Use Of Free Indirect Discourse Research Articles

Free Indirect Discourse in Court: An Overview of Contemporary Jurisprudence in French Press Law

This article analyzes two French court decisions which deal with fictionality and free indirect discourse. Two novelists, Mathieu Lindon and Eric Bénie-Bürckel, have been sued for contentious statements made by fictional characters: the former on the basis of defamation and the latter for racial hatred against Jews. The article shows that the criteria used by judges to evaluate the “narrative distance” between the author and his characters are very variable. In the case of the correctional court that arbitrated the Lindon case, the reasoning behind the judges' decision dismissed the question of reported speech, which, according to them, changed nothing in the representation of the real person defamed. In the Bénier-Bürckel case, on the other hand, the criminal court considered that because the statements were pronounced by a fictitious speaker, there was a distance between the author and the remarks at issue. In that case, the judges thus gave a central place to the criterion of fictionality. However, a linguistic analysis makes it possible to identify the use of free indirect discourse and devices of aphorization in the controversial statements which reduce the distance between the character and the author. The criterion of fictionality cannot therefore resolve the question on its own.

We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction

We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction

Гендерные перспективы представления пространства в романе Вирджинии Вулф «Миссис Дэллоуэй»

Gender aspects of Virginia Woolf’s writings have become an immensely expanded field of interdisciplinary research in the West. In Russia, however, they remain quite little known. The article focuses on the gender-spatial division of space in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs Dalloway”. Drawing from a number of Marxist philosophical and literary conceptions of modernist space and, mostly, from the literary narrative methodology, the authors present a model of interrelations between the narrative social and personal spaces from the perspectives of the two protagonists and of the collective character, that is, various minor characters sharing post-Edwardian societal norms. Literary narrative approach makes it possible to characterize the modernist traits of Virginia Woolf’s novel which she shared with the contemporary writers and her individual, specifically Woolfian literary inventions. One of them consists in a specific use of free indirect discourse imitating the perceptions of the two gender-opposite realities, namely, the “material” reality of the actual story world and the mental reality of the subjective experiences from the protagonists’ pasts. The other is Woolf’s innovative contribution to feminist writing. It may be described as a representation of the female “modernist body” via the female protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness saturated with meaningful gaps. The obtained results include specifying Woolf’s gender principle of structuring her narrative space and the alternations of the female protagonist’s two bodies, which are her gender body “for others” and her mental “modernist” body freed from social limitations.

애트우드의 매드아담 3부작에 나타난 포스트휴먼 유스토피아

Differentiated from traditional dystopias, this paper analyzes the ways Margaret Atwood imagines and formalizes humankind’s transformation into post-human ustopian forms. Discontent with the traditional notion of dystopia as a mode of anti-utopia, Atwood coins “ustopia,” a concept this paper reads as tantamount to immanent dystopia. Her ustopia is not entirely imaginary nor displaced into a distant future, but is revealed within real and relatable places where multinational corporations have taken control of every social and subjective dimension. The first installment of Atwood’s trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2003), narrates the pre- and post-apocalyptic world from the perspective of Jimmy. The second, The Year of the Flood (2009), returns to the plot in the first, but from the perspective of the two female protagonists. The narrators and the characters in this set of assembled texts do not function simply as narrators or characters, but instead can be read as a collective, assembled together through Atwood’s extensive use of free indirect discourse. The third novel, MaddAddam (2013), reveals a post-apocalyptic community consisting of humans, posthumans, hybridized animals, and sundry other creatures: in sum, a kind of post-human ustopia where species not only co-exist but outlast and live beyond the anthropocene.

Countering gender inequality: The use of free indirect discourse in Adimora-Ezeigbo's Children of the Eagle.

Contemporary writers have taken enormous steps in an effort to re-define and focalize on the prejudiced presentation of the African woman in African literature, with themes that advocate and improve the state of the woman to fully partake in and undeniably, lead socio-political struggles in her society. The study, therefore, aims to explore the Feminist approach to Stylistics as a theoretical framework in addressing the issue of gender inequality by identifying the linguistic features of Free Indirect Discourse in the novel, Children of the Eagle (2002) by Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo. Major findings from the study include; Adimora-Ezeigbo's use of Free Indirect Discourse is dynamic in her representation of women in the text; education is an important tool for accomplishing the goals of gender equality, advancement and unity. Women must also be encouraged and integrated in the areas of leadership, political activities and electoral process by providing leadership skills through gender-sensitive training.

Two Paths for the Big Book: Olga Tokarczuk's Shifting Voice

This essay argues for the power of free indirect discourse in the third-person narrative perspective to serve as a collective voice, encompassing a diversity of perspectives, through a reading of two novels by Olga Tokarczuk, Bieguni (Flights) and Księgi Jakubowe (Books of Jacob). Both novels investigate the challenges inherent in the project of providing an image of the world, and alongside various interventions on the level of content, each examines the kind of world-image that different approaches to narrative voice can produce. In Flights, the narrator's striving to arrive at a more expansive and synthetic knowledge of the world is accompanied by an effort to go beyond the first-person voice, to a broader perspective. The novel subtly demonstrates the impossibility of such efforts, but, the essay argues, Books of Jacob continues this project, albeit from the opposite direction, examining the affordances of the third-person voice. Its innovative use of free indirect discourse produces a perspective that, while appearing to be a single voice, contains multiple, contradictory points of view.

Seriously, Jane

Seriously, Jane Toon Staes (bio) Sansei and Sensibility Karen Tei Yamashita Coffee House Press https://coffeehousepress.org/products/sansei-and-sensibility 232 Pages; Print, $16.95 Writing about "serious" literature reminds me of Matthew Arnold, that eminent Victorian, part-time poet and full-time educator, whose literary criticism inspired the F. R. Leavises and Harold Blooms of this world. In "The Study of Poetry" (1880), perhaps his most famous essay, Arnold concerned himself with setting the high standards by which we are to judge what counts as "classic" literature—the poetry that could stand alongside Homer's or Dante Alighieri's. Style and content mattered to Arnold, of course, and so did "superiority of diction and movement," but the two criteria that truly separated the best from the rest were these: "a higher truth and a higher seriousness." Arnold never went into much detail about what passes for truth or seriousness in literature, but no matter: here we might have a yardstick to measure which texts belong to the canon, a benchmark proposed by a prominent scholar who would shape the tastes of English and American critics for years to come. It stood to reason that, within the space of the same essay, Arnold coursed through the history "of our English poetry" with his own criteria in mind. William Shakespeare or John Milton? Yes, please. Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, or Alexander Pope? Brilliant poets, sure, and influential to boot, but not serious enough. "The Study of Poetry" stands as a testament to the importance of scholarship among the Victorians, who touted the Western canon as part of a well-rounded education—much as Leavis, Bloom, and other defenders of the Great Tradition would do later. It also speaks to how vague or even frustrating scholars can get when they want to prescribe what makes "serious" literature function. "Literature is an act of invention," another highpowered writer-turned-scholar, Vladimir Nabokov, would counter, "a great writer is always a great enchanter." But for functionalists, literature seems not just an act of artistic imagination—it's a vehicle that adheres to one, often ill-defined, moral standard. Of course there is nothing wrong with the assumption, say, that poetry or prose can serve as an abstract space in which we come to terms with the complexities of life. They can, and as empirical research on children's literature and theory-of-mind skills suggests, for instance, they often do. But the reading brain is much wider than the classics alone, and rankings of literary models (authors, styles, genres) on the basis of their "seriousness" rarely boil down to more than personal opinions about how literature should behave. When John Gardner or Gore Vidal railed against the "Po-Mo" writers of the sixties and seventies, they simply measured them against the values of the Victorians. Even today, the influence of Arnold and his band of serious readers lingers. How different are "truth" and "high seriousness," really, from more recent buzzwords applied to serious literature? "Relatability" comes to mind. "Sincerity." More questions inevitably follow. Relatable, for whom? Sincere, compared to what? How would the literature of alienation score on the relatability scale? Hasn't irony taught us much about the difference between appearance and reality? Here, too, we might turn to Nabokov—or to Nabokov's own poet, Pale Fire's John Shade, in conversation with his exegete, Charles Kinbote: "when I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool." Jane Austen doesn't appear on Arnold's list of classics, but she is, of course, as classic as they come. (Arnold was always a bit belated as a critic, not having noticed that by his day, some fifty years after Austen's, the novel had already caught up with the poem in terms of literary cachet.) Here we have one writer whose innovative tricks with narration and perspective have kept literature professors occupied for long. Perhaps, for too long. (I once overheard an established narrative theorist propose a twenty year ban on studies of Austen's use of free indirect discourse. Austen might have appreciated his irony.) At...

Dual Narrative Dynamics and the Critique of Privilege

Dual Narrative Dynamics and the Critique of Privilege

The Creative Recuperation of “Blind Tom” Wiggins in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio and Jeffery Renard Allen’s Song of the Shank

Abstract This essay examines Tyehimba Jess’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection Olio (2016) and Jeffery Renard Allen’s acclaimed novel Song of the Shank (2014), focusing specifically on their creative recuperations of “Blind Tom,” a famed pianist who remained in bondage throughout a performance career that spanned the antebellum and postbellum periods. Citing and interpolating archival documents about “Blind Tom,” Olio and Song of the Shank denaturalize what Jennifer Stoever terms the “sonic color line,” whereby music and other forms of aural production became inextricably bound up with racial stratification. Through contrapuntal persona poems, which may be read vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, Jess also pays tribute to Tom’s musical dexterity while implying the myriad possible interpretations of the musician’s life and art. Alternatively, Allen’s nonlinear novel makes use of free indirect discourse, not to reimagine Tom’s interiority but instead to focalize the largely undocumented interior thoughts of those who controlled Tom’s life, underscoring the famed musician’s lack of agency and self-determination. Not purporting to recover the “real” Tom, Allen and Jess employ distinct but decidedly self-reflexive methodologies, suggesting the ways in which historical accounts are similarly constructed to emphasize particular perspectives and silence others. As they advance counternarratives to archival accounts of “Blind Tom,” Jess’s Olio and Allen’s Song of the Shank also elucidate cultural through-lines between the nineteenth century and our own time, especially unsettling teleological readings of the nation’s steady progress toward racial equality.

Translingual Practice and Transcultural Connections in Assia Djebar’s La Femme sans sépulture

Abstract La Femme sans sépulture is one of Djebar’s recent publications which carries on with the author’s self-proclaimed project of recreating an Arabo-Berber past in a French text. The recreation process is achieved through writing in French, which is invaded by Algerian women’s oral voices. In this article, I will argue that French and Algerian oral languages – Arabic and Berber – mutually influence each other, allowing the emergence of new linguistic structures. This is evidenced in the text by the use of free indirect discourse which allows the oral to modify French while being modified by it. Relying on Suresh Canagarajah’s studies on cross-language relations, the mutual relations between Algerian orality and French are interpreted as translingual practices aimed to promote transcultural communication.

Generations in, Generations of: Pregnancy in Jane Austen

ABSTRACTPregnancy seems tangential to the concerns of Austen's oeuvre and has received little scholarly attention. In all major Austen novels, however, pregnant characters are active, if secondary, participants in plot. In this article, I argue that pregnancy pushes at epistemological anxieties between inside and outside in Austen's work, and that pregnancy has something to tell us about tensions between critical notions of surface and depth, dignity and the ridiculous. I explore the ubiquity of pregnancy in Austen's completed mature novels, connect the narrative function of pregnancy to shifting mores in Austen's time, consider excessive bodies more generally in Austen's writing, and read Austen's two most nuanced narrative deployments of pregnancy in Sense and Sensibility and Emma. I approach Austen's much studied use of free indirect discourse – a technique that complicates tidy notions of surface and depth – to suggest that bodies complicate narrative relationships between inside and outside, and that those relationships help elucidate contemporary methodological concerns in literary studies. Austen's passing mentions of pregnancy resonate with critical anxieties about pleasure and perspective, highlighting the generative possibilities of what I call “perverse criticism”.

The Narrative Technique of Free Indirect Discourse in Mrs. Dalloway: ‘Tunnelling Process’ and ‘Narrativization of Characters by Characters’

이 연구는 버지니아 울프의 『댈러웨이 부인』에 구사된 자유간접화법의 양상과 효과를 분석하였다. 울프는 이 작품에서 ‘터널 만들기’라고 명명한 자신만의 독특하고 실험적인 글쓰기 기법을 표현하기 위해 모더니즘 소설의 주요 서술기법 중 하나인 자유간접화법을 채용하였다. 3인칭 대명사와 과거 시제를 사용하면서 시간적으로는 현재, 공간적으로는 ‘이곳’을 나타내는 시공간의 직시소를 함께 구사하는 이 화법은 직접화법과 간접화법의 절충적 형태를 띠고 있다. 울프는 자유간접화법과 ‘터널 만들기’라는 서술기법을 통해 한 인물의 내부와 외부에서 의식이 이동하는 양상, 그리고 과거와 현재의 경험을 공유하는 서로 다른 인물들 사이에서 의식이 이동하고 공유되는 양상을 보여준다. 자유간접화법을 사용한 울프의 서술기법상의 또 다른 특징은 ‘인물에 의한 인물 의 서사화’로 확장되어 드러난다. 인물에 의한 인물의 서사화를 통해 울프는 한 등장인물의 의식과 내면을 다른 등장인물의 의식을 통해 설명하고 표현한다. 이때 한 인물의 행동은 다른 인물이 그의 의식을 설명하는 근거로 작용하는데, 울프는 인물들의 말과 행동을 근거로 한 인물의 의식과 마음을 다른 인물이 설명하는 과정을 보여주고자 한다. ‘터널 만들기’와 ‘인물에 의한 인물의 서사’는 울프가 구사하는 자유간접화법의 주요한 양상이자 특징이다. 이 소설에 드러난 ‘의식의 흐름’은 한 개인의 고립된 내면을 탐색하는 것이 아니라, 서로 연결되고 교차하면서 마침내 하나로 통합되는 ‘집적된 의식’의 내러티브를 탄생시킨다.In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf creates a remarkable writing method, what she calls a “tunnelling process.” To express this method, Woolf employs the style of Free Indirect Discourse(FID), one of the main narrative forms she uses to show that she has successfully established a unique, experimental writing style. FID is mixed in between Direct Discourse and Indirect Discourse, using the third-person pronoun and past tense with deictics indicating the present. With this method of “tunnelling process” using the narrative form of FID, Woolf shows how transitions can take place between different characters’ consciousnesses via experiences of the past and the present that they share. “The narrativization of characters by characters” is another stylistic feature characteristic of Woolf’s writing style using FID. With the narrativization of characters by characters, Woolf accounts for a mind by another mind, attributing mental causes to the actions of her characters. Woof is deeply interested in presenting the process of how a mind accounts for other minds based on external, behavioral evidence, that is, what these other minds say and do. ‘Tunnelling process’and ‘narrativization of characters by characters’ constitute Woolf s main characteristic use of FID. It is also pointed out that in the novel Woolf searches for not the isolated consciousness of an individual but the narrative of the ‘collective discursive continuum’ among a large set of characters.

‘Without you, I am nothing’: on the counterfactual imagination in Emma

ABSTRACTPositioning Austen's Emma in relation to a number of other nineteenth-century novels, this essay proposes that the novel's strategic restraint of its readers’ counterfactual imagining, enacted through repeat reading, affords a minor countermeasure to the contingencies of readership. By staging the counterfactual imagination as the impossible, that is, Austen's narrative strategies in Emma attempt to rein in the reader's imagination of the counterfactual, acknowledging at the same time the uncertainties of the narrative's future once committed to print and as a book in the hands of unpredictable readers. While critics have observed the geographical and social claustrophobia of the novel, and traced that sense of closing in as well in the extensive use of free indirect discourse, this essay extends our understanding of the novel's tight setting of limits to its handling of narrative contingency and of the counterfactual imagination, enacted especially in the experience of repeat reading.

Mrs. May’s Dark Night in Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf”

Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Greenleaf” was significantly influenced by her engagement with the notion of the “dark night of the soul,” which is closely associated with the Christian mysticism of St. John of the Cross. O’Connor became familiar with the dark night through her reading of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism not long before the composition of “Greenleaf.” The story incorporates imagery from St. John’s poem “On a Dark Night” as well as its source text, the Song of Songs chapters 2 and 3. Mrs. May, the protagonist of “Greenleaf,” undergoes a somewhat ironized version of the dark night over the course of the narrative. Her ultimate experience of mystical union is conditioned and even produced by the story’s “sacralizing” use of free indirect discourse.

Dual Textual Dynamics and Dual Readerly Dynamics: Double Narrative Movements in Mansfield's “Psychology”

In many fictional narratives, behind the plot development, there exists a powerful dynamic that runs, at a deeper level, throughout the text. This hidden dynamic paralleling the plot development is what I designate as textual (see Shen, Covert, Style). It involves different instabilities on the story level and different tensions on the discourse level (see Phelan, Narrative Progression, Narrative), thereby conveying contrasting or even opposing thematic significance, character images, and aesthetic values to those in the plot development, and arousing or having the potential to arouse contrasting or even opposing response from readers. In my previous work, I have distinguished covert from other types of meaning as investigated by various critical approaches since the nineteenth century, including the meanings revealed by New Critics and contemporary literary/narrative critics (see Shen, Style 7-12, Covert 148-52). Other concerns with meaning focus on deep or deeper levels of meaning of the plot development, especially ways in which latent meanings of the plot subvert or oppose its manifest ones. In contrast, my concern with progression is a concern with a hidden narrative movement paralleling the plot development. But previously I did not pay sufficient attention to the interaction and joint fonctioning of the two parallel narrative movements, especially in cases where the meanings of the progression subvert those of the plot development. This is the first time I try to offer theoretical models of the dual textual dynamics and the corresponding dual readerly dynamics, both to show and to call for attention to the joint functioning of the two parallel narrative movements. This may enable us to do better justice to the instability, tension, complexity, and otherwise self-contradictory nature of literary narratives. The present effort to theorize about the dual textual and readerly dynamics is based on the most telling case of Katherine Mansfield's Psychology. In this narrative, the progression takes on an opposite event structure, contrastive focalization, and different degrees of narratorial reliability. More specifically, while in the plot development the event structure is merely revelatory and things stay pretty much the same (Chatman 48), in the progression the event structure displays a progress towards a resolution; while in the plot the focalization keeps shifting, in the progression the focalization is quite fixed. Moreover, what appears to be reliable reporting by the narrator in the plot development frequently turns out to be merely character's illusion in the progression. This progression in Mansfield's Psychology very much relies on the ambiguity created by the use of free indirect discourse and point of view or focalization. These devices, among other modernist techniques, have attracted much critical attention in the investigation of Mansfield's fiction, including Psychology, since she is well known for her masterful use of such techniques. But the progression in Psychology has remained overlooked in existing literary criticism because ever since Aristotle, critical attention has focused on one narrative movement, the plot development. Indeed, the progression is a type of meaning that readers miss not because it's hidden but largely because their interpretive equipment won't allow them to see what is right there in plain sight (Abbott 560). As we will see below, unless we revise our interpretive framework and extend attention to another narrative movement behind the plot development, critical sophistication, acumen, and carefulness may not help much in discovering the double narrative movements as such. Significantly, the dual textual dynamics purposefully created by the author invites dual readerly dynamics. In more specific terms, the progression and the interaction between the and overt narrative movements invite the authorial audience to change the perception and judgment of various textual details in the overt plot, increasingly altering and complicating the understanding of the rhetorical purposes of the author and the thematic import, character relationship, and aesthetic effects of the text. …

John Ashbery’s Free Indirect Labor

The early poems of John Ashbery must be read, in part, as a meditation on the plight of labor, particularly white-collar labor, in the postwar United States. Beginning with a very early poem, “The Instruction Manual” (1956), and its exploration of the ambiguous class position of white-collar workers, the essay tracks themes and formalizations of both labor and management as they continue in Ashbery’s highly experimental second book, The Tennis Court Oath (1962). In this book the standpoint of the earlier poem gives way to an explosion of shifting voices as Ashbery’s distinctive use of free indirect discourse and other techniques of point of view registers the contemporary breakdown in labor relations and the crisis for established modes of management. In Ashbery’s mature style of the 1970s, this chaotic play of voices yields to a comparatively measured technology of point of view, which reflects the new modes of management that followed the crises of the 1960s and 1970s.

Resisting Enunciative Homogenization: Isabelle de Montolieu’s La Famille Elliot: The Case of the first French

Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) is characterized by a marked use of free indirect discourse. Some of the novel’s most important passages are in FID. These passages often function to represent the interior monologues of the heroine, Anne Elliot. The syntax of FID is quite distinctive in so far as there is a complete absence of introductory verbs, which would otherwise serve to present reported speech or thought in a subordinate clause. This feature allows for a seamless embedding within the narration of the heroine’s thought and speech. Indeed, it is difficult for the reader to discern where free indirect discourse begins and ends in some contexts. This article focuses on the translation of FID in Isabelle de Montolieu’s La Famille Elliot (1821), the first French translation of Persuasion. For the benefit of her readers, Montolieu prefaces her translation with very penetrating insights into the central place Austen’s novel accords to representations of the heroine’s consciousness. Inspired by narratology, this present study compares extracts from Persuasion and La Famille Elliot with the aim of showing how FID functions in both works. The author demonstrates that the enunciative heterogeneity of the passages of FID in English is maintained in the French translation through a frequent recourse to a subtle use of the indefinite pronoun on in association with the imperfect.

Henry James’s Rat-tat-tat-ah: Insidious Loss, Disguised Recovery and Semi-Detached Subjects

This essay argues that one way to understand James’s late novels is as experiments with depicting his characters in states of semi-detachment. They are neither entirely removed from nor entirely immersed in their social and physical surroundings. James’s distinctive use of free indirect discourse and shifting focalization, along with some other strategies this article explores, introduce an abiding and productive uncertainty about where and when a particular sentence--and the thought that accompanies it--is taking place. That uncertainty is tellingly signposted not just in The Ambassadors (1903) and in the dictated notes that accompany The Sense of the Past .

Jane Austen, the Prose Shakespeare

This essay explores the connection between Shakespearean drama and the novel’s representation of interiority. Jane Austen’s celebrated use of free indirect discourse, I argue, is linked to Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare , which turned dramatic soliloquies into prose narration, rendering a character’s thought and idiom in a third-person voice. Heralded as a “prose Shakespeare” by nineteenth-century critics, Austen also developed an inverse free indirect discourse, the infusion of the narrative voice into characters’ dialogue. Scenes from Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion offer mini-Shakespearean plays of attention, for Shakespearean technique and quotation script Austen’s dramas of reading.

Foucault and Sedgwick: The Repressive Hypothesis Revisited

This essay examines the Foucauldian foundations of queer theory in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The essay argues that Sedgwick’s increasing disappointment with Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis is in part produced by the slippery rhetoric of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Specifically, Foucault’s use of free indirect discourse in that volume destabilizes both the theory of repression and the critique Foucault mounts against it, thereby rendering ambiguous any political promise his critique might seem to offer. Returning to the fraught relation between Foucault and Sedgwick, the essay concludes by reading Foucault and Sedgwick together through the lens of a reparative ethics in which the felt experience of knowing the world is also an experiment in new ways of living.