Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita

Phelan, James

doi:10.1353/nar.2007.0012

Cited by 106 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Phelan introduces a typology to analyze narratorial unreliability with a focus on its effect on the implied reader or "authorial audience" ( [9], p. 223). Starting from the observation that different types of unreliable narration have distinctly different effects on the implied reader, Phelan differentiates unreliability into two groups.…”

Section: Adapting a Non-human Perspective Toward Unreliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Starting from the observation that different types of unreliable narration have distinctly different effects on the implied reader, Phelan differentiates unreliability into two groups. Unreliable narration can either " [underline] or [increase] the distance between the narrator and the authorial audience" ( [9], p. 223), or, to the contrary, "[reduce] the distance between the narrator and the authorial audience" ( [9], pp. 223-24).…”

Section: Adapting a Non-human Perspective Toward Unreliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…223-24). Phelan calls the former type of unreliability "estranging unreliability" ( [9], p. 223), and the latter one "bonding unreliability" ( [9], p. 223). Focussing on the latter, Phelan uses an exemplary discussion of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita to identify and discuss six subtypes of bonding unreliability: (1) "literally unreliable but metaphorically reliable" ( [9], p. 226); (2) "playful comparison between implied author and narrator" ( [9], p. 228); (3) "naive defamiliarization" ( [9], p. 229); (4) "sincere but misguided self-deprecation" ( [9], p. 229); (5) "partial progress toward the norm" ( [9], p. 231); and (6) "bonding through optimistic comparison" ( [9], p. 232).…”

Section: Adapting a Non-human Perspective Toward Unreliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…( [1], pp. 177-78) At a first glance, Snitter's autodiegetic account looks like the form of unreliable narration most characteristic to talking animal stories, an exclusively bonding form of "naive defamiliarization" ( [9], p. 229), endearing the innocently mistaken dog to the implied reader. Yet there is also a much darker note to this story-inside-the-story.…”

Section: Adapting a Non-human Perspective Toward Unreliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet every single one in this cacophony of focalizers is unreliable-the unreliability even extends to the voice of the heterodiegetic narrator, who keeps together all strands of narration. As a result, The Plague Dogs creates a unique mixture of what James Phelan (2007) calls "estranging" ( [9], p. 223) and "bonding" ( [9], p. 223) unreliability. This article aims to show how the unreliable narration of The Plague Dogs defamiliarizes a writing tradition usually committed to conventional means of storytelling, and in doing so calls into question the dominant Western conception of the status of animals in the world.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Unreliability and the Animal Narrator in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs

Höing

2017

Humanities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Richard Adams's talking animal story The Plague Dogs (1978), with its deeply genre-atypical mode of narration, offers a multiplicity of avenues to explore the literary animal as animal. The story draws much of its power from the psychological complexity and related unreliability of both canine narrators, two research lab escapees gone feral. Both the terrier Snitter and the black mongrel Rowf are mentally ill and experience a highly subjective, part-fantastic world. In episodes of zero focalization, a sarcastic voice comments on the plot from the off, aggressively attacking a thoroughly anthropocentric superstructure the protagonists themselves are oblivious of, and presenting all that is normally constructed as "rational" in the implied reader's world as a carnivalesque farce. Combining these equally unreliable narratives, The Plague Dogs creates a unique mixture of what Phelan (2007) calls "estranging" and "bonding" unreliability and brings to light the devastating consequences of anthropocentrism. The Plague Dogs not only defamiliarizes a genre usually committed to conventional means of storytelling, but the dominant Western conception of the status of animals in the world, showing that once we start to read the animal as animal, this sets into motion an avalanche of other concepts in need of re-reading, among them the very ones making up the fundamental pillars of Western societies' anthropocentric self-conception.

show abstract

Section: Adapting a Non-human Perspective Toward Unreliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Adapting a Non-human Perspective Toward Unreliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Adapting a Non-human Perspective Toward Unreliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Adapting a Non-human Perspective Toward Unreliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Unreliability and the Animal Narrator in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs

Höing

2017

Humanities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Narrative Technique

Phelan¹

2010

The Encyclopedia of the Novel

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Narrative technique is the umbrella term for the multiple devices of storytelling. In the terms of narratology's distinction between story and discourse or the what and the how of narrative, narrative technique is a rough synonym for discourse. Narrative technique is so central to our understanding of storytelling that, throughout history, theorists of narrative in general (e.g., Aristotle in the Poetics , ca. 335 bce ) or the novel in particular (e.g., Henry Fielding in his Preface to Joseph Andrews , 1742) invariably comment on it. But ever since Henry James wrote his Prefaces to the New York edition of his novels (1909–10), theorists have paid increasing attention to the subject, as they have proposed and debated various ways of achieving a more adequate understanding of its workings. Here I will focus on four key concepts: transmission, temporality, vision, and voice.

show abstract

Jacqueline Wilson

Day¹

2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita

Cited by 106 publications

References 5 publications

Unreliability and the Animal Narrator in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs

Unreliability and the Animal Narrator in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs

Narrative Technique

Jacqueline Wilson

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About