Tag Archives: Narratology

Retracing Sequence and Series

From “Cartouches” the 11 December 1977 entry (p. 215) in Derrida’s The Truth in Painting translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Retrace one’s steps, always, again, narrative/series [récit/série]. I am grateful to the translators for recording the assonance that … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Mock Interview About the Narrative Impulse

[Anthony?] Storr drawing on Winnicott writes: Transitional objects gradually loose their emotional charge as the child grows older. Often such objects become linked with a variety of other objects and are used in play. Children easily transmute a broomstick into … Continue reading

Posted in Storytelling | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Made and the Making

Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet H. Murray examines ways of world making and at its heart is a tension between two modes: There will always be a trade-off between a world that is … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Temporal and Spatial Qualities of the Novel

In honour of Tara Collington, friend from graduate school days, and author of Lectures chronotopiques: Espace, temps et genres romanesques There is an old riff I’ve always imagined to have been invented by some graduate student […] struggling through Kant’s … Continue reading

Posted in Storytelling, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The One, the Set and the Historical

I’ve visited Richard Boston in the foreward to The Guardian Country Diary Drawings by Clifford Harper (2003, Agraphia Press) and focused on the acquiring a “narrative quality”. Here is the passage given more fully The Country Diary drawings are intended … Continue reading

Posted in Booklore | Tagged | Leave a comment

Unlocatable

I’ve come across a bibliography of works published by the French Department at the University of Toronto. I am interested in the following item: Patte, Daniel. Organisation sémantique et narrativité. 1978-7[9?]. No sign of it in the university’s library catalogue. … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Worlds and Time

In the “Emmulations” chapter of Sense I ended up tracing how narrataivity depends upon sequence and thus operates across sensory modalities. I was quite pleased to later discover that Marie-Laure Ryan in “Transmedial Narratology and Concepts of Narrative” arrives at … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

A favourite passage on what matters in what happens

Stein, Gertrude. Narration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935. Narrative concerns itself with what is happening all the time, history concerns itself with what happens from time to time. And that is perhaps what is the matter with history and … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Zest for Zen

Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Margarita translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor provides a most marvellous set of casuistic teasers. Despite the theater manager’s promise to Azazello never to lie again, he began with a lie. Although one … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Union of Intersections

Robert Scholes’s opening sentence to “Afterthoughts on Narrative” from Critical Inquiry autumn 1980 is worth working through again on a May Day and any day: Narrative is a place where sequence and language, among other things intersect to form a … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment