Narratological Terms Research Articles

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Abstract The article discusses the position of retelling in literary studies. Retelling does neither play a role in narratology, nor raises further questions for text theory. In the focus of literary didactics retelling is often limited to the pragmatics of use. ›Retelling‹, however, is not a term used in literary studies. Although the term denotes a widespread cultural technique, which is used in schools and is accordingly also discussed in the didactics of literature, it has not yet been able to be acknowledged in the discipline. The greatest obstacle standing in the way of a conceptual version of retelling probably lies in its distinction from narrative. Narratology has not found any specifics in retelling that fundamentally distinguish it from narration. And the tools of trans-textuality and intertextuality developed especially in structuralism to describe textual relations are available for narrative texts anyway. Thus, literary studies already apply theories and tools that are useful for analyses of retelling: narratology, text theory and classification of a second-order literature, the theory of trans-textuality and intertextuality, and material history, as well as research on media transposition and adaptation. Defining retelling as a second-order narrative, or meta-narrative, inevitably raises the question of what is being repeated at all, and how, by means of narrative. Medieval studies particularly emphasize the aspect of repetition (›re-telling‹), which precedes a specific mediality of narration. Retelling as a variety of repetition neither presupposes a pre-text nor requires that a narrative be repeated. Rather, in retelling, the narrative procedure enters into the service of repetition. On the one hand, it is a variety of repetition, but not every repetition is also a narrative. On the other hand, one and the same text can be described from the point of view of narration or that of repetition. Literary studies that focus on the uses of retelling will pay attention to the varieties of repetition and should look at the relationship between the act of narration and repetition. Obviously, in retelling, the modes and ways, but also the degrees of reference to the pre-text can vary, so that it remains to be discussed which varieties of reference count as valid repetitions. In addition, there is the fundamental question of what falls under the concept of narrative and what components constitute it. Is narrative to be understood as a turning back with linguistic means? As an organization of events, which in turn are to be understood as displacements of actors across semantic or even physical boundaries? As little as a repetition by means of narration is linked to a preceding narrative text, it is equally questionable where and how a boundary between narrative and non-narrative representation could be drawn. In this respect, the following discussion of retelling touches, on the one hand, on the distinction between describing and narrating, which itself required its own discussion in literary theory and history. On the other hand, the distinction between retelling and paraphrasing raises the question of the suitability of linguistic and rhetorical categories of analysis for an analysis of narrative. The article will not address such fundamental questions, but only selected examples will be presented to discuss ways of retelling. The article shifts the broad question of what a retelling is into a smaller, more manageable question of how retelling is done. This shift in the problem leads to specific examples and puts the spotlight on the uses of retelling. The selection of examples presents extreme cases that lie at the edges of a normal range where research has mostly focused its attention. The discussion of examples, which comes from Thomas Bernhard/Peter Handke, Wilhelm Termeer/Herman Melville and Clemens J. Setz, is intended to show that retelling allows both an integration, appropriation or fusion of narrative voices as well as an entanglement of narrative discourse and narrative histoire. The ambiguity of the retelling, which, by retelling a histoire, always carries its own discours, contrasts with forms of use such as summary. Although content summary and retelling can be distinguished as text types according to pragmatic criteria, summarizing a narrative text and retelling a histoire can also be mixed and merge into each other. The ease with which the practice of retelling can be understood should not obscure the fact that it is not easily grasped in terms of literary theory or narratology, and brings into play fundamental questions and problems.

Metalepsis and Stevens’ Abstraction

Metalepsis and Stevens’ Abstraction

Lies from Outer Space: The Martians’ Famous Invasion of New Jersey

Over the course of time, people have been told many lies concerning the Red Planet. Maybe the most renowned one dates back to the late 1880s, when, owing to an error in translation, scientists were led to believe in the existence of canals on its surface – canals instead of channels – which meant that Mars must be inhabited. More recently, in 1976, a lively discussion arose about the “face on Mars”, something that was spotted by the Viking 2 spacecraft in the region of Cydonia and was later dismissed as a mesa whose unusual shadows had cheated the eye. But the biggest lie of all was told in 1938, when a young actor (Orson Welles) decided to play a Halloween trick with the help of the then-rising medium – the radio. It was not really a lie in the strictest sense of the term. It was not a hoax or a fake, either – it was, in narratological terms, what is commonly called the suspension of disbelief pushed to its extreme. In this essay I am going to reconsider this event mainly in the light of two main conditions concerning lying, namely untruthfulness and the intention to deceive. Our specific case is further complicated by a third factor, that is the fact that somebody lies to someone who is believed to be listening in but who is not being addressed. I will also highlight the aftermath of this mass deception which, despite being followed by a number of disclaimers, actually overturned the utopian portrait of Martians, initiating a long literary and filmic theory of alien invasions.

„Die Sprache hat also ihren Ort.“ Zur Mehrsprachigkeit von Maja Haderlaps Roman Engel des Vergessens

“Die Sprache hat also ihren Ort.” On Multilingualism in Maja Haderlap’s Novel Engel des Vergessens. Based on philological research on multilingualism and with regard to Maja Haderlap’s literary work in general this article deals with the specific form of multilingualism that can be observed in her novel Engel des Vergessens (2011). Maja Haderlap, born 1961 in Bad Eisenkappel/Železna Kapla, Carinthia (region in southern Austria), grew up with two languages, Slovenian and German. The authors of the article pursue the question to what degree her literary work and especially her novel can be characterised as multilingual and what kind of poetic multilingualism can be found there. They focus on the novel’s narrative and on the use of language(s), with a short historical excursus on the Slovenian minority in Carinthia as well as the difficult memory politics in Austria. Maja Haderlap not only writes about the territorial and historical preconditions of multilingualism in Carinthia but also inscribes these conditions in the text itself, characterising both the narrative and the language. Although the novel is the result of a shift from Slovenian to German, its multilingualism can be analysed on different levels: on the level of the relationship between discours and histoire – to refer to Genette’s narratological terms –, on the level of cultural codes of the Slovenian language within the novel’s German text, and in general with regard to the fact, that the text is written with the modes of expression of Slovenian and German or with the help of the ‘no man’s land’ between the languages. One can therefore – with respect to the terms of philological research – find both obvious and latent multilingualism and, thirdly, one can observe Mehr-Sprachlichkeit, a term that has been defined by Silke Pasewalck in previous articles.

Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction, by Kylee-Anne Hingston

Reviewed by: Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction by Kylee-Anne Hingston Natalie Prizel (bio) Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction, by Kylee-Anne Hingston; pp. x + 221. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019, £80.00, $120.00. Reviewing a text concerned with how disability at times disrupts narrative linearity, one might do as well to start at the end as at the beginning, and it is indeed at the end that Kylee-Anne Hingston gives the origin story of her book, Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction, a study of how disability is formally articulated in nineteenth-century literature. Reading Robert Buchanan's indictment of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, Hingston "wanted to know what allowed Buchanan to collapse body and text so thoroughly that he could consider poetic form susceptible to disease" (193–94). If Buchanan turns text into flesh in a manner that inspires Hingston's book, Charles Dickens shows Mr. Venus, the articulator of bones from Our Mutual Friend (1865), turning flesh into text, something to be taxonomized and, as he puts it, articulated. These two examples bookend Hingston's detailed treatment of the relationship between bodies and narrative in nineteenth-century fiction. Hingston's book joins several new endeavors to think about disability in formal and, here, narratological terms in an effort to complicate the hitherto dominant terms of disability theory. It attempts to move from the overarching claims of disability theory—claims that nonetheless underlie and inform Hingston's analysis—to the more contingent and local arguments of disability criticism. Dividing her chapters by subgenre (gothic fiction, social problem fiction, sensation fiction, "sentimental religious" fiction, fairy tales, and detective fiction), Hingston analyzes focalization and narrative shape (especially narrative closure) to account for the narrative workings of disabled bodies from the 1830s to the 1890s (9). Hingston begins with John Ruskin's critique of the presence of disabled, dying, and (to him) disgusting bodies in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880), using his famously intemperate [End Page 310] response to certain texts to make claims about Victorian attitudes toward disabled fictional figures more generally. Ruskin calls Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) "the effectual head of the whole cretinous school" (qtd. 21). Hingston's treatment of Hugo is compelling, particularly her focus on on Hugo's aesthetics of incompleteness, his use of optical discourse, and the relationship between architectural and embodied form in the novel. While shifts in focalization are at the heart of the chapter, it is in reference to these other concerns that Hingston makes her strongest case for complexity and hybridity in Hugo's treatment of disability. (Hybridity might be considered the watchword of this study due to Hingston's insistence on the ambiguous narrative position of disability.) Nonetheless, Notre-Dame de Paris serves as a somewhat odd start to a book announcing itself as Victorian and otherwise concerned with British texts, particularly because much of Articulating Bodies is concerned with culturally contingent anxieties. Despite Ruskin's insistence on Hugo's text as foundational to a "cretinous" canon, it seems that cultural and social anxieties regarding the body might very well differ across the Channel. Ruskin drops out as a principal antagonist as the book goes on, but it is worth mentioning that his aesthetics might not be so diametrically opposed to Hugo's as Hingston (or Ruskin himself) suggests. She writes that Notre-Dame de Paris "insists that there is beauty in hybridity, in the incomplete, and in the ugly; it holds beauty and ugliness, normalcy and abnormality, as both distinct and indistinguishable from one another" (47). Here, Hingston actually sounds much like Ruskin, who writes in Modern Painters, "The ugliest objects contain some element of beauty; and in all it is an element peculiar to themselves, which cannot be separated from their ugliness, but must either be enjoyed together with it or not at all" (The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 5 [London: George Allen, 1903–12], 58). In the second chapter, on Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53), Hingston's claim...

Mise en intrigue, énonciation, pragmatique.

According to Paul Ricœur the "third time" which would be likely to mediate between lived time and cosmic time for an individual divided between identity-idem and identity-ipse, narration would play an essential role of configuration. However, from the third volume of Temps et récit (1985) to Soi-même comme un autre (1990), narrative identity as conceived by the philosopher — in particular in dialogue with A. J. Greimas’ semiotics — is based on emplotment (conceived in terms of structuralist narratology) and not on discursive features, which implies enunciative strategies and pragmatism. However, all cultures have forms of narrative that fall short of the mediated and textual communication presupposed by Ricœur, who choses to focus on different forms of novels or historical writings. These narrative forms correspond to acts of enunciation: they are performances that are generally ritualized and whose narrative temporality coincides with the temporality of enunciation itself. We will explore the consequences of this form of narrative for the question of narrative identity, which encompasses individual as well as collective identity with their practical and cultural consequences.

When Narrative Becomes Theatrical

ABSTRACT Storytelling is an integral component of Irish tradition, folklore, and culture. Ireland's rich narrative tradition can be traced back to the early oral act of storytelling, undertaken by the seanchaí (storyteller or historian). Despite the wide spectrum of studies and broadly ranging arguments on storytelling in general and other specific aspects, in Irish drama narrative and the monologue, as well as narrative levels and types of narrators, have never been analyzed. In narratological terms Irish drama is rich with various degrees of diegetic narrativity employed differently by its various playwrights. This article looks more closely into a subject that until now has not received attention in the context of Irish theatre. In Irish theatre, in which language, narrative, and storytelling are recurrent topics, it is crucial that we understand how narrative is more complicated than the simple telling of a story and that it possesses techniques and levels that are worth reflecting on for their ability to change nuance and the experience of the audience.

Salinger'ın “Franny”sinde Anındalık ve Mesafe Hissi

Jerome David Salinger'ın 1955 tarihli öyküsü “Franny”, Amerikan öykücülüğünün en çok bilinen ve çok tartışılan eserlerinden olsa da tartışmalar sadece eserin içeriğine odaklanmıştır. Öykünün anlatı yöntemi ve biçemine dair hiçbir çalışma yapılmamıştır; anlatıcısından sadece üçüncü tekil şahıs ilâhi anlatıcı diye bahsedilmiştir. Oysa, ilâhi anlatıcı detaylandırılmaya muhtaç bir kavramdır; çünkü öykü ve roman türünde kullanılan bütün ilâhi anlatıcılar aynı özelliklere sahip değildir. “Franny”de kullanılan anlatıcı ilâhi anlatıcının kimi özelliklerine sahip olsa da salt bu kavramla hakkıyla tanımlanamaz. Diğer anlatıbilim kavramlarıyla ilişkilendirildiğinde öyküdeki anlatıcının hem yorumları hem de sözel biçemi itibariyle fâni bir anlatıcı gibi göründüğünü ve böylece hem öyküdeki aracılık hissinin azaldığını hem de okur ve metin arasındaki mesafenin kısaldığını görürüz.

Reliable knowledge, true freedom: The remnant of the analogia temporalis in the theology of Robert Jenson and its implications for the epistemology–freedom debate

AbstractWhile Karl Barth balances the reliability of revelation with divine counterfactual freedom through the analogia temporalis, Robert Jenson rejects this form of analogy, arguing that it posits an unknowable reality of God behind revelation. He instead transposes metaphysics into narratological terms, arguing that this secures the reliability of revelation and divine freedom, since it means God is future to (and so undetermined by) events in time. This metric for divine freedom cannot, however, replace counterfactual possibility; hence, the analogia temporalis (presupposed in counterfactuals) re-emerges in Jenson's theology. This form of analogy is essential in balancing the reliability of revelation with divine freedom.

The Poetic Dependencies of the Airborne Narrative: Subjunctive and Optative Possibilities.

The Poetic Dependencies of the Airborne Narrative: Subjunctive and Optative Possibilities Lorenzo Servitje (bio) It is an interesting, frightening time for those who study health or practice medicine, especially related to infectious disease. While airborne has been in the common lexicon for several decades (reinforced by films like Outbreak [1995] and bioterrorism discourse surrounding 9/11), today fomites, aerosol, and droplets are matters of semantic and scientific Facebook disagreements among family, friends, and strangers. This is not unrelated to debates about the efficacy of masks and the degree to which they are claimed by some to cause hypercapnia and hypoxemia. At stake here is the capacity, efficacy, and danger of breath. My training as a literary scholar and my fondness for Priscilla Wald’s ever-relevant “outbreak narrative” would normally incline me toward considering breath in narratological terms, something like “the airborne narrative”—which might be the story of the (developing) academic and public discourse surrounding SARS-CoV-2’s mode of transmission, along with the politics that co-constitute what we do with that knowledge (or lack of it).1 It might also describe the emplotment of human and nonhuman actors in this uncertain moment. But because time, matter, bodies, and space have for so many of us been radically altered, perhaps something other than conventional narrative logic is in order. In “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Ezra Pound defines a form that might express some of the uncertainty and angst of the moment: the image, “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”2 In that vein, what might William Carlos Williams’s confounding imagist poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” help us to understand about the complexity of this radical alteration?3 What does [End Page 242] the poem’s condensation of language, thingness, and formal dependency reveal about breath, air, and human dependency in this moment? Appropriating its form with some contemporary content might look something like the following: The Fluid Medium So much dependsUpon A fluidmedium Dynamic withflecks depositing inairways While a complete, declarative sentence, my reworking—like the original poem itself—foregrounds matter and density; it also forestalls, or at least makes us work for, closure and meaning. If syntactically speaking the crux for Williams is “a red wheel / barrow,”—on which “so much depends”—then consider what the crux in mine is not: the virus itself. To discover what it is, we must unravel a similarly (copied) dense sentence of recursive modification. Like Williams’s poem, mine has seven of its eight lines—everything after “So much depends”—operating as a prepositional phrase adverbially modifying “depends.”4 This drives our focus away from the ontological object that has captured our attention (the virus as a thing in itself) and asks us to reflect instead on the fluid medium, on air. What does it depend on, and how does that affect those ominous dynamic flecks—be they in droplet or aerosol form? We might, then, consider the role of that which is in between the lines, yet immersed in air: breath, and the human machines (with airways) that produce, diffuse, and vortex the fluid medium and the environments in which they are all entangled. What do all the above depend on and what depends on them? Focusing on the agency, vibrancy, or animacy of air itself is appropriate given the increasingly acknowledged role of aerosol transmission in SARS-CoV-2, and even given just a more nuanced understanding of [End Page 243] what the glazing world of droplets actually entails.5 Unless one happens to suffer respiratory distress, or breathlessness, we don’t really think about the material inputs and outputs of this autonomic process: As Jane Macnaughton notes, “So entangled is breath in everything bodies are, experience and do that it gets taken for granted, lost from view and is rarely a direct focus of attention.”6 Perhaps that is changing. Given the acceleration of climate change, the attention required to produce justice in the social determinants of health, given the way breath has been stifled for so many Black bodies—by police or the virus, among other means—breath must “be understood in...

Narrative structure in the mind: Translating Genette’s narrative discourse theory into a cognitive system

An episodic memory is considered to be mentally encoded or constructed information instead of a copy of the past events. However, the mechanism that constructs episodic memory has not been systematically formulated in previous studies on cognitive architecture and system. In this study, the term “story” is used, rather than episodic memory, to refer to a mental representation of temporally and linguistically organized events and entities. The main difference between a story and an episodic memory is that a story involves a form of mental representation, while the definition of an episodic memory is generally based on the function or content (i.e., it enables the recollection of past events). A story is considered as a uniform mental representation involving episodic memory, current situation, prospective memory, planned or imagined future, and fiction. To ensure systematic formulation of the story-form memory construction, this study introduces Genette’s narrative discourse theory, which is a representative work in narratology. Genette provided a systematic classification of terms used to describe a narrative structure, with particular focus on how a narrative is structured on a text instead of what is told. In this study, Genette’s narratological terms are analogically translated to methods of story-form memory construction in a cognitive system. Furthermore, the narratological methods are rearranged using cognitive terms including temporal segmentation of the world, generalization of stories, theory of mind, metacognition, self-formation, memory organization, and sociocultural aspect of cognition. Thus, a story is characterized as integrative, multifaceted, and multifunctional information in the mind.

The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge

Reviewed by: The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge Julia McCord Chavez (bio) Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), pp. v + 331, $85.00 hardcover. The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier, by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, provides illuminating new answers to a foundational question for Victorian periodical studies: “How does the form of the illustrated Victorian serial novel invite readers to read?” (2). Drawing upon an impressive range of archival research and invoking an eclectic set of case studies that range from canonical works such as David Copperfield (May 1849–November 1850) and The Small House at Allington (September 1862–April 1864) to lesser-examined works such as The Tower of London (January–December 1840), Griffith Gaunt (December 1865–November 1866), and Peter Ibbetson (June–December 1891), Leighton and Surridge convincingly argue that images and letterpress in Victorian serial fiction most often function as coequal modes of representation that “impel reflective and complex reading strategies” (50). Anchoring their analysis in narratology, the theory of how fiction is narrated, Leighton and Surridge demonstrate that illustration does more than simply picture a novel’s text; instead, images add complexity and “thicken” serial plots by infusing Victorian novels with a second source of narrative influence (19). Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of The Plot Thickens, and this is reflected in an astute methodology that embraces historical, materialist, and formalist approaches to the illustrated Victorian serial. The introductory chapter, “Material Matters,” provides a detailed history of the developing technologies of book illustration (from steel etchings and engravings [End Page 806] to wood engravings to photomechanical reproduction); an overview of the Victorian literary marketplace informed by the work of Robert L. Patten, Brian Maidment, Julia Thomas, Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, Catherine Golden, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, and others; and a new theoretical lens for reading serial illustration. The innovative application of narratology to images as well as letterpress is a significant contribution to the field of periodical studies because it provides a precise vocabulary for describing verbal-visual relationships. As Leighton and Surridge point out, “Narratological terms—such as prolepsis, analepsis, mimesis, diegesis, iteration, repetition, and extradiegesis—can help us to identify and understand these complex relationships between visual and verbal plots” (20). The remaining chapters of the book, grouped by genre, apply narratological analysis to representative texts from the birth of the format in the 1830s through the waning of the serial novel during the fin de siècle. The first chapter focuses on the genre of autobiography through two case studies: Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, illustrated by Hablot K. Browne, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phyllis (November 1863–February 1864), illustrated by George Du Maurier. Analyzing the representation of reading and the presence of word pictures within these illustrated serials, Leighton and Surridge argue that “the technology of the illustrated book became a potent metaphor for inner life, memory, and self making” (53). Historical serial fiction is the focus of chapter two, which examines The Tower of London by William Harrison Ainsworth with illustrations by George Cruikshank, William Makepeace Thackeray’s self-illustrated Vanity Fair (January 1847–July 1848), and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Looking specifically at the two dominant modes of visual historical representation—metaphorical and metonymic—the authors argue that the illustrations in each example interact with the letterpress to produce a distinctive theorization of historical change. The Tower of London uses metonymic wood engravings, for example, to inspire readers to preserve national monuments. Vanity Fair, on the other hand, “deploys verbal and visual sign systems to play ironically with both imagined scenes and metonymic representations of the past” (95). Even two different illustrated versions of the same novel, in the case of A Tale of Two Cities, provide contrasting visions of history. The American version in Harper’s Weekly (May 7–December 3, 1859), illustrated by John McLenan, uses “matching mimesis” to create for readers “an illusion of immediacy and immersion in history” (95). In contrast...

Narratorhood in the Anthropocene: Strange Stranger as Narrator-Figure in The Road and Here

ABSTRACTThis essay develops a definition of a type of “narratorhood” specific to the Anthropocene. The concept of the strange stranger is adapted from Timothy Morton into narratological terms through an ecocritical perspective on unnatural narratology and the reading experience, arguing for an ethic of de-anthropomorphized reading that resists the interpretation of narrators as humanoids. Through analyses of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here, this ethic is described as the encounter with a narrator-figure that is dialogic, radically indeterminate, and that foregrounds spatial juxtaposition and description over linear time and discourse representation.

The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction by Reshmi Dutta-Flanders

Reviewed by: The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction by Reshmi Dutta-Flanders Jia Xiaoqing (bio) Reshmi Dutta-Flanders. The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xvii + 500 pp. The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction is a comprehensive formal analysis of the devices by which suspense is created in crime fiction. Although the subtitle is “a linguistic stylistic approach,” the analysis in the book is actually “interdisciplinary” which the author acknowledges in Chapter 1 (3), and which is the trend of stylistic study in recent years. Although the multidisciplinary sources are listed by the author as “recent advances and interest in crime studies in literature, forensic linguistics and social sciences” (3), this reviewer finds that the author resorts to narratology at least as often as stylistics in her book-length analysis. Therefore, it is the combination of narratology and stylistics that explains the mechanism of suspense in crime fiction. After a brief introduction to the features of crime fiction in Chapter 1, particularly suspense, Chapter 2 centers on two key concepts: “manipulated context” and “frame.” Manipulated context (MC) is a context constructed by the offender narrator by using devices such as retrospection and prospection to disturb the coherence of the narrative. Frame refers to both the physical episodes in the novel and readers’ cognitive scenario. The cognitive scenario enables readers to spot the perpetrator’s purposeful distortion of event sequences, and the resultant lack of “episodic link” and “causality.” This chapter starts with the comparison between story and discourse levels, a narratological distinction which the author relates to stylistic features by saying that “MC constructed in the narrative frame is based on the bidirectional function of the DR (discourse referent) as the risky point in the plot form” (14). The DRs are pronouns such as “it, that, anything” and noun phrases such as “the girl” (26, 52). The referents of these uncertain pronouns are unavailable in the immediate contexts, but the narrator’s repeated, recalled, and withheld frames of certain episodes mislead readers [End Page 508] into regarding some character as the referent of the uncertain pronoun and build the scenarios in which that character is the suspect. These devices fulfill the perpetrator’s intention to conceal the real crime and create suspense in the novel. Besides these uncertain pronouns and nouns, the author also analyzes the linguistic features introducing frames, like “remember, inform,” which introduce mental frames and suspend the actuality of the frame contents (41). In the case studies that follow, the author lists the main frames in the three chosen crime stories, and contrasts them with readers’ cognitive frames so as to reveal the distortion of the event sequences. In addition, the ensuing analysis of uncertain DRs such as “it,” as well as the linguistic features such as the obligation adverbial “must” and deictic pronoun “that,” exposes the perpetrator’s motives and criminal acts. Using Genette’s three-level division of narratives—story, narrating, narrative—the author explains that Chapter 2 focuses on the narrative as a finished product, whereas Chapter 3 is “concerned with the issue of narrating in the narrative” and aims to reveal how suspense is created in crime fiction through the study of language (139), complex and multilevel narrative situations. Starting with the narratological terms indicating narrating and focalizing agents, such as “narrator, focalizer, focalized, diegesis, interdiegesis,” this chapter focuses on the distinctions of narrative levels like narrator, narrated, and character. The author employs Polanyi’s “discourse-shifters” such as stylistic features “deictics, demonstratives, and pronouns” to distinguish the vantage points in story worlds (148). For example, tense alternation, including both undifferentiated temporal deictics and abrupt tense shifts, accounts for the realignment (i.e., homodiegeticization [154]), content gap, shifts in point of view that take place at the microlevel (clausal level) in the embedded story worlds (subworlds). These story worlds are built by the devices like mental processes (151), which are analyzed in the light of the transitivity analysis of Functional-Stylistics or speech and thought presentation studied by stylisticians like Short. In the case studies of three crime novels, the author mainly approaches them from temporal alternation (time orientation markers like “tense, modality, and adverbials” [158]), and...

Ellipsis, Narrative Gaps, and Their Functions in Contemporary British Poetry: A Narratological Approach

The narratological understanding of ellipsis is defined as a gap in the presentation of a narrative’s histoire. The absence of extensive consideration of verse in narratological studies is argued. It is suggested that such an absence is surprising, as narrative and verse constantly intersect. The work of several contemporary British poets is discussed in terms of their employment of narrative ellipsis. A provisional typology of ellipsis in verse and functions for such ellipsis are put forward. It is hypothesised that this device is widespread in verse, and that examination of poetry using this and other narratological terms will prove fruitful.

Affective Tales of the Body: Narrative and Narrativity in Biological Art

The paper aims to introduce biological art projects into the fi eld of narration studies, with a focus on two examples: physiological architecture projects (including Jean-Gilles Decosterd’s and Philippe Rahm’s ‘Hormonorium’ and ‘Split time café’), which go beyond classical representation and concentrate on the hormonal dimensions or the movement of retina, trying to explore the affective aspects of the body, and the artistic experiments of Turkish artist Pinar Yoldas (‘Fabula: Origins of Species’, ‘Speculative Biologies’, ‘After Evolution’ and ‘Remembering The Future’) – sculptures, photos and instalations based on organic materials. The article combines the theory of affect, cognitive narratology, the concepts of storyworld and possible worlds, and redefi nes the terms of post-classical narratology in order to determine whether it is possible to construct a narrative beyond language, an embodied one.

Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture by Jan-Noël Thon

Reviewed by: Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture by Jan-Noël Thon Jan Horstmann (bio) Jan-Noël Thon. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. Lincoln, London: U of Nebraska P, 2016. xxii + 527 pp. $60.00. ISBN: 978-0-8032-7720-5. A new publication in the University of Nebraska's Frontiers of Narrative series is Jan-Noël Thon's revised PhD thesis, Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. It provides a theoretical framework for research on transmedial strategies of storytelling as well as case studies of narrative representations in three different media: contemporary film, comics, and video games. In this case, these media represent "contemporary media culture." The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on one of three transmedial aspects of narrative representation. These are (1) the representation of storyworlds, (2) narratorial representations, and (3) subjective representations of characters' consciousnesses. In each part, Thon first builds up a theoretical basis and subsequently shows the concept "at work" in methodological analyses across the three media. Thon's contribution fills a research gap, namely the need to create a "genuinely transmedial narratology" (xviii) for media studies in particular but also for literary studies of narrative representations. Although he primarily focuses on the three mentioned media, his approach is not limited to them. He intends the categories he deals with to be open to adaptation and the analysis of other media or even of convergent narrative works of different media. Likewise, his transmedial approach leads to a critical reconsideration of existing narratological concepts and terms. In the first chapter, "Toward a Transmedial Narratology," Thon situates himself in relation to various theoretical discourses in both narratology and media studies and makes it clear that his book provides not only a theoretical framework but, in particular, a method "for the analysis of prototypical aspects of narrative across media" (6). Although his approach is clearly [End Page 247] associated with transgeneric and intermedial movements in postclassical and neoclassical narrative studies, he does not fail to clarify the connections between his approach and the other two main research areas in narratology, contextualist and cognitive narratology. Comparing different understandings of media, mediality, intermediality, and transmediality, for the most part Thon discusses the approaches of Marie-Laure Ryan, Irina Rajewsky, David Herman, and Werner Wolf, arguing that a transmedial narratology should not be "a collection of medium-specific narratological terms and concepts" (15). Instead, it should focus on continuous and neutral aspects that appear across media, while preventing media-blindness as well as media-relativism. His aim, therefore, is to "examine a variety of strategies of narrative representation across a range of conventionally distinct narrative media while at the same time acknowledging both similarities and differences in the ways these media narrate" (31). Part I is thus concerned with "Storyworlds across Media," expanding upon the classical story/discourse distinction by referring to storyworld conceptions established by researchers such as Herman, Ryan, and Lubomír Doležel, all of whom emphasize that there is more to the story ("implicit narrative content"; 37) than that which is explicitly presented. Storyworlds are therefore "mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate" (Herman, Story Logic 9, quoted on 44f.). Because the spatial, temporal, and causal relations between the represented events and existents also contribute to the constitution of the storyworld, Thon describes storyworlds as "intersubjective communicative constructs based on a given narrative representation" (54). Consequently, Thon states a need to clearly differentiate between the internal mental representation of a world, its external medial representation and the storyworld itself (cf. 51). He points out that the recipients of a narrative representation do two things: they (1) "fill in the gaps" with their world (and fictional) knowledge, which researchers commonly agree upon; but also (2) willingly ignore aspects of the representation that are medium-specific and do not represent the storyworld. Thon writes with recourse to Gregory Currie's representational correspondence (60) and Kendall L. Walton's principle of charity (61) about the "medium-specific forms of charity" (70) recipients provide. In doing so, they seek to make sense of seemingly...

Blues Narrative Form, African American Fiction, and the African Diaspora

This essay examines key narratives in the African American tradition as rhetorically motivated and pedagogically engaged extensions of the musical genre known as the blues. Through the process of identifying, describing, organizing, and interpreting the elements of what can be termed blues narrative form , the essay argues that in these narratives performer-listener relationships draw from and also extend the rhetorical dimensions of blues music, lyrics, and performance styles. The essay introduces a taxonomy of examples developed from a set of approximately one hundred novels and narratives, and proposes several narratological terms to signify these narratives’ connections with blues music, specifically strategic variation, vernacular delivery, and participatory musicality. More generally, the concept of blues narrative form provides an advance over that of the “blues novel” because it helps to foreground often-overlooked narrative elements that have given unique rhetorical dynamism to the century-long practice of literary blues writing and its connections to the African diaspora.

Memento and the Embodied Fabula: Narrative Comprehension Revisited

Abstract Although Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) has been the subject of numerous critical examinations, the unique manner in which the film’s reverse-chronological dramaturgy interweaves the spectators’ cognitive-analytical attempts to ensure causal-linear coherency together with a corporal-affective sensation of temporal loss remains underexplored. This I believe is due to the inability of prevalent narratological terms of cutting across the current divide and uniting on the same conceptual plane the cinematic spheres of the cognitive-analytical, evaluative, and interpretative, on the one hand, with the visceral, haptic, and sensory-affective, on the other hand. As an attempt to carve out a conceptual ground where these key facets of the cinematic experience can be unified in a nonhierarchical and nonreductive manner, I propose an embodied reconceptualization of the cognitive-formalist concept of the fabula. In order to do so, however, it is necessary to dispute a series of dominant assumptions about cinematic spectatorship and narrative comprehension that automatically come with this narratological concept.

Narratological Bakhtin

Although Bakhtin did not use special narratological terms, he was interested in narratological issues. The significance of Bakhtin’s thought is especially felt in three fields of narratology: the correlation between the author and narrator figure (according to Bakhtin between the “primary” and “secondary” authors); the problem of eventfulness; and, finally, the metalinguistic view on the nature of narrative expression. This paper explores the correspondences between the three domains of narratology and Bakhtin’s phenomenology of speech genres and authorship.