NARRATIVE最新文献

{"title":"Mad about the \"Boys\"? Desire, Revulsion, and (Mis)Recognition in Varro's Eumenides","authors":"Chris Mowat","doi":"10.1353/nar.2024.a926174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2024.a926174","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the surviving literature of the Roman Republic, the galli are near-universal objects of repulsion, with their gender presentation being constantly derided. The fragments of Varro’s <i>Eumenides</i>, however, offer an opportunity to consider repulsion alongside desire and how the two are often closer than we think. I begin this essay by contextualizing the galli within Roman society and broader trans history; I then employ a trans narratological reading to consider how the narrator attempts to construct different positive images of the galli and how they in turn refuse his categorizations regardless. As the genre of this text is satire, we might initially understand the galli as targets of mockery for Varro; however, the fragmentation of the text, alongside the narrator’s consciously unstable viewpoint, allow this group the opportunity to step outside of the conventional depiction of them, and even construct themselves beyond the normative bounds expected of them, by the narrator or the audience. Reading the galli through a lens of desire allows us to recognize the multiplicity of emotional responses that they would have elicited in the Roman world and expand our understanding beyond the reductive image usually presented by their authors. As well as opening up new lines of conversation around the galli themselves, this essay also offers a broader opportunity to consider how trans experiences can be narrated, even at the expense of the narrator, the author, or their own wider society.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140829277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trans-forming Narratology","authors":"Susan S. Lanser","doi":"10.1353/nar.2024.a926177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2024.a926177","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>From the vantagepoint of a feminist/queer/cisgender narratologist, “Trans-forming Narratology” asks which aspects of narrative practice might be particularly salient to developing a fruitful trans narratology while also calling our attention to elements of narrative that conventional (cis)narratology has undervalued or ignored. Keeping in mind matters that might be particularly relevant to trans narratives, this speculative essay explores aspects of voice, embodiment, character space, plotting, and closure in a set of recent American and British novels. It considers ways in which trans narratives can exploit the gender freedom of the first-person English pronoun or, conversely, signal temporally dual identities through heterodiegetic naming practices. It addresses tensions between a character’s proclaimed gender and their assigned sex and the differing implications of texts with narratees who are also textual actors and those whose narratees serve as external confidantes. Through brief forays into multiple aspects of narrative form, this essay argues for a narratology that can show the rich and varied capacities of trans writings past and present, with the hope that attention to trans narratives will both deepen our understanding of trans literature and advance the larger project of a comprehensive, situated narratology.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140833213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"How to Become a Rock\": Non-Human Metaphors as Trans Paranarratives","authors":"Sven Van den Bossche","doi":"10.1353/nar.2024.a926176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2024.a926176","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Non-human metaphors, including animal metaphors, are widely used to evoke trans experiences, but the blooming flowers and hatching butterflies are often reduced to mere tropes or clichés. This article investigates what a narrative approach to these non-human metaphors can offer us to reconceptualize trans existence. I employ Benjamin Biebuyck and Gunther Martens’s concept of the ‘paranarrative,’ which allows us to look at metaphors as creating an additional narrative layer where aspects of the main narrative can be deepened, nuanced, or even contested. In two case studies, I unearth hidden sides of trans experience evoked through non-human metaphors on a paranarrative level. In Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s novel <i>Mijn lieve gunsteling</i>, animal metaphors ranging from otters to birds bring to the surface a view of transness not limited to gender, but one that entails feelings of isolation and even uncontrollable desires. The metaphors in the novel <i>Wormmaan</i> by Mariken Heitman likewise raise attention to the connectedness between human, plants, and matter that society has tried to contain in limiting categorizations, such as gender divisions. By broadening the scope of trans as an embodied experience across various boundaries, this article calls for an expansive approach to trans narratology that reaches beyond gender towards the variety of affects that trans is capable of exposing.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140829377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"To Become a Warrior and a Son to My Father\": Aleksandr Aleksandrov's (Nadezhda Durova) Notes of a Cavalry Maiden (1836) as Transgender Autobiography","authors":"Margarita Vaysman","doi":"10.1353/nar.2024.a926173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2024.a926173","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Transgender autobiographies have been a subject of narratology since the 1990s. Most of these studies have focused predominantly on twentieth- and, later, twenty-first-century texts, guided by the increasing availability of primary sources and the temporal limitations of transgender history. And yet, as Jay Prosser argued in his influential 1998 work <i>Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Sexuality</i>, “even without the official discourse of sex change, the plot lines of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transgendered subjects are remarkably consistent with those of contemporary transsexuals” (133). This article expands the chronology and geography of narrato-logical analysis of this genre through reading <i>Notes of a Cavalry Maiden</i> [Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy] (1836) by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova) (1783–1866), a Russian-Ukrainian hero of the Napoleonic wars, as a transgender autobiography. This reading brings into consideration new forms, affects, and narrative structures as constituent elements of trans narratives and has the potential to expand anglophone trans imaginaries past the confines of their current locations and temporalities.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140829376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Transforming Paratext: A Transgender Touch across Time in Confessions of the Fox","authors":"Gil Mozer","doi":"10.1353/nar.2024.a926175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2024.a926175","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper examines the overlaps between a fictional paratext and a fictional personal narrative, as framed within Jordy Rosenberg’s 2018 novel <i>Confessions of the Fox</i>. The novel’s primary narrative, a “manuscript” of the metafictional biography of eighteenth-century transgender criminal célèbre Jack Sheppard, is encased in multiple layers of heavy footnoting by the novel’s narrator, Dr. Voth, a trans scholar himself. Rosenberg manipulates the novel form with insertions of substantial paratextual narrative, crossing over and at times mirroring Sheppard’s story, blending queer theorizations of temporality with narrative structural innovations to explore a trans “touch across time.” Rosenberg thus queers the nature and function of the paratext, reimagining and complicating its centrality to both the narrative “presenting” and the temporal “making present” of an individual narrative.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140829378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Queering a Trans Life Story: The Unnatural Potential of Weak Narrativity in succubus in my pocket","authors":"Joonas Säntti","doi":"10.1353/nar.2024.a926172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2024.a926172","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Discussing similarities between antimimetic and queer/trans narratives, as well as interlacing subjects of interest in the respective fields of unnatural and queer/trans narratology, this article suggests the importance of experimental texts for theorizing trans narratives. It presents its arguments by focusing on one case study, a mixed genre manuscript written in 2004 and published in 2015, <i>succubus in my pocket</i> by the late trans poet kari edwards (1954–2006). My approach mines queer narratology (Susan Lanser), trans poetics (Trace Peterson), unnatural narratology (Brian Richardson), and the study of narrative poetry (Brian McHale) for conceptual tools to discuss how an extremely antimimetic narrative entwines transgressions of narrative expectations with transgressions of expectations about sex and gender. The work invites narrative interpretations of sequential events based on causal expectations while consistently refuting default interpretive strategies. This article shows how weak narrativity can be deployed as a critique of narrative sense-making processes in general and, more particularly, of conventional progression in narratives about trans lives.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140833456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Contextualizing Trans Narratologies","authors":"Cody Mejeur, Chiara Pellegrini","doi":"10.1353/nar.2024.a926171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2024.a926171","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Introduction: <span>Contextualizing Trans Narratologies</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Cody Mejeur (bio) and Chiara Pellegrini (bio) </li> </ul> KEYWORDS <p>trans narrative, trans narrative studies, queer narratology, feminist narratology, social justice, political narratives, gender norms</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Prefatory Note:</em> <em>While we have aimed to write this introduction with one voice, we have at times felt it important to differentiate between us, highlighting a dialogic process. As Cody is trans and Chiara is not, our positionalities result in different inflections when discussing transness. This situation is not only inevitable but potentially very generative when forming a trans narrative studies that, on the one hand, is adamant in centering trans people and, on the other, also calls upon cis people to do the work; trans methodologies, politics, and justice should not be viewed as the niche interest of a few but as necessary for the liberation of all. The sections following</em> <strong><em>our names in bold</em></strong> <em>are in our individual voices, and unmarked paragraphs are written together with one voice</em>.</p> </blockquote> <p>WE WRITE THE INTRODUCTION of this special issue on trans narrative studies in a moment of ascendent transphobia and aggressive organizing and legislation against trans peoples around the world. In the US, 385 bills of anti-trans legislation have been introduced, with 22 states banning gender affirming care for people under age 18, and some currently considering bans regardless of age. In Tennessee, attacks on a transgender health clinic at Vanderbilt University led the hospital to remove trans healthcare information from its website, and later turn over trans patient medical <strong>[End Page 125]</strong> records to the state attorney general, allowing the state to identify and potentially target trans people and their families. In the UK, transphobic groups are given space in the media to voice their support of proposed government policies such as banning trans women from single-gender hospital wards, and writers known for voicing anti-trans views, such as Janice Turner and Kathleen Stock, are honored with awards.¹ In the EU, 28 countries require a mental health diagnosis to change one’s name or gender on identity documents. Many more countries around the world do not recognize trans identity nor offer legal protections against anti-trans violence and discrimination. Global violence against trans people (particularly trans women of color) has remained consistently high since 2021, the “deadliest year” since records began, and every year murders are reported for the first time in countries around the world (with many in Central and South America), indicating both growing violence and the likelihood that many more lost trans lives never make it into the","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140833458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward a Narratology of Western Narrative Theatre Dance","authors":"Cristina de Lucas","doi":"10.1353/nar.2024.a916607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2024.a916607","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: Dance is barely present in narrative studies. It is generally accepted as a narrative medium, yet lacks a systematic study that addresses its distinctive qualities. This article focuses on generic theoretical issues of dance as a narrative medium and discusses its place within current narratological debates. The first premise suggested here is that among the diferent manifestations of dance, narrative theatre dance is the fullest expression of narrativity, with a narrative essence that the notions of plot and experientiality help defining and grading. Taking the discussion through routes explored for drama, this essay also argues for a narratological model of the analysis of dance narratives on two levels: the story level and the discourse level understood as performance. Another set of considerations concentrate on the semiotic structure of dance, showing how it can be dissected in a productive way for narratological analyses. The essay ends with a discussion on the relevance of context and cultural conventions for the interpretation of dance. Underpinning these reflections are foundational studies of transmedial narratology, widely-used narratological definitions of narrative, and discussions of the narrative nature of drama as well as key texts from the history, philosophy and analysis of dance. Three examples of dance—John Weaver’s ballet The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717), Kenneth MacMillan’s The Invitation (1960), and Leonid Yakobson’s Vestris (1969)—illustrate this theoretical argumentation.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139392135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Implicated Reader: Second-Person Address in Novels of US Imperialism","authors":"Jennifer Noji","doi":"10.1353/nar.2024.a916603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2024.a916603","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: This essay explores how literature can help reckon with past and present political violence by employing formal and rhetorical techniques to implicate readers in such violence. Bringing Michael Rothberg’s concept of “the implicated subject” (2019)—a figure who is neither a victim nor perpetrator but rather enables or benefits from regimes of violence—into conversation with narrative theory and formalist criticism, the essay conceptualizes what I call an implicated reader , a term that designates an implied reader who is implicated in the violent events and structures represented in the given text. In order to develop and demonstrate my theoretical framework of the implicated reader, I analyze three twenty-first-century novels depicting diferent legacies of US imperialism: Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine (2002), representing the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans; Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), portraying post-9/11 racial violence; and Tommy Orange’s There There (2018), depicting legacies of Indigenous genocide and dispossession. I examine how these novels use distinct forms of second-person address—either characterized or uncharacterized , and internal or external —to invite readers to identify with the narratee evoked as an implicated subject. The essay ultimately suggests that rather than facilitating the reader’s identification and empathy with victimized subjects, some works of literature challenge injustice and provoke political responsibility by prompting readers to imagine themselves in the position of someone who contributes to rather than sufers from political violence.","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139395835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Narrative Beginnings: Relations between First Full-Fledged Scenes and the Beginning of the Main Action","authors":"Eyal Segal","doi":"10.1353/nar.2024.a916602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2024.a916602","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: This essay focuses on two important phenomena in the context of narrative “beginnings”: the beginning of the action proper and the first full-fledged scene (FFS), namely, the first time-section in the text that the author finds to be of consequence enough to deserve full scenic treatment. The point of departure for my discussion is Meir Sternberg’s claim that the FFS always signals the beginning of the action proper (and the end of the exposition) in the fabula. To refute this as an absolute claim, I examine several types of openings where the FFS either succeeds or precedes chronologically the beginning of the action proper. I thereby also try to demonstrate it is instructive to consider the FFS more generally as significant on aesthetic and rhetorical grounds within the narrative whole; it can perform various and possibly alternative functions to the one Sternberg attributes to it as necessary and constant. Moreover, regarding the question of establishing the beginning point of the action proper, I suggest as an alternative signpost another full-fledged scene—the first in what I call the “main linear sequence” of the work (the application of both criteria often leads to the same result, but not always). This alternative indicator is not without its limitations either, but these limitations are methodologically useful since they help us identify and explain cases where the demarcation between exposition and action proper is genuinely problematic (when it is difficult to identify a main linear sequence in the work).","PeriodicalId":45865,"journal":{"name":"NARRATIVE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139392254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}