Style articles from June 2000

Style archives from June 2000

Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory.
June 22, 2000... Now, narrative is everywhere. The study of narrative continues to grow more nuanced, capacious, and extensive as it is applied to an ever greater range of fields and disciplines, appearing more prominently in areas from philosophy and law to...

Desire and the Female Protagonist: A Critique of Feminist Narrative Theory.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2000... When, at the beginning of Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), Ruth decides she can no longer endure her husband's infidelity and emotional abuse, she articulates her desires and forms a plan of action to fulfill them. "I want...

Maurice in Time.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2000... Dedicating Maurice "to a happier year," E. M. Forster sums up the many ways his novel looks to the future. Maurice waited 57 years to be published, because Forster felt it had to wait for a time in which its desires could express themselves...

After Dynamic Narratology.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2000... Since Barthes's S/Z, in effect, theories of narrative have had uneasy relations with textual theory. Structuralist narratology attempts to explain narrative figuration, or thematics, in terms of a perceived textual grammar. This position...

A Corporeal Narratology?(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2000... Despite its signal importance to so many schools of contemporary criticism, the human body has largely failed to garner a significant place in narratology. This neglect results from narratology's traditional focus on what Gerald Prince has...

Narrative and Historiography: Writing the France of the Occupation.
June 22, 2000... From the 1930s to the 1960s, the problem of the relations between narrative and historiography often was posed in normative terms. The question was: Should historians use narrative? Does that form provide an adequate type of knowledge? In the...

What Do We Mean When We Say "Narrative Literature?" Looking for Answers Across Disciplinary Borders.
June 22, 2000... It often seems that the various disciplines are like city-states, each with excellent plumbing, excellent standards governing the width of the pipes, the depth of the threads, the valves, the fixtures, the nuts and the bolts, so that...

Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? Narrative Modalities and Generic Categorization.
June 22, 2000... In Coming to Terms (1990), Seymour Chatman initiated an enquiry into the delimitation of the narrative text type as against the text types of argument and description. This revolutionary step was a major landmark for literary scholars;...

Lateral Reflexivity: Levels, Versions, and the Logic of Paraphrase [1].(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2000... Narratology was born along with the rise of self-reflexivity in modernist and postmodernist fiction. Thus, when he sought to justify the application of Saussurean language theory to narrative discourse in his "Introduction to the Structural...

Discordant Narration.
June 22, 2000... Recent studies have recognized with increasing clarity the need to distinguish between two different kinds of unreliable fictional narration: a factual kind of unreliability that is attributed to a mis- or disinformed narrator, unwilling or...

Forty-One Questions on the Nature of Narrative [*].(Brief Article)
June 22, 2000... 1. What is the difference, if any, between narrative, nonnarrative, and antinarrative? 2. Would a text like Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie be (a) narrative or (an) antinarrative? 3. Is there more than narrative in a narrative? 4. Can...

Bibliography of Recent Works on Narrative.(Bibliography)
June 22, 2000... The following list of significant titles in narrative theory is intended to cover work published during the last dozen years or so. Omissions, though inevitable, are regretted. The items below can be further divided by approach or emphasis into...

The Narrative Forms of Southern Community.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Scott Romine. The Narrative Forms of Southern Community. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. 226 PP. $49.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. What began a little over a decade ago in American studies, the post-Americanist,...

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism.(Review)
June 22, 2000... John Brannigan. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. ix + 249 PP. $55.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. A central theme of John Brannigan's usefully compact critical survey of new historicism and cultural...

Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Katherine A. Fowkes. Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. 202 pp. $24.95 paper. One section of Todd Haynes's brilliant film triptych Poison concerns an...