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On the Epistemology of Narrative Theory: Narratology and Other Theories of Fictional Narrative
Abstract
In this article, I propose to analyze narrative theory from an epistemological standpoint. To do so, I will draw upon both Genettian narratology and what I would call, following Shigeyuki Kuroda, “non-communicational” theories of fictional narrative. In spite of their very unequal popularity, I consider these theories as objective, or, in other words, as debatable and ripe for rational analyses; one can choose between them. The article is made up of three parts. The first part concerns the object of narrative theory, or the narrative as a constructed object, both in narratology (where narrative is likened to a narrative discourse) and in non-communicational narrative theories (where fictional narrative and discourse are mutually exclusive categories). The second part takes up the question of how the claims of these theories do or do not lend themselves to falsification. In particular, Gérard Genette’s claim that “every narrative is, explicitly or not, ‘in the first person’”, will be considered, through the lens of Ann Banfield’s theory of free indirect style. In the third part the reductionism of narrative theory will be dealt with. This leads to a reflection on the role of narrative theory in the analysis of fictional narratives.
... ¿O deberíamos por el contrario postular la voz de un narrador en primera persona? A esta última tendencia obedecen, en opinión de Sylvie Patron (2006), aquellos narratólogos que tratan de asimilar el relato de ficción a un esquema de comunicación oral [18] . ...
... La meta-ficción post-moderna aparece así como ilustradora de la segunda teoría sobre la ficción defendida por Sylvie Patron (2006). En este otro modelo, la ficción se concibe como un mundo registrado y programado mediante la escritura. ...
... Dennoch lässt sich die Erzählinstanz im Sinne einer inner-textuellen Sprecherposition (Margolin 2011(Margolin , 2014 als konstitutiv für narrative Texte ansetzen. Einen argumentativen Ausgangspunkt hierfür liefert gerade Patron (2006), die sich gegen die Prämisse des obligatorischen Erzählers ausspricht. So ist die Annahme von ‚erzählerlosen' Erzählungen aus ihrer Sicht eine Grundlage dafür, "to advance our understanding of the reader's cognitive activity concerning the fictional narrative" (Patron 2006: 130 ...
... Dennoch lässt sich die Erzählinstanz im Sinne einer inner-textuellen Sprecherposition (Margolin 2011(Margolin , 2014 als konstitutiv für narrative Texte ansetzen. Einen argumentativen Ausgangspunkt hierfür liefert gerade Patron (2006), die sich gegen die Prämisse des obligatorischen Erzählers ausspricht. So ist die Annahme von ‚erzählerlosen' Erzählungen aus ihrer Sicht eine Grundlage dafür, "to advance our understanding of the reader's cognitive activity concerning the fictional narrative" (Patron 2006: 130 behaves like a quotation whose 'grammatical skeleton' (= the tenses and pronouns) had been modified to match the perspective of the narrator". ...
... Neither is the author in this strict view the narrator, because the author creates the novel and does not 'tell' or 'narrate' it (Patron 2006;Ryan 2001Ryan , 1981. But could the author not be a narrator in a manner analogous to a journalist 'narrating' a news event? ...
This article situates the semantics of fictional characters within a broader framework of authorial communication. It argues that theories of character in the novel will be deficient to the extent that characters are not conceptualised as motivated creations of an author. The influential approach of Georg Lukács effectively excluded the point of view of the author in favour of a direct relationship between the fictional work and processes of history, as an instance of the particular related to the universal. But here it is argued that the notion of the typical should rather be seen as a relation between the social milieu of the authorial experience on the one hand and the figure-ground construction of character on the other. This constitutes part of a project to examine the question of realism on a renewed basis, particularly in terms of the authorial presence within the fictional world, and the case is argued with specific reference to a novel by John Fowles.
... Post-modern meta-fiction appears as an example of the second theory on fiction defended by Sylvie Patron (2006). In this model, fiction is conceived as a world registered and programmed through writing. ...
Laurie Anderson's multimedia performances explore the impact of technology on memory and the construction of both individual and collective identity. Her stories and songs are thus related to other contemporary genres such as postmodern fiction and Cyber-punk. Her work analyses the new modes of perception which use technology and which locate the human being between the moment of the lived experience and the moment of recording, that is to say, in a virtual time in which the simultaneous presence and absence of events are mixed. All this helps us reflect on the loss of the present subject, of self experience, in the era of information and communication. Keywords: technological fiction-postmodern fiction –narrative identity-enunciative narratology and musicology-minimal electronic music.
This article addresses two subjects relating to the topic of this issue of Scandinavian Journal of History from a ‘difference approach’ in narratology. This means that we assume that words like ‘narrative’ and ‘fiction’ are used to denote different things and that it is important to distinguish between these uses. We also assume that narrative texts that share similar surface structures can still ‘do’ different things and are approached differently by readers. The first issue we focus on concerns history writing and narrative. We are especially interested in the discussion about the distinction between narrative history writing and literary fiction. When discussing this issue, we distinguish between different uses of terms like ‘narrative’, ‘fictiveness’, and ‘fiction’. The second issue concerns the application of narratology as a method in the analysis of oral and written texts. We suggest that narratological concepts like narrator and perspective do not have the same denotation in the analysis of literary fiction as in the analysis of non-fictional narratives, and hence that narratology with its many concepts cannot be applied indiscriminately. In the discussion of these issues, we refer to factual and fictional written and oral texts concerned with migration.
This article aims to characterize a commonly misunderstood and neglected critique of narratology and insists that the critique could advance the narratological discussions if taken more seriously. I describe the notions of three individual critics and one group of critics and their suggested alternatives to what they hold to be the dominating description of narrative fiction in narratology. In turn, I take up Sylvie Patron’s linguistic approach, Lars-Åke Skalin’s aesthetic approach, and Richard Walsh’s pragmatic approach, as well as unnatural narratology (which is less radical), and suggest that they have a Difference approach to narrative fiction. The critique is contrasted with what I refer to as a Sameness approach, guiding the dominating description of narrative fiction in narratology. The Sameness approach relates novels and short stories to a notion of a default mode of “narrative” which is based on situated speech about something that has happened. This is, according to the critics, a mistake. The main thrust of the critics, although with some exceptions, is instead that narrative fiction needs to be approached as sui generis in order to be described effectively. Yet how this should be done is still open for debate.
The aim of the present paper is to discuss the question of why readers accept a literary narrative discourse attributed traditionally to an "omniscient third-person narrator" unconditionally as true. I will advocate two theses. First, that this characteristic of narrative comprehension is a consequence of a grammatical feature of the narrative discourse, namely, the absence of the "narrating-I." This format mimics what Cosmides and Tooby label as scope-free representation, i.e., a representation that is not bound by scope-operators and thus treated by a cognitive architecture as architecturally true. Second, narrative discourse ascribed traditionally to a third person narrator should be understood as the linguistic representation of the true states of affairs of a narrative world.
This brief contribution is aimed at the elaboration of some critical questions often addressed within the contemporary debate in narrative theory. In particular, we regard the task of defining narrative as an important preliminary path to be followed in order to reflect on broader issues concerning the role of narrative studies, both within the humanities and with respect to other disciplines (e.g. cognitive sciences, psychology, pedagogy, etc.). We reckon among the most important duties in the field a reflection on the epistemological grounds of narrative theory, because we think that many incompatibilities and frictions between terminologies, models and theories are often underestimated. It is important to the extent that such incomprehension may negatively affect the debate or even thwart acknowledgement of the specificity of the concepts used in narrative theory. In the light of the considerations above, we are focusing here on the theoretical effectiveness of the classical/postclassical distinction and on the proposal of a different dichotomy (par. 2); on the definition of narrative sequence (par. 3); on the epistemology of the two different paradigms indicated by t h e objectivist/constructivist dichotomy (par. 4); on the evaluation of the pros and cons of the two paradigms outlined (par. 5).
Dans cet article j'analyse la poetique jackobsonienne d'un point de vue epistemologique. Je soutiens que, tout en traitant de normes, la poetique n'est pas plus condamnee a l'un ou l'autre subjectivsme que ne l'est la pragmatique griceenne. D'autre part, je tente de montrer que la theorie de Jackobson est authentiquement reductionniste, en ce sens que la dichotomie de base entre metaphore et metonymie doit rendre compte des deux varietes essentielles de l'art verbal: la prose litteraire et la poesie