Narrative Thickness

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the experience of a literary narrative qua literary narrative is an experience of narrative thickness, that is, an experience in which narrative form and narrative content are inseparable. I explain my thesis of poetic thickness in § 1, showing why it does not admit of extension from poetry to literary narratives. § § 2-3 synthesize the work of Derek Attridge and Peter Lamarque, advancing narrative thickness as a necessary condition of literary narratives. I propose a work of didactic literature-J. M. Coetzee's 'The Lives of Animals'-as a paradigmatic counterexample to narrative thickness in § 4. I show, in § 5, that narrative thickness holds for this work in particular and didactic works which are literary in general, concluding that narrative thickness is indeed a necessary condition of literary narratives. My thesis employed Lamarque's definition of poetic content as 'the subject-asrealised-in-the-poem' and poetic form as 'the-mode-of-realisation-of the-subject-in-the-poem'. 7 I began with Bradley's conception of form-content

Undecidable Literary Interpretations and Aesthetic Literary Value

“…The reader who connects Galvano Della Volpe's semantic theory and the contemporary philosophical frame is not entirely wrong. Keep in mind, for example, concepts such as narrative opacity (Lamarque 2014(Lamarque , 2015(Lamarque , 2017a and literary thickness (McGregor 2015a(McGregor , 2015b(McGregor , 2016. Accor ding to Rafe MacGregor, literary works, both poetic and narrative, are highly sensitive to formal changes because content and form are inseparable (McGregor 2015a: 346).…”