Neapolitan novels under the magnifying glass of feminist 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.

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

Humanities ◽

10.3390/h8010028 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 28

Author(s):

Nathan Dwight Frank

Keyword(s):

Film Adaptation ◽

The Novel ◽

Male Gaze ◽

The Third ◽

Karen Tei Yamashita ◽

Feminist Narratology

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.

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Unnatural narratology: core issues and critical debates

Journal of Literary Semantics ◽

10.1515/jls-2015-0007 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 44 (2) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Shang Biwu

Keyword(s):

The Core ◽

Unnatural Narratology ◽

Primary Object ◽

Feminist Narratology ◽

Cognitive Narratology ◽

Postclassical Narratology ◽

Unnatural Narrative ◽

Rhetorical Narratology ◽

Core Issues

AbstractTaking anti-mimetic narratives as its primary object of investigation, unnatural narratology aspires to establish its status as a discipline of unnatural poetics. In recent years, it has rapidly developed into one of the most prominent sub-branches of postclassical narratology, standing in direct parallel to feminist narratology, rhetorical narratology, and cognitive narratology. This paper begins by delineating various definitions of unnatural narrative and proceeds to discuss unnaturalness, interpretative strategies, heuristic values, and the interrelations between unnatural narratology and other schools of narratological thought, so as to investigate the core issues of unnatural narratology and the critical debates on it. The paper ends with an outline set of directions for future explorations in this field.

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