Description
Book SynopsisTwentieth-century narratology fostered the assumption, which distinguishes narratology from previous narrative theories, that all narratives have a narrator. Since the first formulations of this assumption, however, voices have come forward to denounce oversimplifications and dangerous confusions of issues.
Optional-Narrator Theory is the first collection of essays to focus exclusively on the narrator from the perspective of optional-narrator theories.
Sylvie Patron is a prominent advocate of optional-narrator theories, and her collection boasts essays by many prominent scholars—including Jonathan Culler and John Brenkman—and covers a breadth of genres, from biblical narrative to poetry to comics. This volume bolsters the dialogue among optional-narrator and pan-narrator theorists across multiple fields of research. These essays make a strong intervention in narratology, pushing back against the widespread belief among narrative theorists in general and t
Trade Review“This is a strong contribution to a centrally important concept of narrative theory. The essays provide quite rich and varied reasons to question the assumption that every narrative has a narrator, and Sylvie Patron gives a detailed account of the background to this debate in her introduction. Her account is clear, thorough, indeed magisterial.”—Ann Banfield, author of
Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of FictionTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Sylvie Patron
Part 1. Optional-Narrator Theory in Literary Studies
1. Some Problems concerning Narrators of Novels and Speakers of Poems
Jonathan Culler
2. Implied Authors and Imposed Narrators—or Actual Authors?
Brian Boyd
3. Real Authors, Real Narrators, and the Rhetoric of Fiction
Vincenz Pieper
4. Voice and Time
John Brenkman
5. The Narrator: A Historical and Epistemological Approach to Narrative Theory
Sylvie Patron
6. Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Narrator
Robert S. Kawashima
7. The Narrator in Biblical Narratives
Greger Andersson
8. Narrator Theory and Medieval English Narratives
A. C. Spearing
9. Marquis de Sade’s Narrative Despotism:
The Mystified Magistrate and
The Misfortunes of Virtue Marc Hersant
Part 2. Optional-Narrator Theory before and beyond Literature
10. Silent Self and the Deictic Imaginary: Hamburger’s Radical Insight
Mary Galbraith
11. Aesthetic Theory Meets Optional-Narrator Theory
Lars-Åke Skalin
12. The Vanishing Narrator Meets the Fundamental Narrator: On the Literary Historical and Transmedial Limitations of the Narrator Concept
Kai Mikkonen
13. A Paradox of Cinematic Narration
Paisley Livingston
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
