John Pier

The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology

With the emergence of postclassical narratology, it has become necessary to take stock of ongoing developments against the backdrop of established aspects of research in the field. The contributions to this volume employ some of the recent epistemological and methodological models in an attempt to resolve a number of unsettled issues while charting out potential vistas for new themes in narrative studies.

Gérard Genette's Evolving Narrative Poetics

Centre de recherche sur les arts et le langage (CNRS-EHESS) in Paris, where he co-directs the seminar “Narratologies contemporaines.” A member of the steering committee of the European Narratology Network, he has published many articles on narrative theory and literary semiotics and has edited or co-edited a number of collective volumes including The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology (2004), Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation (2005), Théorie du récit: L’apport de la recherche allemande (2007), Theorizing Narrativity (2008), and Handbook of Narratology (2009), and Narratologies contemporaines: nouveaux paradigmes pour la théorie et l’analyse du récit (2010).

Fictional vs. Factual Narration

Factual and fictional narrative are generally defined as a pair of opposites. However, there is no consensus as to the rationale of this opposition. Three major competing definitions have been proposed: (a) semantic definition: factual narrative is referential whereas fictional narrative has no reference (at least not in “our” world); (b) syntactic definition: factual narrative and fictional narrative can be distinguished by their logico-linguistic syntax; (c) pragmatic definition: factual narrative advances claims of referential truthfulness whereas fictional narrative advances no such claims. One could add a fourth definition, narratological in nature: in factual narrative author and narrator are the same person whereas in fictional narrative the narrator (who is part of the fictional world) differs from the author (who is part of the world we are living in) (Genette [1991] 1993: 78–88). But this fourth definition is better seen as a consequence of the pragmatic definition of fiction.

Fonctions du Cliche: Du banal a la violence (review)

Cendrine Reboul-Touré categorizes the tourist guide as a discourse aimed at the transmission of information. She draws on an earlier thesis that linguistic studies can reveal the values of representations, whether made by communities providing information or by those in charge of producing the information or opinions. In the light of this hypothesis, Reboul-Touré applies linguistic tools to certain representations of Italy in French tourist guides. Drawing also on previous studies by Amossy and Anne Herschberg Pierrot, Reboul-Touré considers stereotype—an opinion already molded, passing from one discourse to another without ever being questioned—as a notionmore limited than ‘‘representation’’ and chargedwith a negative connotation.The key words examined by her are Italian as noun and adjective. The former refers to all thosewhowere born in Italy, and the generalization ‘‘Italians are . . .’’ covers the entire group and presents characteristics more or less stereotyped. Stereotyped representations result from the association between the noun and the adjective: replacing Italian car with American car will create a wholly different stereotype.The key word of this tourist guide discourse, Italian, thus becomes the vehicle of a representation that exceeds its primary definition. It is the task of the analyst, Reboul-Touré argues, to uncover such stereotypes and to show how they are woven into the text through the use of general statements and chosen adjectives. Anat Feldman, Tel Aviv