H. Porter Abbott

Letters to the Self: The Cloistered Writer in Nonretrospective Fiction

ception of The Sorrows of Young Werther and the Lettres portugaises, are cast in the form of diaries. The pretense in all of them is that the author has assigned the task of writing to someone who is neither a teller of stories, like Conrads Marlow, nor even a narrator so determinedly nonliterary as Robinson Crusoe, who, while untrained in storytelling, has nonetheless a story to tell, a tale of past events that have left him wiser than he was. In the fictions I discuss, the narrators are as yet uneducated by the experiences they relate. They are not even, properly speaking, narrators. Their form is the short entry, the note, the letter, the unconnected anecdote, and they do not know how their story will end until they have finished recording it. What sets these works off from other forms of

Time, Narrative, Life, Death, & Text-Type Distinctions: The Example of Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

“[A]ll knowledge is encoded as stories.” This sweeping assertion by Roger Schank and Robert Abelson seems designed to provoke (2).1 But then here’s Mark Turner affirming much the same position: “Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought” (4). And here’s Merlin Donald asserting that “the narrative mode is . . . the basic product of language” (257). Fredric Jameson called narrative “the central function . . . of the human mind” (13), and Lyotard called it “the quintessential form of customary knowledge” (19). Goranson and Cardier called narrative a “driving imperative” (1), and Robert Storey contended that narrative is “an innate way of knowing, essentially as pre-linguistic in its operations as conceptualization has proven to be” (84) and, as such, “the ‘deep grammar’ of literature itself ” (113). Storey was echoing both Algirdas Greimas and Greimas’s sometime critic Paul Ricoeur, who both preferred the term “narrativity” for this deep pre-linguistic informing capability, with Ricoeur extending its operation well beyond fictive literature, as did most emphatically Hayden White, who called narrativity a “panglobal fact of culture” (19). If there is no empirical evidence yet that would put any of these assertions beyond doubt, they nonetheless indicate a shared intuition that narrative is somehow of a different order from the other text types. And this intuition, in turn, can make the job of discriminating text types a lopsided endeavor. In strictly literary discourse, discriminating text types has traditionally been a matter of formal categories rather than cognitive equipment. Generally, as formal categories, they constitute equivalent kinds in a hierarchy of forms. In this scheme, they are usually situated equally together at

Character, Singularity, and Rhetorical Modeling

“Why, sir,” the student asks, “does Achilles drag the body of Hector around the walls of Troy?” “That sounds like a stimulating question. Most interesting. I’ll bite,” says the professor. “Well, you see, sir, the ‘Iliad’ is full of circles—shields, chariot wheels and other round figures. And you know what Plato said about circles. The Greeks were all made for geometry.” “Bless your crew-cut head,” says the professor, “for such a beautiful thought. You have exquisite sensibility. Your approach is both deep and serious. Still I always believed that Achilles did it because he was so angry.”

Beckett's Lawlessness: Evolutionary Psychology and Genre

Becketts aggressiveness in crossing generic lines paradoxically accompanied a keen sensitivity to genre and medium differences that often constrained his writing. My argument here is that this combination of abandon and respect was founded in a recognition not just of formal differences in art but of differences in the ways we think. In the wake of groundbreaking work by Jerry Fodor and Howard Gardner, there has been a great deal of research advancing (and qualifying) a modular conception of how the mind evolved and how it continues to work in modern humans. This work puts new light on both the formal differences between mimesis and diegesis, and on Becketts approach to these two different ways of rendering narrative. Particularly it makes clear why Beckett should have so radically subordinated character and action to staged diegesis in his later work.