Letters from Austenland

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-209
Author(s):  
Mike Goode

The chapter contends that Austen fanfiction set within her novels’ “canonical universe” reveals how fanfiction is a design medium. The chapter analyzes how Austen prequels, sequels, and rewrites, through their medial gravitation to epistolary forms (letters and diaries), collectively render their explorations of narrative possibility a means of perceiving and undoing the medial foreclosures enacted by Austen’s narrative voice and its reliance on free indirect discourse. It further contends that, as a population, canonical-universe fanfiction collectively renders narrative a vehicle of virtual place-making, thereby aligning fanfiction more with open-source media design—for example, Software Development Kits (SDKs)—than with the documentary impulses implied by the figure of the fanfiction “archive.” Given that canonical-universe Austen fanfiction preserves the geographical centrality of Austen novels’ fictional English country estates to their canonical universes, the estates become hypermedial figures for realist Austen fanfiction’s own place-making practices and its media platforms.

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-72
Author(s):  
Noé Blancas Blancas ◽  

The study of narrative resources such as free indirect discourse and narrated monologue, in Los de abajo, although it has been clearly pointed out by critics such as Mansour, Escalante and St. Ours, is scarce in comparison with the works on the Mexican Revolution and the controversy over the ideological position of its author, Mariano Azuela. In the present work, an approach to these resources is made, following the precepts of narratology, starting from the relationship between the narrative voice and the figural discourse, and between the discourses of the characters; that is, from the citation processes. Specifically, an approach is made to the way in which Demetrio Macías recounts his exploits by repeating the speech of Alberto Solís, shaped, in turn, by other anonymous speeches. The relevance of self-narrating in this way is such that it implies a radical change in the personality and destiny of Demetrio Macías.


Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Egetenmeyer

Abstract In this article, we investigate the role free indirect discourse (FID) plays in temporal discourse structure. In contrast to the most widely accepted account of FID, which compares the content of FID to the surrounding content (two voices or two contexts), we take FID as a discourse entity and, thus, focus on the FID event. We follow a prominence-based approach to temporal discourse structure, through which we are able to describe the temporal relations the FID event maintains to the preceding and the following discourse in a precise manner. We can also account for the temporal developments that may be brought about by FID events. This becomes especially interesting in longer passages where FID events alternate with non-FID parts of discourse. The interaction involves the three levels which together make up our account of temporal discourse structure.


Author(s):  
Rae Greiner

Sympathy and empathy are complex and entwined concepts with philosophical and scientific roots relating to issues in ethics, aesthetics, psychology, biology, and neuroscience. For some, the two concepts are indistinguishable, the two terms interchangeable, but each has a unique history as well as qualities that make both concepts distinct. Although each is associated with feeling, especially the capacity to feel with others or to imaginatively put oneself “in their shoes,” the concepts’ sometimes shared, sometimes divergent histories reveal more complicated origins, as well as vexed and ongoing relations to feeling and emotion and to the ethical value of emotional sharing. Though empathy regularly is considered the more advanced and egalitarian of the two, it shares with sympathy a controversial role in historical debates regarding questions of an inborn or divine moral sense, prosocial behavior and the development of human communities, the relation of sensation to unconscious mental processes, brain matter, and neurons, and animal/human difference. In literary criticism, sympathy and empathy have been key components of aesthetic movements such as sentimentalism, realism, and modernism, and of literary techniques like free indirect discourse (FID), which are thought (by some) to enhance readerly intimacy and closeness to novelistic characters and perspectives. Both concepts have also received their fair share of suspicion, as the capacity to feel, or imagine feeling, the emotions of others remains a controversial basis for ethics.


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