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Dan Shen
Neo-Aristotelian Rhetorical Narrative
Study: Need for Integrating Style, Context and Intertext
Massimiliano Morini
Point of View in First-Person Narratives:
A Deictic Analysis of David Copperfield
Stefan Kjerkegaard
The Medium Is Also The Message. Narrating
media in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama
Adam Hammond
The Honest & Dishonest Critic: Style
and substance in Bahktin and Auerbach
Book Reviews
John Leonard
Milton and the Victorians by Erik
Gray
Jane Denison-Furness
The Cambridge Introduction to Zora
Neale Hurston by Lovalerie King
A. S. G. Edwards
Broken Lines: Genelogical Literature
in Medieval Britain and France ed. by Ralucca L. Radulescu
and Edward Donald Kennedy
Ranen Omer-Sherman
Reading the Underthought: Jewish Hermeneutics
and the Christian Poetry of Hopkins and Eliot by Kinereth Meyer and
Rachel Salmon Deshen
Micael Clarke
The Adventure of Philip on His Way
through the World,: Shewing Who Robbed Him, Who Helped Him, and Who
Passed Him By by William Makepeace Thackeray
John Fleming
Tom Stoppard: A Bibliographic History
by William Baker and Gerald N. Wachs
Donald E. Hardy
Narrative Progression in the Short
Story: A Corpus Stylistic Approach
by Michael Toolan
Dan Shen. “Neo-Aristotelian Rhetorical Narrative Study: Need for Integrating Style, Context and Intertext.” / 576
In the thriving development of narrative theory and criticism for the past few decades, the rhetorical has been one of the most influential approaches. The rhetorical approach, which has been shedding significant light on the author-audience communication, is in the neo-Aristotelian tradition pioneered by the first generation of the Chicago School. There are two self-imposed preclusions that contemporary rhetorical critics have inherited from the early neo-Aristotelians: first, the preclusion of style or language, and second, the preclusion of the context of creation. This essay argues that, in order to get closer to the implied author’s norms and better account for the relation among the implied author, narrator, character and audience, it is necessary to integrate style, context of creation, and intertextual comparison into rhetorical criticism.
Massimiliano Morini. “Point of View in First-Person Narratives: A Deictic Analysis of David Copperfield.” / 598
First-person narratives, in stylistics, are held to be straightforward as regards point of view: since everything is seen from the narrator’s perspective, no need is felt for further qualifications and distinctions. However, most evidently when the narrator is also the central character in his/her story, there can be a lot of shuttling to and fro between his/her outlook on things right now, in his/her own coding time, and his/her outlook back then, when he/she was a character. Drawing on a number of narratological studies on the divided consciousness of homodiegetic narrative, Morini’s article applies the tools of deictic shift theory to a chapter of David Copperfield, and shows how many of Dickens’ comic effects and moralistic conclusions depend on various kinds of subtle shifts between the “I-narrator’s” and the “I-reflector’s” deictic planes.
Stefan Kjerkegaard. “The Medium Is Also The Message. Narrating media in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama.” / 619
“No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media” Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin write in Remediation. Understanding New Media. This is also the case when it comes to a postmodern novel like Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama. Hence this article demonstrates how different kinds of narrative ambiguities in a novel like Glamorama may be explained by the use of concepts like self-reflexive narration, remediation, and intermediality. It begins with some suggestions to improvements of previous narratological readings of the novel. Then by focusing on first-person present tense narration the article shows how the research on remediation may be a useful when explaining how literary fiction absorbs media and new media. To rephrase Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, one could say that the medium is also the message in many postmodern novels, and in this respect Glamorama certainly is no exception.
Adam Hammond. “The Honest & Dishonest Critic: Style and substance in Bahktin and Auerbach.” / 638
I begin my essay by noting some striking similarities between Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: both were written in exile from totalitarian regimes, and both responded to the experience of exile by championing multi-voiced, multi-perspectival literary styles. Bakhtinian “dialogism” and Auerbachian “multi-personal representation of consciousness,” I go on to argue: can both be understood as attempts to theorize an “honest” literary style in response to the “dishonest” styles of the Stalinist and Fascist states? I next ask which of these two critics is himself the more “honest” — which employs the critical style closest to “dialogism” or “multipersonal representation of consciousness.” Bakhtin’s forceful, dogmatic, single-voiced style, I argue, is “dishonest” by his own terms; but Auerbach’s discontinuous, self-reflexive, multi-voiced style is “honest.” I conclude by asking why Auerbach, the more honest of the two, is, by comparison to Bakhtin, so little read.
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