DES EFFETS DE LA (NON)FIABILITÉ DU NARRATEUR DU « NŒUD DE VIPÈRES » MAURICIEN

Le roman Le Sari vert (2009) d’Ananda Devi, écrivaine franco-mauricienne, relate une histoire de haine et de violence familiales entre un homme à l’agonie d’un côté, et de l’autre, son épouse, décédée depuis longtemps et réapparaissant comme un fantôme, le hantant, puis leur fille et leur petite-fille, celles-ci bien vivantes et assoiffées de vengeance. Devi écrit son roman sous la forme du monologue intérieur d’un seul narrateur, qui, cependant note aussi les paroles et les réactions des deux femmes qui l’assistent. Il s’agit dans cet article de montrer comment est obtenu l’effet à la fois de la non fiabilité du narrateur et de sa monstruosité. Les notions théoriques d’auteur implicite et de narrateur (non) fiable/(in)digne de confiance sont empruntées à Wayne Booth, puis nuancées par quelques autres notions narratologiques plus récentes (distinction d’A. Nünning (1999) entre « non fiable » et « indigne de confiance » ; J. Phelan (2005) introduit, quant à lui, trois critères ou axes de la (non)fiabilité : narratif, interprétatif et axiologique). À l’aide de ces notions, on conclut à une certaine fiabilité du narrateur dans le domaine des faits, à son interprétation fréquemment erronée de la psychologie et des motivations des autres personnages et enfin à son indignité sur le plan éthique. Le discours narratorial est donc miné par des contradictions discrètement introduites qui sont autant de signaux de la part de l’auteur implicite, le narrateur lui-même est déjoué et sanctionné à la fin du roman, apparaissant dans toute sa turpitude.

LOS CONTRASTES Y LAS IRONÍAS EN LA CIUDAD ALEGRE Y CONFIADA DE JACINTO BENAVENTE

Resumen: Este trabajo propone un estudio sobre los contrastes y las ironías en La ciudad alegre y confiada de Jacinto Benavente. Estos tienen un impacto estilístico y cómico característicos del teatro español de las primeras décadas del siglo XX. Además, el contraste y la ironía definen la estructura ideológica de esta obra y justifican su cierre. En la primera sección, las características y los personajes individuales serán estudiados a través de las contradicciones e incoherencias sociales que contribuyen a la imprevisible naturaleza de la trama. En la segunda sección, el análisis de la estructura socioeconómica de la sociedad proveerá las bases para los conflictos individuales y colectivos. La última sección se enfocará en la relación entre la vida y la muerte. Los protagonistas Crispín y Desterrado están convencidos que la muerte es la única manera de purificar a la gente y de salvar su ciudad. Soren Kierkegaard, Wayne Booth and Peter Roster proveen los acercamientos teóricos a la ironía que se utilizarán en este trabajo.Abstract: This paper proposes a study of contrasts and ironies in Jacinto Benavente’s play La ciudad alegre y confiada. They produce stylistic and comical effects that are typical of the Spanish drama in the first decades of the 20th century. However, they also define the ideological structure of the play and justify its outcome. The contrasts and the ironies of this play will be studied in three sections. In the first one, the personal characteristics and roles will be examined. Their contradictions and incoherencies contribute to the unpredictable nature of the play. In the second section, the analysis of the socioeconomic structure of the society will provide the bases for individual and collective conflicts. The last section focuses on the relation between life and death. The key protagonists Crispin and Desterrado are convinced that death is the only way to purify the people and to save their town. Soren Kierkegaard, Wayne Booth and Peter Roster provide the theoretical approaches to irony that will be used in this study.

When good art is bad: Educating the critical viewer

There is a debate within philosophy of literature as to whether narrative artworks should be judged morally, for their ethical value, meaning and impact. On one side you have the aesthetes, defenders of aestheticism, who deny the ethical value of an artwork can be taken into consideration when judging the work’s overall aesthetic value. Richard Posner backs artists such as Oscar Wilde who famously wrote, ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all’. On the other side of the debate are proponents of ethical criticism such as Martha Nussbaum, Wayne Booth, Noël Carroll and Mary Devereaux. This article examines the educational implications of each position and ultimately defends the importance of moral education alongside aesthetic education. Given artworks are powerful vehicles for moral sentiments and meaning, it is important that viewers are taught to engage critically with art’s ethical features as well as aesthetic features. In this way, educational concerns pose a challenge to the position of aestheticism.

Barthes’s Myths of America

Roland Barthes’s writings were very positively received in the United States – in 1979 Wayne Booth called him the strongest influence on American criticism today – but America played a strange, often contradictory role in his work. In his middle years he visited the US four times – in 1958, 1961, 1966, and 1967 – but his initial enthusiasm for New York City was soon qualified by a range of negative comments about the country and its culture, and after 1967 he only returned once, very briefly, though he was much in demand. While opposing the knee-jerk anti-Americanism common among French intellectuals in his day, and especially resistance to America’s modernity, he soon made America a foil for Japan, which represented true exoticism, the opposite of bourgeois Western culture. There are relatively few references to America or American literature in his writings, though American cinema was a significant cultural reference for him, but these do help to reveal the complexity of Barthes’s affective and intellectual engagements, especially since there is often a comparative dimension to them. This chapter explores the varying attitudes and comments about America in Barthes’s letters and his published writings.

Rhetoric of Anxiety and Anxieties of Rhetoric: Strategies of Remembering Memories of Genocide in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) and Christopher Mlalazi’s Running with Mother (2012)

In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983) Wayne Booth argues that the rhetoric of fiction is its capacity to endlessly defer meaning, and in this process produce new meanings via unexpected significations. This article draws from some of Booth’s insights to tackle three creative problems related to the rhetorical challenges of fictionally representing genocide in the African novel. The first problem is how to artistically translate knowing into telling; the second challenge relates to how authors writing on genocide can guard against the danger of creating archetypal images of suffering women that might prove inadequate to capture women’s multiple human agencies. The third problem regards how to deal with the anxiety of what the language of genocide narratives may not be able to manifest in representing women’s responses to atrocities. Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2012) and Christopher Mlalazi’s Running with Mother (2012) are two novels from Zimbabwe that suggest that creative authors who use metaphorical language to magnify suffering may not always be in total control of meanings and tend to not always know the implications of the metaphors they use in describing the process by which they make their own metaphors of suffering. The language of genocide has generated certain archetypal images that represent more than one thing. Vera and Mlalazi use the language of the genre of the literature of atrocities to enlarge, embellish and stylise representations of genocide. This article argues that these creative problems are inevitable because language is the only cultural resource that the fictional imaginaries might manipulate in order to recover and reconstitute certain memories of genocide.

Omniscience

This chapter discusses two very different forms of omniscience, and Wayne Booth famously described and deconstructed them in A Rhetoric of Fiction. The Victorian novel is, at a certain point, annexed to a structuralist idea of French realism, which is imagined as free of intrusive narration. These combined critical moves regularize the Victorian novel into something less interesting and less problematic than what it had been for previous generations of more skeptical critics, or critics for whom that novel was not yet great. The chapter also explains that the pleasure of the text is also the pleasure of consenting to not knowing, to knowing that one does not know and having that be a condition of being in the world. Readers do not identify with characters because they are like people, but because readers are like characters, relying on forms of omniscience to keep narrating various aspects of reality for them. Omniscience hangs around as an omnipresent narrative and epistemological form. Disembodied but not disempowered, dismembered but not defunctioned.

O narrador em Corinthians (2) VS. Palestra (1): (im)parcialidade?

O presente trabalho objetiva apresentar uma leitura do conto Corinthians (2) VS. Palestra (1), de Alcântara Machado. Texto de grande vigor narrativo, o conto em apreço abre margem para estudos desta natureza dada à linguagem radiofônica mobilizada pelo narrador para a condução dos fatos, uma vez que as marcas linguístico-enunciativas sugerem a torcida do narrador para um dos times de futebol. Pesquisa de natureza bibliográfica, este artigo faz uso do método qualitativo para propor uma leitura que evidencie a imparcialidade do narrador ante o jogo entre Corinthians e Palestra. No curso da análise realizada, constatou-se que o narrador revela-se corintiano, o que o torna uma instância ficcional parcial. Com intuito de atestar tal parcialidade, este estudo mobiliza estudos teóricos e críticos acerca do foco narrativo, tais como o de Norman Friedmann (2002), Wayne Booth (1980) e Davi Arrigucci (1998).

Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of the longstanding division within the discipline of English between literary studies and composition studies. It briefly examines the writings of critics, most notably Wayne Booth, who seek a way of overcoming the hostilities that have long characterized the relationship between these two fields. The introduction then offers the central thesis of the book: that the relationship between literary studies and composition was complicated significantly by the introduction of French theory in the 1960s and 1970s. The incorporation of theory into English departments not only intensified existing antagonisms within the discipline but also forged new and unexpected alliances.

Evangelisk ironi

This article addresses the question whether unreliable narration, as the concept is understood in the tradition following Wayne Booth’s original definition, can occur in non-fictional stories. Contrary to Pekka Tammi’s conclusion in a recent article, this article’s answer is affirmative. It seeks to demonstrate, through a comparative analysis of respectively Mark’s and Matthew’s stories about the Canaanite woman (Mark 7:24–30 and Matthew 15:21–28), how Matthew comes forward as an unreliable narrator, and that his narrative unreliability is a function of what James Phelan has termed underreporting. The textual analysis, which leans on Gregory Currie’s and James Phelan’s theories of unreliable narration, argues that far from being more or less identical stories, as is suggested by various exegetes, Matthew’s pericope is significantly different from that of Mark. It is different both thematically and regarding the portrayal of the figure of Jesus, but also, and not least, by pursuing a more complex and daring communicative strategy based on unreliable narration and a system of multilayered irony. In concluding the theoretical discussion of unreliable narration, I suggest not only that unreliable narration is possible in non-fictional stories, but also that it is a somewhat misleading concept when applied to the kind of stories Wayne Booth normally referred to, namely fictional first-person narratives.

Reflexões sobre a tradução de si: Ugo Foscolo e Jacopo Ortis entre a vida e a poiesis

O artigo objetiva analisar a interconexão entre a escrita de si e a tradução de si a partir da experiência de Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827), autor do romance Ultime letterediJacopoOrtis [As últimas cartas de JacopoOrtis], publicado em definitivo em 1817. Toma-se como corpus o referido romance e as cartas que Foscolo enviou à AntoniettaFagnaniArese entre 1801 e 1803, período que coincide com a primeira publicação completa de Ultime LetterediJacopoOrtis. Uma leitura comparativa entre as cartas trocadas entre Foscolo e Arese e as cartas escritas pelo personagem JacopoOrtis e endereçadas a Lorenzo Alderani revela pontos em comum na escrita de Foscolo e do protagonista do seu romance. Utiliza-se o conceito de autor implícito de Wayne Booth (1980) e as considerações sobre tradução em Marco Lucchesi (2016).