Optional-Narrator Theory

Principles, Perspectives, Proposals

Sylvie Patron

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781496223371
• eBook ISBN: 9781496224507
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Twentieth-century narratology fostered the assumption, which distinguishes narratology from previous narrative theories, that all narratives have a narrator. Since the first formulations of this assumption, however, voices have come forward to denounce oversimplifications and dangerous confusions of issues. Optional-Narrator Theory is the first collection of essays to focus exclusively on the narrator from the perspective of optional-narrator theories. Sylvie Patron is a prominent advocate of optional-narrator theories, and her collection boasts essays by many prominent scholars—including Jonathan Culler and John Brenkman—and covers a breadth of genres, from biblical narrative to poetry to comics. This volume bolsters the dialogue among optional-narrator and pan-narrator theorists across multiple fields of research. These essays make a strong intervention in narratology, pushing back against the widespread belief among narrative theorists in general and theorists of the novel in particular that the presence of a fictional narrator is a defining feature of fictional narratives. This topic is an important one for narrative theory and thus also for literary practice. Optional-Narrator Theory advances a range of arguments for dispensing with the narrator, except when it can be said that the author actually "created" a fictional narrator.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1
• 1. Some Problems concerning Narrators of Novels and Speakers of Poems
• 2. Implied Authors and Imposed Narrators—or Actual Authors?
• 3. Real Authors, Real Narrators, and the Rhetoric of Fiction
• 4. Voice and Time
• 5. The Narrator
• 6. Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Narrator
• 7. The Narrator in Biblical Narratives
• 8. Narrator Theory and Medieval English Narratives
• 9. Marquis de Sade’s Narrative Despotism
• Part 2
• 10. Silent Self and the Deictic Imaginary
• 11. Aesthetic Theory Meets Optional-Narrator Theory
• 12. The Vanishing Narrator Meets the Fundamental Narrator
• 13. A Paradox of Cinematic Narration
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• About Sylvie Patron
• Series List