Style articles from September 1994

Style archives from September 1994

Introduction: second-person narrative and related issues. (Second-Person Narrative)
September 22, 1994... They are coming for you, to take you to the firing squad, the gallows, the stake, the electric chair, the gas chamber. You have to stand up; but you can't. Your body, gorged with fear, is too heavy$to move. You'd like to be able to rise and walk...

I etcetera: on the poetics and ideology of multipersoned narratives. (Second-Person Narrative)
September 22, 1994... you have to say, It's I who am doing this to me, I who am talking about me to me. Then the breath fails, the end begins, you go silent, it's the end, short-lived, you begin again, you had forgotten, there's someone there, someone talking to you,...

Narrative apostrophe: reading, rhetoric, resistance in Michel Butor's 'La modification' and Julio Cortazar's "Graffiti." (Second-Person Narrative)
September 22, 1994... Narrating with the second-person pronoun is a rhetorical act. Storytellers from "Homer" and Vergil to Laurence Sterne, George Eliot, Michel Butor, and Julio Cortazar have turned to the persuasive force of you to move their audiences. When the...

'Self-Help' for narratee and narrative audience: how "I" - and "You"? - read "How." (Lorrie Moore's short story 'How' from the collection 'Self-Help') (Second-Person Narrative)
September 22, 1994... 1. HOW ARE YOU? A voice addresses you. Not from clouds, a mountaintop, or a burning bush. From this page. It asks how you are and what you're up to. It is a friendly, though unfamiliar, voice. You are unsure of how to react. You have an...

Self-consuming second-person fiction: Jose Emilio Pacheco's "Tarde de Agosto" (August Afternoon). (Second-Person Narrative)
September 22, 1994... I offer you explanations of yourself, theories/about yourself, authentic and surprising news/of yourself. (Jorge Luis Borges) Pacheco's "Tarde de agosto" (from the collection of stories El viento distante [The Distant Wind]) juxtaposes two...

Textual 'You' and double deixis in Edna O'Brien's 'A Pagan Place.' (Second-Person Narrative)
September 22, 1994... A story is like a letter. Dear You, I'll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, like...

From cultural provocation to narrative cooperation: innovative uses of the second-person in Raymond Federman's fiction. (Second-Person Narrative)
September 22, 1994... All narration, whether historical or fictional, is the fruition of an act, all stories are products of labor; one "does history" the same way one does literature, and that act of doing (poiesis) belongs to somebody, implicates a productive agent...

The speaking object: Daphne Marlatt's pronouns and lesbian poetics. (Second-Person Narrative)
September 22, 1994... 1. INTRODUCTION The discussion of much recent feminist theory is centered on what might be meant by a woman as subject in discourse when that discourse is ordered by "phallogocentric" power. The question revolves around how a woman might...

Second-person narrative as a test-case for narratology: the limits of realism. (Second-Person Narrative)
September 22, 1994... This essay will concentrate on three related issues that connect with second-person fiction. I will start by reprinting and (re)analyzing the narrative typology presented in my "Second Person Fiction," which attempts to revise and mediate between...