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Extra Novel Context - Coggle Diagram
Extra Novel Context
STORYWORLDS, NARRATIVE, CHARACTERS & NARRATORS
Storyworlds
Imaginary worlds.
Real Cosmogony: worlds do not precede their narration so authors do not have to start from scratch: they rely on a shared knowledge of the reader and their experience of a pre-existing world
Experiential repertoire (Herman 2002)
Saturation = concerns the amount of info in a text about the structure of a story world. High saturation (geographical & historical) can be paired with low saturation (characters' past or present biographies)
Narrative
Pivotal tension between the unfolding of events in the represented world and the way this is reflected through the temporal order of the narrative
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Plot as a process = a selective process that brings events from the story. Has a mediating function between story and narrative. Authors choose what order to reveal info to their readers in; complete control. Doesn't have to be a linear narrative. Analepsis / Anachronies = condensation & expansion of time. Order and duration are selective decisions made (via a narrator) which can reveal details about the characters' lives.
Characters
Narrative fiction provides a transparent access to a hidden inner status of other minds / beliefs / desires/ conscious thinking.
Polyphonic potential of the novel = symphony of consciousness interacting ('The Dialogic Imagination', Bakhtin)
Narrators
Narrative Distance: "the narrator's degree of involvement in the story" (Abbott, 'Intro to Narrative, p. 74)
Genette =
homodiegetic narrator: character in the story e.g. Jane Eyre. 1st person
heterodiegetic narrator: outside the fictional universe e.g. Emma. 3rd person
Focalization = the distinction between who speaks and who sees (Genette)
- Internal
- Non-focalized = free from laws of cognition & perception (omniscient)
- Figural narrators = not a character, but momentarily violates this distance by borrowing characters' perceptions
REALISM RECONSIDERED
Brontë, Austen & Dickens were aware of the conventionality of realism and sometimes address that directly in their fiction. Finding ways of depicting everyday or ordinary experience in fiction. Mimesis
"[Realism is] the serious treatment of everyday life" (Auerbach, 'Mimesis')
Moll Flanders
- Narrates an account of an unordinary individual with an unordinary name
- Defoe doesn't idealise Moll.
- Movement between social classes.
- Typical protagonist can be flawed (different to Greek epic)
- Defoe leaves stuff out = reality cannot be fully copied.
Emma
Objective = to urge common sense and practicality
Emma makes mistakes and learns from them; she is sometimes an unfavourable heroine
Ordinary wedding to Knightley. Austen seeks a non-embellished literary style. She opposes realism & Gothic (e.g. Northanger Abbey is a satire of Gothic realism)
Jane Eyre
Gothic tropes: the B provides a means of representing interior states of consciousness as well as oppressive conditions.
Also clearly realist = documents psychological condition and development of Jane
Jane's self-proclaimed "plainness" is central to the realist objectives of the novel = Jane knows she is ugly (not Romantic)
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