Okay, theory peeps: I need a quick and dirty introduction to narratology. Right now I seem to be muddling toward a line of argumentation that I suspect there's already a well-developed discourse surrounding, and I want to make sure that I'm not reinventing the wheel and that the terms I'm assuming have coherent and stable meanings actually have those meanings.
Briefly, I'm looking at what seems to be the failure or breakdown of narrative in specific circumstances: the attempt to narrate an experience that seemingly can't be told (possibly because it doesn't unfold in time or follow the accepted patterns of causality; possibly because there isn't a cultural framework that would allow others to understand that experience). So as written huge parts of the story might be omitted, or its chronology might be blurred, or it otherwise just doesn't make sense.*
Can anyone help a blogger out? I'd be grateful to be pointed toward works that provide either a general introduction to narratology or that seem to deal with the specific phenomenon I'm interested in. (The only article I'm familiar with that discusses something like it is Gerald Prince's "The Disnarrated.") Many thanks!
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*And, uh, yes: I do seem to talk about this sort of thing a lot. But it's only recently that I realized I'm interested in it in my research, too.
13 comments:
When I took a comp lit proseminar, Mieke Bal's Narratology and H. Porter Abbott's The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative were the quick-and-dirty introductions to narratology of choice. Looking up those titles, I came across a Longman critical reader on narratology edited by Onega and Garcia Landa whose contributor list looks pretty good--this might be another good place to start, or perhaps the next resource for a particular area of narratology.
You would have a much better sense of this than I, but would trauma theory be another place to look for discourses that you could tap into?
-Sarah
I've got those and some others ---- let me get back to you about a list.
This is usually on the standard reading lists for narrative theory:
http://www.amazon.com/Recent-Theories-Narrative-Wallace-Martin/dp/0801493552
I'm afraid I know sweet FA about narratology, but as a medievalist, your bit about "the attempt to narrate an experience that seemingly can't be told" reminds me of the attempts to explain apophatic mystical experiences in works like The Cloud of Unknowing. Also, this may be of some use in the narratology theory department, if you haven't read it already: Roland Barthes' Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative. http://www.rlwclarke.net/Theory/SourcesPrimary/BarthesIntroductiontotheStructuralAnalysisofNarrative.pdf
A couple of classics leap to mind: Wolfgang Iser's Languages of the Unsayable and Hayden White's The Content of the Form. Then there's trauma theory, but that's a rather huge can of worms...
Aha! I knew I could count on my peeps.
The suggestions about trauma theory and mystical experiences are also well-taken; I'm not writing about either trauma or mysticism, but it had struck me that both kinds of experiences--or the problems inherent in describing them--are very loosely akin to the phenomenon I'm working on.
Thanks again. I'll check these titles out.
More on the trauma front (and thus maybe not so apropos): Scarry's _The Body in Pain_ does a whole lot with the breakdown of language and telling in the face of unspeakable pain.
Yup, Mieke Bal's Narratology. Also see James Phelan & Peter J. Rabinowitz, A Companion to Narrative Theory, esp. Robyn Warhol's essay on "Neonarrative." Abraham Stoll's Milton and Monotheism is specifically about this type of problem when it comes to a God who can't be represented.
I don't have the impression that psychoanalysis is really your thing (and it's not mine either), but it seems that some of the work on trauma might be apropos here.
On further reflection, Content of the Form might not be the best place to start with Hayden White. Maybe his contribution to Saul Friedlander's volume Probing the Limits of Representation is better? At any rate, that whole collection is an excellent starting place for theories of the unspeakable as they relate to the Holocaust.
I've always been a big fan of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's _Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics_ (1984; rev. 2002), but I'm out of my area, and would actually be interested if anyone else wants to offer a quick-and-dirty assessment of that work.
R-K's work is organized phenomenologically, with chapters on stuff narrative does (characterization, use of time, narration) using examples mostly from 19th-20th century English lit. Her focus is on the text, with a final chapter in the revised edition that addresses the centrality of the reader in recent decades.
Thanks again, peeps! I got several of these out of the library and they are indeed proving useful--some for my actual research and others for my apparently abiding personal interest in the way we narrate and make sense out of our lives.
I think I'm also going to go ahead and buy Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot, an excerpt from which was in the Longman anthology (and was one of the three best essays, for my purposes/interests, alongside those of Jonathan Culler and Hayden White).
If you're going to look at Brooks, I have to encourage you to look at an article that was in PMLA that critiques Brooks' oedipal model of narrative, Susan Winnett's "Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure."
Thanks, Dr. C!
And thanks also Shane--I'm really grooving on White, and just ordered his Content of the Form from Amazon as well.
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