What are the 2 different approaches on narrative and give a short defintion of both.
Story-oriented defintion: WHAT IS NARRATED
A story-oriented definition focuses on what is narrated that is, the content of the narrative. It looks at the structure, emphasizing elements like plot, characters, actions, and the setting in which the events take place.
Discourse-oriented defintion: HOW IS IT NARRATED
A discourse-oriented definition focuses on how the story is narrated that is, the mediation of the narrative. It’s concerned with the narrative situation, such as who tells the story, how events and characters are presented, and how psychological depth or plot elements are conveyed to the reader.
What is a plot?
Various events are linked causally and logically to one another
Name the 3 typical narrative situations (Stanzel)
First Person narrative situation
Authorial narrative situation
Figural narrative situation
Which narrative situation is defined?
“narrating I” = ”experiencing I”
seperated due to process of reflection or maturation
only insight into feelings, thoughts of narrator or “narrating I”
1-Person or 3-Person narrator (external perspective dominates)/ Outside the world, character
personal interjections, comments, moral judgement
Adresses Reader, flashforward, metanarrative commentaries
ominpresence/ omiscience
Narrator recedes in background (3-Person narrator / not part of storyworld)
narrated world from perspective of character = reflector
stream of consciousness (inpression of having insight)
Which narrative situation can you spot?
[...] and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deep-down torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. James Joyce, end of Ulysses, 1922
In that part of the western division of this kingdom, which is commonly called Somersetshire, there lately lived (and perhaps lives still) a gentleman whose name was Allworthy, and who might well be called the favourite of both Nature and Fortune; for both of these seem to have contended which should bless and enrich him most. [...] From the former of these, he derived an agreeable person, a sound constitution, a solid understanding, and a benevolent heart: by the latter, he was decreed to the inheritance of one of the largest estates in the country. [...] Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any farther together, to acquaint thee, that I intend to digress, through this whole history, as often as I see occasion: of which I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic whatever. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749, book 1, chap. 2.
She sat on the floor – that was her first impression of Sally – she sat on the floor with her arms round her knees, smoking a cigarette. Where could it have been? The Mannings'? The Kinloch-Jones's? At some party (where she could not be certain), for she had a distinct recollection of saying to the man she was with, 'Who is that?' And he had told her, and said that Sally's parents did not get on (how that shocked her – that one's parents should quarrel!). But all that evening she could not take her eyes off Sally. It was an extraordinary beauty of the kind she most admired, dark, large-eyed, with that quality which, since she hadn't got it herself, she always envied – a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything; a quality much commoner in foreigners than in Englishwomen. Sally always said she had French blood in her veins, an ancestor had been with Marie Antoinette, had his head cut off, left a ruby ring. Perhaps that summer she came to stay at Bourton, walking in quite unexpectedly without a penny in her pocket, one night after dinner, and upsetting Aunt Helena to such an extent that she never forgave her. There had been some awful quarrel at home. She literally hadn't a penny that night when she came to them – had pawned a brooch to come down. She had rushed off in a passion. They sat up till all hours of the night talking. Sally it was who made her feel, for the first time, how sheltered the life at Bourton was. She knew nothing about sex – nothing about social problems. She had once seen an old man who had dropped dead in a field – she had seen cows just after their calves were born. But Aunt Helena never liked discussion of anything (when Sally gave her William Morris, it had to be wrapped in brown paper). There they sat, hour after hour, talking in her bedroom at the top of the house, talking about life, how they were to reform the world. They meant to found a society to abolish private property, and actually had a letter written, though not sent out. The ideas were Sally's, of course – but very soon she was just as excited – read Plato in bed before breakfast; read Morris; read Shelley by the hour. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 1925 (London: Granada, 1983), 30-31.
Genette`s structualist taxonomy
What is the difference between:
Narration and Focalization
Narration:
Who speaks? Who narrates?
Refers to the speaker who funtions within the text as the narrating subject
Focalization:
Who sees? From whose perspective is the fictional world presented?
Refers to question of the persepctive
Stanzels “reflector”
What is extradiegetic communicationlevel of the speaker?
Extradiegetic:
a narrator who exists outside the storyworld
Located on the level of narrative transmission (frame narrative)
What is intradiegetic communicationlevel of the speaker?
anything that is narrated in situated on the intradiegetic level, part of the story
(i.e. all characters, all events etc.)
What is hypodiegetic communicationlevel of the speaker?
narrative within narrative, i.e. narrative told by a character, who is situated on
the intradiegetic level (a character level another story)
What is the difference between
Heterodiegetic and Homodiegetic and Autodiegetic
Heterodiegetic:
Narrator is located outside of the narrated world
Homodiegetic:
Narrator appears as a character within the story
Autodiegetic:
A homodiegetic narrator who is identical with the main protagonist and narrates their own life.
Focalization: Narrator know as much as the Character
Focalization: Narrator knows more Character
Focalization: Narrator know less than Character
What is the difference between a covert and overt narrator?
covert: Anonymous voice
overt: Narrator appears on the level of the narrative transmission as an individualized speaker and concrete persona
What are textual signals for unreliable narration?
contradictions with narrators comments
Inclusion of contrasting versions of the same event
Discrepancy between statement and actions of the narrator
Contradictions between self-charaterization of narrator and narrator of other charaters
Repeative occurrence of subjective comments
Narrator addresses reader to manipulate
Presentation of consciousness
Which three presentations exist?
Psycho narration
Free indirect discourse/ narrated monologue
Interior monologue
How can you identify a stream of consciousness?
associative thoughts
unusual syntax
sensory detail
The following definition describes which presentation of consciousness?
The narrator describes the character’s thoughts in third person.
Often summarized or paraphrased.
More distance between narrator and character.
Blends narrator’s voice with the character’s inner thoughts.
Third person, but in the character’s tone.
Gives a sense of immediacy while staying in third person.
Direct first-person expression of the character’s inner thoughts.
Often lacks quotation marks, very immediate and personal.
Full access to character’s mind.
“ It took a few hours to make the child feel that if she was in neither of these places she was at least everywhere else”
“He turned back. His scalp went icy and he shivered. What was he to do? Ridiculous to try driving away. And to leave the wood, with the rain still coming down full pelt, was out of question
“ (…) and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the montain, yes when I put the rose in my hair like Andalusian girls used to or shall I wear a red dress and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and (…)”
Presentation of time: Order
What is a flashback and a flashforward?
Presentation of time: Duration
discourse time > story time
discourse time < story time
discourse time ∅ story time goes on
discourse time goes on story time ∅
discourse time = story time
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