08 Literary Narrative Fiction

History, Genres, Analysis

Dickens Bicentenary

Teachers’ resources:http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/dickensLiterary events:http://literature.britishcouncil.org/projects/2011/dickens-2012Student website for info:http://dublin.studenty.me/2012/02/07/what-

the-dickens-is-dickens-2012/

Dickens Bicentenary Continued

Celebration on 19 December: a live-streamed audience with Lucinda dickens

Hawksley, Great-Great-Great-Granddaughter of Charles Dickens

http://audiencewithlucindadickenshawksley.eventbrite.com/

Narratives

Personal, political, historical, legal, medical narratives: narrative’s power to capture certain truths and experiences in special ways

- unlike other modes of explanation and analysis such as statistics, descriptions, summaries, or reasoning via conceptual abstractions

The spectrum of fiction

fact – fiction – truth?

History Realism Romance Fantasy

Realism vs romance: a matter of perception vs a matter of vision

2 principal ways fiction can be related to life

Realism Romance

Literary narrative fiction

literature: art of languagekinds of Iiterature: poetry,

drama, narrative fiction

prose: from Latin prosa or proversa oratio=‘straightforward discourse’

M. Jourdain: I've been speaking in PROSE all along! Moliere (1622-1673), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

Literary conventions

an agreement between artist and audience as tothe significance of features appearing in a work of art

knowledge of conventions = literary competence narrative: tells of real or imagined events;

tells a story fiction: an imagined creation in verse/prose/drama story: (imagined) events or happenings,

involving a conflict plot: arrangement of action → structure

Literary, narrative, fictional:

distinct features, do not presuppose each other

• Where do we place lyric poetry?

Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory.Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1991

Literary, narrative, fictional:

examples literary narrative fictional

+ + + Lit. narr. fict.

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+ - +

+ - -

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- + -

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- - - Nonlit. nonnarr. nonfiction

The history of fiction

• Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957)

• Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel (1988)• Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the

Novel (1996)

NovelIn: J. A. Cuddon: Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory.

London: Penguin, 1999

Derived from Italian novella, 'tale, piece of news‘applied to a wide variety of writings

only common attribute is that they are extended pieces of prose fiction

The length of novels varies greatly when is a novel not a novel or a long short-story or a short novel or a novella?

Fewer and fewer rulesin contemporary practice a novel is between 60-70.000 words and, say, 200.000.

Cuddon Novel

The actual term 'novel' has had a variety of meanings andimplications at different stages.

From roughly the 15th to the 18th c. its meaning tended toderive from the Italian novella and the Spanish novela (theFrench term nouvelle, is closely related)

The term (often used in a plural sense) denoted short stories ortales of the kind one finds in Boccaccio's Decameron (c. 134951). Nowadays we would classify all the contents of these asshort stories.

CuddonNovel /novelty

The term denoted a prose narrative about characters and theiractions in what was recognizably everyday life and usually in thepresent, with the emphasis on things being 'new' or a 'novelty'.

It was used in contradistinction to 'romance'.

In the 19th c. the concept of 'novel' was enlarged.

CuddonNovel

A form of story or prose narrative containingcharacters, action and incident and, perhaps, aplot

CuddonNovel

The form - susceptible to change anddevelopment

Pliable and adaptable to a seemingly endless variety of topic and themes

A wide range of sub-species or categories.

CuddonNovel

The subject matter of the novel eludes classification.A number of these classifications shade off into each other.

or example, psychological novel is a term which embracesmany books; proletarian, propaganda and thesis novels tend tohave much in common; the picaresque narrative is often a novelof adventure; a saga novel may also be a regional novel.

CuddonNovel

The origins of the genre are obscure

but in the time of the XIIth Dynasty MiddleKingdom (c. 1200 BC) Egyptians were writingfiction of a kind which one would describe as anovel today

CuddonNovel

From Classical times

Daphnis and Chloe (2nd c. BC) by LongusThe Golden Ass (2nd c. AD) by ApuleiusSatyricon (1st c. AD) of Petronius Arbiter

Most of these are concerned with love and contain therudiments of novels as we understand them today

CuddonNovel

Oriental prose fiction

Arabian Nights‘ Entertainments, or The Thousand and OneNights, 10th c. the collection, collected and established as a group of stories probably by an Egyptian professional story-tellerat some time between the 14th and 16th c.

Became known in Europe early in the 18th c., since when theyhave had a considerable influence.

CuddonNovel

Collections of novella or short talesItaly -Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349–52, revised 1370–1371)

had much influence on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (late 14th c.)

Matteo Bandello’s Le Novelle (written between 1510 and 1560)France -Marguerite of Navarre‘ Heptaméron (published in 1558)

These were integrated short stories but important as they werein proseIn their method of narration and in their creation anddevelopment of character they are forerunners of the modernnovel

CuddonNovel

Until the 14th c. most of the literature of entertainment (and thenovel is usually intended as an entertainment) was confined tonarrative verse, particularly the epic and the romance.

Romance eventually yielded the word roman, which is the termfor novel in most European languages.

In some ways the novel is a descendant of the medievalromances, which, in the first place, like the epic, were written inverse and then in prose (e.g. Malory's Morte D'Arthur, 1485).

Verse narratives had been supplanted by prose narratives by theend of the 17th c.

CuddonNovel

Spain - was ahead of the rest of Europe in the development ofThe novel form. Cervantes's Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) satirizedchivalry and a number of the earlier novels

In France Rabelais's Gargantua (1534) and Pantagruel (1532)can be classed as novels of phantasy, or mythopoeic

CuddonNovel

England, end of the 15th c., extended prose narrative:John Lyly's Euphues (in two parts, 1578 and 1580Sir Philip Sidney's pastoral romance Arcadia (1590).

1719 – Daniel Defoe published his story of adventure RobinsonCrusoe, one in a long tradition of desert island fiction

Defoe's other two main contributions to the novel form wereMoll Flanders (1722), a sociological novel, and A Journal of thePlague Year (1722) – a reconstruction and thus a piece ofhistorical fiction

Books on Fiction

Booth, Wayne: The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second edition. London: Penguin, 1991 (1983)

Lodge, David: The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin, 1992

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith: Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London and New York: Methuen, 1983

Sub-genres

Integrated short storiesArabian Nights' Entertainments, or The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio: DecameronJames Joyce: Dubliners

Sub-genresRomance

any sort of stroy of chivalry or of loveCervantes: Don Quixote (1605-1615)Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th c.)Thomas Malory: Le Morte D’Arthur (15th c.)

Pastoral romanceLongus: Daphnis and Chloe (2nd c. A.D.)Philip Sidney: Arcadia (1590)

Anti-pastoral:Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895)

Sub-genres

Picaresque noveltells the life of a knave or a picaroon who is the servant of severel mastersDaniel Defoe: Moll Flanders (1722)Henry Fielding: Jonathan Wild (1743)

Sub-genresNovel of adventure / desert island novel

related to te picaresque novel and the romanceDaniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719)R.L. Stevenson: Treasure Island (1883)Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer (1876)

Huckleberry Finn (1885)James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

Sub-genresGothic novel

a type of romance, popular from the 1760s until the 1820s, has terror and cruelty as main themes, impact on the ghost story and the horror storyHorace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764Ann Radcliffe: Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey (1818)Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (1861)R. L. Stevenson: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Dracula, doppelgänger

Sub-genresEpistolary novel

in the form of letters, popular in the 18th c.Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740) and Clarissa

Harlowe (1747, 1748)Tobias Smollett: Humphrey Clinker (1771)

Sub-genres

Sentimental novel / novel of sentimentalitypopular in the 18th c., distresses of the virtuous Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740)Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

Sentimentality in fictionLaurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey (1768)

Sub-genresHistorical novel

a form of fictional narrative which reconstructs history imaginativelyWalter Scott: Waverly (1814)William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair (1847-48)Robert Graves: I, Claudius (1934)William Golding: Rites of Passage (1980)

Sub-genres

Documentary novelbased on documentary evidence in the shape of newspapee article, etc.Truman Capote: In Cold Blood (1966)Graham Greene: The Quiet American (1955)

Sub-genres

Key novelactual persons are presented under fictitious namesAldous Huxley: Point Counter Point (1928) (D. H. Lawrence)

Sub-genres

thesis / sociological / propaganda noveltreats of a social, political, religious problemHarriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

the condition of England novel /regional novelCharles Dickens: Hard Times (1854)Charlotte Brontë: Shirley (1849)

Sub-genres

Utopia[gr. Ou + topos = no place adn eutopia = place where all is well]Thomas More: Utopia (1516)George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735)William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)

Anti-utopia, dystopiaScience fictionPhantasy or fantasy

Sub-genresCampus novel

has a university campus as settingMary McCarthy: The Groves of Academe (1952)Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim (1954)David Lodge: Changing Places (1975)

Sub-genres

The saga / chronicle novelnarrative about the life of a large familyJohn Galsworthy: Forsyte Saga (1906-1921)

Sub-genres

Time novelemploys stream of consciousness technique, time is used as a themeJames Joyce: Ulysses (1922)Marcel Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927)

Sub-genres

Psychological novelconcerned with emotional, mental lives of the charactersVirginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Building blocks of narrative

• types of character (»roles)• types of event• types of lack and restoration • types of getting from beginning to end

(How do you know it is the end of the story?)• types of setting• types of narrator

Characters

characterization: round vs flat characters E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

stereotypes: characters based on conscious or unconscious cultural assumptions that sex, age, ethnic or national identification, occupation, marital status and so on, are predictably accompanied by certain character traits, actions, even values

Arrangement of events

• with a particular kind of beginning and ending orientation, closure, coda

• usually told for a purpose• typically about change:

situation A changes to situation Black leads to

restoration

Structure

structure: connecting elements, repetition, parallelism

selection, connection, ordering of information leading to a recognitionmoving to illuminate the beginning

by the ending

SettingThe space where the narrative takes place:

rural setting, urban setting, nature scenes, country houses etc.

Settings often echo or emphasize other features: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)

Yorkshire moorsWuthering Heights ↔Thrushcross Grange

Earnshaws Lintons harsh, rough warm, soft, civilised

Space and Time

James Joyce, Ulyesses (1922)Dublin, 16 June 1904

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)London, a single day in June,

after WWI

Narrator, narration

narrator: one who tells a story within/outside the space and time of story

Who tells the story? To whom? Why? How?

narration: narrative perspective: point of viewauthor ≠ author's persona (mask) ≠ narrator

(Samuel Clemens vs Mark Twain)

Narrator, narration, narrative• account of a sequence of connected events • told by a narrator

what happened vs how it is told 'story' 'narration'

Narration - rearranges the order of eventse.g., flashback: historical time vs narrated

order - sets up relations between events

e.g., cause and effect

Narrative perspective

• viewing aspect: focus like a movie camera:

choosing, framing, emphasizing, distorting

limited/unlimited (omniscient narrator) stand back: dramatic focus • verbal aspect: voice

Point of view• visual perspective• ideological framework• basic types of narration: 1st person (I-narration)

3rd person (they-narration) e.g., 'window' on text: seems objective

internal vs external restricted knowledge vs unrestricted knowledge(seemed, looked as if)• texts with instability of point of view: watch out for

WHO experiences and WHAT is experienced

Focalization

• external focalization: unidentified narrator• character focalization: a character experiencesfocalizer: the one who is lookingfocalized: what is being focussed on

expression and construction of types of consciousness and self-consciousness

Shifting narrative viewpoints, several narrators:Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)

Narratology

the study of narrative in literatureEarly examples in the 20th century: Vladimir Propp (Russian Formalist)

Morphology of the Folktale (1928)Claude Lévi-Strauss (Structuralist)

Anthropologie Structurale (1958) (myths)

Gérard Genette, Narrative discourse (1972)

Gérard Genette’s system

Based on the distinction between story and plot (fabula and syuzhet in Russian formalism)

- récit (the chronological order of events in a text or narrative)

- histoire (the sequence in which events actually occur)

- narration (the act of narrating) (Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, 1972)

Genette’s system

narrative: the result of the interaction of its component levels3 basic kinds of narrator:

- narrator is absent from his own narrative((‘heterodiegetic narrator’))

- narrator is inside his narrative (1st person) ((‘homodiegetic narrator’))

- narrator is inside his narrative and also main character ((‘autodiegetic narrator’))

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

France: from structuralism to poststructuralismattempt to describe narrative as a formal system

based on the model of a grammar‘The death of the Author’ (essay from 1967)

(against the concept of the author as a way

of forcing a meaning on to a text)S/Z (1970) a critical reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine

text open to interpretation

Task

What can you notice about the following excerpts? (Can you guess the period, the author, the work?)

How is the weather defining the beginning of the book in Chapter 1?

What do we find out about the narrator from the way Mrs Fairfax is introduced in Ch 12?

How is the introduction of the people in Moor house different in Ch 30?

Do you notice anything special about the way the last chapter, Ch 38 begins?

Chapter 1

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs Reed, when there was no company, dined early), the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.

(Penguin Classics edition, p 39)

Chapter 12

The promise of a smooth career, which my first calm introduction to Thornfield Hall seemed to pledge, was not belied on a longer acquaintance with the place and its inmates. Mrs. Fairfax turned out to be what she appeared, a placid-tempered, kind-natured woman, of competent education and average intelligence. My pupil was a lovely child; who had been spoilt and indulged (140)

Chapter 30

The more I knew of the inmates of Moor House, the better I liked them. In a few days I have so far recovered my health that I could sit up all day, and walk out sometimes. I could join with Diana and Mary in all their occupations, converse with them as much as they wished, and aid them when and where they would allow me. There was a reviving pleasure in this intercourse, of a kind now tasted by me for the first time – the pleasure arising from perfect congeniality of tastes, sentiments, and principles. (376)

Chapter 38

Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present. When we got back from church, I went into the kitchen of the manor house, where Mary was cooking the dinner, and John cleaning the knives, and I said –

‘Mary, I have been married to Mr Rochester this morning.’ (474)