Narrative Texts Flashcards
First-person narrative situation
- narrating I, I as protagonist
- limited perspective
- extent and variation of the temporal and cognitive distance between the narrating I and the experiencing I
- shares the characters’ world
„Only the internal processs, thoughts and feelings of the narrating and experiencing I can be related”
Authorial narrative situation
- concrete, tangible speakers
- omnipresent/omniscient
- looks at the character’s world form the outside but can also look into characters
“The authorial narrator mediated between the world of character and that of the reader, creating the illusion of a fictional world but also breaking it by intrusive comments and reader addresses.”
Figural narrative situation
- Refers to a character’s perspective
- character serves as a reflector of the fictional world
- usually covert narrator
- “narrated world is presented from the perspective of the ‘reflector’, who functions as a medium or center of orientation, whose perceptions and internal processes play a central role in determining what is narrated”
- events are presented through a character’s perspective in the third person
story
chronological sequence of narrated events
Constituents of narrative texts
- narrativity = they have a plot
- mediacy (narrative transmission) -> whatever happens is being recounted
- experientially = the ability of narrative texts to give expression to human experiences by means of their narrative structure; “quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience’”
Constituents of the narrated world
- temporal and spatial structures
- various objects which exist within the world
- characters
Characterisation (esp. in narrative texts)
- additional level of narrative transmission compared to drama
- characterisation by the narrator
- reliability of character must be taken into account
narrator perspective
impression formed by the recipient concerning the personality of the narrator on the basis of information contained through the text, primarily explained through the values and norms adopted by the narrator
ab avo beginning
- detailed development of the plot with plenty of introductory and antecedent information
- typically commencing with the birth of the protagonist
in medias res beginning
the launch of the narrative somewhere in the middle of action
in ultimas res beginning
beginning with the end of the story and gradually revealing the conditions of the beginning
closed ending
ending with all problems solved and the plot concluded in a logical manner
open ending
conflict unresolved and the fate of the characters left open
expected ending
‘poetic justice’ or a fair allocation of reward and the punishment is brought to bear upon the characters
ex machina ending
ending results from unexpected intervention of an external agency, which has not been involved in the plot up to this point
narrative situation
the structure of narrative transmission
used to describe the way in which characters, events, plot elements or internal, psychological processes are presented in narrative texts
Stanzel’s model of three typical narrative situations
mode: narrator (explicit narration by a narrator persona) /reflector (presentation through the consciousness of a protagonist)
person: first person/third person
perspective: internal/external perspective
Genette’s Structuralist Taxonomy
- Who speaks?/Who narrates? (voice)
- Who sees? From whose perspective is the fictional world presented? (focalizer) -> includes all sensory processes
- includes cognitive, emotive and ideological orientation
narrator = gives a linguistic account of the fictional world
focalizer (Genette)
- a psychological center of orientation through whose perceptions and consciousness the fictional events are filtered
extradiegetic narrator
located on the level of the narrative transmission and, together with the fictive addressee, constitute the narrative process
intradiegetic narrator
part of the narrated story, located on the level of the story–> narrating characters p.e. in a framing narrative
homodiegetic narrator
narrator appears as a character within his own story, corresponds with Stanzel’s first person narrator
Autodiegetic narrator = identical with the main protagonist
heterodiegetic narrator
located outside the narrated world
overt narrator
on the level of narrative transmission as individualized speaker, give comments that guide the reader’s understanding
covert narrator
a voice that passes on information, passes the task of evaluating the story to the reader
fixed focalization
restricted to one and the same perspective
multiple focalization
same event is presented from several different perspectives
variable focalization
different scenes are presented through different perspectives
internal focalization
limiting the information to the perception of one individual:
- character-focalizer
- limited observer
- knows only the present
narrator’s knowledge = character’s knowledge
external focalization
- narrator-focalizer
- information about character’s external behaviour (speech and action) without presenting their feelings or thoughts
narrator’s knowledge < character’s knowledge
zero focalization
- perspective cannot be attributed to an individual character or has no restrictions
- bird’s eye
- knows present, past & future of characters
narrator’s knowledge > character’s knowledge
narratology
- methodological tool of analysis
- interested less in the interpretation of texts and more concerned with the questions of what and how something is narrated
showing mode
mimetic; narrative evokes the impression in readers that they are shown the events of the story or that they somehow witness them; also called narrative with small distance
telling mode
narrative evokes the impression in readers that the are told about the events; also called narrative with large distance
interior monologue
- direct representation of thought/mental images
- quoted without any mediating instance
- extensive use of the first-person singular
- or fragmentary as stream of consciousness (describes the content of the monologue)
diegetic summary
the bare report that a speech act has occurred, without any specification of what was said or how it was said
e.g. “When Charly got a little gin inside him he started telling war yarns for the first time in his life.”
summary, less purely diegetic
= summary which to some degree represents, not merely mentions, a speech event in that it names the topics of conversation
e.g. “He stayed till late in the evening telling them about miraculous conversions of unbelievers, extreme unction on the firing line, a vision of the young Christhe’d seen walking among the wounded in a dressingstation during a gas attack”
indirect content paraphrase/indirect discourse
= a paraphrase of the content of a speech event, ignoring the style or form of the supposed ‘original’ utterance
e.g. “The waiter told him that Carranza’s troops had lost Torréon and that Villa and Zapata were closing in on the Federal District.”
indirect discourse, mimetic to some degree
creates the illusion of ‘preserving’ or reproducing aspects of the style of an utterance beyond the mere report of its content
e.g. “When they came out Charley said by heck he thought he wanted to go up to Canada and enlist and go over and see the Great War.”
free indirect discourse
= grammatically and mimetically intermediate between indirect and direct discourse
e.g. “Why the hell shouldn’t they know, weren’t they off’n her and out to see the goddam town and he’d better come along.”
- Narrator refers to the character in third person and reports character’s thoughts using the character’s mind style
- ‘combined speech’, not only the co-presence of two voices but also that of the narrator’s voice and a character’s pre-verbal perception or feeling
- on the border of showing and telling: mixes the narrator’s and the character’s voices
direct discourse
= a ‘quotation’ of a monologue or a dialogue. This creates the illusion of ‘pure’ mimesis, although it is always stylized in one way or another
e.g. “Fred Summers said, ‘Fellers, this war’s the most gigantic cockeyed graft of the country and me for it and the cross and red nurses.’
free direct discourse
= direct discourse short of its conventional orthographic cues. This is the typical form of first-person interior monologue
e.g. “Fainy’s head suddenly got very light. Bright boy, that’s me, ambition and literary taste… Gee, I must finish looking backward […]”
extradiegetic narrative level
narrator of the first-degree or diegetic events
intradiegetic narrative level
narrator of the second degree or hypodiegetic events - story within a story
embedded narratives
narrative within a frame narrative; two narrators present
story time
denotes the temporal duration of the action that is described in the course of the narrative text
discourse time
period of time required in order to narrate or read a text
order
discrepancy between story-order and text-order: anachronous (flashbacks/retrospection = analepsis and foreshadowing/anticipation = prolepsis)
duration
- acceleration (summary/speed-up) = a short segment of the text is devoted to a long period of the story
- deceleration (stretch/slow-down) = a long segment of the text is devoted to a short period of the story
- ellipsis (omission): zero textual space corresponds to some story duration
- scene = effacement of narrator, use of dialogue but not a play: st=dt
frequency
generaly singulative (telling once what happened once) versus repetitive (telling n times what happened once) or iterative (telling once what happened n times)