Gerald Prince

Narrative pragmatics, message, and point

Abstract After presenting some reasons for the rise of narrative pragmatics and after providing a definition of the latter, this paper sketches some of the ways in which narratologists might deal explicitly and systematically with pragmatics-related problems. Specifically, the problems of narrative message and narrative point variability are considered and context-incorporating solutions are proposed. Implications for literary studies and for the study of reading are discussed and the conclusion stresses the importance for narratologists of articulating the theory of narrative with a contextual theory of interpretation and evaluation.

On Narrative Studies and Narrative Genres

In the past two or three decades, students of narrative have very much consolidated and developed our knowledge by isolating, (re)characterizing, and (re)classifying a large number of features distinctive of or pertinent to (verbal) narrative (see Adam 1985; Genette 1980, 1988; Mitchell 1981; Prince 1987; Scholes and Kellogg 1966). In the area of narrative discourse (that of the narrating rather than the narrated, the representing and not the represented), for instance, Genette and others (e.g., Bal 1985; Chatman 1978; Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Todorov 1981) have described the temporal orders that a narrative text can follow, the anachronies (flashbacks and flash-forwards) that it can exhibit, the achronic (undatable) structures that it can accommodate. Furthermore, they have characterized narrative speed and its canonical tempos (ellipsis, summary, scene, stretch, and pause). They have investigated narrative frequency (the relationship between the number of times an event happens and the number of times it is recounted), examined narrative distance (the extent of narratorial mediation) and narrative point of view (the perceptual or conceptual position according to which the narrated events are depicted), studied the types of discourse that a text can adopt to report the utterances and thoughts of characters, and analyzed the major kinds of narration (posterior, anterior, simultaneous, intercalated) as well as their modes of combination (two different acts of narration can be linked through a simple

Narratology, Narrative, and Meaning

What I intend to do, in the main, is to retrace a journey, but first I will mention an old joke-that of the madman reading the telephone directory and thinking that it is a rather mediocre novel: too many characters and too little action. If I find it relatively easy to read the directory as a novel (and a set of directories as a saga), I find it more difficult to use a novel as a directory. But not impossible: a code would suffice.

Classical and/or Postclassical Narratology

Less formalist than classical narratology, postclassical narratology brings together poetics and hermeneutics, studying narratives as contextually situated practices. Yet postclassical narratology does not represent a negation of its predecessor but its extension. Whether classical or postclassical, narratology maintains its commitment to elaborating the best model of narrative possible and, at least in this sense, it should continue to be formalist.

Narratology and translation

In their explorations of narrative, many narratologists distinguish between the narrated (the situations and events presented), the narrating (the way these situations and events are presented), and the concrete manifestation of narrated and narrating in a particular medium (linguistic, say, pictorial, balletic) or a particular form thereof (English or French, film or painting, classical or modern). By and large, narratologists focus on the narrated and the narrating rather than on the medium of manifestation. Still, they are not unaware of, nor insensitive to, the effects that specific means of expression can have on narratives and, more particularly, on their transpositions (from prose to canvas, from stage to screen) or on their translations (from English to French, for instance, and vice versa). Taking as examples a variety of fictional texts by Stendhal, George Eliot, Anne Garréta, Ernest Hemingway, and others, the article discusses some of the effects that translation’s inevitable nonequivalences, variances, or paraphrases have on narrating and narrated features. More specifically, it uses translation to revisit these features, to reconsider their basicness, centrality or indispensability, and to reassess the narratological models they bring about.

A virtual roundtable on Iser’s legacy Part I: conversation with Gerald Prince

In this article you find the first part of a roundtable on Wolfgang’s Iser legacy with Gerald Prince, Mark Freeman, Marco Caracciolo and Federico Bertoni. In Part I we discuss with Prof. Gerald Prince the influence of Iser’s aesthetic response theory on past and current reader oriented approaches, as well as Iser’s last insights on literary anthropology and the role of literary theory.