craft and the expression of fin’ amor. Indeed, Jean-Michel Caluwé has commented on the use of the parrot in the Old Occitan conte as a mimetic device similar to the nightingale in the lyric, yet representative of the craft of prose or poetic narrative. However, if one can read the nightingale in the troubadour lyric as a metaphor for love, or perhaps a mimetic device for the troubadour himself, what can the mimetic function of the parrot tell the reader about the evolving role of narrative in thirteenth-century Occitan culture? This study explores the parrot’s essential function in this particularly self-conscious text towards legitimizing the shift towards the narratives in the langue d’oc. It will take into consideration the author’s position in relation to the looming literary traditions of both northern and southern France, as well as how the strategic use of the parrot revalues the contribution of the narrative genre. The second half of this study draws connections between this reevaluation of narrative and a persistent discourse of exchange in the poem as demonstrated through the parrot’s essential role as negotiator in the text. While groundbreaking work has been done on the language and role of economy in troubadour lyric and razos, by comparison, Old Occitan narrative texts have received much less attention, and a more complete understanding of this dynamic has yet to be elucidated.4 This study will therefore yield a clearer picture of the narrative genre’s emerging function in medieval Occitania. Here, one finds a renegotiation of values—rooted particularly in the...

“Memories that are(n’t) mine”: Matrilineal Trauma and Defiant Reinscription in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard

This article examines Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006) as a poetic narrative of intergenerational cultural trauma. A mother’s fears about her daughter’s being born in the hostile environment of the civil rights-era South creates a “maternal impression” on her unborn child. And after birth, the daughter’s identity is shaped by her mother’s various forms of silencing as well as by socially-imposed moments of naming, blackening, and erasure that persist until the narrator tells the buried history of the Native Guards. By doing so, she resituates herself in a revised history of racialized trauma and reappropriates the meanings of her multiple identities.

A Better Life

This paper offers a poetic narrative of an international student-mother. The author seeks to address the call for more in-depth qualitative inquiries into student-parent experience in higher education. This poetic narrative is offered in the hope that humane connections are discovered that facilitate others to make sense of a similar life event as well as to challenge preconceived perceptions of undergraduate international student-parents.

Yannis Hamilakis. Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, xiii + 255pp., 26 b/w figs., hbk, ISBN 978-0-521-83728-6)

European Journal of Archaeology 18:4 (2015) 705-708 Review of Yannis Hamilakis. Archaeology and The Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, xiii + 255pp., 26 b/w figs., hbk, ISBN Yannis Hamilakis provides a very different framework for incorporating the senses into the construction of the past using archaeological research – a framework that might be a challenge for those who understand the senses as a tool to enrichen and elaborate their interpretations and explanations of archaeological data. In this book Hamilakis turns on its head the traditional understanding of the senses as epiphenomena of more powerful forces that drive history by forefronting them as the driving forces in a history that is constructed as the affective, event-based, and practice-oriented construction about real people. To those who have read other works by Hamilakis, the clear explication of his anti-modernist anti-colonialist standpoint that is expressed from the outset will be familiar. But there are a number of aspects of his writing in this book that were new to me, including some very intimate and poetic narratives. However, the general thesis that he puts forward was not entirely unexpected, since I had heard and seen its prelude in his Afterword to Making Senses of the Past edited by Jo Day (Hamilakis, 2013). The book under review is called Archaeology and the Senses in order to draw away from the idea that it is an Archaeology of the Senses or a Sensorial Archaeology, which Hamilakis is at pains to repeat throughout the volume it definitely is not. He is quite explicit that this volume is not a proposal to create a new sub- discipline in archaeology. It is a proposal to look at what we do as archaeologists in a quite different way by enlisting sensorial experience. This would not be such a novel proposition, given the recent interest in phenomenology and sensorial experience in the broader fields of archaeology, anthropology, history and geography. But Hamilakis puts forward what seems to me a quite novel way of incorporating sensoriality into our interpretations of the past as well as what we do as archaeologists, and how we do it. What he writes here is relevant not just for archaeologists working in the field, but also cultural heritage and museum professionals. As he points out, whether we are speaking of the world of the past or present, ʻThere has always been a tension between the anarchic and messy world of the senses …, and the often politically motivated attempts by various people and groups to regulate and channel sensorial experience, often using material culture and physical and built space.ʼ (p.15). In Chapter 1, Hamilakis introduces this different approach to the senses. Many of the arguments of going beyond the strict boundaries of empirical observations of archaeological materials in order to build sensorial awareness of the past have been covered by contributions to Making Senses of the Past (Day 2013). Hamilakis’ aim is not to re-present the past but to evoke its presence (see page 6). After the fiery introductory chapter, Hamilakis starts his Chapter 2 with a genealogy of sensoriality in the context of western Modernism. ʻI show that the construction of the Western sensorium in modernity is embedded within the colonial and national nexus of power.. ʼ (p. 13). His aim is to provide the background to how western modernist archaeologists incorporated the five bodily senses into their research. This latter topic forms the second half of this chapter in which he traces how ʻthe official archaeological apparatusʼ separated the visual from the multi-sensorial experience and gave it a privileged focus, all as part of a project to regulate and control the uncontrollable senses, especially the ʻless remoteʼ ones

Feminist Narratology Revisited

In 1986, in pages of Style, a debate was launched between Susan Lanser and Nelli Diengott on feasibility of a new theory, which Lanser named narratology. Lanser argued that as a textual and structuralist methodology could be very useful to feminist critical inquiry, but only if its principles were fundamentally changed to accommodate materialist issues vital to most feminist critics, including gender of author, psychology of character narrating, and time and place of fiction. In a subsequent issue, Diengott countered that such synthesis, by its own terms, would not be possible because materialist feminism is completely antithetical to as theory; combining two into a single methodology called narratology would cross impenetrable line between narrative poetics and interpretive criticism that in practice strictly observes. The debate was revived by Kathy Mezei a decade later in her Introduction to Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. There she explicitly argues for legitimacy of Lanser's definition over Diengott's opposition, defining narratology as a method of analysis that includes the sexuality and gender of author, narrator, character, and reader (2), elements that transcend narratology's normal structural and textual bounds. In 2002, in Feminist Metafiction and Evolution of British Novel, I argued, in contrast, for a theory of narratology that does not depend on gender of author or qualities of female narrating character as person. My thesis instead focused on structure and discourse of woman's narrating activity on level of text, demonstrating that narratology is feasible as a strict narratological theory and can also be used as critical methodology in that way. Since that time, perhaps because of oxymoronic difficulties inherent in term, narratology has mostly been dropped from critical lexicon and its use in feminist criticism has become almost extinct. The kinds of analyses produced in response to Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, however, suggest relevance of reexamining narratology as a methodological approach and validity of renegotiating its possibilities to include both sides of theoretical debate. Alias Grace is a novel based on real murder of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery in 1843. Each chapter opens with excerpts from actual historical documents relevant to murder case and published around same time as crime. Alongside these excerpts are pieces of canonical English and American poetry, all also written during nineteenth century and all by or on subject of women. The primary narrative, however, is delivered by a fictionalized version of real convicted female killer, Grace Marks, imprisoned for crime and trying to reconstruct, in a mostly linear fashion, events leading up to murder she claims she cannot recall. Also included in narrative text are fictional sections of free indirect discourse attributed to Simon Jordan, male psychiatrist who elicits Grace's first-person story, as well as occasional fictional letter from other official and unofficial sources in connection with his enterprise. Precisely because of this unique structural polyphony of different generic narratives, focus on narration in critical response to this text is almost inevitable; and because primary narrative, one that shapes plot and structurally coordinates all other discourses, is delivered in voice of a woman, complexities of woman's narrating act become central to a number of critical essays on a variety of hermeneutic subjects written in response to book. (1) To date, all critical attention paid directly to complexities of female narration in Alias Grace has concerned itself with credibility of its main narrating character as a person and, consequently, as a story teller. …