Optional-Narrator Theory: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals

Description

Twentieth-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 theorists of the novel in particular that the presence of a fictional narrator is a defining feature of fictional narratives. This topic is an important one for narrative theory and thus also for literary practice. Optional-Narrator Theory advances a range of arguments for dispensing with the narrator, except when it can be said that the author actually &;created&; a fictional narrator.   Cover Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1 1. Some Problems concerning Narrators of Novels and Speakers of Poems 2. Implied Authors and Imposed Narrators—or Actual Authors? 3. Real Authors, Real Narrators, and the Rhetoric of Fiction 4. Voice and Time 5. The Narrator 6. Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Narrator 7. The Narrator in Biblical Narratives 8. Narrator Theory and Medieval English Narratives 9. Marquis de Sade’s Narrative Despotism Part 2 10. Silent Self and the Deictic Imaginary 11. Aesthetic Theory Meets Optional-Narrator Theory 12. The Vanishing Narrator Meets the Fundamental Narrator 13. A Paradox of Cinematic Narration Bibliography Contributors Index