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Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory PDF

328 Pages·2011·3.23 MB·English
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Analyzing World Fiction Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture Series Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Arturo J. Aldama, and Patrick Colm Hogan Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture includes monographs and edited volumes that incorporate cutting-edge research in cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, narrative theory, and related fi elds, exploring how this research bears on and illuminates cultural phenomena such as, but not limited to, literature, fi lm, drama, music, dance, visual art, digital media, and comics. The volumes published in this series represent both specialized scholarship and interdisciplinary investigations that are deeply sensitive to cultural specifi cs and grounded in a cross-cultural understanding of shared emotive and cognitive principles. Analyzing World Fiction New Horizons in Narrative Theory EDITED BY FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA University of Texas Press Austin Copyright © 2011 by University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2011 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713–7 819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ○∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48– 1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Analyzing world fi ction : new horizons in narrative theory / edited by Frederick Luis Aldama. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Cognitive approaches to literature and culture series) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-292-72632-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-292-73497-5 (e-book) 1. Narration (Rhetoric) 2. Fiction—History and criticism. 3. Discourse analysis, Narrative. 4. Motion pictures and literature. 5. Postcolonialism and the arts. I. Aldama, Frederick Luis, 1969– pn212.a5 2011 809.6′923—dc22 2011009903 Table of Contents How to Use This Book vii frederick luis aldama PART I. Voice 1 1. U.S. Ethnic and Postcolonial Fiction: Toward a Poetics of Collective Narratives 3 brian richardson 2. Language Peculiarities and Challenges to Universal Narrative Poetics 17 dan shen 3. Reading Narratologically: Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba 33 gerald prince 4. Jasmine Reconsidered: Narrative Structure and Multicultural Subjectivity 41 robyn warhol 5. Voice, Politics, and Judgments in Their Eyes Were Watching God: The Initiation, the Launch, and the Debate about the Narration 57 james phelan 6. Narrating Multiculturalism in British Media: Voice and Cultural Identity in Television Documentary and Comedy 75 hilary p. dannenberg vi Analyzing World Fiction PART II. Emotion 91 7. Anger, Temporality, and the Politics of Reading The Woman Warrior 93 sue j. kim 8. Agency and Emotion: R. K. Narayan’s The Guide 109 lalita pandit hogan 9. The Narrativization of National Metaphors in Indian Cinema 135 patrick colm hogan 10. Fear and Action: A Cognitive Approach to Teaching Children of Men 151 arturo j. aldama PART III. Comparisons and Contrasts 163 11. The Postmodern Continuum of Canon and Kitsch: Narrative and Semiotic Strategies of Chicana High Culture and Chica Lit 165 ellen mccracken 12. Initiating Dialogue: Narrative Beginnings in Multicultural Narratives 183 catherine romagnolo 13. “It’s Badly Done”: Redefi ning Craft in America Is in the Heart 199 sue-im lee 14. Nobody Knows: Invisible Man and John Okada’s No-No Boy 227 josephine nock-hee park 15. Intertextuality, Translation, and Postcolonial Misrecognition in Aimé Césaire 245 paul breslin Afterword. How This Book Reads You: Looking beyond Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory 269 william anthony nericcio Works Cited and Filmography 277 Contributor Notes 297 Index 301 How to Use This Book frederick luis aldama The impulse behind the essays collected in Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory spins out of a symposium sponsored by Project Narrative, “Multicultural Narratives and Narrative Theory.” This symposium, held at the Ohio State University during Oct. 25– 27, 2007, brought together scholars from around the world working in, among other fi elds, narrative theory, U.S. ethnic studies, English studies and Anglophone literatures, linguistics, feminist and critical race theory, cognitive approaches to literature, and creative writing. Many of these scholars demonstrated how scholarship in narrative theory and work done under the umbrella designation of U.S. ethnic and postcolonial studies could create a productive synergy. Nonetheless, although Analyzing World Fiction was inspired by this symposium—and seeds planted there grew into several of the following essays—the collection expands the purview to include analyses not just of African American, Asian American, Filipino American, South Asian Indian, and U.S. Latina literature but also of literature from China, France, and the Francophone Caribbean. Moreover, it does not limit itself to the analysis of literature, for it encompasses work on Afro- Caribbean British televisual stories and cinematic narratives by South Asian Indian and Mexican directors. Whereas each contributor uses a distinct theoretical approach, they all share a common sensitivity to the exigencies of proof and corrobora- tion, as well as an understanding that ideological dogmatism impedes the exploration of the principles and mechanisms involved in the pro- duction and reception of narrative fi ction. In this, the essays I have col- lected here have affi nities with the work I have been doing since the pub- lication of Postethnic Narrative Criticism (2003), followed by Brown on Brown (2005) and A User’s Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland viii Frederick Luis Aldama Fiction (2009). And, like the other scholars represented here, I consider both critical theory and critical practice to be most productively served by fi rst understanding narrative fi ction within its worldwide dimension and then analyzing its myriad expressions as particularities in each time and place. The kinds of fi ction in which we are most interested all com- prise unique, idiosyncratic works that cohere into unifi ed wholes; at the same time, they are all part of the ongoing dialogue sustained by au- thors the world over. Part I: Voice Brian Richardson’s essay, “U.S. Ethnic and Postcolonial Fiction: Toward a Poetics of Collective Narratives,” opens the collection. Richardson of- fers a widely encompassing overview of the ways tools and categories (e.g., narrative, story and plot, narrative temporality, character, and “re- ception and the reader”) can be used to enrich our understanding and appreciation of a great range of literary texts. In a discussion of point of view, Richardson teases out the various nuances of the “we” narrative and other unusual voices in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Nuruddin Farah’s Maps, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Grain of Wheat. Focusing on the varying degrees of pres- ence of multiple and divided voices, Richardson shows how authors can create all sorts of tensions among the individual, the community, and a dominant society. Indeed, the narrative voice provides authors writing under constraints of artistic and political censorship an important tech- nique for speaking both to an “ideal reader” who will get the “deeper, hidden meanings” and to the censoring audience. The subsequent essays in this section continue to sharpen our under- standing of the way narrative techniques such as voice work in a num- ber of world narrative fi ctions. For example, in “Language Peculiarities and Challenges to Universal Narrative Poetics,” Dan Shen demonstrates how linguistic markers of tense in Chinese differ from English ones in ways that signifi cantly alter the category of voice in narrative fi ction. To understand the narrative richness in Chinese novels such as Mao Dun’s Shop of the Lin Family and Cao Xueqin’s Dream of Red Mansions, where the Chinese narrating voice lacks tense markers, we must keep in mind the tense-ambiguous category of the “fi nite blend.” While Shen dem- onstrates certain overlaps between Chinese and non-Chinese literatures, such linguistic variations create differences in the device of voice. How to Use This Book ix In “Reading Narratologically: Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba,” Gerald Prince also attends to nuances of language in his exploration of beur literature (i.e., works written in French by children of North Afri- can immigrants to France). Prince attends to code switching between standard French, French Lyonnais slang, and Algerian Arabic in Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba and the way such linguistic shifts mark the narrator-protagonist’s movements among his neighborhood, his school, and the city. Prince’s focus on language and narrative voice “system- atically” allows us to characterize the particular functioning of Begag’s “narrativity.” Using the concept of the “narratee” originally introduced and sharp- ened by Gerald Prince in 1980, Robyn Warhol analyzes Bharati Mukher- jee’s tense shifts and chronological disruptions, as well as the narrator- narratee confi gurations, in the novel Jasmine. In “Jasmine Reconsidered: Narrative Structure and Multicultural Subjectivity” Warhol identifi es how the narrator-narratee confi guration presents an instance of the im- possibility of integrated subjecthood for its Indian narrator-character, known variously as Jyoti, Jasmine, or Jane. Unlike its alluded-to pre- de ces sor, Jane Eyre, where “the heroine’s subjectivity is monocultural [and] her reader—the narratee to whom she is speaking—perfectly aligned with the narrator’s and narratees’s values and teleology,” War- hol argues, Jasmine presents a character-narrator whose difference from other middle-class North American characters is marked both by the presence of such characters in the storyworld and the identifi cation of a like- positioned narratee. Also attending to the importance of voice, James Phelan teases out how Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God establishes at the outset a certain type of dynamic interaction among the various com- ponents of the narrative fi ction blueprint and the reader. In “Voice, Pol- itics, and Judgments in Their Eyes Were Watching God: The Initiation, the Launch, and the Debate about the Narration,” Phelan identifi es “initiation” (the initial rhetorical exchanges among author, narrator, and audience) and “launch” (the taking off of the narrative when a “global instability” is introduced) to reveal the formal and political importance of Hurston’s initial use of an authoritative narrator who subsequently aligns the reader’s interest with the characters Janie and Pheoby and with the telling situation generally. In some cases of dialogue, Phelan further argues, Hurston presents a “block of monologic discourse from a collective voice” that guides the reader to “strongly negative ethical judgments of the speakers.” Phelan shows that as the narrative unfolds,

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Why are many readers drawn to stories that texture ethnic experiences and identities other than their own? How do authors such as Salman Rushdie and Maxine Hong Kingston, or filmmakers in Bollywood or Mexico City produce complex fiction that satisfies audiences worldwide? In Analyzing World Fiction,
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