Feminist Narratology

Graham Greene, the twentieth century British author, demonstrated an interest in the
problems of evil, violence and alienation from the very beginning of his writing career. In his
novels he created a unique world of isolation, oppression and mistrust, which was later given
the name of Greeneland. It reflects Greene’s belief in the reality of another world, which is
removed from people in the same way God is, but which undoubtedly exists and represents
the rich material for human imagination to feed on. Since for Greene imagination and
intuition are significantly more important than objective measurement, the ordinary, run-down
and third-rate are given deeper, almost allegorical significance, as the three analysed novels
(The Heart of the Matter, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor) show. As a
consequence of the Greenean method of permeating the facts of reality in an omnipresent
sense of suffering, unhappiness and impending catastrophe, the border between reality and
imagination becomes blurry, fades and finally disappears.
Key words: Greeneland, reality, imagination

You say that [Lucy Snowe] may be thought morbid and weak unless the history of her life be more fully given. . . . i might explain away a few other points but it would be too much like drawing a picture and then writing underneath the name of the object intended to be represented.

As a private personal addressal of the constraints and commitments that muffle the voice of the woman writer, Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence (1988) deals directly with feminist narratological preoccupation with the context of how a woman writes. Deshpande expertly handles the use of the first person homodiegetic narrator to build a sense of intimacy and empathy with the reader, and also to add to the touch of real life authenticity which facilitates the reader's sense of identification with the situations depicted in the novel. As in most women's writing, the plot is minimal, and is restricted to the mind of the narrator, which is the site for the quest for selfhood that formulates the substance of the novel. Shashi Deshpande exploits the flashback and stream of consciousness techniques to their full potential to lay bare the innards of the intimate personal story of a woman. Considering the nature of the subject matter, perhaps this is the only technique permissible. That Long Silence as a representative sample of women's writing exposes stereotypical images of women as meaningless constructions of the male imagination. The novel also shows instances of "reflexive perception" and "inversion" which have been identified as characteristic features of women's writing. Also the presence of a mad woman in the text allows us to interpret the novel from the perspective of When Femi Osofisan in "Warriors of a Failed Utopia" identifies African exiled writers as "disillusioned fugitives" (qtd. in Cazenave and Celerier 131) writing for Europe and America, he could equally well be referring to the elite tribe of Indian writers with foreign credentials investing in foreign audiences, and basking in the warmth of foreign recognition. While glittering awards are no doubt attractive, this paper honours one who dared to remain behind.

This dissertation explores narrative strategies of self-identity in autobiographies by six pioneering women writers, each of whom lost what has traditionally been woman’s place: her home. The accounts of emigration, expatriation, and exile by Anna Brownwell Jameson, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Ada Cambridge, Isak Dinesen, and Alyse Simpson illustrate the implications of this loss, as each woman struggled to recover a sense both of home and of grounded identity. The writings span more than a hundred years, from the 1830s to the 1950s, and tell of lives lived in locations as different as Canada, Australia, and British East Africa (now Kenya), places that variously proved to be confining and/or liberating. By narrating the ways in which identity adapts to and is transformed by a new environment, these texts provide access to the construction and alteration of the self in relation to place. This study probes this process by using the concept of place, rather than the more conventional one of time, as the dominant category of analysis.
My readings are both intertextual and interdisciplinary: they rely on theorizing by sociologists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between place and identity, studies on the same subject by literary scholars, and formulations by women’s autobiography theorists. My investigation reveals, among other discoveries, that the gender-specific aspects of the process of adaptation persistently centre on the notion of homecoming and that they are articulated with reference to the figure of the mother.

3 Дисертацією є рукопис. Робота виконана на кафедрі теорії літератури і порівняльного літературознавства Тернопільського національного педагогічного університету імені Володимира Гнатюка Міністерства освіти і науки, молоді та спорту України. Науковий керівник: кандидат філологічних наук, доцент ПАПУША Ігор Володимирович, Тернопільський національний педагогічний університет імені Володимира Гнатюка, кафедра теорії літератури і порівняльного літературознавства, доцент. Офіційні опоненти: доктор філологічних наук, професор ТКАЧЕНКО Анатолій Олександрович, Київський, національний університет імені Тараса Шевченка, кафедра теорії літератури і компаративістики, професор; кандидат філологічних наук, доцент РУДЕНКО Марта Ігорівна, ПВНЗ «Тернопільський комерційний інститут», кафедра гуманітарних дисциплін, завідувач. Захист відбудеться «____» лютого 2012 року о _____ годині на засіданні спеціалізованої вченої ради К 58.053.02 у Тернопільському національному педагогічному університеті імені Володимира Гнатюка (вул. М. Кривоноса, 2, м. Тернопіль, 46027). З дисертацією можна ознайомитися у бібліотеці Тернопільського національного педагогічного університету імені Володимира Гнатюка (вул. М. Кривоноса, 2, м. Тернопіль, 46027). Автореферат розісланий «____» січня 2012 року. В. о. ученого секретаря Спеціалізованої вченої ради Н.М.Поплавська 4 ЗАГАЛЬНА ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКА РОБОТИ Актуальність теми. Розповідь (наратив) є одним із фундаментальних компонентів соціальної взаємодії та комунікації. Найважливішою характеристикою наративу є його самодостатність і самоцінність. Наратологія як теорія розповіді набула поширення й концептуального наповнення як окрема галузь гуманітарних наук протягом останніх десятиріч ХХ ст. Аналізуючи численні оповіді, вчені-структуралісти прагнули віднайти єдину формальнооповідну модель, тобто структуру чи граматику оповідання, на основі якої кожне конкретне оповідання розглядалося б у термінах відхилення від цієї базової, глибинної структури. Нині наратологія -це фундаментальна наука, яка розглядає тексти, що охоплюють не лише літературу, а й кінематограф, театральну драматургію, психотерапевтичні наративи, юридичні тексти. Праці з наративної теорії ілюструють вплив та поширення розповіді у різноманітних сферах: від лінгвістики до риторичної критики та історичних досліджень. Увага до наративу в літературі та драматичному мистецтві сягає часів Арістотелевої «Поетики», що ще раз доводить тривалість історії дослідження наративів. Але навіть за наявності спільного у мовах і наративах, на комунікативні моделі і структури впливають культурні та ідеологічні відмінності. Дослідження впливу таких факторів є першочерговим завданням у вдосконаленні методів аналізу текстів художньої літератури. Сучасна наратологія під впливом фемінізму зосередила свою увагу на жіночих наративах та теорії мови. Теорії наративу та ґендерної відмінності стали предметом зацікавленості також і для науковців, що досліджують засоби масової інформації у телевізійному просторі, в кіно та у дослідженнях порівняно нових технологій, як мультимедіа та відео. Ґендерні дослідження дають можливість відійти від традиційних літературознавчих і соціально-політичних тлумачень та аналізувати твори з погляду уявлень про «чоловіче» і «жіноче», розглядати їх як конструкти культури, що постійно еволюціонують в історичній перспективі. Ґендерний вимір сприяє виробленню нового погляду на літературний твір, а його інтерпретація з урахуванням ґендерної диференціації забезпечує пошук форм, які б відображали символи жіночого досвіду, формуючи тим самим ґендерну поетику. У дисертації головна увага зосереджується на поєднанні феміністичної та наратологічної методологічних перспектив, що знайшло своє втілення у проекті під назвою «феміністична наратологія». На думку німецького наратолога Ансгара Нюннінга, фемінізм та наратологія, на перший погляд, мають мало спільного через різні інтереси, теоретичні підходи, методологічний апарат. Наратологія, чи то структуралістська, чи постструктуралістська, прагне до поповнення своєї теоретичної бази. З іншого боку, феміністичне бачення наративів активізує історичні, соціальні, культурні та ідеологічні елементи і структури текстів та конструкцій всередині них.

his special issue collects articles that reflect on how the effects of the cultural changes the sixties have produced are still relevant fifty years later. Is there a critical text from that period that has been foundational in forming your critical thinking as feminist narratologist?

The paper aims to examine the extent to which
student-centred ESP (English for Specific Purposes)
teaching approaches can be and are being applied
in higher vocational schools in Serbia at the moment
and what the prospects for the future promotion
of these approaches are. In order to achieve this
objective, the paper relies on the data collected by
means of an e-mail questionnaire consisting of 30
questions, both open- and close-ended, sent to 22
respondents, all of whom are currently employed
as English teachers in 22 higher vocational schools
in Serbia. The results of the research indicate that
despite the fact that traditional approaches are still
present in ESP teaching, constant efforts are being
put in and significant results are being achieved
regarding the implementation of communicative
language learning and similar strategies, which make
ESP learning a student- rather than teacher-centred
process.
Keywords: ESP, student-centred teaching, higher vocational schools

The study focuses on the fictional conflict between an ethical and an aesthetical attitude to life arising from the overthrow of traditional social values. In chapter 1, the theoretical starting-points of the dissertation are presented. An analysis of the links to the new aesthetics of the Swedish 1890s, the decadence movement, and to Nietzschean currents is undertaken in chapter 2,  highlighting the novel's aesthetic understanding of life and Lagerlöf's breach with gendered expectations. Chapter 3 argues that the novels narrative structure, characterized by dramatic reversals, corresponds to the insecure living conditions in modernity. The narrator's relation to the reader and to the inner world of the fictional characters are examined in chapter 4. A tension is set up between a mode of writing associated both with the oral tradition and femininity and a modern, narrative technique. The theme of modernization is explored in chapter 5 and is found to be reflected in the dialogue with Goethe's Faust and Mme de Staels Corinne. Gösta Berlings saga carries on the debate about the position of med and women in modernity, but does so in terms of the scope for freedom, knowledge, and individual needs. In its discussion of the novel's resolution, chapter 6 deals with the growing opposition between between an aesthetic attitude to life, related to Nietzsche, and an ethical attitude, spiritually allied to Lutheranism and moral Utopian ideas of the concluding nineteenth century. The dissertation ends in a discussion of the text as an ethical encounter, both between the fictional characters and between reader and text.

"Casa de muñecas" (2012) de Patricia Esteban Erlés es una obra en cuyo seno abundan temas femeninos y feministas: el confinamiento en el ambiente doméstico, las experiencias de violencia, las maneras de escaparse del enredo del patriarcado, etcétera. En ella, la narración doble (textual y visual), la estructura (subordinada a la temática) y la convención literaria (narrativa fantástica y gótica) junto con un sinfín de elementos paratextuales son factores que inducen ciertos afectos en los lectores y el despertar de emociones concretas. El presente artículo constituye un intento de traducción de algunos conceptos del giro afectivo al estudio de textos literarios, que aspira a dar respuesta a las siguientes preguntas: ¿cómo es que el narrador intenta estimular el afecto de los lectores? ¿En qué medida la forma literaria (como cognado de la noción sociológica y psicológica del «ambiente») es capaz de afectar a los lectores? ¿Qué recursos literarios y componentes extradiegéticos inducen el afecto? ¿Puede la misma estructura del texto influenciarlo?

The paper attempts to examine the narrative methods in Ann Beattie’s short stories from the collections Where You’ll Find Me and Follies and in the novella, Walks with Men. It touches upon the peculiar quality of Beattie’s fictive world, trying to clarify the ways in which her storytelling shares with film narrative not only the effects such as short cuts, snapshots or juggling with urban eccentricities and brand names, but also the strategies. The applied research approach relies on the theory of narrative which postulates the existence of three
levels: the level of events, the level of presentation and the level of structure. The paper aims at showing how Beattie’s allusive decentered narrative techniques serve to parallel the listlessness of her characters and to mirror their physical and emotional displacement. It also
demonstrates that strategies such as supporting the narrative by metonymy, instead of more commonly used metaphor, and using images as links rather than symbols, help not only to reflect but also to create content, thus constructing the unique logic of Ann Beattie’s story.

This chapter argues for the need of developing a “black feminist narratology” in order to understand the complex role of the racialized narrator in Post-Soul fiction. Building off of the work of feminist narratology, this chapter applies the black feminist narratology – with its dual focus on race and gender – to ZZ Packer’s recent story “Brownies.” Packer’s satire works to emphasize the need for marginalized peoples to foster positive approaches to community identification, while also suggesting the need to develop such communal identification between reader and writer.

‘Hindu: A Herstory’ appeared in a Special Issue on Bhalchandra Nemade of Yashashri: International Journal of English Language and Literature, ISSN no. 2319-5851, Vol. VII, issue 4, January-March 2015. It argues that the novel Hindu needs to be read as an Indian interpretation of feminism. In spite of it being written by a male novelist, it presents a remarkable range of experiences from the world of Indian women and not just with empathy but with a mature sense of deference for women's intelligence and agency.

"The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction by Paul Dawson argues that the omniscient narrator, long considered a relic of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, has reemerged as an important feature of contemporary British and American literary fiction. It further argues that the development of contemporary omniscience can be situated in relation to ongoing anxieties about the novel’s decline of cultural authority in the age of digital media. In this context the book identifies and classifies new modes of omniscient narration that are neither nostalgic revivals nor parodic critiques of classic omniscience, but the result of experimentations with narrative voice in the wake of postmodern fiction.

To address this phenomenon, the book reformulates existing definitions of literary omniscience, shifting attention away from questions of narratorial knowledge and toward omniscient narration as a rhetorical performance of narrative authority that invokes and projects a historically specific figure of authorship. Through a study of fiction by authors such as Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Martin Amis, Rick Moody, Edward P. Jones, and Nicola Barker, the book analyzes how the conventional narrative authority of omniscient narrators is parlayed into claims for the cultural authority of authors and of the novel itself.

In the course of its investigation, The Return of the Omniscient Narrator engages with major movements in narrative theory—rhetorical, cognitive, and feminist—to challenge and reconsider many key narratological categories, including Free Indirect Discourse, the relation between voice and focalization, and the narrative communication model. This challenge is framed by an argument for a discursive approach to narrative fiction that addresses the neglect of authorship in narrative theory.

Introduction: The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction
Chapter One: Omniscience and Narrative Authority
Chapter Two: The Direct Address and the Ironic Moralist
Chapter Three: Prolepsis and the Literary Historian
Chapter Four: Style and the Pyrotechnic Storyteller
Chapter Five: Polymathic Knowledge and the Immersion Journalist/ Social Commentator
Chapter Six: Voice and Free Indirect Discourse in Contemporary Omniscient Narration
Chapter Seven: Paralepsis and Omniscient Character Narration
Chapter Eight: Real Authors and Real Readers: A Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model""

For more than a century now, the desire for a political interpretation of literary form has persistently resurfaced in many seemingly unrelated corners of literary theory and critical practice: in the early work of Georg Lukács and in the literary sociology of Lucien Goldmann and Franco Moretti, in poststructuralist readings of modernist fiction, in Foucauldian interpretations of the realist novel, in feminist narratology of Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol, and, most recently, in the attempts by scholars such as Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh to subvert the distinction between the patterns of literary and social organization. And yet, despite the long list of scholars who sought to explore the relationship between form and ideology, attempts to develop a political formalism have been plagued by far-reaching methodological issues, including excessive reliance on homological reasoning, problematic mechanisms of assigning ideological significance to specific techniques, unresolved relationship between formal and thematic analysis, and implausible claims of literary formalism’s political relevance. In this essay, I introduce the categories of soft formalism, hard formalism, and expansionist formalism in order to analyze both the sources of literary criticism’s attraction to the project of political formalism and the methodological difficulties that make such a project a near impossibility: What do we truly mean when we speak of the politics of form? What do we promise when we imagine a political formalism? What theoretical and rhetorical moves do we perform in an attempt to fulfil that promise? And what do we deliver in the end?

The debates whether Joyce’s Dubliners is rather naturalist in nature or prefigures his later Modernist eccentricities are well-known, yet inconclusive. New light can be shed on established issues by contrasting apparently similar texts, which nevertheless highlight unexpected differences. I would therefore like to read one of Joyce’s stories, “A Painful Case”, in dialogue with another proto-Modernist text, Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”. My point of departure for a contrastive reading of both narratives is the question of female and male voices and discourses. Gender relationships are at the heart of both stories, but are these merely themes or do the narrative styles of both texts justify the label “Modernist” as well? As I will show, Joyce’s critique of Dublin society veers uneasily between the epiphanic mode, which betrays a radical egotism, and the still strong ties to traditional authorial narration. Chopin, on the other hand, is more radical both in her claims about gender and in her skilful use of narrative perspective, which ironically prefigures the techniques which Joyce would later make the trademark of his Modernist style. The label “Modernist” can be applied to a varied range of texts, depending on the critical lens the interrogator wears and the questions he or she brings to the text. Read in contrast to Chopin’s story, the hybridity of Joyce’s “A Painful Case” can be made more transparent in that this reading shows the story’s commitment to both tradition and innovation.