Construction of Female Awareness and Discourse Authority : Interpretation of Palace of Desire from the Perspective of Feminist Narratology

Palace of Desire is an excellent costume TV series directed by Li Shaohong. There are two screenwriters named Zhen Chong and Wang Yao. They used unique writing strategies to narrate the story of Princess Tai Ping and Empress Wu Zetian who are trapped in a delimma of power and emotion during a special period of Tang Dynasty, showing the confusion of women in the feudal society of ancient China. This article will use the theory of feminist stylistics to analyze the script of Palace of Desire. To be more specific, the paper focuses on narrative voices in Palace of Desire. It is hoped that how the screenwriters construct the narrative authority of women and make the work a feminist classic can be interpreted.

Narratology

Narratology studies what all and only possible narratives have in common as well as what allows them to differ from one another qua narratives, and it attempts to characterize the narratively pertinent set of rules and norms governing narrative production and processing. This structuralist-inspired endeavor began to assume the characteristics of a discipline in 1966 with the publication of the eighth issue of Communications, which was devoted to the structural analysis of narrative and included contributions by the French or francophone founders of narratology. In its first decades, or what has come to be viewed as its classical period, narratology dedicated much of its attention to characterizing the constituents of the narrated (the “what” that is represented), those of the narrating (the way in which the “what” is represented), and the principles regulating their modes of combination. Though classical narratology had ambitions to be an autonomous branch of poetics rather than a foundation for critical commentary and a handmaid to interpretation, the narrative features that it described made up a toolkit for the study of particular texts and fostered a considerable body of narratological criticism. Besides, by encouraging the exploration of the theme of narrative as well as the frame that narrative constitutes, it contributed to the so-called narrative turn, which is the reliance on the notion “narrative” to discuss not only representations but any number of activities, practices, and domains. In part because of the influence of narratological criticism and that of other disciplines; in part because of its biases and insufficiencies; and in part because of its very concerns, goals, and achievements, classical narratology went through important changes and evolved into postclassical narratology. The latter, which rethinks, refines, expands, and diversifies its predecessor, comes in many varieties, including feminist narratology, which exposes the way sex, gender, and sexuality affect the shape of narrative; cognitive narratology, which examines those aspects of mind pertaining to narrative production and processing; natural narratology, in which experientiality, the evocation of experience, is the determining element of narrativity; and unnatural narratology, which concentrates on nonmimetic or anti-mimetic narratives and tests the precision or applicability of narratological categories, distinctions, and arguments. Other topics—for example the links between geography and narrative or the narratological differences between fictional and nonfictional narrative representations—have lately evoked a good deal of interest. Ultimately, whatever the specific narratological variety or approach involved, narratologists continue to try and develop an explicit, complete, and empirically or experimentally grounded model of their singularly human object.

How Karen Tei Yamashita Literalizes Feminist Subversion: Extreme Domesticity, Space-Off Reversals, and Virtual Resistances in Tropic of Orange

In Tropic of Orange (1997), Karen Tei Yamashita builds an expansive narrative on the premise that the Tropic of Cancer shifts mysteriously from its actual latitude, barely north of Mazatlán, México, to that of L.A.’s latitude: from 23.43692° north of the Equator to 34.0522° N. By doing so, Yamashita literally takes that which is “south of the border” and repositions it in a hub of neoliberal hegemony; that is, she takes what is below (“sub-”) and puts it on top (“-vert”). I read such a literal and magically realistic move as an allegorical template that guides the novel in its entirety, but more specifically, in its repositioning of women from their spaces of relegation to spaces animated by their resistances to such relegation; from spaces of dependency to spaces characterized by feminine influence. This essay examines three strategies through which feminist subversions may be accomplished according to Yamashita’s textual template: The first follows Susan Fraiman’s theory of Extreme Domesticity (Fraiman 2017) as it tracks how subservient spaces of home and household can become sites of nonconformity; the second takes its cue from the cinematic strategies of “space-off” and “reversal” as examples of how marginal or negative spaces can be leveraged against the male gaze (c.f. José Rodríguez Herrera’s analysis of Sarah Polley’s film adaptation of Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over The Mountain,” Herrera 2013); and the third engages my own notion of a spatial virtuality (“that which is present without being local,” Munro 2014) as a mode of resistance that culminates, ultimately, in “a condition of literature,” that is to say, a condition in which Tropic of Orange refers to the conditions of its own making instead of referring to the conditions that create it (ibid.). My tripartite method thus highlights and celebrates the domestic, cinematic, and technological spaces of Yamashita’s writing, respectively, just as it articulates how these spaces might also be read as subversively feminist and feminizing. But it also meditates formally and contextually, as Tropic of Orange’s condition of literature implies, a sort of ablated feminist narratology, even as it works toward feminist narratological ends.

FEMINIST AND STRUCTURAL NARRATOLOGIE AS IDENTITY (RE)-CONFIGURATIONS IN AFRICAN NARRATIVES: A META-CRITICAL EXPOSITION OF LITERARY ARTICLES

Research in African literature articulated a number of literary and philosophical theories, particularly in the way that they can potentially undo conventional understandings of gender in the Nigerian context. This paper seeks to apply these insights in the form of a critical narratology.� Although narratology has a structuralist or formalist orientation, having its theoretical beginning in Saussure�s modern linguistics, and like structuralism, aspires to �scientific� or �universalist� claims, it, also, examines the way in which narratives affect the way we perceive the world. This paper will attempt to mobilise narratology critically, with the benefit of the insights emerging from various articles, in order to help our understanding of the question of gender and social themes in Nigerian post-colonial literature. Most especially, this paper will visualise the analysis of structural narratology and finally with feminist narratology in order to correct the inadequacies of structural narratology and the suppression of women in texts.Keywords: African literature, feminist narratology, gender identity, structural narratology