Omniscience for Atheists: Or, Jane Austen's Infallible Narrator

Nelles, William

doi:10.1353/nar.2006.0003

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…As several studies on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century heterodiegetic narrators attest, there is of course no straightforward diachronic trajectory from unknowing to all-knowing narrators. See, e.g., Kukkonen 2014;Lanser 1992;Nelles 2006;Nünning 2012. Strategic limitations in narratorial "omniscience" continue to be an important compositional and rhetorical means in contemporary fiction as well.…”

Section: Conclusion and An Attempt At Synchronizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exceptionality or Exemplarity?

Mäkelä

2018

Poetics Today

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The article challenges both cognitive-universalist and unnatural-exceptionalist approaches to fictional minds by analyzing how the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century novel merges the premodern poetics of exemplarity with emergent modern techniques of representing consciousness. It focuses on the "immature" forms of free indirect discourse in Madame de Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves (1678) while also briefly digressing to some relevant European novels in the eighteenth-century sentimental tradition. In these novels the negotiation between the socially shared and the imaginatively constructed is tangibly inscribed in the narrative discourse. The article argues, first, that the heterodiegetic narrator's epistemic and psychological authority is narratively located not far from the gossip and social scheming ("naturally occurring storytelling") within the story world. Second, rather than outrightly replacing the representation of exemplary minds and dispositions with an individualizing rendering of subjective consciousness, these novels transform the code of exemplum into an internalized strategy for the characters-and a case for self-reflection for the amateurish heterodiegetic narrators. The theoretical framework draws from Monika Fludernik's (1993) pioneering cognitive-narratological theory of schematic speech and thought representation, suggesting that this linguistic theory should be modified to encompass a pertinent theme in the Western novelistic tradition.

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Section: Conclusion and An Attempt At Synchronizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exceptionality or Exemplarity?

Mäkelä

2018

Poetics Today

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“…But for most of the story, the reader must rely on the inexact accounts of this initial report in order to try to form a reliable impression of Emma's new friend. In this sense, the style of Jane Austen may be said to fall toward the more-or-less absolutely reliable end of the third-person continuum (Nelles 2006).…”

Section: The Unmarked Status Of Third-person Narrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This explains the persistence of debates over the issue of the limits to so-called narrative omniscience (Culler 2004;Nelles 2006;Dawson 2009 contrast, first-person fiction is marked. Indeed, it is the unacknowledged marked status of first-person fiction that explains the persistence of the critical debate over narrative unreliability.…”

Section: Narration Markedness Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining the reliable narrator: The marked status of first-person fiction

Murphy

2012

Journal of Literary Semantics

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In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Wayne Booth first proposed the critical concepts of the reliable and unreliable narrator. Booth suggested that the notion of reliability was best defined in terms of its underlying relationship to the implied author. But this attempted linkage was never a truly secure one; and in the intervening years, a protracted debate has persisted regarding this central issue. This paper suggests that the key to resolving this debate is the formulation of a more secure definition of narrative reliability. The linguistic concept of markedness provides the critical means for doing this. Using the test case of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, five determinants of a reliable narrator in first-person fiction are suggested: a secure speaking-location back home; the use of the classical middle style of standard English; observer-narrator status; ethical maturity; and a plot structure which involves the retrospective reevaluation or Aristotelian anagnorisis of a character other than the narrator. If this much is accepted, unreliable narration may be defined in terms of a range of departures from this basic model.

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“…We may smile in passing at the quibble on whether Jane Austen's disclosure to her nephew of how long Emma's father survived counts as "knowledge" or "ancillary anecdote." Nelles (2006), in self-defense against what he categorically denies-an Austen who sees ahead-would probably also opt for the latter slot. But the "anecdote" told itself entails a world (fore)known.…”

Section: Gaps Blanks and Afterlivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…83. Nelles (2006), who both adopts and globally applies the misnomer "telepathy," at least reserves it to mind reading as one of several narrative privileges. epistemically reliable) mind reading, and thus prejudges the issue by sheer verbal fiat.…”

Section: Alternatives To Omniscience?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Omniscience in Narrative Construction: Old Challenges and New

Sternberg¹

2007

Poetics Today

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Since modernism, narrative omniscience has been much attacked, yet little studied and understood. This in inverse ratio to the central role it actually plays in narrative discourse and metadiscourse alike: the telling, reading, grouping, evolving, conceptualizing of stories, invented (e.g., novelistic) or inspired (biblical, Homeric). Here I review the various old-new critical thrusts against epistemic superprivilege (outright denials, partisan judgments, attempted confinements, impairments, replacements, as well as genuine misunderstandings) arisen since my constructive theory of omniscience appeared, often in response to it. Those neomodernist challenges meet, multiply, and frequently run to extremes in Jonathan Culler's (2004) antitheistic critique, which accordingly presents an overall mirrorimage to how and where and why omniscient narrative is (re)constructed. Nor is this key question of epistemic privilege vs. disprivilege alone at stake. The argument shows afresh its bearings on larger issues yet, especially narrative's open-ended art of relations. Thus the relations between axes of perspective, between perspective and plot, between power and performance, between mimetic and artistic sense-making, between factual and fictional storytelling. Equally involved, at a higher level still, are the relations between part and whole, form and force or function, typology and teleology, theory and history, (meta)discourse and ideology, the realities of literature and the desires of the literati. Throughout, the choice ultimately lies between freezing, even nullifying those relations via package deals and allowing them free play in the spirit of the Proteus Principle.

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Omniscience for Atheists: Or, Jane Austen's Infallible Narrator

Cited by 17 publications

References 10 publications

Exceptionality or Exemplarity?

Exceptionality or Exemplarity?

Defining the reliable narrator: The marked status of first-person fiction

Omniscience in Narrative Construction: Old Challenges and New

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