No abstract

The following is a somewhat reshaped extract from work in progress 1 on a theory of narrative that Spans the entire spectrum of narrative genres. In contrast to the 'classic' narratologies of Bai, Chatman, Genette, Prince or Stanzel, this model sets out to discuss narrativity, not from the vantage point of the realist and Modernist novel or short story, but from the perspective of those discourse types which have hitherto attracted comparatively little sustained analysis: oral and pseudo-oral types of storytelling, including conversational narrative, oral poetry and oral history; historical writing; early forms of written narrative (the medieval verse epic, medieval histories and saints' lives, storytelling in early letters from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, narrative of the Elizabethan age up to Aphra Behn); and, at the other end of the spectrum, postmodernist writing (including the fairly well-known types of neutral narrative and the present tense novel, but also fiction in the second person and in the we form, or employing #, one äs well äs German man or French on ; skaz-lype narratives; and experimental writing from Beckett to Maurice Röche, Clarice Lispector, or Kazuo Ishiguro and Christa Wolf). Such an emphasis on what I am tempted to call the non-canonical forms of narrative (non-canonical, that is, within present-day theoretical discussions of the novel) triggers a number of modifications of current narratological paradigms äs well äs raising some serious methodological questions about the basic presuppositions of the classical paradigms. An analysis of non-canonical narrative therefore prepares the way for fresh reconceptualizations of the storytelling mode, resulting in the proposal of a new narratological paradigm that is based on cognitive parameters and a reader response framework, and that allows one to integrate fictional and non-fictional types of narrative. From this perspective, the realist underpinnings of classical narratology can be transcended in the Brought to you by |

No abstract

No abstract

The following paper is an attempt to extend the recent findings of discourse analysis in the area of conversational storytelling by supplementing the more narrowly (text-)linguistic approach with theoretical and structural considerations inspired by the literary discipline of structuralist narratology. Rather than analyzing a new corpus of oral stories and drawing yet another set of conclusions from this new material, I will follow the methodology of my own discipline, narratology, in (mostly) relying on available corpora and subjecting these to literary and theoretical criticism. In doing so, I will pretend that conversational narratives are as worthy of sustained interpretative analysis as literary' works of art.As Stanley Fish has noted in a recent response (Fish, 1990) to criticism of his 'Being interdisciplinary is so very hard to do' paper (Fish, 1989), interdisciplinary research usually fails to combine two disciplines into one; it usurps bordering areas into the magnetic field of its own theoretical and practical preoccupations. This portrait of interdisciplinary practice represents my own attitude towards linguistics, from which I keep receiving new ideas and models for the study of narrative. If I have decided to make my results availabe to linguists, it is because I hope some cross fertilization may take place for the other side as well. More liberal students of language who are willing to look at conversational narratives as narratives rather than texts will perhaps grant that oral storytelling might be determined by a more general narrative frame, a frame that determines the structure of stories and the functions of their linguistic properties.A word is here due at the very start about the wording 'oral and quasioral storytelling' in the title. Like many other roughly equivalent terms this has its drawbacks. My theses involve a recognition that present-day conversational stories share a structure (and therefore the use of the 0165-4888/91/0011-0365 $2.00Text 11(3) (1991), pp. 365-397 © Walter de Gruyter Monika Fludernik'historic' present tense) with certain 'literary' narratives. This structure can be defined as episodic, and it prevails in literary narrative up until the eighteenth century. Episodic structure dominates in medieval verse and prose tales and is common as late as the early eighteenth-century novel. During the eighteenth century, episodic structure is increasingly superseded by more discursive narrative forms and in English literature at least -only survives in oral storytelling and in imitations of oral narrative in fictional dialogue. This history of the replacement of episodic narrative -eloquently proposed by Ermarth (1981) -can be argued to coincide with the replacement of verbal style by nominal style (Wells, 1960), or `doric' by 'attic' prose (Halliday, 1987). In fact, Halliday makes an explicit connection between verbal and nominal styles on the one hand and the oral vs. the written on the other, linking 'verbal' done prose to the accumulative mostly paratactic language...