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).

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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. 

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.

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 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.