Reading Authorial Narration
The Example of the Mill on the Floss
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4375416 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Carl D Malmgren (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1986 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 471 |
| Publication date | 1986-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1772507 |
| OpenAlex | W2023618441 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 7 |
Narration, then, rests upon the presence of a narrator or narrative medium (actors, book, film, etc.) and the absence of the events narrated.These events are present as fictions but absent as realities.Given this situation, it is possible to distinguish different kinds and qualities of narration by the varying extents to which they emphasize either that immediate process of narration . . .or those mediated events themselves (Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation).Any fiction is, by definition, characterized by the inevitable presence of a teller and a tale.Thus, in any fictional text there exist two planes of signification: the plane of the fictional world and the plane of the speaker.In brief, the former consists of the sign-vehicles which designate characters (invented or drawn from "real life"), the topoi through which they move, and the plot which concatenates the actions and events interrelating those characters.The latter consists of sign-vehicles which designate the necessary existence of the speaker, who, in a discursive speech act, recounts or creates that fictional world.This speaker may exist "inside" or "outside" the fictional world, and may be either foregrounded or backgrounded, may either advertise his or her presence or attempt to erase evidence of his or her existence.A typology of narrational forms can be constructed around the nature of the speaker's plane and its relation to the plane of the fictional world.'In its largest sense the plane of the speaker includes the basic operations which a storyteller performs upon a narrative situation, those of selection and ordering.From the storehouse of detail and articulation which envelopes the narrative germ, the storyteller 1.For a systematic theoretical analysis of the matter, see Lubomir Dolezel, "
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Mill · Narrative · Semiotics · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1989 - 2010 (22) |
| Highly cited | No |