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.

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 “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 article considers some of the ways in which Seamus Deane’s novel maps political, sectarian, and folkloric borders onto the Catholic tradition of textual exegesis. In particular, the essay argues that Reading in the Dark treats Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises as a productive site where both political and community identity are reconfigured through direct contact with literary-theoretical concerns.

In memory of Daniel Stern (Jan. 18, 1928 -- Jan. 24, 2007)

This article provides a brief historical overview of the changing perspectives in trauma studies, the field that has spawned an academic interest in the nature and impact of traumatic experiences. The latest insights of psychotherapists, historians, and cultural and literary critics such as Dori Laub, Bessel van der Kolk, Dominick LaCapra, Saul Friendlander, and Cathy Caruth about witnessing, testimony, representation, and working-through traumatic experiences are used as a frame of reference for the analysis of two novels by the Jewish American novelist Daniel Stern, whose work has somehow failed to achieve canonical status. Stern’s two early Holocaust novels, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die (1963) and After the War (1967), it is argued, are remarkable, not only for their understanding of the psychological effects of trauma, but also for their use of narrative strategies to mitigate and contain the traumas that dwell at the core of these novels.

Paul de Man believed that he had dismissed Jorge Luis Borges’ stories in calling them “contes philosophiques.”  However, this appellation only works as disparagement if one considers philosophical stories to be frivolous puzzles. There is a puzzle in Borges’ story “Funes the Memorious,” but it is of the utmost relevance not only to general philosophy but to the philosophy of language and, ultimately, that of ethics. Borges’ central character, Ireneo Funes, does not match his name, being the reverse of peaceful in mind, the reason being that he is gifted or, better, afflicted with the ability to remember all that he has ever sensed in infinitely intricate detail. The effect is to deny him our own humbler ability to classify his experiences usefully, either for himself or, more importantly, for others. The story brings his affliction subtly into focus, astonishing us with its autistic grandeur, but, in so doing, also lays bare the dialogic nerve of human communication.

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.

In the short story “Bluebeard’s Egg” (1983), Margaret Atwood simultaneously replicates the form of one Bluebeard tale, “The Robber Bridegroom,” and recapitulates the content of another, “Fitcher’s Bird,” by having her protagonist recall to herself a tale about three sisters and a sorcerer she recently heard in a course on “Forms of Narrative Fiction.” The recollection of the Grimms’ story of “Fitcher’s Bird” within “Bluebeard’s Egg” is structurally analogous to the climactic scene in their “Robber Bridegroom” in which the robber’s bride is called upon to regale her wedding guests with “a good story.” She gives a first-person account of prior events that is nearly identical to the sequence already described by the third-person omniscient narrator. In other words, the bride whose experiences were the object of narration (at the diegetic level) now engages in narrating the events in which she took part (at the hypodiegetic level). For Atwood, as I propose, the mise en abyme in “The Robber Bridegroom” serves as a point of departure in both senses of the phrase: her text deviates from the structural model it imitates. The hypodiegetic narration in “Bluebeard’s Egg” – namely, the embedded tale of “Fitcher’s Bird” – does not verge on identity with events previously narrated; rather, Atwood literally realizes the rhetorical device of mise en abyme in her story. Things are put into an abyss. Nothing mirrors nothing. Through this inventive deployment of intertextuality, Atwood’s variant of the Bluebeard motif presents a case of negative mise en abyme.

As a child the Serbian-Jewish author Danilo Kiš witnessed the massacre of the so called “cold days” in Novi Sad in 1942, when thousands of Jewish and Serbian inhabitants were executed by the fascists and their corpses thrown into the Danube, and the disappearance of his father who perished in Auschwitz. As an adult he was witness to the dictatorship of Titoist Yugoslavia. His narratives focus on Fascism and Stalinism insisting on their purely literary representation. Relying on the documentary character of autobiographical testimony (Karlo Stejner’s Seven Thousand Days in Siberia), the “real” story of mystifications (Protocols of the Elders of Zion), the semantic energy of fictive documents, and the charm of story-telling, Kiš creates a multilayered, highly artificial narrative compositum. He combines the literary experience of Russian avant-garde “factography” (literatura fakta, 1929) with the puzzling effect of documentary simulacra without resuming the ludistic implication of this procedure, which – as he is well aware – is an integral element of Borges’s poetics. Without ignoring the intertextual orientation of Kiš’s text, the paper concentrates on the mnemonic dimension of his narratives, on the stylistics of anti-pathos and litotes, on the semantic coalition of “factography” and “thanatography,” and discusses the problem of hyperbole/understatement in virtual documents.

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.

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.

One of the functions of literary fiction, in particular narrative fiction, is the construction, circulation and maintenance of world-models.  Literature, Lotman taught us, is a secondary modeling system: using the primary modeling system of language as its vehicle, it constructs models of and models for reality.  It also models itself: narrative fictions regularly embed within their own continuums secondary worlds – inset narratives, found manuscripts, ekphrastic descriptions, remediations of non-verbal media, micro-worlds and paraspaces, etc. – that mirror the primary worlds framing them.  Such structures en abyme have typically been treated as uncanny disruptions, fatally compromising fiction’s world-modeling function, at worst summoning up the specters of crippling paradox and infinite regress.  In fact, world-modeling and self-modeling are interdependent functions of fiction; they complement and sustain each other.  Internal scale-models make the “outer” fiction’s model of the world salient.  Far from disrupting the primary world, they hold a mirror up to it, providing the reader with a kind of schematic diagram of it, or an instruction manual for its proper operation. Moreover, the relationship between the “outer” world and the internal scale-model, the way one maps onto the other, can itself serve as a model for the relationship between the fictional world as a whole and the real world – the world “out there,” beyond the text.  So internal scale-models yield knowledge of the fictional world, but also of how the fictional world models the real.

          The paper revisits the literature on mise en abyme, as well as Jameson’s powerful notion, derived from the urban planning literature, of cognitive mapping.  Case-studies include Cervantes’ Don Quixote, read in the light of Fernand Braudel’s cognitive mapping of the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II; micro-worlds and scale-models en abyme in science fiction (Gibson, Sterling), and in the American mega-novel (Sorrentino, Pynchon, Barth).

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.