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One may take issue with Gerard Genette and Mieke Bal, who argue for the possibility of a frequency relation in singulative narration where something that happened several times is narrated several times, but a different number of times. A closer look at Bal's own examples from Marguerite Duras's L'Apres-midi de Monsieur Andesmas demonstrates that the significance lies in the perception of the focalizing character. The number of times this focalizer perceives something happening provides the only knowledge a reader has of how often something occurs., The frequency relationship between the narrative (recit) and the story (histoire) has not attracted the attention of narrative scholars, perhaps because this aspect of temporality has been the least controversial [...]

As part of its revision of traditional narrative practices, postmodernism has raised questions concerning the status of 'voice' and 'agency' in historical (re)writing. Especially when focused on the 'unthinkable' events of recent history (mass extermination, ethnic cleansing, racial wars), postmodern fiction problematizes its narrative and communicative situation, resorting to nontraditional, 'transgressive' modes of narration such as the second person. The second-person mode is a natural choice for an innovative novelist like Raymond Federman, confronted with a major human drama (the Holocaust and its aftermath). Federman's innovative uses of the second person accompany the evolution of his approach to history as a shift from a strategy of deconstructive provocation to one of dialogic sharing. His earlier novels employed the second person dialogically to create a 'platformatic' confrontation between tellers, protagonists, and narratees; by contrast, Federman's recent work employs the second person to enhance the cooperative, recreative aspect of historical narration., All narration, whether historical or fictional, is the fruition of an act, all stories are products of labor; one 'does history' the same way one does literature, and that act [...]

Linguistic theories of (person) deixis have emerged historically from more broadly pragmatic theories concerning utterances in contexts. A principled account of the discourse functions of the second-person pronoun in narrative contexts can help specify, in turn, the structure and ontology of the entities invoked by textual you, yielding new tools for the poetics of second-person fiction, which may be applied profitably to Edna O'Brien's 1970 novel A Pagan Place. Of the five functional subtypes of textual you in O'Brien's novel, one subtype, 'doubly deictic' you, produces an ontological hesitation between the virtual and the actual by constantly repositioning readers, to a fundamentally indeterminate degree, within the emergent spatiotemporal parameters of one or more alternative possible worlds. Study of the doubly deictic mechanism of narrative you reveals, like theories developed under the auspices of linguistic pragmatics, a permeable border between texts and contexts. In turn, rethinking the relation between texts and contexts suggests the need for a postclassical narratology that reconfigures and redescribes, without wholly abandoning, the earlier structuralist models., A story is like a letter. Dear You, I'll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: [...]

One of the precepts of ecriture feminine is that relationships between women are not adequately articulated within a phallocentric symbolic system, that is, within conventional language. Luce Irigaray suggests that the construction of a subject inevitably establishes a power struggle through grammatical structure between the subject and object in 'the economy of discourse.' She speculates about what would happen 'if the 'object' started to speak.' Irigaray's utopian linguistic structures identify the need for a radical approach to subject positions in terms of gender politics. Canadian writer Daphne Marlatt attempts to articulate a new kind of subjectivity for women in her poetics and in her subversive novel ana historic. There are demands for alternatives to phallogocentric language from the ecriture feminine and the ways in which Marlatt herself gives voice to the 'object,' by creating a nonexclusive pronominal system and a deliberately inclusive, active, and feminized second person. A reconceptualized subjectivity is produced by philosophers such as Irigaray and Monique Wittig, and Marlatt's work offers a literary realization of such theories developed through her pronominal use., 1. INTRODUCTION The discussion of much recent feminist theory is centered on what might be meant by a woman as subject in discourse when that discourse is ordered by 'phallogocentric' [...]

Narrated in the Spanish second-person familiar tu, Jose Emilio Pacheco's short story of initiation 'Tarde de agosto' ('August Afternoon') is at once homo-, hetero- and autodiegetic. While protagonist, narratee, and eventually narrator coincide in one fictional individual, the conventions of initiation provide for the redivision of the self into a pre-initiation protagonist, a liminal narratee, and a continuous self who can rerepresent the events of the afternoon consists of a folkloric self-narration of an attempted (but failed) initiation based on traditional models, a failure that has made the memory of the afternoon both unforgettable and painful. In retelling the story, the narrator exposes and reverses the rhetorical mechanisms by which the protagonist has shaped his self-narration and offers the episode back to the narratee as a prosaic and comprehensible misadventure., I offer you explanations of yourself, theories/about yourself, authentic and surprising news/of yourself. (Jorge Luis Borges) Pacheco's 'Tarde de agosto' (from the collection of stories El viento distante [The Distant [...]

Because second-person narration creates complex relationships among actual readers, addresses, and observers, it provides an excellent occasion to examine the relationship between two concepts of audience from different theoretical traditions: structuralism's narratee and rhetorical theory's narrative audience. Second person shows that this relationship is one of complementarity and that each tradition needs to incorporate the insights of the other. Thus, the narratee will be the audience addressed; the narrative audience will be the observer within the world of the fiction; and the ideal narrative audience will be the audience that the narrator is wishing he is writing for. These concepts illuminate the complex narrative discourse of Lorrie Moore's short story 'How' from her collection called Self-Help. By manipulating the relationships among actual readers, narratee, and narrative audience, Moore is able both to satirize the self-help genre and generate significant emotion in her version of a common cultural narrative., 1. HOW ARE YOU? A voice addresses you. Not from clouds, a mountaintop, or a burning bush. From this page. It asks how you are and what you're up to. [...]

When Rebecca Harding Davis died in 1910, eulogies recounted how her most famous work, 'Life in the Iron Mills,' published in the Atlantic Monthly nearly fifty years earlier, defied nineteenth-century [...]

Narratology was born along with the rise of self-reflexivity in modernist and postmodernist fiction. Thus, when he sought to justify the application of Saussurean language theory to narrative discourse in [...]

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the problem of the relations between narrative and historiography often was posed in normative terms. The question was: Should historians use narrative? Does that [...]

In Coming to Terms (1990), Seymour Chatman initiated an enquiry into the delimitation of the narrative text type as against the text types of argument and description. This revolutionary step [...]

Dedicating Maurice 'to a happier year,' E. M. Forster sums up the many ways his novel looks to the future. Maurice waited 57 years to be published, because Forster felt [...]

Despite its signal importance to so many schools of contemporary criticism, the human body has largely failed to garner a significant place in narratology. This neglect results from narratology's traditional [...]

Since Barthes's S/Z, in effect, theories of narrative have had uneasy relations with textual theory. Structuralist narratology attempts to explain narrative figuration, or thematics, in terms of a perceived textual [...]

When, at the beginning of Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), Ruth decides she can no longer endure her husband's infidelity and emotional abuse, she articulates [...]