This paper delineates the early-modern re-conception of gender categories in the work of Margaret Cavendish, and her opposition of imagination and wit to the disenchanted reality produced by male thinkers of her time. Conceptions of “knowledge” and “truth” changed significantly during the first six decades of the seventeenth century, fashioning contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity. Against the background of the rise of modern science, within a system of epistemic hegemony synonymous with male strength and social superiority, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, initiated a tacit work of feminine redemption by endorsing and elaborating conceptions imposed by the dominating habits of thought of her time. Responding to those philosophical discourses in which intellectual inquiry had taken on the traits of an allegorical penetration of the masculine “mind” into the secrets of a feminine nature, Cavendish reconceived that mind as the “Rational Soule,” understood as the source and objective of human knowledge. Cavendish forged an epistemological system which was intended not to oppose this “patriarchal” system, but to define a fanciful and witty dimension parallel to the masculine dominion of objectivity, where she manifested and realized the inalienable right for a woman to think within the intimacy of her mind and her house. The privacy of her “solitary mind” was not a prison but the independent locus of feminine cognition and enfranchisement.

With a novelist’s attention to significant detail, in Life Studies Robert Lowell depicts a suite of connecting rooms in which generations of Lowells and Winslows enact their roles in a cultural narrative of the decline and fall of two of New England’s leading families. This paper focuses on three of those rooms – a dining room, a bedroom, and a ship’s cabin – and on how Lowell connects family history and cultural history through use of significant detail evoking Asian associations. Additional rooms, ranging from the prototypical Beacon Hill living room of the Boston Brahmins, to fictional rooms in New England crime novels, to an attic room in Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle, are also glanced at on the way to “Father’s Bedroom” in Life Studies. By way of historical prologue to the cultural narrative inscribed in those rooms, the paper begins with a brief account of the origins of New England Orientalism in the China trade and the opening of Japan, before closely examining how Lowell tellingly integrates allusions to the China trade and New England Orientalism in “Fourth of July in Maine” and “Soft Wood,” where they link New England’s past and present, and are assimilated into a broad cultural critique. The detached, ironic rhetorical stance Lowell adopts as New England historian and cultural critic is less distanced, more complex in Life Studies, where he engages with a central personal theme, his problematic relationship with his father.

Frank Kearful is Professor of English at Bonn University, where he has taught since 1974. He has been a visiting professor at Tübingen University and Hamburg University, and before moving to Germany in 1972 he was an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He has written numerous articles on twentieth-century American poetry, is editor of The Robert Lowell Newsletter, and since 2003 he has written the annual chapter on American poetry since the 1940s for American Literary Scholarship.

Updated July 29, 2011

The essay addresses -- in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel -- the link between authority, ideology, and formal features of discourse in “we” fictional narratives. It presents three main types of relationships between the individual “I” narratives and the “we” group to which he or she belongs as well as between the “we” group and “other” (often hostile) groups. These types differ in the group’s stability and cohesion, the possibilities of transition from this group to another community, and the importance of the role attributed to the individual (or to a particular individual) and to other groups in constructing, sustaining, and (re)shaping the identity of the “we.”

These patterns of relationship suggest that not only can “we” fictional narratives be dialogical but also that they often challenge the norms and values uncritically accepted by the group and subvert the authority of their communal-voice narrator(s). Especially notable in this context are “we” fictional narratives in which the main conflict is instigated by an outsider, who is neither a full member of the group nor a member of a rival group and whose “disorienting discourse” undermines the hegemonic discourse. These types of disagreement, which demonstrate the centrifugal forces of the story, are evidence of the fragility of the group and of its tendency to disintegrate, unless these forces are balanced by the centralizing, centrifugal ones. First-person-plural narration is as much a force of disintegration, discord, and instability as of unison, concord, and stability.

At the time of publication, The Female Quixote (1752) by Charlotte Lennox was received on the terms announced by its title: as a Cervantine, parodic novel. Modern critics read it either as a reflection of the historical forces that restricted writers at that time, or as a failed Cervantine novel. Read as a true inheritor of Cervantine narrative strategies, The Female Quixote is a “metarepresentation” that highlights the creative agency of its source, inviting readers to a hermeneutic game. In contrast to modern accounts of the novel that focus on the historical author and her relationship with Samuel Johnson, to whom parts of the novel have been attributed, I argue that the novel parodies Johnson’s style and literary norms. Through an investigation of the novel’s interpretive history, the essay demonstrate that a novel’s point, if a metafictive one, may be lost if we enter through a historical anteroom of little relevance to its concern.

The paper analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go in terms of the narrative techniques that cause the reader to re-enact the cognitive process by which the characters come to comprehend their predicament. It links these techniques with the ethical implications of the novel’s reshaping the topoi of dystopian fiction in view of the modern concerns with cloning and organ transplant. 

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.

The paper discusses Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight as his first English experiment in constructing a model of a possible metaphysical contact between the world of human consciousness and a mysterious dimension beyond it. Nabokov's almost invariable principles of composition make the narrative stance of the novel open to various interpretations; the paper argues in favor of the version in which the title character’s secret (Russ. Taina Naita) is his calculated absence from the book of which he appears to be the biographical subject. The Appendix presents some results of archival study of the novel's extant manuscripts.

Born in Moscow, Gennady Barabtarlo (1949-2019), received a degree in philology from the University of Moscow in 1972, emigrated from the USSR, with his wife and daughter, in 1979, received a PhD from the University of Illinois in 1985, and was since professor of Russian Literature at the Univeristy of Missouri. He has published several books and numerous essays on Nabokov and translated into Russian three of his novels (Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Original of Laura) and all his short stories. He also published articles on Pushkin, Tiutchev, Solzhenitsyn,  and a book of poetry. updated in March 2019

Taking its starting point from Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel featuring an autistic first-person narrator, this paper explores the capabilities and limits of narrative as a cognitive instrument with special attention to the connection between knowing, living, and telling. In the novel the impairments connected with autism, affecting social interaction and the understanding of other persons as beings with minds of their own, influence both the narrator’s style of telling his story and his way of using narrative thinking to plan the future and conceive of the past. The discussion focuses on both these issues, arguing that narrative is not only a cultural technique which enables orientation in time and space as well as the understanding of other agents as intentional – that it is a highly social art, of vital importance for everyday action and interaction in a web of social relations.

What is the relation between public notations of time and the personal experience of duration? And how have these two different approaches to temporality been explored in early novels? This article considers Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, arguing that through renderings of objective time and of the experience of duration Defoe differentiates between two different modes of sociality: contractual relations on the one hand and intimate attachments on the other. Furthermore, in these novels Defoe lays the terms for one of the main tropes through which later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels represent both domesticity (in its inherent duality of love and marriage) and temporality (in its inherent duality of duration and time). This is a trope of parallax view, which captures an important condition of these dualities – that their poles can never be viewed simultaneously even as they coexist in the same phenomena.      

The article presents the history of translation of Velimir Khlebnikov’s poetry into Hebrew. Khlebnikov (1885--1922), one of the founders of Russian Futurism, was a trailblazer of new linguistic and philosophic vistas in poetry. His poems are singularly difficult and original in their highly involved idiom and construction, as well as the subject-matter which borrows from such diverse fields as history, mythology, mathematics, and biology. The translations of his poems into Hebrew, starting with those by Lea Goldberg, Avraham Shlyonsky, and Eliyahu Tesler in the pioneering 1942 collection “Shirat Rusiia” (“The Poetry of Russia”) and ending with Aminadav Dykman’s in his magisterial anthology of Russian poetry “Dor Sheli -- Khaia Sheli: MiShirat Rusiia BaMea HaEsrim” (“My Generation, My Beast: Russian Poets of the Twentieth Century,” 2002), are characterized by ingenuity in rendering Khlebnikov’s “trans-sense” idiom while transposing his thoroughly Russian world-view into Hebrew realia. The article also discusses the Israeli reception of Khlebnikov as poet and philosopher, as reflected in Dan Avidan’s poetry and Mikhail Grobman’s paintings.

The article explores the weave of memory, time, and narrative as it unfolds in the autobiographical process. It offers a reading of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz as a book that outlines a new narrative vision of memory and autobiographical time. In this book Sebald, in a break with the traditional model of memory as an archive, describes remembering as an uncertain and speculative search movement which defies chronology, sequentiality, and linearity. What emerges instead is an idea of time as a mode of simultaneously co-existing moments and episodes from very different periods of clock and calendar time. This reading of Austerlitz leads, on a more general plane, to reflections about the autobiographical process as a way of narrative meaning-making that constitutes what Ricœur has called human time.

The essay analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go in the context of both fictional representations of cloning and the contemporary debates on the ethics of cloning. In certain debates human cloning has been framed primarily in terms of its effects on the parent-child relation and the family. But an investigation of arguments both for and against cloning reveals how this scenario privileges a specific normative narrative of individuation that prescribes the proper form for life. The conventions of cloning narratives highlight the role of this normative narrative in our constructions of the human. From movies like The Island to science fiction classics like Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, these narratives betray anxieties over individuation. Never Let Me Go, on the other hand, reflects on the narrative modes that shape what it means to be human. It measures the human not in terms of some narrative of internal or immanent development but rather through the process of relating to another.

This article proposes a cognitive approach to narrative that moves away from a “representational” paradigm – one concerned with exploring the fictionalized representation of conscious experience – to a conceptualist paradigm – one concerned with the functional organization of the mental structures that underlie our ability to comprehend a narrative in the first place. Stated blandly, my argument is that literary narratologists in particular need to jettison the remnants of traditional criticism that conceives of narrative in the form of a mimetic textual artifact and to adopt a method that systematically explicates the explicitly mental structures than underlie narrative comprehension. What kinds of categories, distinctions, and relations must be realized in the mind-brain in order to effect narrative comprehension? I suggest that this emphasis upon what we can characterize as the “content” of the mental structures that underlie narrative comprehension (rather the content of the narrative text) offers a paradigm for narratological research that respects the need for both disciplinary specialization and interdisciplinary collaboration.

The article reconsiders Jerome Bruner’s famous article “Life as Narrative” (1987), and in particular its thesis about those who “become” the autobiographical narratives they are telling. Galen Strawson’s recent criticism of narrativity is used as one perspective to weigh Bruner’s thought. Autobiography is, for Bruner, a cognitive achievement, yet he challenges the understanding of narrative as simply following and imitating life. He foregrounds the ways in which life imitates narrative, and the manner in which narrative cognition precedes and organizes experience. However, the key idea about the merger of autobiographical narratives and lived life privileges autobiography vis-à-vis the continuous process of the reception of narratives. Autobiography is never the sole cognitive resource used in organizing experience. The article argues that Bruner’s later emphasis on “folk psychological,” canonical narrativity and the “breaches” of these expectations as a cause of real narratives marks a change in his thought. The function of narration is to contain, solve, or deal with the “uncanniness” of life and shattered expectations. Experience is thus, to some extent, at odds with the preceding autobiographical narratives, and thus calls for revision of the preceding narratives rather than being dominated by them.  

Last year, guided by theories that regard sympathy as an imaginative capacity that can bridge divisions between people of different backgrounds, I conducted an experiment with nearly 200 Finnish secondary school students, in order to determine the extent to which particular texts would generate their sympathy for characters who seem unattractive, undesirable, or generally outside of the accepted norms of the societies in which they live. The present paper builds on my findings in that study by suggesting some of the pedagogical implications of providing adolescents with opportunities to engage with the lives of fictional characters, and particularly to experience feelings of sympathy for individuals toward whom they ordinarily might feel aversion or uncertainty. It examines some of the ways in which experiences with narrative fiction can be used to help develop emotional and conceptual structures in adolescent readers. In Education and Experience John Dewey contends that “the conditions found in present experience should be used as sources of problems”; indeed, the present paper shows how narrative experience can help form the basis for a problem-solving, emotionally-rich curriculum that takes as its primary aim the development of students’ capacities for emotional awareness and ethical reflection.

Drawing on treatments of the problem of intentionality in fields encompassed by the umbrella discipline of cognitive science, including language theory, psychology, and the philosophy of mind, this paper explores issues underlying recent debates about the role of intentions in narrative contexts. To avoid entering the debate on the terms set by anti-intentionalists, my analysis shifts the focus away from questions about the boundary for legitimate ascriptions of communicative intention, the tipping-point where those ascriptions become illicit projections of readerly intuitions onto an imagined authorial consciousness. Instead, I propose a two-part strategy for examining how storytelling practices are bound up with inferences about intention. The first part uses Hemingway’s 1927 short story “Hills Like White Elephants” to argue that narrative interpretation requires adopting the heuristic strategy that Daniel Dennett has characterized as “the intentional stance.” In other words, it makes sense to assume that stories like Hemingway’s are told for particular reasons, in the service of communicative goals about which interpreters are justified in framing at least provisional hypotheses. This first part of my analysis is tantamount to grounding stories in intentional systems. The second part, which draws on work on folk psychology (and research in the philosophy of mind more generally), describes narrative as a means by which humans learn to take up the intentional stance in the first place, and later practice using it in the safe zone afforded by storyworlds. This part of my analysis involves grounding intentional systems in stories. Here I argue that narrative constitutes in its own right a discipline for reading for intentions, a primordial basis for making the ascriptions of intentionality that lie at the heart of folk psychology, or everyday reasoning concerning one’s own and others' minds.

The paper deals with the presentation of minds in the mixed media environment of graphic narratives, inspired by the notion of narrative experientiality as it is defined in recent narratology. Focusing specifically on three interrelated medium-specific issues, it examines the way graphic narratives can also be said to stimulate the viewer’sengagement with the minds of characters and narrators: the mimetic aspect of the graphic image; the problem of the narrative agent; and the interaction between visual focalization, verbal focalization and verbal narration. Graphic narratives pose a challenge to common narratological analytical categories concerning narratorial authority, enunciation and control in that they display diverse and shifting relationships between verbal narration and visual presentations. The analysis of the graphic means of thought and mind presentation aims to illuminate some of the challenges that narrative theory meets in its transmedial extension. The main examples include first-person autobiographical narratives as well as third-person historical fiction that uses various focalizers and “behaviorist” graphic narratives that are structured around dialogue and action.

The “disnarrated” (Gerald Prince) means textual elements that consider (in a negative or hypothetical mode) what did not happen but could have. The scope of the term is inconveniently wide at present, ranging from explicit denials to lengthy passages of imagined or otherwise hypothetical events. This essay seeks to clarify the concept by relating it to the pragmatic and rhetorical functions of negatives in language and literature.

A statement of what could have happened but did not may often be rephrased as what should have happened but did not. Negatives reveal what is expected in a given situation and of a particular person or ethnic group. They thus render social and literary norms visible and subject to resistance, which makes them valuable for feminist and postcolonial criticism. Negatives do not record a neutrally observable reality but must be attributable to a narrative agent with her own set of cultural and individual norms. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s bicultural story “Interpreter of Maladies”, the descriptive focus inhering in (negative) phrases sometimes conflicts with the focalization indicated by contextual cues.

Salman Rushdie frequently evokes the voice of local gossips but renders their narrative hypothetical by using negatives. This may be regarded as one way of standardizing the expectations of a multicultural readership. Both Rushdie and Arundhati Roy invite the reader to make certain kinds of inferences concerning the events only to disappoint them by switching to disnarration at a climactic juncture. In making the reader conscious of the cultural stereotypes guiding her inferencing, negatives and the disnarrated serve ethical and political ends. They direct the reader’s attention to the discursive context of the text, urging her to read metonymically.

The disciplinary rapprochement between various disciplines across the arts and social sciences that have had an interest in narrative forms and functions has been slow and is still far from being completed. An area which has not been extensively covered yet is the question whether certain forms of third-person consciousness, i.e. the representation of the consciousness of a third party, are at all possible in oral narratives. One mode of depicting third-person consciousness in literary narratives is free indirect discourse (FID), which is commonly viewed as a dual-voiced narrative technique that entails both a reference to the thinking subject and to the narrating instance. The evaluation of FID as a literary narrative technique that is deemed less possible in oral stories results from the attribution of qualities of fictionality and factuality to the respective narrative genres and modes, whereas claims of truth-commitment and sincerity are made for spoken language. This paper discusses the methodological implications of FID for a cross-disciplinary narratology by looking at oral narratives from a sample of illness narratives on the UK’s DIPEx website. While FID can hardly be found in the spoken data, third-person consciousness is still made possible through the use of hypothesizing discourse markers and through devices such as constructed dialogue, which can be used to ascribe thoughts and feelings to other people in an indirect way. The paper demonstrates how third-person consciousness is used by speakers to come to terms with the motives behind other people’s actions. On a more abstract level, the paper explores the limits of a cross-disciplinary narratology when it comes to rigid methodological frameworks while at the same time arguing for a re-conceptualization of defining criteria such as fictionality and truth-commitment that allows for more flexibility.

In spite of Emmanuel Levinas’s famous criticism of narratives as artistic representations, the essay argues that we should construct a “post-Levinasian” approach to narrativity that would both respect the ethical priority of the Other, and go beyond Levinas by taking into account narrative techniques, as well as the historical and political contexts. As an example, the essay analyzes different encounters that take place in Baudelaire’s prose poem “The Eyes of the Poor.” In the narrator’s inevitable failure of reading the face of the Other we can perhaps hear the singular way in which, to quote Levinas, “across all literature the human face speaks -- or stammers, or gives itself a countenance, or struggles with its caricature.”