Studies in Narratology Meeting Ten NLP: Lute (Philosophy Narrative); ETP: Campbell (Eve's Bayou)

Studies in Narratology

Meeting Ten

NLP: Lute (Philosophy Narrative);ETP: Campbell (Eve's Bayou)


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10. Character and Self in Narrative


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“We cannot see inside character.”


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reader/viewer + narrative –> reader/viewer’s construction of a character


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“Guess what Flem Snopes did last night?

reader/viewer + narrative –> reader/viewer’s construction of a real person


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James Olney, who lead an NEH Summer Seminar on “The Forms of Autobiography” I

attend in 1983 at UNC Chapel Hill


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http://davidlavery.net/Cinematic_Lives/index.html


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"To create and in creating to be created,” the fine formula of Lequier, ought to be the motto of autobiography. The creative and illuminating nature . . . discerned in autobiography suggests a new and more profound sense of truth as an expression of innermost being, a likeness no longer of things but of the person. Now this truth, which is too often neglected, nevertheless constitutes one of the necessary references for understanding the human realm. We understand everything outside of us as well as ourselves with reference to what we are and according to our spiritual capacities. This is what Dilthey, one of the founders of modern historiography, meant when he said that universal history is an extrapolation from autobiography.

Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography"


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Little by little it has become clear to me that every great philosophy has been the confession of its maker, as it were his involuntary and unconscious autobiography.—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil


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In living that life over again I struck up a first acquaintance with myself. As if I had more choice than time, I had walked with my face immovably set forward, as incapable as time of turning my head and seeing what was behind me. I looked, and what I saw was myself as I had lived up to that moment when I could turn my head. . . .

When my past life came alive in me after lying for so long, a dead weight, my actual life came alive too as that new life passed into it; for it was new, though old; indeed, I felt that only now was I truly living it, since only now did I see it as it was, so that at last it could become experience. Without . . . looking and looking back, I might never have lived my life.

Edwin Muir, The Story and the Fable


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V. Literary Fiction and Reality

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Modernist Theory and CriticismSecond Edition 2005

Until the 1980s the term "modernist " was most often used in literary studies to refer to a radical break with the literary forms of the past in the experimental, avant-garde style of writing prevalent between World War I and World War II. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, understandings of the term "modernism " underwent a temporary reversal. The emergence of postmodernism as the preserve of emancipatory language practices and experimental negotiations between "high " and "low " culture (technology, popular culture) temporarily realigned modernism with Enlightenment rationality and the traditional "elitist " notion of aesthetics as necessarily divorced from cultural concerns. (While modernism is an international movement, erupting in different countries at different times, in fact one characteristic of modernism is its transgression of national and generic boundaries. Our main focus here, however, is on English-language modernism.) In the 1990s, however, the "return to the scene of the modern " in literary studies has further redefined

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http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0255.htmlStudies in Narratology

preserve the high cultural values of tradition. Consequently, the project of identifying a modernist criticism and theory is often vexed by contradictory definitions of the relation between art, society, tradition, and the individual within the profusion of manifestoes and essays characterizing the modernist period.

One pervasive axiom of modernist theory that resulted in both reactionary and progressive interpretations of art, society, and the individual, importantly articulated by T. E. Hulme in "Romanticism and Classicism " (1913–14, posthumously published in Speculations, 1924), is an acceptance of limits that are identified with classicism. Hulme argues: "The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas " (120). The classical style, Hulme states, is carefully crafted, characterized by accurate description and a cheerful "dry hardness " (126). He asserts that "it is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things " (131); Hulme’s preference is for the visual and the concrete over the general and abstract, for freshness of idiom, for the vital complexities that are "intensive " rather than extensive (139).

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modernism. "Modernity " increasingly refers to a highly contradictory movement, often characterized by startling juxtapositions and incongruities, whose criticism and theory both affirmed traditional notions of "high " art and drew links between the modernist poetics of change and the culture at large.

Thus, T. S. Eliot’s insistence in essays such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent " (1917)that the young poet need only assimilate the (all-male) canon of established authors contributed to public definitions of literary modernism that would exclude mass culture. Simultaneously, Eliot’s essays on the music hall and its performers, including the now prominent article "Marie Lloyd " (1922), helped make popular culture a legitimate object of criticism and a subject for art. Similarly, prewar aesthetic manifestoes linked to movements such as imagism and vorticism, including Ezra Pound’s well-known "A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste " (1913)and Pound and Wyndham Lewis’s 1914 manifesto published in the first number of their journal BLAST, urged writers to "make it new " and praised the aesthetic possibilities of urban, technological "steel " but also claimed to


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Studies in NarratologyMeeting Ten

A. S. Byatt

Muriel Spark


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to live in conditions of reality unprotected by

myth—Paul Tillich


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Studies in Narratology Meeting Ten NLP: Lute (Philosophy Narrative); ETP: Campbell (Eve's Bayou)

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