By James Phelan
In Experiencing Fiction, James Phelan develops a provocative and interesting affirmative resolution to the query, “Can we adventure narrative fiction in related ways?” Phelan grounds that resolution in parts of narrative positioned on the intersection among authorial layout and reader reaction: judgments and progressions. Phelan contends that targeting the 3 major types of judgment—interpretive, moral, and aesthetic—and at the rules underlying a narrative’s circulation from commencing to finish unearths the event of analyzing fiction to be very likely sharable. partially One, Phelan skillfully analyzes progressions and judgments in narratives with a excessive measure of narrativity: Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Toni Morrison’s liked, Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever,” and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. partially , Phelan turns his realization to the several relationships among judgments and progressions in hybrid forms—in the lyric narratives of Ernest Hemingway’s “A fresh, Well-Lighted Place,” Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek,” and Robert Frost’s “Home Burial,” and within the portrait narratives of Alice Munro’s “Prue” and Ann Beattie’s “Janus.” extra commonly, Phelan strikes from side to side among the exploration of theoretical rules and the certain paintings of interpretation. consequently, Experiencing Fiction combines Phelan’s clean and compelling readings of diverse leading edge narratives together with his fullest articulation of the rhetorical conception of narrative.
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Extra resources for Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative)
Example text
28 Besides Butor, McHale cites Monique Wittig’s Les guérillères, in which the apparently linear text winds around a capital O, thoroughly polysemic, referring to the female menstrual cycle and to the cosmic revolution and political revolution (or circle); to that new beginning, the starting point of zero (0) after the flood waters (the French eaux, a homonym of O); or again, to The Story of O. The feminine circle combats the male line: feminist “guerilla” writing moves by dislocation and relocation, as opposed to the linear continuity that represents (for Wittig) phallocratic thought.
To my knowledge, Borges here provided the first explicit example of spatiotemporal belief generated by a profusion of timelines. Again, we see that the breakdown of the timeline leads to a spatialization of time. In his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, in the heart of a long section devoted to psychoanalysis, Deleuze returned to this issue of multilinearity to draw this spatializing conclusion: “At each moment, we are made up of lines which are variable at each instant, which may be combined in different ways, packets of lines, longitudes and latitudes, tropics and meridians, etc.
In this regard, Prigogine notes, “In the presence of equilibrium it is always possible to linearize, while far from equilibrium we have a nonlinear behavior of matter. ”24 On the metaphorical level, the principle of entropy has animated several literary works of the last century, especially from the 1960s. This is true of Thomas Pynchon’s early novels, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, as well as his short story “Entropy,” written in 1959 (republished in Slow Learner). Through his work, Pynchon was instrumental in popularizing the concept of entropy in literature, and others have followed.