Narrative Time Research Articles

Translation and Temporality in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie by Maud Burnett McInerney

Reviewed by: Translation and Temporality in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie by Maud Burnett McInerney Sylvia Federico maud burnett mcinerney, Translation and Temporality in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie. Gallica Vol. 47. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. xii, 228. isbn: 978–1–84384–615–4. $99. The central argument of this study is that Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s translation of the Troy story ‘from Late Latin into Old French, from Late Antiquity to the twelfth-century Renaissance, and from prose into verse also translates history into romance, reconfigures narrative time, and causes the appearance of unexpected textual objects’ (p. 2). Acknowledging that her subject is very well-traveled ground, McInerney claims a narrower path of interest for the present book: not the ‘external, political effects’ of the medieval Troy story but ‘its internal, narrative effects’ with special emphasis on how ‘what I call Trojan time’ . . . ‘shapes the temporality and spaciality of its own telling and that of the new genre, the romance, that it helps create’ (p. 2). Following this statement of intent, the Introduction reviews medieval translation theory and the curiosities of temporality it permitted and disallowed, with supporting reference to Gérard Genette, Paul Ricouer, and Jorge Luis Borges. Chapter One reviews the historical contexts of Benoît’s poem and summarizes the author’s claims about his identity, purpose, and source; the evidence for the fraudulence of ‘Dares’ and ‘Dictys’ as eye-witnesses to the Trojan War is reiterated. The main argument in this section is that Benoît fills the ‘gaps’ left by his prose sources with ‘the themes and techniques that animate the Roman de Troie: heroism, courtly love, and a passion for ekphrasis’ (p. 46). Chapter Two summarizes the central conceits and contexts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum, including its linking of Troy to Britain, its specious claims to veracity, and its author’s political relationships with his dedicatees. Geoffrey’s notoriously inventive and elaborate prophecies are compared to the ‘brief and somewhat dismissive’ (p. 80) approach to the material in the Dares text. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Matilda Bruckner’s assertion regarding Benoît’s embedded technique with regard to prophecies. In Chapters Three and Four, McInerney treats ‘heterosexual erotics’ (with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of ‘romance time,’ p. 89, n. 3 and passim) and ‘queer time’ in the Dinshawian sense (p. 123, n. 2 and passim), respectively, to show how Benoît expands on the topics of sexuality as presented by other versions of the Troy story. Ultimately, McInerney claims, the Roman de Troie ‘is a romance in which the heterosexual system of courtly love . . . fails’ (p. 154). The fifth and final chapter turns to Benoît’s use of ekphrasis ‘to turn epic and history into romance’ (p. 190). A short appendix reviews the manuscript history of the poem through reliance on Marc-René Jung. Few readers would be surprised by any of the points raised in McInerney’s study. Its themes and its arguments are readily familiar, drawn as they are from some of the criticism (of the poem itself and of the medieval Troy story) published largely between 1985 and 2000, with further sampling from the early twenty first century. Students who are unfamiliar with the Roman de Troie and its traditions will benefit from this book: it handily summarizes the content of the story and offers an extremely selective and [End Page 81] digested version of its existing critical analysis. Seasoned readers of Benoît and experts on the matter of antiquity in the Middle Ages may enjoy the stroll down memory lane, renewing with fondness our reflections on this poet’s treatment of ‘Troy time.’ Sylvia Federico Bates College Copyright © 2022 Arthuriana

Inherited Revolution. Narratives in Transgenerational Memory Transfer

AbstractOur essay deals with narratives of social upheaval that act as vehicles for transgenerational memory transfer. We look at narratives of collectively experienced processes of emancipation and the subsequent possibility of remembering things not experienced firsthand under the prism of the political event of revolution understood as an inherently violent process (Arendt 1990). In this context, we inquire about postmemory along similar lines to those staked out by Marianne Hirsch, while also considering whether the term can be separated from trauma and linked to other emotional responses of comparable affective intensity. Memories of violence are frequently disjointed and impressionistic. The connection of fragments to a narrative context is often severed while the action of linking the threads into a coherent narrative faces vehement resistance. In principle, this is not different from the experience of violence in revolutions and their remembrance. However, narratives on revolution tend to exert a strong force of attraction upon their recipients. Considering the figures ofcycle,linear progression,iteration,disruptionandirreversibilityas the time modes of revolution, we look at how these have enabled entirely new understandings of time since the nineteenth century. New forms of temporality, in turn, are entangled with the roledisplacementplays in the relationship between a transgenerational transfer of narratives and the construction of narrative time.In order to explore how a generation deals with the dominance (Hirsch 2012) of the narratives transmitted to them by the preceding one, we deal with two models in which affective states charged with both suffering and pleasure are developed into terms of cultural and literary theory: Bini Adamczak’s reading ofdesireas fetish in post-revolutionary Soviet Russia, and Svetlana Boym’s work onnostalgiaas an emotional disposition characteristic for modernity. Taking into account that both models are more or less constructed by cultural practices, historical events, and transformations in the history of ideas, and thus cannot always be precisely distinguished from one another, we present two main narrative strategies: The reception of the stories of one generation by another involves either contracting the affective intensity of their narratives at the expense of linear time or expanding narrative time far beyond individual life spans. For our analysis we mainly refer to Rodolfo Usigli’sEnsayo de un crimenand Heinrich Heine’sLudwig Börne: A Memorialas post memory narratives on revolution. We understand them as examples of each narrative strategy and as part of the dialectic of this way of remembering.

A temporal gaze on work-life balance in academia: Time, gender, and transitional episodes in Bangladeshi women faculty narratives.

This article seeks to decentre the Global North knowledge production about ‘work–life balance’ (WLB) in academia by applying a temporal gaze to illuminate WLB possibilities in Bangladeshi academia where institutional WLB policies are absent. Drawing on Adam’s (2008) timescapes and Flaherty’s (2002) time work concepts, we focus on Bangladeshi women faculty’s experiences as an example of how a temporal gaze can help illuminate the interrelationships between time, gender, and life transitions underlying women faculty accounts of WLB in a Global South context. Drawing on the narratives of three Bangladeshi women faculty in different career stages and family statuses, we probe how women faculty manipulate, control, or customize their temporal experience (i.e. temporal agency) in response to local gendered norms and life transitional episodes (e.g. separation, academic mobility, illness, and/or retirement). We demonstrate how WLB is not a static outcome, but a work-in-progress, and that a temporal lens helps illuminate multiple time work strategies that emerge during life transitional episodes. We argue that a temporal lens troubles the outcome (quantitative, clock-oriented) and spatial orientation of WLB practices, as our participants constantly blurred work/home boundaries refracted across social positionality, gendered norms, and relationships. By examining the temporal dimensions underlying WLB, we contribute a comprehensive understanding of the interrelationships between academic/personal life, various roles, and temporality in a South Asian context.

Balance history and fiction in narrative: Approaching Walter Scott’s classical historical novels

Abstract Water Scott sets up the literary genre with his outstanding and genuine composition of twenty-seven historical novels. With unique and tactical narrative strategies, Scott successfully balances the real historical world and the fictional world in the stories. Scrutinizing from four aspects, namely plotting, narrative time, narrator and focalization, and characterization, the present paper will reveal how the history is told in a fictional world without losing the historicity and keeping the vividness at the same time. Taking the faithfulness to history as the major principle, Scott fabricates a fascinating fictional world embedded with his understanding and emotions of the past.

Othered Temporalities and Possibilities: The Question of Narrative Synthesis in Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics and Anthony Doerr’sAbout Grace

ABSTRACTThis article examines the synthetic function of narrative temporality as presented in Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative. By critically analyzing the applicability of Ricoeur’s conclusions about literary narratives as temporalizing worldhood to contemporary fiction, the author argues that an alternative conception of narrative time is needed to supplement Ricoeur’s homogenizing of the link between the literary treatment of time and historical interpretation. By examining the ways in which multiple scales of temporality intersect and fray against one another in Anthony Doerr’s novel About Grace, the author probe the limitations and possibilities of a Ricoeurian analysis of narrative temporality in terms of a fracturing of existential modes of comportment toward a lifeworld under threat from human exploitation. By reevaluating Ricoeur’s hermeneutical arguments, the author argues that instead of fusion, it is discordance that characterizes both the openness and fragility of contemporary fiction’s treatment of worldhood and temporal experience.

At the Limits of Narrative. Unintelligibility and the (Im)possibilities of Self-Disclosure in the Asylum Claiming Process.

This paper offers an intervention into the notion of narrativity. It aims to refract Ricœur’s hermeneutics of the subject through a more expanded account of the political dimension of narrative, both to situate the narrative self politically, and to flesh out the ethico-political (im)possibilities of self-disclosure. Focusing on the process of claiming asylum as an instance of politically precarious self-disclosure in which narrative is demanded as a marker of truthful identity, it will explore the limits of narrative as the mode through which subjectivity is made intelligible. Through an analysis of the residues of power in the institution of language that qualify the emergence of the speaking subject and the socio-political assumptions we can excavate from the notion of narrative time, this paper will suggest that narrative unintelligibility could have politically transformative potential.

Catalan Narrative 1875–2015 ed. by Jordi Larios and Montserrat Lunati

Reviewed by: Catalan Narrative 1875–2015 ed. by Jordi Larios and Montserrat Lunati David George Catalan Narrative 1875–2015. Ed. by Jordi Larios and Montserrat Lunati. Cambridge: Legenda. 2020. xiii+278 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–781887–10–3. This fascinating collection of articles on a wide variety of Catalan writers emerged from a two-day conference held at the University of St Andrews in 2015. Some are comparative studies. Enric Bou's, for instance, subtly and convincingly compares quite distinct writers from different eras. His highlighting of seemingly insignificant details in the chosen texts illuminates these in an original fashion. Josep Murgades offers an evaluation of noucentista prose writers and excoriates critics who have suggested that narrative is virtually absent from noucentisme. Montserrat Lunati examines the presence of Maria-Mercè Marçal and another female writer, Mercè Rodoreda, in the work of a third, Mercè Ibarz. Other contributors consider the work of single authors. Elisa Martí-Lopez demonstrates how Narcís Oller's La febre d'or exposes the emptiness of the unstable surface sheen produced by speculative money during the period of Barcelona's stock market boom of the early 1880s. Helena Buffery's article contains detailed and highly pertinent readings of primary archival sources in her analysis of Maria-Mercè Marçal. A number of studies set Catalan writers within a broader European cultural framework, be it literary or philosophical. Schopenhauer's pessimism is the basis of Jordi Larios's fresh interpretation of Caterina Albert's seminal novel Solitud. Dominic Keown probes such questions as the fraught and shifting relationship between colonizer and colonized, the complex role of literature in portraying sociopolitical issues, and the dialectic conducted by his chosen author, Albert Sánchez Piñol, with mainstream European writing. Using as his point of departure a 1938 essay by Albert Camus and drawing on philosophical texts from ancient Greece to Heidegger, Joan Ramon Resina analyses texts by five Catalan poets and prose writers. Sílvia Mas i Sañé sheds light on a complex novel by Avel·li Artís-Gener through an analysis of its links to existentialism and the nouveau roman. A second study of Artís-Gener by Rhiannon McGlade employs various aspects of humour theory, while making a strong case for the importance of the fiction of a figure who is best known for his writing and cartoons in the popular press. Approaches to history figure strongly in this volume. Kathryn Crameri explores how the family, on both a personal and, more specifically, a national level, emerges from novels about the 1714 defeat of the Catalans by the Bourbons. P. Louise John-son's intriguingly titled article ('Oedipus and the Spanish Crown') is a study of two [End Page 514] novels by Guillem Viladot about historical Castilian figures. Through a discussion of simultaneity and the fluidity of narrative time, Mario Santana examines how Jaume Cabré presents moral responsibility, guilt, redemption and the way in which 'the crimes of history cannot be written out of the record' (p. 252) in his novel Jo confesso. Language is the focus of two articles. Jordi Cornellà-Detrell's is a shrewd analysis of multilingualism in three novels, highlighting different motives for and results of heteroglossia, which he locates within the changing nature of sociolinguistics in Catalonia, both south and north of the Franco-Spanish border. Alan Yates explains how 'literary translation has been [. . .] the most satisfying if not the most remunerative facet of my professional activity, the ideal complement to linguistic and literary studies' (p. 261). This, he writes, is the context of his own translation of Raimon Casellas's Els sots feréstecs, a complex, ground-breaking novel that has fascinated him since he first read it more than half a century ago. Two attractive features of the volume are its richness and the way it brings to life the wide variety of works analysed. Critical theory figures strongly in a number of the articles, but it is employed carefully and sometimes subtly as a framework that enhances rather than obscures the narrative texts under discussion. Finally, the editors' succinct Introduction intelligently, clearly, and deftly ties together the diverse strands of the...

Research on Interactive Spatial Scheduling of VR Movie Based on Spatiotemporal Relational Narration

The application of virtual reality (VR) technology has revolutionized the aesthetic concept of traditional movies, which especially causes the evolution of the concept and form of time and space in movies that the space-time structure and narrative form of traditional movies are no longer suitable for VR movies. Therefore, in this paper, the space-time of VR movies is deconstructed and reconstructed, and the space-time consciousness is taken as the research background. From the perspective of creative subject and audience experience, the space-time narrative characteristics, structure, and methods of virtual reality movies are discussed. At the same time, based on the dynamic scheduling principle of VR images, a multisource scheduling model is established with narrative space, intention space, aesthetic empathy, emotional identity, time deconstruction, and music expression as the original data sets, which is of guiding significance to the creative practice of VR movies.

Temporal Intertwining in a Slovenian Narrative

This article, based on the assumption that narrativity and temporality are closely related, explores the Chronotope of the Slovenian historical tale Martin Krpan z Vrha (1858) by Fran Levstik. It focuses on the narrative time as presented by the epic story, as well as on the time frame in which this narrative was published. According to the assertion that literary time and place are intrinsicallysss connected, the time-line of this epic text is viewed as a constituent part of the setting and therefore the geographical location is also highlighted. The analysis of the story-line reveals that the tale, presenting three time frames clearly separated by centuries, when viewed from a historical perspective, displays cohesion and credibility despite the intermingling of two temporal settings. It is significant that the story was published in the aftermath of the Spring of nations (1848) in which Slovenians demonstrated the increasing awareness of their ethnic identity. Since scrutiny of the author’s biography reveals that this text was heavily influenced by the time-related issues, my premise is that the narrative time, viewed in the network of connections, can best be elucidated by the concepts of Chronos and Kairos. They can foreground the relationship between the narrative period of this tale, the date of its publication and even highlight the specificity of the time when the protagonist of this tale became the best known Slovenian national hero.

The Illusion of Time in Information World Narratives

The Illusion of Time in Information World Narratives

Narrative Time and Narrative Viewpoints in Films About Revolutionary History During the “Seventeen-Year Period” (1949–1966)

Abstract Film narratology focuses on narrative time and narrative viewpoints. In films about revolutionary history produced in China’s “Seventeen-year Period” (1949–1966), narrative time chiefly involved choice of time, sequencing, and time spans (deformation of time). The creators basically followed the temporal order, so those films seem neat and standardized, giving prominence to the key plots and components. The narrative viewpoint of the day was chiefly omniscient, or a combination of the limited and omniscient viewpoints. The creators chose to let the narrator hide behind the text, so as to strengthen the “visual illusion” and promote the plot development through the plot itself. This narrative technique was decided by the ideology of the times and its aesthetic orientation.

Dialogue with the past: linguo-stylistic analysis of V. G. Rasputin’s short story "French Lessons" (to the 85th anniversary of the birth)

The relevance of the article is determined by the fact that V. G. Rasputin’s prose is mostly researched from literary and methodological perspectives; less attention is devoted to its linguistic analysis. Despite the abundance of studies focusing on individual aspects of the short story "French Lessons", its holistic linguo-stylistic analysis has not been performed yet. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive description of the linguistic and stylistic specific features of the literary work in question. The research relies on the contextual, aesthetic-stylistic, linguo-poetic methods as well as level-by-level analysis. The paper identified a complex of linguistic means. On the one hand, these means are directed at the sphere of the environment depicted by the writer, and in which the main plot events unfold. On the other hand, they help to create the images of the author, the narrator, and the characters. The paper concludes that V. G. Rasputin made extensive use of lexical phraseological and grammatical means characteristic of the colloquial style to depict "fictional time". The characters’ specific speech features are reflected in the "author’s register" of the narration. The stylistic leitmotif of the story that determines both its composition and its imagery is a complex interaction of different viewpoints (those of the author, the adult narrator, the child-narrator, the characters). "Narrative time" is an amalgamation of colloquial and stylistically neutral means, a frequent occurrence of the adult narrator’s free indirect speech employed to assess the protagonist’s actions and emotions.

Analysis of the Theme of "Escape" in Bone from the Perspective of Narrative Time

Chinese American writer Fae Myenne Ng’s debut novel, Bone, adopts a unique narrative style to embody a Chinese American family’s choice of “escape” from Chinatown in mental or physical way. This paper studies the theme of “escape” from the perspective of Genette’s narrative time, and analyzes how the designed narrative structure reflects the theme of “escape”. On narrative order, the author constructs the story through the inverted memory of the character Leila, creating a sense from distance to proximity that bespeaks the theme of “escape”. On narrative duration, the author uses the skills of summary, scene, and pause to present different forms of “escapes” of the two generations of Chinese Americans; on narrative frequency, the author focuses on repeating the death of Ona, which is the epitome of the whole family’s “escape”. By organizing such narrative structure, the pain and bewilderment of Chinese American “escapes” from Chinatown are reinforced.

The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source

The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source

Narrative time and International Relations.

Telling a story can explain how an event came about. It can thereby also change how we grasp temporality. In this article, I will discuss Paul Ricœur’s notion of ‘narrative time’ in the context of International Relations. Viewed from this perspective, narratives not only explain, but also mediate two ways of understanding time, phenomenological and cosmological, by weaving experienced time and natural time together. How they do so will be shown considering three tools: calendar, succession of generations, and trace. The calendar and the succession of generations interlink, through narratives, physical and biological elements with experience. This includes the creation of ‘temporal watersheds’ by extraordinary events, periodisations, traditions, and the recasting of preceding academic generations. The trace gestures at the temporal implications of the sources on which IR builds by referring to their time bridging function.

Narrativization of dramatic statements in the plays of Oleg Bogayev

The purpose of this work is, first of all, the analysis of different forms of narration in the comedy works of Oleg Bogaev. Among them, we have selected those plays that differ in a special way of organizing the narrative: Lermontov of our time, Dead Ears and Gray. The article emphasizes that although the phenomena of epization and narrativization are closely interrelated, they must be distinguished. While epization is associated with the process of creating a picture of the world and with generic transformation, the phenomenon of narrativization should be attributed to the way of presenting reality and self-presentation of the author. The conclusions explain that in modern Russian drama, the process of narrativization of a dramatic statement is primarily due to the manifestation in the poetics of the text of an epic view of the world and the view of the narrator himself. Thanks to his omniscient position, it is possible to distinguish two temporal planes in the poetics of action: the time of narration and the time of the action depicted in the play. The processes of the utterance narrativization in the analyzed plays undoubtedly broaden the spectrum of an objective view of the events presented, first of all, the events of the characters telling.

The Routes and forms of Narrating Political Events in Mardin Ibrahim’s Novels

This research is entitled (The Routes and forms of Narrating Political Events in Mardin Ibrahim’s Novels). The aim of this research is to discuss the narration techniques, alongside this, the political events bad consequences on the nations’ destiny is highlighted, especially those nations referred to in the novels of our framework. In this research, it is attempted to accurately clarify the narration time trends like rising route, falling route and twisting route, as well as clarifying the narration forms of the political events, like amalgamating and blending form, turn taking form and circular form. According to this research, it is realized that Mardin Ibrahim’s novels have strong and effective construction with reference to the events levels and their narrations. One of the findings of this research is that the falling route is generally used more than the other routes, and amalgamating and blending form is more broadly used than the other forms to enrich the novels.

From Narrative to Reality: The Inter/Trans Discourse of Bakhtin’s Chronotopes and Lyotard’s Metanarratives

Abstract: Examining the historical and social geography of a nation requires studying the time and the space so as to give rise to a discourse exploring how people interact with each other as well as with their nation. Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope unveils how the inter/trans textual and contextual relationships of narrative time and space intersect with historical moments to generate interactive involvement with certain temporal and geographical scales in the real world. Discussing the chronotopicity of a society is also associated with Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of metanarratives (aka grand narratives); his ideologies are complementary to Bakhtin's use of the chronotope as an analytical lens; theirs is an inter/trans discourse. The paper seeks to underline the interactive inter/trans discourse between reality and literary narratives from an intertwined Bakhtinian and Lyotardian approach. The article also attempts to accentuate the homogeneity of the concepts of the chronotope and metanarrative because an interactive chronotopic-metanarrative approach facilitates involvement with the reality and makes the oscillation between the fictional and the real possible. Keywords: Chronotope, narrative, time, space, paralogy

МУЛЬТИМЕДИЙНЫЙ НАРРАТИВ В РУССКОМ И АНГЛОЯЗЫЧНОМ МЕДИАДИСКУРСАХ

The article considers actively developing multimedia media in Russian and English. The relevance of this work is due to the insufficient coverage of the specifics of multimedia narrative in Russian studies, therefore, the question of the similarities and differences between Russian and English-language multimedia narratives remains open. The aim of the work is to identify integral and differential narrative categories in the Russian and English media spaces. The research was carried out at the junction of related sciences: linguistics, communication theory, media journalism. The material was the Russian-language and English-language versions of the popular magazine Marie Claire,freely available on the Internet. In total, about 200 articles on various topics were analyzed. The criteria of the comparative analysis were seven consolidated narrative categories: the author's position in relation to the narrated, the theme of the narrative, the way of characterization of the characters, the type of plot, the type of conflict, the time of the narrative, as well as the organization of space. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the published multimedia materials allowed us to conclude that the similarity of the Russian and English-language narratives in the subject, the way of organizing the plot, the time of narration. The differences are more evident in the use of a different number of multimedia elements working to attract attention to social conflicts and media personalities in the English edition. Russian narrative is marked by the text-centricity and dominance of mat erials that actualize the frame space of the language, appealing to background knowledge and reflection, which brings the Russian media narrative closer to the artistic one.

Stolen Life, Stolen Time

Working on the B-side of time, this essay considers the way Afro-futurism often configures time as nonlinear and entangled. In doing so, it looks at contemporary apocalyptic forms of storytelling, Watchmen, Parasite, Black Mother, Exit West, and On Such a Full Sea. The way the timeline of racial capitalism is represented in each reveals how blackness affects narrative time and historical time. In addition to the stolen land (dispossession of Native sovereignty) and the stolen life (African enslavement) that inaugurated the Americas, stolen time is a critical axis of analysis. Speculative fiction holds the potential to undo the divisive power of speculation, in its rawest form, capitalism. Subverting colonial time, maroon time, or stolen time, accumulates at the edges of the plantation. Ultimately, marronage offers radical forms of waiting—slow and deliberate warfare—against the linear storytelling that erroneously tells us colonialism was inevitable.