Exhuming the Narrator in 'The Buried Giant': Genre and Intertextual Inference in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

<p>This thesis takes the critical response generated by Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, his most recent novel, as an invitation to re-examine the overall literary ‘experiment’ of his body of work. Ishiguro’s novels, regardless of their genre, message, or cultural moment, create experiences in which the reader engages with each narrator as if they were a human being. His attention to stylistic and formal detail foregrounds our awareness of his art in each text, and much scholarship focuses on overarching discussions of memory, identity, and history; however, this all relies upon the empathy that the texts generate between the character-narrator and the reader. The commitment to mimesis over the synthetic or thematic dimensions of the text, to draw on the theoretical model of character presented by James Phelan, often remains covert throughout each novel, but character mimesis nevertheless acts as both an accessible entry point to the novels, and a consistent touchstone throughout and across the texts. Upon the publication of The Buried Giant, Ishiguro was met with criticism and dissatisfaction from numerous reviewers and scholars, despite general public appreciation of the novel. At the heart of this dissatisfaction lies a sense that Ishiguro’s foray into fantasy lacks the affective power of his iconic artlessness. Specifically, The Buried Giant appears to lack a central, consistent, human voice to hold together the synthetic and thematic work that the text performs. This thesis presents an argument that finds within The Buried Giant the presence of a first-person voice that, rather than diverging from each of Ishiguro’s previous narrators, takes his experimentation with the first-person voice to a new extreme. This reading allows me to locate The Buried Giant more squarely back in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, by identifying a covert but vital thread that exists beneath the shifts in genre, thematic and synthetic choices, and context of the novel. I explore the establishment of character mimesis across Ishiguro’s body of work, how this feeds into both the dissatisfaction with The Buried Giant and my reconciliation of the novel to his earlier works, and finally how The Buried Giant and its shift to both a covert narrative voice and the genre of fantasy provides an opportunity to re-examine Ishiguro’s use of non-mimetic structures and generic conventions in his first six novels around the central, mimetic narrator. As suggested, this approach draws significantly on the theory of character presented by James Phelan, which allows for comprehensive consideration of diverse textual functions that occur both throughout a given text and across several texts of widely varying genres and perspectives. I touch on notions of unreliability, memory and subjective history, trauma, and identity performance, each of which are central to many pieces of scholarship on Ishiguro’s novels; however, the aim of this project is to swiftly push beyond readings that prioritise synthetic and thematic dimensions of the novels to reach the heart of how the voices who capture their own stories completely entrance Ishiguro’s readership.</p>

Exhuming the Narrator in 'The Buried Giant': Genre and Intertextual Inference in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

<p>This thesis takes the critical response generated by Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, his most recent novel, as an invitation to re-examine the overall literary ‘experiment’ of his body of work. Ishiguro’s novels, regardless of their genre, message, or cultural moment, create experiences in which the reader engages with each narrator as if they were a human being. His attention to stylistic and formal detail foregrounds our awareness of his art in each text, and much scholarship focuses on overarching discussions of memory, identity, and history; however, this all relies upon the empathy that the texts generate between the character-narrator and the reader. The commitment to mimesis over the synthetic or thematic dimensions of the text, to draw on the theoretical model of character presented by James Phelan, often remains covert throughout each novel, but character mimesis nevertheless acts as both an accessible entry point to the novels, and a consistent touchstone throughout and across the texts. Upon the publication of The Buried Giant, Ishiguro was met with criticism and dissatisfaction from numerous reviewers and scholars, despite general public appreciation of the novel. At the heart of this dissatisfaction lies a sense that Ishiguro’s foray into fantasy lacks the affective power of his iconic artlessness. Specifically, The Buried Giant appears to lack a central, consistent, human voice to hold together the synthetic and thematic work that the text performs. This thesis presents an argument that finds within The Buried Giant the presence of a first-person voice that, rather than diverging from each of Ishiguro’s previous narrators, takes his experimentation with the first-person voice to a new extreme. This reading allows me to locate The Buried Giant more squarely back in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, by identifying a covert but vital thread that exists beneath the shifts in genre, thematic and synthetic choices, and context of the novel. I explore the establishment of character mimesis across Ishiguro’s body of work, how this feeds into both the dissatisfaction with The Buried Giant and my reconciliation of the novel to his earlier works, and finally how The Buried Giant and its shift to both a covert narrative voice and the genre of fantasy provides an opportunity to re-examine Ishiguro’s use of non-mimetic structures and generic conventions in his first six novels around the central, mimetic narrator. As suggested, this approach draws significantly on the theory of character presented by James Phelan, which allows for comprehensive consideration of diverse textual functions that occur both throughout a given text and across several texts of widely varying genres and perspectives. I touch on notions of unreliability, memory and subjective history, trauma, and identity performance, each of which are central to many pieces of scholarship on Ishiguro’s novels; however, the aim of this project is to swiftly push beyond readings that prioritise synthetic and thematic dimensions of the novels to reach the heart of how the voices who capture their own stories completely entrance Ishiguro’s readership.</p>

Literature Review on Unnatural Narrative Theory

Unnatural narrative becomes a popular theory in literary criticism. In 2016, No. 4 issue of Style is a special issue on Brian Richardson’s Target Essay “Unnatural Narrative Theory”. Narratologists such as Marie-Laure Ryan, Shen Dan, James Phelan have responded actively to this new paradigm in narrative theory. In spite of its popularity, unnatural narrative remains controversial because of its diversified definitions, the hard-to-identified manifestations of unnaturalness, and its various interpretive strategies. Accordingly, this paper tries to comb the existing literature and provide a systematic review on the definitions, the manifestations, and the interpretive strategies of unnatural narrative theory.

James Phelan’s Three Judgments in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

George Eliot, well-known as one of greatest realists in the 19th century, weaves multiple narratives in her representative work Middlemarch, presenting vividly the realistic picture of society between 1829 and 1832. The narrative clue of love affair between Dorothea, Casaubon and Will Ladislaw permeates the whole story, which attracts the attention of numerous scholars with fruitful, inspirational studies. However, few numbers of scholars delve into the controversial issue of Casaubon’s “will” in the story to analyze the moral values and thoughts expressed by the implied author. Thus, the paper attempts to analyze the issue of “will” by borrowing the concept of three judgments proposed by James Phelan to figure out how the implied author expresses her interpretative, ethical and aesthetical judgements by means of her distinct narrative.

Τα διηγήματα στα κείμενα νεοελληνικής λογοτεχνίας για τη δευτεροβάθμια εκπαίδευση

Αντικείμενο της παρούσας Διδακτορικής Διατριβής είναι η συστηματική αφηγηματολογική ανάλυση των διηγημάτων, τα οποία εντάσσονται και ανθολογούνται στα "Κείμενα Νεοελληνικής Λογοτεχνίας" των έξι τάξεων της Δευτεροβάθμιας Εκπαίδευσης, υπό το φως της Θεωρίας της Λογοτεχνίας. Ειδικότερα, η Διατριβή ασχολείται με τη μελέτη της δράσης, της ψυχολογικής και ηθικής εξέλιξης των μυθοπλαστικών χαρακτήρων των κειμένων αυτών, καθώς και με τη δυνητική πρόσληψη της δυναμικής τους από τους αναγνώστες, με τη βοήθεια των θεωρητικών μοντέλων-εργαλείων της Δομικής Αφηγηματολογίας του Claude Bremond, της Ανθρωποσημειωτικής του Ibrahim Taha και της Αφηγηματολογίας των Πιθανών Κόσμων της Marie-Laure Ryan. Επίσης, αξιοποιούνται στοιχεία από το θεωρητικό μοντέλο του χαρακτήρα του James Phelan και από τους τύπους των χαρακτήρων που προτείνει ο David Fishelov. Απώτερος στόχος της Διατριβής είναι να διαμορφώσει και να προτείνει ένα μεθοδολογικό εργαλείο μελέτης που μπορεί να εφαρμοστεί και στη Λογοτεχνία για Παιδιά και Εφήβους, κείμενα της οποίας βρίσκουμε στα σχολικά εγχειρίδια του Γυμνασίου, και φυσικά στη Λογοτεχνία για ενήλικους αναγνώστες, δείγματα της οποίας βρίσκουμε στα σχολικά εγχειρίδια του Λυκείου.

From “German Wolfhounds” to “Ordinary People”

The image of the perpetrator in Israeli Holocaust fiction changed fundamentally in the mid-1980s: from one-dimensional Nazi beasts, typical of earlier Israeli writing, to humanized individuals, whose vulnerability and multidimensionality may blur the divide between victims and victimizers. This development, which corresponds to similar patterns in other literatures (e.g., George Steiner’s Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.; Jonathan Littell’s Kindly Ones) has received relatively little critical attention, and it is discussed here through a close reading of major Israeli works of fiction—Ka-Tzetnik’s Salamandra, David Grossman’s See Under: Love, A. B. Yehoshua’s Mr. Mani—as well as more minor texts. Using theoretical work in narrative (E. M. Forster, James Phelan) and imagology (Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen on German national character), this article formulates the recent shift in modes of perpetrator characterization in terms of its poetics and its place in Israel’s literary history.

Rhetorical Theory of Narrative and Contemporary Narrative Poetics: A Conversation with James Phelan

In the summer of 2018, James Phelan co-organized the Summer Seminar on Narratology on behalf of Project Narrative at Ohio State University, in collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the journal Frontiers of Narrative Studies. During this period, Shang Biwu, the editor of Frontiers of Narrative Studies, had a conversation with Phelan, who talked about important issues such as rhetorical poetics, fictionality, and narrative communication.

The Imaginative Space of Narrative

Narrative imagination creates a space of learning where contemporary and historic knowledge of designed place merge. This paperdiscusses how an instructor’s curation and narration of archival material can provoke design-students to imagine narratives and actively visualize processes humans use to construct, inhabit and adjust comfort in place. The concept of narrative imagination presented in this paper is informed by traditional narrative as Marie-Laure Ryan defines it her 2005 article, Narrative and the Split Condition of Digital Textuality: (The traditionalist school) “conceives narrative as an invariant core of meaning, a core that distinguishes narrative from other types of discourse, and gives it a trans-cultural, trans-historical, and trans-medial identity.”1 The work of Gerard Genette, Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Monica Fludernik, John Fiske, James Phelan, Henry Jenkins and others is also influential.2