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.

voix du "moi" dans Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute

Si la autobiografía constituye el reino privilegiado del relato en primera persona, Nathalie Sarraute adopta en Enfance(1983) un procedimiento original: el diálogo. En su relato, la alternancia de la primera y la segunda persona del singular permite simular un diálogo entre dos instancias de un mismo “yo”. El presente artículo analizará este desdoblamiento interior orquestado por dos voces narrativas donde afloran las voces implícitas que han marcado el pasado de la autora – las voces de la madre, del padre y de la madrastra, Véra. Toda una polifonía de voces vivas, tan intactas como los recuerdos evocados. If autobiography is the privileged field of the first person narrative, Nathalie Sarraute adopts in Enfance(1983) an original procedure: the dialogue. In her autobiography, the alternation between first and second person singular enable to simulate a dialogue between two instances of the self. This article entitled “Voices of the self in Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance” aims to analyse this interior duality orchestrated by the two narrative voices where the implicit voices that have shaped the writer’s childhood – voices of the mother, the father and the stepmother Véra – emerge from the past. A polyphony of living voices, as intact as the memories evoked. Si l’autobiographie est le domaine privilégié du récit à la première personne, Nathalie Sarraute adopte dans son autobiographie Enfance (1983) un procédé original: le dialogue. Dans son récit, l’alternance du début à la fin de la première et deuxième personnes du singulier est là pour simuler un dialogue entre deux instances d’un même "moi". Un dédoublement intérieur orchestré par deux voix narratives où se glissent les voix implicites qui ont marqué le passé de l’auteur, à savoir les voix de la mère, du père et de la belle-mère Véra. Tout une polyphonie de voix vivantes, aussi intactes que les souvenirs évoqués.

The Horror of the Archives: The Novel 300

The explosion of a military warehouse (2005) in the Guatemalan capital exposed the archive of the National Civil Police. Key information suddenly appeared to illustrate the dark years of repression and the incredible suffering of numerous innocent victims during the civil war. The novel 300, by Rafael Cuevas, was inspired by this particular fact. This essay interprets Cuevas’s book as a specific form of modern historical novel characterized by multiple narrative voices. These chronicles and monologues help the reader imagine a very complex universe of repression, horror and human suffering and also to understand the false justifications used by some of the protagonists.

Sensible/visible: les hijes de detenides desaparecides en Hasta que mueras, de Raquel Robles (2019) y Yo la quise (2020), de Josefina Giglio

The literature of the children of forced disappeared victims, including that of Raquel Robles and Josefina Giglio, who went through the traumatic experience of the last Argentine civic-military ecclesial business dictatorship in 1976, has been the subject of multiple approaches by vernacular critics (Reati, Domínguez, Basile), or foreign (García Díaz, Bolte, Gatti, et al). In this study, I name the group as lowercase in order to displace the institutional character that, although important, can reduce the perspective that I am trying to display. This perspective focuses on questioning what the writing of children of the disappeared contributes in terms of complexity to literary studies within the framework of memory-literature articulation. Thus, I notice an accumulation of writings, whether in the multiple arc of narrative or poetry, where the assumption of the voice that enunciates, in some cases, works the experience in the first person from styles already registered in literature, although the experiences of the authors enhance writings that are difficult to place in literary trends. As if literature were to make visible the very tension that its politicity implies from the narrative voices with one foot in the lived experience and the other in the creative laboratory; It is also necessary to point out that this experience places state politics as the central node since it reconfigured the life not only of the authors but of all society, in this case Argentina. In the selected novels we are faced with what Jacques Rancière (2015, 2011) understands as a principle of action, from which neither literature nor readers can be far from a new ethos. From this it is possible to connect with certain experiences that emerge in this case from both novels and that affect our perception of reality and history. Argentine literature, born in the very bosom of the nation-state, is not the same after the sons once they intervened in the street in the second half of the 90s of the last century to demand justice, they speak in the new millennium and write experiences that affect us all, and that reshape the ways of thinking politics, literature and history.

Poor Law Institutions through Working-Class Eyes: Autobiography, Emotion, and Family Context, 1834–1914

Histories of the English workhouse and its satellite institutions have concentrated on legal change, institutional administration, and moments of shock or scandal, generally without considering the place of these institutions, established through the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, in the emotional life course of poor inmates. This article uses working-class autobiographies to examine the register of emotional responses to workhouses and associated Poor Law institutions, and the range of narrative voices open to authors who recalled institutional residence. It also gives close attention to two lengthy narratives of workhouse district schools and highlights their significance in comparison to the authors’ family backgrounds and the representation of each writer in the wider historical record. It suggests that a new affective chronology of the workhouse is needed to accommodate room for disparity between the aspiration of systematic poor relief and the reality of individual experience within local interpretations of the law.

Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic Fragment: ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’

Charlotte Brontë’s eighteen-page fragment, ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’, written shortly after the publication of Villette in 1853, combines the gothic and realism and uses multiple narrators to tell a disturbing story of cruelty towards a child. The generic instability and disordered temporal framework of this fragment make it unlike anything Brontë had previously written, yet it has attracted the attention of few scholars. Those who have discussed it have condemned it as a failure; the later fragment ‘Emma’, also left incomplete by the author's premature death, has been seen as the more likely beginning of a successor to Villette. ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’ reveals Brontë at her most experimental as she explores the use of different narrative voices, including that of an unnamed genderless ‘ghost’, to tell a story from different perspectives. It also shows Brontë representing a child's experience of extreme physical abuse which goes far beyond the depictions of chastisement in Jane Eyre (1847). This essay argues that ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’ affords rich insights into Brontë’s ideas and working practices in her final years, suggesting that it should be more widely acknowledged as a unique aspect of Brontë’s oeuvre, revealing the new directions she may have taken had she lived to complete another novel.

The Silenced Narrator and the Notion of “Proto-Narrative”

Narrative voices in Ismet Prcić’s memoir/novel “Shards” are many; this article primarily focuses on what we refer to as the voice of the “silenced narrator” that appears to speak from a deep (“s ubdiegetic”) narrative level shaped by the unconscious workings of traumatic experience. Starting from psychological insights into traumatic states (Elbert and Schauer, Hunt, Crossley, etc.) and tracing the encoded symptoms of this illness across the text, the discussion moves on to a theoretical level to investigate notions proposed by authors such as Genette (to discuss narrative levels), Ricœur (in examining the construction of self), Caruth (in evaluating narrative implications of the literary voicing of trauma), Antonio Damasio (in exploring the source and the nature of the trauma-related destruction of the narratively voiced “I”), and others. These are used to establish the concept of a narrative subject whose voice emerges from the deep zone of their “proto-self” (Damasio), to be weaved into a distinctive narrative form that we will refer to as “proto-narrative.”

La narration autothanatographique dans « Tropique de la violence » de Nathacha Appanah

"Treating the theme of death in such and such a fiction undoubtedly represents an archaic, recurrent subject that has already been addressed in the literature. What about when the narration is entrusted to a dead character? It is by this narratological modality that Nathacha Appanah built her novel entitled ""Tropic of violence"". The importance of this work is reflected in the fact that the author highlights a new poetics of narratology: ""to make a dead man speak"". In this context, it is not the words of the deceased which are reported by a living character, but the deceased himself takes charge of the narration while recounting an action specific to him, or events concerning other subjects in fiction. Our problematic aims to treat the Autothanatographic Narration in this novel distinguished by the alternation of the narrative voices and the diversity of the perspectives. Our essential objective is to implement a kind of applied narratology since we will try to approach what is called autothanatographic narration, to highlight its different criteria, to demonstrate to what extent it has effects on the other constituents of the diegesis, as well as on the voices telling."