On the First-Person Novel
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4270833 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michal Glowinski, Rochelle Stone |
| Year | 1977 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 103 |
| Publication date | 1977-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Literary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/468439 |
| OpenAlex | W2325503670 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
LTHOUGH THE SIGNIFICANCE Of grammatical forms in the novel, primarily personal pronouns and tense structures, has been Lunderstood for a long time, the issue has not become dated; it continues to preoccupy both novelists and critics.' It is undoubtedly a matter of enormous importance. The choice of a personal pronoun affects many subsequent choices. It concerns the basic problem of placing narration among the possible epic categories of expression; that is, it results in the choice of its semantic design. The semantic design of impersonal narration where the characters are called by the third-person pronoun he or its equivalents, such as proper names (Vautrin, Castorp, Schweik),2 is totally different from the semantic design in which the narrator speaks in the first person. Third-person narration progresses within the boundaries of what can be defined as the language of the novel. By quasi-objective language, I mean such a language which informs us in an manner about fictitious facts, events, and objects constituting the world represented in an epic work. an objective manner refers, in this case, to the way in which the reader is commanded to accept the author's statement as unquestionable knowledge about one or another element in the novelistic world. Here the language pertains to objects rather than to the usually hidden person of the narrator. Consequently, the reader does not have any information which would cast doubt on a sentence such as the following: For Ignacy Rzecki, the time of concern and amazement came again. The reader would have been in quite a different situation if this sentence were formulated in the following way: Mr. Ignacy Rzecki reported (thought, said, etc.) that for him the time of concern and amazement had come again. In this case, the reader might wonder whether Rzecki's declaration is truthful, having in mind the specific meaning
Element (criminal law) · Linguistics · Narrative · Personal pronoun · Pronoun · Sentence · Statement (logic) · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Law · Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1990 - 2020 (31) |
| Highly cited | No |