Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory

Style, Summer, 2000 by Brian Richardson

The essays in this volume amply illustrate the wide range of impressive work being done in narrative theory today as well as the persistence and continued utility of many earlier explanatory models. The first three intervene directly in ongoing debates involving different strands of narrative theory. In "Desire and the Female Protagonist," Honor Wallace critically examines basic aspects of feminist narrative theory, in particular the opposition between lyric and narrative and the frequent valorization of the lyric mode as a progressive alternative to the masculinist biases of traditional narrative trajectories. In "Maurice in Time," Jesse Matz argues persuasively for a new kind of narrative temporality in Forster that he terms "tenselessness"; though eccentric to typical modernist deployments of time, "tenselessness" gestures toward a homosexual form that would elude constricting notions of "identity." Eyal Amiran analyzes the work of three central poststructuralist theorists (Peter Brooks, Deleuze and Guatt ari, and Michael Fried) and demonstrates how each ultimately confuses figuration with poetics, just as the earlier theorists they critique had done; Amiran goes on to offer an approach to the text that eludes this and other comparably faulty binary oppositions. Daniel Punday in turn imagines what a thoroughgoing narratology of the body would look like and shows how basic concepts of narrative theory (character, plot, space) depend on an understanding of bodies that has yet to be adequately articulated.

The next three essays look at the concept and definition of narrative from different vantage points. Philippe Carrard examines three types of modern history writing both to determine whether a genuinely nonnarrative history exists and what its features might be. Building on cognitive science, Porter Abbott, by contrasting the dissimilar ways in which "narrative" and "literature" function, provides a better understanding of each while revealing the large conceptual gap between them. Monika Fludernik, drawing on the resources of linguistics, utilizes text-type theory to better comprehend narrative as a discourse type.

The issue concludes with two important investigations into basic concepts of narrative analysis that turn out to have significant implications for more general theoretical concerns. David Herman on the one hand, scrutinizing the concept of reflexivity, differentiates it sharply from metalanguage and identifies a distinctive type of "lateral" reflexivity that produces a series of changing versions or "self-paraphrases" of basic material, rather than a hierarchical order of distinct levels--a differentiation found elsewhere in narrative discourse, and one that illuminates core cognitive principles. Dorrit Cohn, on the other hand, breaks down the unwieldy category of "unreliable narration" into the more useful subtypes of "misinformed" and "discordant"; in doing so, she discloses discordant narration to be an exclusive property of works of narrative fiction.