(Minor Field) Narrative Theory

I. NARRATIVE SOURCE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY/IMAGINATION/THE "REAL" From Montaigne and the Areopagitica through Saussure and Levi-Strauss and along the deconstructionist turn, authorship has evolved from a concept of epistemic authority to a recognition of ventriloquism and play. Whence within the writer (teller) does the narrative spring -- whether the narrative be autobiography, fiction, myth, or history? If "the teller of a story is primarily, none the less, the listener to it, the reader of it too," then how does the teller learn it? Where is the boundary between phylogenetic and ontogenetic memory? The author, the person holding the pen, begets Booth's implied author, who in turn begets a narrator who may or may not be reliable. Through each generation, the story (the fabula, the donnee) accrues both meaning and refutation, rolling as it does down the encoded spiral toward discourse (sjuszet, treatment). Yes, no needle without thread, but how is the word to contain the world? Primary Texts: — Evelina — Emma — Pale Fire Theoretical and Critical Works: — M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). — Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans Willard Trask. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). — M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. (Austin: Univesrity of Texas Press, 1981). — Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text," "The Death of the Author," "The Rustle of Language," "Semiotics of Medicine" — Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983). — Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Invention in Narrative. New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1985). — Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). — Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?", The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1975). — Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans James Strachey. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966). "The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming" — Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). — Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984). Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans Anna Bostock. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987). — Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of Caliifornia Press, 1957). II. NARRATIVE TIME/FRAME Writer and reader together impart time and space to a narrative, the writer structuring a sequence, frame, and point of view into the text and the reader finding it out. Whether a convention-bound retelling of a story already known or a non-linear acausally correlated sequence of events, the narrative will force (?invite) its reader into many levels of narrative time, the relationship among them contributing to meaning. A narrative not only means something but does something, being simultaneously both a structure and an act. What makes an event narratable? Answers to such questions as "Who tells the story to whom for what reason?" influence the meaning and the outcome of the telling, contextualization in multiple dimensions required for robust interpretation. (The texts [and the practice] of medicine qualify as a complex and peculiarly interesting narratives because the "deep structure" and the "superficial structure" can reverse: the life story and the story of the body take on ascendancy in an oscillating pattern, or the manifest health of the person and the body's inner pathophysiological and cellular functional state take turns as the key determinant of well-being. These deep and superficial structures unfold concurrently, the emphasis shifting with point of view and corporeal logic. As compared to a fictional narrative in which the story relies on the discourse for its existence, medicine's stories unalterably happen before they are put into words. Not text-as-body but body-as-text.) Primary Texts: — The Dead — Mrs. Dalloway — As I Lay Dying Theoretical and Critical Works: — E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1927). — Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). — Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1979). — Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). — W.J.T. Mitchell, ed. On Narrative. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981). — Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). III. THE ACT OF READING How far have we progressed since Wimsatt and Beardsley's Affective Fallacy? "[T]he reader," it is again permissible to say, "does quite half the labor." Look at the reading strategies called forth by a range of writing strategies: from highly controlled narrators calling forth a Gibsonian "mock reader" to highly plastic texts allowing multiple interpretations. How do such categories as scriptible and lisible and such events as the death of the author help the reader in the hermeneutical voyage toward coherence? Do Holland's and Fish's claims for reader-specific meaning destroy the concept of text altogether? Does the postmodern text, by replacing convention with acausal correlation, again take the interpretive keys out of the reader's hands? How does the real reader, the person holding the book, find a way into the narrative world? Is this process different for women (or, more specifically, for those who "read as a woman") and men? Primary Texts: — The Scarlet Letter — The Figure in the Carpet — A Jury of her Peers Theoretical and Critical Works: — Stanley Fish. Is There a Text in the Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). — Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart, eds, Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). — Norman Holland, 5 Readers Reading. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). — Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). — Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). — Georges Poulet, "Phenomenology of Reading," New Literary History 1969;1:5367. — Elaine Showalter, ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature & Theory. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). — Jane Tompkins, ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). — Virginia Woolf, "How Should One Read a Book?", "Robinson Crusoe," "Modern Fiction," "Hours in a Library," "Reading," "On Re-reading Novels"