Journal articles on the topic 'Autodiegetics'

In spite of the prominence acquired by dialogues among characters in creating a series, we cannot ignore that radio speech can be represented in turn by the narrators’s presence. For this reason, in the present article the emblematic Taxi Key detective series has been selected as an object of study, in order to determine the narrators’s appearance percentage in the series episodes, the narrator’s typology that prevails and the main functions that plays in this fictional product. It is an exploratory study in which descriptive and inferential analyzes have been made from Taxi Key original radio scripts. The results of the study reveal that narrator’s presence reaches the most significant prevalence in the episodes of the sample, being the autodiegetic narrator who stands as the most frequent type of narrator. Providing contextual information, acting as a nexus and transition device between scenes and assessing the characters or incorporating them on stage are the narrator’s functions that prevail in this series that remained almost twenty years on Radio Barcelona network. Keywords: Series; Taxi Key; Radio Script; Detective Fiction Genre; Storyteller; Autodiegetic.

Penelitian ini ditujukan untuk mendeskripsikan bagaimana peran narator ditampilkan dalam karya haruki murakami yang berjudul noruwei no mori (1991). dalam karya itu, narator ditampilkan melalui "boku/aku" yang sekaligus berperan sebagai tokoh utama. Teori yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah persona dan fokalisasi dari Gerard Genette. hasil penelitian atas novel ini adalah membuktikan peran narator dengan persona homodiegetik dan narator autodiegetik.

Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (1988) bends narrative boundaries to the extreme. This article analyses the novel’s postmodern metatextuality, its confrontation of high culture and mass culture, its exploration of recursive thought processes, its inclusion of constantly shifting time references, and the function of its autodiegetic narrator. Special attention is given to the use of the footnote as a narrative device as it allows Baker to develop Gérard Genette’s concept of narrative metalepsis. Because of the unique way these advanced narrative resources are interwoven, the novel deserves wider academic attention as a milestone in contemporary literature in English.

This article focuses on the first novel by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus (2003). It examines how religious prejudice is encoded in the account of the book’s autodiegetic narrator, a fifteen-year-old girl whose father is a violent, extremist Igbo Catholic. Based on a close reading of the text, the essay argues that an analysis of the novel’s use of speech and thought presentation may contribute to the assessment of the main character’s evolving ideological stance. It is suggested that the resulting appraisal of the narrator’s development provides key insights into the interpretation of the book.

This article analyses gendered genealogies in an example of North African Jewish women’s writing in French: Paule Darmon’s Baisse les yeux, Sarah (1980), which draws heavily on the author’s personal experience. This autofictional novel recounts the chequered personal history of autodiegetic narrator Sarah Lévy, born to an Algerian father and a Moroccan mother, and raised in Morocco until the age of 17 when her family leave for France. The articles focuses on a three-generational female genealogy of Moroccan-Jewish women, and its problematic relationship with the stereotypical Eastern model of woman. Sarah’s ambivalence towards her matrilineal heritage throws into relief the fault lines that can occur in lines of descent. Although allied with her mother in the latter’s partial rejection of female oppression, she is also sensitive to her mother’s always already subaltern and therefore undesirable status as doubly stigmatized object – female and Oriental – within the French colonial discourses internalized by her father.

AbstractThis article considers the “narrating-I” in African American fiction, reexamining its significance for narratological and sociopolitical theorizations of literature. First-person narratives can normally be understood as autodiegetic, in which the narrators present their experiences from their own perspectives at the expense of access to the viewpoints of other characters. However, African American narratives sometimes present their readers with first-person narrators who are seemingly more omniscient. Able to slip across the boundaries that demarcate their experience from that of others, these narrators can adopt the subject positions of other characters, shifting narrative focalization in ways that would normatively be impossible. Unlike “we” narratives that rely on the first-person plural to evoke collective storytelling, these works pluralize an otherwise singular narrator into a different sort of collective multiplicity. This paper argues that this plurality and multiplicity problematize the limitations of first-person narration, and in so doing resonate with issues surrounding the sociopolitical imagining of community. Through an investigation into the innovative narrative structures of John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday, this paper thus hopes to contribute to ongoing conversations in narrative studies by reassessing its standard narrative frameworks, as well as argue for the applicability of narratology to contemporary sociopolitical thought.

This article analyzes Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, a rewriting of Homeric epic, The Odyssey. Atwood rewrites the story — the saga of gallantry and triumphalism of Odysseus, with narrative shift that brings postmodern irony and parody, self-reflexivity and metafiction, and intertextuality and paratextuality into play. The article tries explore if Atwood’s shifting of narrative orientation of the Homeric epic yields any different and substantial reception and interpretation of the epic in the recent context.Moreover, I demonstrate how Atwood’s reconstruction and subsequently the empowerment of the minor characters unfolds the incompatibilities and discrepancies the official version of Homer’s epic, and brings the marginal voice to the front by granting a variety of narrative access.I argue, giving subject positions to silent agents and using various genres of expression, for instance, history and myth, Atwood, through the deployment of an autodiegetic narrative, brings together gender, genre and language in such a way that results in a decisive shift in conceptualizing the narrative structure for the marginal voice and agency female characters. The article concludes that why rereading of classical and canonical text is crucial to bring the marginals’ claim to a subject position, and produce a different language and literature that allows space for expression subjectivity of characters on the margins

Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in England in 1884 and a year later in the US, is paradoxical in that it is one of most frequently censored books of world literature – and, concurrently, one of the most frequently read and praised. The following article will try to explain this paradox and, in a first step, address the history of the novel’s censorship and the (various) reasons given for it. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has undergone censorship since its first publication, and even today it is included in the list of »Banned and Challenged Books« of ALA (American Library Association). What are, in fact, reasons for banning the book? And how are these reasons questioned by defenders of the book? Which strategies are used? Since the novel’s publication, those who have completely dismissed the book and those who have appreciated it as a »masterpiece« have opposed each other. An overview of these controversies will result in a close reading of one of the most debated chapters in the novel, with a focus on the autodiegetic narrator Huck, who has been characterized as a naïve child that simply does not know any better, as a »fallible narrator«, or as a liar. But it remains doubtful whether the narrator’s weakness is the answer to the question of Huck’s alleged racism. The paper will offer alternative roads into the novel that consider both the text and the context of its origin.

<p>Todas las acciones de los cuentos sobre Dan Turner, escritos por Robert Leslie Bellem para las revistas pulp<em>, </em>transcurren en el contexto de la industria cinematográfica hollywoodense. Este artículo indaga en las diversas situaciones criminales y en los tipos de personajes que aparecen en esta serie detectivesca: estrellas de cine, dobles, productores, agentes, extras, una infinidad de glamurosas starlets<em>…,</em> de los que el narrador autodiegético (es decir, el detective protagonista) proyecta una imagen nada idealizada.</p><p>This article examines some characteristics of the series about Dan Turner written Robert Leslie Bellem.<br />In these short stories, crime, intrigue, detective investigation, sexual content and satire are mixed with a colorful and colloquial linguistic style. All their actions take place in the context of the Hollywood<br />film industry (of which Bellem had personal knowledge). So this irreverent detective’s mysteries are also linked to the genre category which we call "Hollywood narrative", which emerges over the course<br />of the silent film era. In this sense, the work researches the types of characters that appear in these short stories -film stars, stuntmen, producers, agents, extras, an endless array of glamorous female<br />starlets…-, all of whom are depicted by an autodiegetic narrator (that is, the detective-protagonist) in a clearly non-idealized and funny fashion.<br /><br /></p>

ResumenTomando como modélica la tradición “Dónde y cómo el diablo perdió el poncho”, se analiza, bajo el enfoque narratológico, el estilo palmista, incidiendo en los elementos de creación literaria: construcción de personajes y manejo de las dimensiones temporal y espacial, sin dejar de lado la dimensión aspectual que encierra la temática y las circunstancias producidas después del proceso de desrealización operado en el texto. Este balance pone de manifiesto la extraordinaria capacidad creativa de Palma para ficcionalizar historias, para mostrarnos, en este caso, una Ica textual que, sin dejar su esencia paisajística y la idiosincrasia de sus personajes, se convierte en otra Ica, que aloja protagonistas y antagonistas en unadimensión espacio-temporal inédita.Palabras clave: Construcción de personajes, dimensión espacial, dimensión temporal, dimensión aspectual, desrealización, narratología, ficcionalizar, decodificación, narrador autodiegético, diégesis,temporalización anacrónica. AbstractTaking as a model the tradition “Dónde y cómo el diablo perdió el poncho”, the style of Palma is analyzed, under the narratological approach, focusing on the following elements of literary creation: construction of characters and handling of the temporal and spatial dimensions, without leaving aside the aspectual dimension contained in the theme and the circumstances produced after the unrealisation process operated in the text. This balance shows Palma’s extraordinary creative capacity to fictionalize stories, to show us, in this case, a textual Ica that, without leaving its landscape essence and the idiosyncrasy of its characters, becomes another Ica, which houses protagonists and antagonists in an unprecedented spatiotemporal dimension. Keywords: Construction of characters, spatial dimension, temporal dimension, aspectual dimension, derealization, narratology, fictionalization, decoding, autodiegetic narrator, digesis, anachronistic temporalization.

O presente artigo tem como objetivo apresentar uma análise a partir do viés memorialístico procurando situar a obra publicada em 1979, Os Cus de Judas, de António Lobo Antunes, como um romance de caráter testemunhal. Na obra, o autor descreve os vinte e sete meses em que combateu na guerra das colônias portuguesas situadas na África. Através de um narrador autodiegético, ele relembra seus tempos de criança e sua longa jornada na idade adulta como médico das Forças Armadas Portuguesa. Neste romance, Lobo Antunes provoca a diluição da tênue linha que separa ficção e realidade, o que se caracteriza pelo dilema presente no gênero testemunhal. A análise se deu a partir de autores como Assmann (2011), Derrida (2004), Lobo Antunes (2008), Reis (2005), Lejeune (2008), Seligmann-Silva (2003 e 2010) e Pollak (1989 e 1992). *** Testimonial: between fiction and reality. An analysis of António Lobo Antunes’ novel, Os Cus de Judas ***The present work aims to present an analysis from the memorialist perspective seeking to frame António Lobo Antunes’ book, published in 1979, The Land at the End of the World, in 2011, as a testimonial character novel. In his work, the author describes 27 months during which he fought in the Portuguese Colonial War in Africa. Through an autodiegetic narrative, the author recollects his infant memories and his long journey at adult age as an army doctor by the Portuguese troops. In this novel, Lobo Antunes provokes the dilution of the thin line between fiction and reality, which is a characteristic of the testimonial genre’s dilemma. The analysis is based upon authors such as Assmann (2011), Derrida (2004), Lobo Antunes (2008), Reis (2005), Lejeune (2008), Seligmann-Silva (2003 and 2010) and Pollak (1989 e 1992).Keywords: The Land at the End of the World; romance; testimony; fiction; reality.

Abstract This paper explores why unreliable narration should be considered as a concept not only applying to single works of fiction, but also to whole series of fiction, and why impersonal (›omniscient‹) narration can also be suspected of unreliability. Some literary genres show a great affinity to unreliable narration. In fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), for instance, the reader’s »hesitation« towards which reality system rules within the fictive world often is due to the narration of an autodiegetic narrator whose credibility is not beyond doubt. Detective stories, in contrast, are usually set in a purely realistic world (in conflict with no other reality system) and typically do not foster any doubts regarding the reliability of their narrators. The only unreliable narrators we frequently meet in most detective stories are suspects who, in second level narrations, tell lies in order to misdirect the detective’s enquiries. Their untruthfulness is usually being uncovered at the end of the story, in the final resolution of the criminalistics riddle (›Whodunnit‹?), as part of the genre-typical ›narrative closure‹. As the new genre of detective novels emerged at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, its specific genre conventions got more and more well-established. This made it possible for writers to playfully change some of these readers’ genre expectations – in order to better fulfil others. Agatha Christie, for example, in 1926 dared to undermine the »principle of charity« (Walton) that readers give to the reliability of first person narrators in detective stories – especially when such a narrator shows himself as being a close friend to the detective at work, as it was the case with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Dr. Watson, friend to Sherlock Holmes. Christie dared to break this principle by establishing a first-person narrator who, at the end, turns out to be the murderer himself. Thus, she evades the »principle of charity«, but is not being penalised by readers and critics for having broken this one genre convention because she achieves a very astonishing resolution at the end of the case and thus reaches to fulfil another and even more crucial genre convention, that of a surprising ›narrative closure‹, in a very new and satisfying way. Fantastic literature and detective novels are usually two clearly distinct genres of narrative fiction with partly incommensurate genre conventions. Whereas in fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), two reality systems collide, leaving the reader in uncertainty about which one of the two finally rules within the fictive world, detective novels usually are settled in a ›simply realistic‹ universe. Taking a closer look at a contemporary series of detective fiction, that is, the Dublin stories of Tana French (2007–), I will turn to an example in which the genre convention of ›intraserial coherence‹ provides evidence for the unreliability of the different narrators – whereas with regard only to each single volume of the series, each narrator could be perceived as being completely reliable. As soon as we have several narrators telling stories that take place within the same fictive world, unreliable narration can result from inconsistencies between the statements of the different narrators about what is fictionally true within this universe. Additionally, the Tana French example is of special interest for narratology because in one of the volumes, an impersonal and seemingly omniscient narrator appears. Omniscient narration is usually being regarded as incompatible with unreliability, but, as Janine Jacke has already shown, in fact is not: Also impersonal narration can mire in contradictions and thus turn out to be unreliable. With regard to Tana French’s novel, I would add that it can also be mistrusted because the utterances of this narration can conflict with those of other narrators in other volumes of the same series. So in the light of serial narration, the old question of whether impersonal narration (or an omniscient narrator) can be unreliable at all should be reconsidered. In the case of narrative seriality, the evidence for ascribing unreliability to one of its alternating narrators need not be found in the particular sequel narrated by her/him but in other sequels narrating about events within the same story world. Once again, narrative unreliability turns out to be a category rather of interpretation than of pure text analysis and description. Again, Tana French like previously Agatha Christie is not being penalised by readers and critics for having broken this one genre convention of letting her detective stories take place in a purely ›realistic‹ universe because today, genre conventions are merging more and more. Tana French achieves an even more tempting ›narrative tension‹ by keeping her readers in continuous uncertainty about whether a little bit of magic might be possible in the otherwise so quotidian world of her fictive detectives. Thus, the author metafictionally (and, later also overtly) flirts with the genre of »urban fantasy«, practicing a typical postmodern merging of well-established, hitherto distinct popular genres.

This paper examines how Charlotte Brontë's belief in phrenology influences the narration of her novel Jane Eyre. Phrenology was a nineteenth-century belief that the shape of the skull could give information about a person's temperament. Phrenologists speculated that the brain was split into separate parts, or faculties, that defined the individual's ability to feel a particular emotion. A bump on the skull implied that the faculty underneath that part of the skull was bigger, so the individual was more inclined to feel that emotion. By placing Jane Eyre within the historical context of the rise of phrenology, I explore the ways in which Brontë's phrenological representation of Jane's mind informs and parallels the autodiegetic narration of Jane Eyre. My analysis focuses on moments when Jane draws attention to the fact that she is a first-person narrator telling the story of her own past experiences. I argue that these moments are comparable to those when Jane’s experiencing-self is fractured into phrenological faculties. Concomitantly, I seek to trace how Jane's narration changes as she moves between the locations of Thornfield, the Moor House, and Ferndean. I suggest that the shifts in narration draw attention to these locations as metaphors for varying degrees of restriction on Jane's faculties. Through an application of nineteenth-century psychological studies, I conclude that Brontë uses her narration style to criticize phrenologists who promote an unnaturally restrictive control of the faculties.

RiassuntoQuesta lettura cursoria si propone di trattare il fondamentale problema del giudizio etico sul viaggio atlantico di Ulisse partendo dall’assunto che lo stesso Ulisse viene destinato da Dante alla condanna infernale e che le ragioni di tale scelta punitiva sono tuttora estremamente discusse dalla critica. Dal racconto autodiegetico dell’ultima azione della sua vita emerge l’immagine di un Ulisse viaggiatore ›inconsapevole‹: un uomo temerario di epoca precristiana, a cui manca necessariamente, così come al suo interlocutore Virgilio, qualsiasi tipo di ancoraggio teologico e di fede nella salvezza ultraterrena. Sulla base soprattutto della situazione comunicativa instauratasi nel canto XXVI, che esclude ›Dante‹, pellegrino consapevole, dal colloquio del poeta epico pagano con gli eroi epici dell’antichità precristiana, si mette qui in evidenza come il canto intenda fornire l’esplicita rappresentazione di un dislivello informativo escatologicamente determinato (ed escatologicamente determinante). Soltanto all’orizzonte conoscitivo cristiano si dischiude la consapevolezza che il pagano Ulisse, scaltrito e abilissimo negli inganni, si converte con la sua traversata marittima in un uomo ingannato e fuorviato, al quale la cognizione del vero significato del proprio agire rimane costantemente inattingibile persino nell’inferno.

Tras presentar la novela de Stephen Marlowe The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus (1987) como un ejemplo prototípico de ‘metaficción historiográfica’, este artí- culo estudia las características que la alejan de la tradición norteamericana. La posición de un personaje histórico como narrador autodiegético y crítico de sus propios biógrafos trae consigo una radicalización de los ataques contra la autoridad, eficiencia y “objetividad” de la Historia convencionalmente vertidos por la metaficción historiográfica. Marlowe utiliza esta estrategia innovadora para llevar más allá no sólo la deslegitimación de la historiografía tradicional, sino también el desafío auto-deconstructivo de los conceptos de autoridad y autoría en la propia novela de Marlowe.Palabras clave: Historia, metaficción historiográfica, inestabilidad temporal, autoridad.Abstract:After presenting Stephen Marlowe’s 1987 The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus as a prototypical example of ‘historiographic metafiction,’ this paper focuses on the features that make it a special case in the U.S. trend of postmodern historical novel. The positioning of a historical personage as autodiegetic narrator and critic of earlier historiography on his life and enterprise brings about a radicalization of the attacks upon the authority, efficiency and ‘objectivity’ of History. This innovative strategy is used to further not only the novel’s de-legitimatization of traditional historiography but also the self-deconstructive challenge it launches against the concepts of authority and authorship in Marlowe’s novel itself.Keywords: History, Historiographic metafiction, temporal instability, authority

AbstractIn describing the position of the narrator, research in literary studies generally follows Gérard Genette’s pioneering theory of narrative in distinguishing between the homo- and heterodiegetic type of narrator. This categorization is not sufficient to allow the position of the narrator to be described properly. The different ways in which the terms are used in literary studies reveal a shortcoming in the distinction behind them. Even in Genette’s work, there is a contradiction between the definition and the names of the two categories: Genette defines homo- and heterodiegesis with reference to the narrator’s presence in the narrated story, whereas he elsewhere states that the diegesis (in the sense of FrenchThe present article aims to do just that, starting from a theoretical standpoint. Thus, the different types of narrator that are possible are sketched in outline, and then explained with the help of examples.I begin by exposing the problems that result from using the terms in Genette’s manner (1), in order then to develop a list of possible narratorial standpoints based on the one hand on the involvement of the narratorial instance in the narrated world and on the other on its involvement in the story. By establishing separation of the two aspects as a ground rule in this way, a number of misunderstandings that are due to the varied ways in which the terminology has been used to date can be overcome.There follows a description of those cases that are unambiguously hetero- and homodiegetic (2), after which the problematic cases are considered (3), yielding the different types of homodiegetic narration that are possible. This latter set of distinctions will, like the others, shed light on the contours of the different narratorial positions and thus be capable of being put profitably into practice in textual interpretation. Accordingly, what is suggested is a way of using the terms that is first unambiguous and second beneficial to the interpretation of works, thus doing justice to the heuristic importance of narratology (see Kindt/Müller 2003; Stanzel 2002, 19).Thus, whereas the concept of diegesis provides the foundation for a distinction based on an ontological criterion that divides homo- and heterodiegesis from each other, the relationship between story and narrator is used to describe various types of homodiegetic narration. In the process, there come to light two types that are distinguished from each other by involvement in events (›homodiegetic, in the story‹ and ›homodiegetic, not in the story‹ narrators). If the narrator is not involved in events, the question arises of whether it would in principle have been possible for him to be involved in events, which is the norm with ›homodiegetic, not in the story‹ narrators, or whether a physical impossibility is the reason for his lack of involvement in the story. A special case of the ›homodiegetic, not in the story‹ narrator can be derived from this: peridiegetic narration: whereas narratorial instances of the ›homodiegetic, in the story‹ and ›homodiegetic, not in the story‹ types could in principle have been involved in the action and those of the ›homodiegetic, in the story‹ type actually were, peridiegetic narrators are marked by the fact that they cannot have been involved in the events.In summary, it will be shown that the concept of homodiegesis – in particular in the form in which it has previously been used, where links with the action and appearance in the story were not kept distinct – is in effect an umbrella term that brings together a number of possible forms. There is a prominent distinction between the ›homodiegetic, in the story‹ and the ›homodiegetic, not in the story‹ types of narrator (these types are represented in the present article by the old lawyer in Leo Perutz’s »The Beaming Moon« and the narrator who is a friend of Nathanael in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s »Sandman« respectively). The different degrees of homodiegetic narrator, which have often been mentioned in previous research and are defined by the strength of the character’s presence in the narrated world (from an uninvolved witness to an autodiegetic protagonist), are also to be situated between these two poles.It will also be shown in the process that the case of the narrator who is, for reasons of physical difference, not involved in events (the peridiegetic narrator) should be treated as a form of homodiegesis (for instance the schoolmaster in Theodor Storm’s