This essay discusses the element of length as the shared basis that forms the epic tradition in its various transformations of the narrative and heroic modes. Length preserves a certain quality that other terms (such as “heroic” or “narrative”) are meant to express. What is at stake here is our understanding of narrativity, its relation to length in the epic tradition, and the narrative facet of the tradition itself. The article delineates a tentative narrative of a tradition of long poems that narrate past values as an ideal. Latent in the question of these poems’ length is the question of multiplicity and unity: what are the relations between the poem’s parts and how – or whether – they create one poem. The long poem of the epic tradition is the fruit of the attempt to contend with the relationship between multiplicity and unity; it is the expression of this attempt — either by searching for an option that does not make these two concepts mutually exclusive or by pointing to another world, where such a worldview apparently existed. In this sense, the narrativity of the long epic poem preserves the past and turns it into a utopian future.

At the odd intersection of narratology and clinical medicine can be found some fresh postings of old questions about the consequences of representational acts for tellers and listeners. The simple practice of guiding health care professionals to write in non-technical language about what they witness patients to go through and what they themselves undergo in caring for the sick has led us contemplate the acts of attention and representation in primal and primary ways. We see the intersubjective affiliation born of narrative transactions, as it were, unadorned, right there in front of us as doctors, nurses, and social workers discover, through acts of writing, what on earth they know and how what they know connects them to their patients.

Like arboreal and nocturnal tarsiers in the Malay Archipelago with their enormous eyes, we are open collecting retinae for the impressions and the assault of that which might be seen. The seer attends—absorbs, composes, puts himself or herself in the way of things to be seen. The simultaneous act of representation expresses, with muscular force, the value of what is seen as if expressing juice from a lemon or, more saliently for my writers, milk from a nipple or secretions from a gland. My conceptual examination of clinical representations rely on Henry James’s theoretical and formal practices that suggest that the self (or consciousness) is constituted by, and not simply made visible by, acts of attention and representation. If indeed the self is the most powerful therapeutic instrument, we need intensive means whereby doctors and nurses, who owe sick people authentic attention and care, can constitute and inhabit that self. Narrative training can expose these fundamental aspects of self to health care professionals, if only so that they can use that self on behalf of the ill.

According to Paul Ricoeur’s concept of “narrative identity,” both narrative and self-identity are formed and developed as an outcome of a constant vacillation between sameness and selfhood. The theoretical discussions of narrative identity, including Ricoeur’s, underestimate the threat posed by a radical shift to the pole of sameness, stasis, and stagnation. After clarifying some of the reasons for the asymmetry between the two facets of identity, the paper explores the possibility of sameness taking over selfhood in the constitution of self-identity and narrative. It briefly examines techniques by which such narrative identity is formed and deals with its implications for both self and narrative in Agota Kristof’s The Notebook (Le Grand cahier).

It is assumed that today the novel is the predominant form of narrative. There are many ways that the novelist may use his narrative to think for him. One obvious way is through narratorial commentary, as for instance, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Another way is through structural manipulation, as in the two narratives of Dickens’s Bleak House. A third possibility, the one to be investigated in the case of Conrad, is to use the sjuzhet to disrupt thoroughly the chronology of the fabula. This is not done merely to enhance the mysteriousness of the text, but to make it think for the novelist by evoking central thematic concerns. This mode of thinking will be discussed in relation to Lord Jim and Nostromo.

“Because you cannot act, you find yourself unable to think,” says Anna Blume in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things. This idea is discussed in connection with thinkers who connect action and narrative, such as Arendt, Ricoueur and Fludernik. If narrative indeed is a way to perceive and interpret action, a world reduced to hazard and behavior seems to leave neither space nor frameworks for thinking.  Looking from this perspective, the narrative way of thinking is a prerequisite for other modes of thinking as well. The discussion of the extreme situation of no narrative and no thinking is related to Dominick LaCapra’s work on trauma and narration.

The celebrated ubiquity of “narrative” in culture is both a fecund premise and the bane of narrative studies today. While not outright against narrative, nor narrative studies, the present paper aims to remain skeptical towards broad, overly enthusiastic uses of the notion: not necessarily the most promising stance in a narratological conference. What is more, and no less ominously, the paper might just as well be subtitled “A Boring Story” – though this is in fact the title of the Chekhov text (“Skuchnaia istoriia” 1889) using as an illustration.

The articles surveys some exemplars of the broad usage – albeit briefly: this has been done before – with special regard for repercussions on the domain of literary narratology. This is where the skepticism comes in: either (1) the notion of narrative is stretched disproportionately (“it is simply there, like life itself,” Barthes), becoming synonymous, say, with fiction (e.g. Palmer 2004: “in a sense we are all novelists,” an empty phrase); or (2), conversely, the expansion of narratological approaches to domains such as cultural studies or social sciences may lead to a narrow privileging of the “natural” or quotidian, linear, causal, realistic type of narrative (a bias discerned by Rimmon-Kenan 2002 in her work on illness narratives).

This may be all right for cultural studies. But for literary narratology the way to go seems to be in the opposite direction. Is not it the role of literary narratives to subvert, transgress, make problematic in a thousand and one ways the generalizations thought up by theorists? Chekhov’s “A Boring Story,” an illness narrative in its own right, displaying precisely those anti-linear, anti-causal, iterative features that are ignored by more sweeping definitions. Aside from being a poignant tale of a burnt-out professor, Chekhov’s story also emerges as a meditation on narrative and, if you will, narratology itself. Such subversive narrative tactics add up to what has been termed “weak” narrativity (by McHale 2001, 2004, with regard to a very different set of texts), narrativity sous rature. Possibly, this tendency is always already there, underlying not only post-modernist texts, but seemingly realistic, linear fiction.

Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007) is author of The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication of in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (1974); The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978); Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1985); Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment (1987); Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989); The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (1993), The Range of Interpretation (2000), and How to Do Theory (2006).

Updated in December 2007

The category of narrative space, which was side-stepped by classical narratology and narrative theory in general, has recently become a center of interest for a growing number of literary scholars. Using Bakhtin’s insights with regard to the “interconnectedness” of spatial and temporal relations in literature, the paper attempts to define a category of a “negative” chronotope which structures trauma narratives, suppressing time and foregrounding space. Ida Fink’s short story “traces” serves as an example for the workings of such a chronotope.

Alice Munro’s “Prue” (1984) is a formally innovative short story that eschews epiphany or any other sign of change or movement on the part of its protagonist and that nevertheless offers its audience a highly moving experience. I attempt to account for the story’s effective unconventionality by examining the interrelations between its form and its ethical dimension. I locate those interrelations in the interactions of narrative judgment and narrative progression. More specifically, I identify three main kinds of narrative judgment — interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic, and their connections to three main kinds of progression — those we associate with narrativity, lyricality, and what I call portraiture.  Portraiture is a mode, familiar in the dramatic monologues of Browning, in which the main goal is the representation of character. By examining the interaction of judgment and progression in “Prue,” I argue that it is both a highly successful hybrid form, one that synthesizes narrativity and portraiture, and that this understanding leads us to its ethical dimension. I close with some observations about larger implications of the analysis for our understanding of both other hybrid forms and the utility of this rhetorical approach to form and ethics.

The Conservationist is widely regarded as constituting a transition in Nadine Gordimer’s work, from her earlier realistic fiction with its detached stance to the kind of prose which has earned her a respected place as an engaged African writer: fully identified with the materials she is dealing with and, through the delineation of her protagonist, Mehring, exposing the inevitable demise of the white capitalist class in South Africa and the reclamation of the land by the blacks. Moreover, her shift to a more experimental technique, and especially the use of stream of consciousness, has been seen as one of the markers of that transition. Through a close analysis of Mehring’s internal monologue, this paper aims to show that embedded in her prose there can still be found a universalist humanist quest for wholeness which is not subsumed in the ideological and political reading and which exists side by side with it, thus making for a more complex, richer reading.

Following Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the figure of the “enthymeme” is understood as a syllogism in which one of the premises is missing or non-valid. Much of the wit of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is based on this figure, and in Stuart Gilbert’s scheme, the technique of the Aeolus episode on Joyce’s Ulysses is listed as “Enthymemic.” But are there narrative phenomena that can be regarded as enthymemes? The paper argues that the notion of the enthymeme is a useful tool for the analysis of reference and signification. In Joyce’s “The Sisters,” in particular, it is a mechanism through which the external and the internal fields of reference enrich each other.

Leona Toker, editor of Partial Answers, is Professor Emerita in the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (2010), and articles on English, American, and Russian writers. She is the editor of Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (1994); and co-editor of Rereading Texts / Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H.M. Daleski  (1996) and of Knowledge and Pain (2012). Her book Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Inter-Contextual Reading is coming out in the fall of 2019.

As with most narratives of catastrophe, the touchstone and point of departure of the narratives of persecution is a state of equilibrium disrupted by an act of violence. Persecution is a disruption of the normal orbit of history and the rituals of any given social body of social state of mind. In a passage from his major post-World War I novel A Guest for the Night (1939), which predicts World War II and the Holocaust, S. Agnon describes this transition from normalcy to the insecure state of the victims of a historical catastrophe.

            Agnon confronts the potentially idyllic normal narrative of bourgeois and Jewish life with the real state of affairs after the catastrophe: the narrative of normalcy is disrupted by the crisis of war and persecution. The time gets out of joint, and life ceases to accommodate the major stations of the process of human change. The narrative has two permanent actants: the persecutor (singular or plural) as victimizer and the persecuted (singular or plural) as victim. The struggle between them creates a diversity of typologies of persecution, but basically it is the conflict between the powerful and the weak. The moral evaluation of the two sides is not uniform. The cat-and-mouse game is not the only legitimate plot; the conflict can be ambiguous – when, for instance the so-called criminal and an innocent victim are one (Jean Valjean in Hugo’s Les Misérables). In some instances the same plot could be interpreted differently by different witnesses: the representative of justice can be justified by one party and accused of cruelty and injustice by another. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice provides a good example of the diversity of interpretations in different times and under different social circumstances. The archetypes of Cain and Ahasuerus, traditionally understood as the fugitive victims of their sins, were reinterpreted as positively by Byron and Stephan Heym. This paper examines the different aspects of the topos and narrative of persecution.

Born in Vienna, Gershon Shaked (1929-2006) was Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the leading experts on Hebrew literature. 

Assuming that the “ontological homogeneity” principle is inherent to the literary work and that the fictionalization of literary referents is its logical derivation, I have coined the concept of “pseudo-real referents” and I show how these referents function in two contemporary Chilean novels: Santa María de las flores negras [Holy Mary of the Black Flowers], by Hernán Rivera Letelier, a text that is consistent with an “aesthetics of totality,” and Amuleto [Amulet], by Roberto Bolaño, a work that on some levels displays an “aesthetic of decentralization or instability.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, dystopian nightmare has become a fact, no longer a cautionary tale of the imagination. But fantasy of destruction is embedded in Western culture, and apocalyptic disaster becomes a re-visioning of familiar cultural paradigms and scenarios. Indeed, postwar America as satirized by Don DeLillo was a site of catastrophe before the planes struck the WTC. The attacks on New York can be seen against the background of postmodern aesthetic theory expounded by Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Frédéric Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Safran Foer respond to 9/11 in novels that grapple with the implications of that event and its aftermath for representation and for the novel form. What 9/11 has shown is that the relation of the real and the imagined in dystopian fiction has been reversed, as both lived experience and hypermediated image.

The historical caesura of the Holocaust bisects the twentieth century, its horror effecting a kind of temporal doubling or fold in the psyches of survivors as well as a permanent damage on Enlightenment conceptions of the progressive march of time. The traumatic experience of a continual turning back inflects the twentieth-century novel and our readings of it, calling into question modernist tropes of redemption. This essay examines changes in the way that both the passage of time and the ghostly return of the dead are portrayed, first in a modern text, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which deals with World War I, and then in two postmodern works both of which inscribe a vain dream of the rectification of Holocaust trauma: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. My emphasis is on trajectories of plot and memory, trajectories that trauma distorts and the artistic impulse inclines to even out (as in Amis’s trope of the story told backwards, with genocide undone). While modernist experimentalism cannot help indulging in redemptive fantasies, it also incorporates its own critique of this conservative longing.

This essay has two main arguments, the first of which proposes a model for understanding narrative beginnings that focuses on both their textual dynamics (designated by the concepts of exposition and launch) and their corresponding readerly dynamics (designated by the concepts of introduction and entrance) and then uses that model to analyze Austen’s atypical beginning and its consequences in Persuasion. The novel’s exposition and launch do not invite the audience to feel that they have entered a comic world, one in which the protagonist’s eventual happiness is assured. Instead, Austen delays these assurances until the setting of the novel shifts to Lyme. As a result, Austen interjects into her comedy some striking new elements: unmerited suffering by the protagonist without any promise that it is only temporary; an awareness that the happy outcome could have been achieved by way of a much less painful route; and a corresponding awareness that, despite the happy outcome, the painful past has permanent effects. The second argument contrasts this view of Persuasion’s form and ideology with the account of both offered by Mary Poovey. Where Poovey sees the form papering over tensions in the ideology of romantic love, this essay sees the novel’s attitude toward love as more realistic than romantic. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that, in the effort to connect form and ideology, critics are likely to be better served by starting with form and then working out toward ideology rather than starting with ideology and working back toward form.