FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE AND POSSIBLE WORLDS IN IAN MCEWAN’S THE CHILD IN TIME

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-132
Author(s):  
Adriana Diana Urian ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Subsequent Discussion ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Narrative Syntax

The paper discusses the nature of free indirect discourse and the manner in which it appears within postmodern fiction, more precisely in Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time, through the modality of possible world semantics. First it explains how free indirect discourse should be understood in this context, outlining the theoretical introduction and justification of this particular approach. The subsequent discussion focuses on speech acts and how they can be understood theoretically and in a fictional universe. It then showcases how free indirect discourse works in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, which offers an excellent case study for this type of analysis, given the fact that the novel is a third person narrative, an indirect account of events, and a reported story, and thus a perfect sample of free indirect discourse in fiction. Finally, by blending these perspectives within the narrative universe and observing how they render a structural matrix of fiction upon which worlds of possibility can be modally distinguished, the paper will prove that the analysis of free indirect discourse completes the picture of narrative syntax within possible world determinism.

Two Paths for the Big Book: Olga Tokarczuk's Shifting Voice

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-87
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
The Third ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Single Voice ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
World Image

This essay argues for the power of free indirect discourse in the third-person narrative perspective to serve as a collective voice, encompassing a diversity of perspectives, through a reading of two novels by Olga Tokarczuk, Bieguni (Flights) and Księgi Jakubowe (Books of Jacob). Both novels investigate the challenges inherent in the project of providing an image of the world, and alongside various interventions on the level of content, each examines the kind of world-image that different approaches to narrative voice can produce. In Flights, the narrator's striving to arrive at a more expansive and synthetic knowledge of the world is accompanied by an effort to go beyond the first-person voice, to a broader perspective. The novel subtly demonstrates the impossibility of such efforts, but, the essay argues, Books of Jacob continues this project, albeit from the opposite direction, examining the affordances of the third-person voice. Its innovative use of free indirect discourse produces a perspective that, while appearing to be a single voice, contains multiple, contradictory points of view.

Voice at the Threshold of the Audible: Free Indirect Discourse and the Colonial Space of Reading

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-59
Author(s):  
Julie Beth Napolin
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Technological Mediation ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
Lip Sync

Chapter One is a study of Joseph Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, and it concentrates on the first two words of the novel, neither of which are in English. The chapter approaches the novel through the filters of these words’ racial and colonial sound effects, which become a basis for reappraising canonical tropes of voice in narrative theory, media theory, and the phenomenology of reading. Conrad’s novelistic writing becomes critical when read in relation to emergent sound technologies, the phonograph and ethnography, both of which simultaneously depended on the oral while superseding it through a different mode of technological mediation. But the novel, as a form, only becomes a “modern” technology of voice in its discovery of free indirect discourse, which is premised upon an exclusion of the colonial sonic traces of sexual violence. The chapter concludes with Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Conrad using lip-sync as a postcolonial strategy.

The use of deictic reference in identifying point of view in Grazia Deledda’s Canne al Vento and its translation into English

Target ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Johnson
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Functional Model ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Grazia Deledda

Point of view in narrative has been identified in literary stylistics through the use of deixis, modality, transitivity and Free Indirect Discourse. These findings have also been applied to literature in translation (Bosseaux 2007). This article focuses on deictic cues in the narrative structure of Canne al Vento by Grazia Deledda in the original Italian and the English translation, following an earlier study focussing on constructing a particular point of view through mental processes of perception, the translation of which did not always reflect that point of view (Johnson 2010). Data emerging from a corpus-assisted study is examined qualitatively using a systemic-functional model in order to assess to what extent the point of view constructed by these cues in the ST is conveyed in the novel in translation.

Narrated perception revisited: The case of Jane Austen’sEmma

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Pallarés-García
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Objective Fact ◽  
And Function

Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) is generally considered an ambiguous and unreliable narrative in terms of point of view (Morini, 2009: 53–57; Wallace, 1995: 77–97). These qualities are often attributed to the extensive use of free indirect discourse (Finch and Bowen, 1990: 5–6; Mezei, 1996: 72–75). This article aims to demonstrate that another narrative technique is also responsible for the ambiguity and unreliability of the novel. ‘Narrated perception’ (NP) portrays the sensory perceptions of a fictional character by describing events as they are experienced by that character (Fludernik, 1993: 305–309). NP has been pointed out by some critics to be a distinct narrative technique, but in general perception is included within the broader category of free indirect discourse (FID), and occasionally as an aspect of free indirect thought (FIT). This article suggests that there are some subtle differences between NP and FID/FIT, and thus it can be beneficial to examine NP separately. In fact, NP is frequently similar to pure narration in terms of form and function. As a case study, this article presents a stylistic analysis of a number of passages containing NP in Emma which do not typically feature in studies of FID/FIT. The analysis provides textual evidence of (1) the presence of Emma’s sensory perceptions within what looks like narration, (2) the close connection between perception, thought and emotion, and (3) the difficulty of distinguishing between perception and narration in some cases, which suggests the potential of NP to mislead the reader by presenting as a seemingly objective fact what later on turns out to be Emma’s mistaken assessment.

scholarly journals Vidas secas: as percepções de Fabiano e o estado ausente

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (37) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Rayssa Mykelly de Medeiros Oliveira ◽  
Luiz Antonio Mousinho
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Its Analysis ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Second Look ◽  
Historical Moment

<p>Much has been researched about Graciliano Ramos’work. Vidas secas had numerous studies devoted to its analysis. The position of the criticism about the brutalized characters has changed.The first reviews dealt with the animalization of Fabiano and his family, seeing them as non psychologically complex After this first interpretation, criticism proposed a reinterpretation of Graciliano’s stylistic resources, through which is possible to comprehend the characters in a different way. This study proposes a second look at two distinct moments of the novel in which Fabiano has contact with the State: through his confrontation with the yellow soldier in chapters Cadeia and O soldado amarelo. The questions and perceptions of Fabiano, brought to light by Ramos’ free indirect discourse help us to reflect on his psychological complexity denied by early reviews. In this paper, we investigate how the historical moment passes through the narrative,which is used as raw material for the character’s constitution.</p>

Narrative Language and Possible Worlds in Postmodern Fiction. A Borderline Study of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-264
Author(s):  
Adriana Diana Urian ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
World System ◽  
Narrative Text ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Possible World Semantics ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
Narrative Worlds ◽  
Narrative Language

"Narrative Language and Possible Worlds in Postmodern Fiction. A Borderline Study of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time. The present paper is a study of more traditional hermeneutics combined with a tinge of possible world modality, with the purpose of creating a thorough picture of narrative worlds and balancing it against the possible world system, with practical applications onto postmodern fiction, in Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time. The article focuses on exposing narrative language, worlds and characters, viewing them through Seymour Chatman’s perspective and slightly counterbalancing this approach with the possible world semantics system (as envisioned by Kripke, Lewis, Nolan, Putnam) for a diverse understanding of the inner structure and functioning of narrative text and fictional worlds. Keywords: possible worlds, possible-world semantics, narrative worlds, fictional worlds, narrative language, fiction, postmodern fiction, fictional characters "

Coda

2019 ◽  
pp. 209-212
Author(s):  
Jeanne M. Britton
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sympathetic Response ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Cognitive Patterns ◽  
The Relationship

The coda explores the relationship between the framed narratives discussed in previous chapters and free indirect discourse. Fiction’s redefinition of sympathy arises from the attempt to represent, in the first person, the experience of being another person. Through grammars and structures of vicarious narrative, one character tells another’s story after a shift in perspective. Similar modifications of perspective characterize free indirect discourse, which often follows the cognitive patterns that Smith identifies in the workings of sympathetic response. The similarities between vicarious narratives and free indirect discourse betray a fundamental aspect of the novel—a pervasive interest in witnessing the attempt to uncover and inhabit another person’s present emotional state and past lived experience. Shifts in narrative levels that are indexed by strained experiences of sympathy, however, show how novelistic structures, and fiction itself, can stand in for human sympathies in their absence.

Free Indirect Discourse in the Translation into Finnish

Target ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarja Rouhiainen
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Person Reference ◽  
Mental Language ◽  
Third Person

Abstract Free indirect discourse (FID) is a narrative technique which purports to convey a character’s mental language while maintaining third-person reference and past tense. This paper deals with the problems the use of FID may create for Finnish translators of English literary narratives. A comparative analysis of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and its translation into Finnish shows that the translator’s treatment of the pronouns he/she may shift the viewpoint from the character’s consciousness to the narrator’s discourse. The article concludes with the question of what stylistic norms could explain the translator’s avoidance of the spoken-language simulation typical of the source text.

scholarly journals 'A Peculiar Fusion of Soul'

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Géza Maráczi
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Linguistic Representation ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Narrative Techniques

In an attempt to integrate the study of characterisation with that of narration in D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, this paper traces the psychological themes whose realisation structures the narrative techniques of character presentation and the types of discourse applied for establishing and presenting the psychologies of characters. It examines the narrative techniques the novel employs for characterisation and describes, in terms of narrative situations, focalization and the technique of free indirect discourse, its methods for presenting the mental activities of the characters. It finds that by means of constant shifts of focalization within two specific types of discourse ("psycho-narration" and "narrated monologue"), the narrative accomplishes the linguistic representation of the psychological themes that can be defined as 'the dislocation of sensibility' and 'the loss of the self,' and explains them accordingly.

George Eliot’s Lot

Empty Houses ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kurnick
Keyword(s):  
Habits Of Mind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Grammatical Form ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Spanish Gypsy ◽  
Narrative Forms

This chapter focuses on George Eliot's tangled engagement with the drama. It begins with an analysis of the mutual constitution of theatricalized space and characterological interiority in Romola (1863) and Felix Holt (1866)—transitional novels in which her emphasis on psychological inwardness works at the expense of demonized crowds. But during this period she also undertook a dramatic work that challenged her most fundamental formal and ethical commitments. Conceived as a play but published as an epic poem mixing dramatic and narrative forms, The Spanish Gypsy shows Eliot refusing both the novel as a form and the inward cultivation it seems designed to encourage. The Spanish Gypsy includes narrative passages that take the grammatical form of free indirect discourse, in which a character's habits of mind are mimicked by the narrator's prose. But the exteriorized perspective demanded by the dramatic origin of The Spanish Gypsy assures that these eminently psychologizing sentences emanate from and attach to no character in particular, instead appearing to echo in an auditorium populated with spectators. Eliot carried this experiment in externalized forms of psychological narration into the novels she wrote next, Middlemarch (1871–72) and especially Daniel Deronda (1876).

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