Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel

Elke D'hoker, Gunther Martens, Elke D'hoker, Gunther Martens

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9783110206302
• eBook ISBN: 9783110209389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume deals with the occurrence and development of unreliable first-person narration in twentieth century Western literature. The different articles in this collection approach this topic both from the angle of literary theory and through a detailed reading of literary texts. By addressing questions concerning the functions, characteristics and types of unreliability, this collection contributes to the current theoretical debate about unreliable narration. At the same time, the collection highlights the different uses to which unreliability has been put in different contexts, poetical traditions and literary movements. It does so by tracing the unreliable first-person narrator in a variety of texts from Dutch, German, American, British, French, Italian, Polish, Danish and Argentinean literature. In this way, this volume significantly extends the traditional 'canon' of narrative unreliability. This collection combines essays from some of the foremost theoreticians of unreliability (James Phelan, Ansgar Nünning) with essays from experts in different national traditions. The result is a collection that approaches the 'case' of narrative unreliability from a new and more varied perspective.

Table of contents

• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Introduction
• Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita
• Reconceptualizing the Theory, History and Generic Scope of Unreliable Narration: Towards a Synthesis of Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches
• Revising and Extending the Scope of the Rhetorical Approach to Unreliable Narration
• Sincerity, Reliability and Other Ironies – Notes on Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Werfel, Weiss and Co. Unreliable Narration in Austrian Literature of the Interwar Period
• Unreliability between Mimesis and Metaphor: The works of Kazuo Ishiguro
• A Sophisticated Form of Lying: Hugo Claus and the Poetics of Unreliability
• ‘Un Fou Raisonnant et Imaginant’. Madness, Unreliability and The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short
• An Eye for an I. Telling as Reading in Bruno Schulz’s Fiction
• Didn’t Know Any Better: Race and Unreliable Narration in “Low-Lands” (1960) by Thomas Pynchon
• Unreliability in Italian Modernist Fiction: The Cases of Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello
• “He” Who Knows Better Than “I”: Reactivating Unreliable Narration in Philip Roth’s Human Stain and Jean Echenoz’ Nous trois
• An Unreliable Narrator in an Unreliable World. Negotiating between Rhetorical Narratology, Cognitive Studies and Possible Worlds Theory
• The Deconstruction of the First-Person Narrator in the French New Novel
• First Person, Present Tense. Authorial Presence and Unreliable Narration in Simultaneous Narration