Second person : a point of view? The function of the second person pronoun in narrative prose fiction

This thesis looks at the functions and effects of the ‘second-person’ pronoun in narrative prose fiction, with particular focus on the fluidity and ambiguity of the mode that I will call Protean-'you.' It is a mode in which it is unclear whether the ‘you’ is a character, the narrator, a reader/narratee, or no-one in particular—or a combination of these—so that readers find ‘second-person’ utterances at once familiar and deeply strange. I regard the ‘second person’ as a special case of narrative ‘person’ that, at its most fluid, can produce an experience of reading quite unlike that of reading traditional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. Essentially, this unique experience comes about because Protean-‘you’ neglects to constitute the stable modes of subjectivity that readers expect to find within narrative textuality. These stable modes of subjectivity, modelled on what I will refer to as Cartesianism’s hegemonic notion of the self, have been thoroughly formalised and naturalised within the practices of ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. The Protean-‘you’ form of ‘second-person’ narrative, conversely, is a mode of narrative discourse that puts readers in a place of doubt and uncertainty, its unsettling equivocations forcefully disrupting accustomed, mimetic explanations of narrative and denying us access to the foundational, authorising subject of classical Cartesian thought. Rather than founding a notion of ‘second-person’ narrative and narrative ‘person’ generally on Cartesianism's ‘self-ish’ logic of unified, privatised identity, I turn to C.S, Peirce's notion of the semiotic self and to developments in post-structuralist thought. Essentially, the conception of subjectivity underpinning my arguments is Peirce's proposition that the self is to be conceived of not as a cogito, but as a sign by which the conscious entity knows itself. It is a sign, moreover, that is constantly being re-read, reinterpreted, so that identity is never self-complete. This reconception of subjectivity is necessary because 1 will argue that the effects of Protean-‘you’ arise in some part from a tension between Cartesianism's hegemony and what philosophical pragmatism and post-structuralism glimpse as the actual condition of the human subject—the subject as dispersed and contingent rather than unified and authoritative. Most discussions of ‘second-person’ narrative conceive of the mode in terms of implicit communicative relations, in some measure instituting Cartesianism's notion of the intentionalist self at the centre of literary meaning. I contrast the paradigmatic address model that arises from this conception against a model that approaches the analysis of ‘second-person’ narrative modality in terms of a referential function, that is, in terms of the object or objects referred to deictically by the ‘second-person’ pronoun. Two principal functions of ‘second-person’ textuality are identified and discussed at length. The first is generalisation, which is rarely dissipated altogether, a situation that contributes to the ambiguities of the pronoun's reference in much ‘second-person’ fiction. The second principal function is that of address, that is, the allocutionary function. Clearly, although stories that continually refer to a ‘you’ can seem quite baffling and unnatural, not all ‘second-person’ narratives unsettle the reader. In order to make the ‘second person's’ outlandish narratives knowable and stable, we bring to bear on them in our habits of reading whatever hermeneutic frames, whatever interpretive keys, come to hand, including a large number of unexceptional forms of literary and ‘natural’ discourse that employ the ‘second-person’ pronoun. These forms include letter writing and internal dialogue (i.e., talking to one's self), the language of the courtroom, the travelogue, the maxim, and so on. In looking at the ways in which the radicalising potentials of ‘second-person’ discourse are contained or recuperated, I focus on issues of vraisemblance and mimesis. Vraisemblance can be described as the ‘system of conventions and expectations which rests on/reinforces that more general system of ‘mutual knowledge’ produced within a community for the realisation and maintenance of a whole social world’. All of the forms of the vraisemblable are already instituted within social, cultural relations, so that what vraisemblance describes is the way we fit the inscriptions we read-that is, the way in which we naturalise what we read-into those given cultural and social forms. I also look at the conventionalising and naturalising work done by notions of mimesis in explaining relations between the world, our being in it, and texts, proposing that mimesis provides a principle buttress by which the good standing of the metaphor of ‘person’ is preserved in traditional and pre-critical modes of analysis. Indeed, the critic’s recourse to ‘person’ is in some measure always an engagement with mimesis. Any discussion that maintains that mimesis is in some way productive of meaning-which this thesis in fact does-must identify mimesis as a merely conventional category within practices of reading and semiosis more generally, and at the very least remove that term from its traditional position of transparent primacy and authority. Some of the most interesting and insightful arguments about ‘second-person’ narrative propose that the ‘second person’s’ most striking effects derive from the constitution of an ‘intersubjective’ experience of reading in which the subject positions of the ‘you’-protagonist, reader-narratee and narrator are combined into a fluid and indeterminate multiple subjectivity. Notions of intersubjectivity frequently position themselves as liberating the reader from Cartesianism's fixed, authoritative modes of subjectivity, Frequently, however, they tend implicitly to reinstate Cartesianism's notion of the self at the centre of textual practice and subjectivity. I look at Daniel Gunn's novel ‘Almost You’, at length in this context, illustrating the constant overdetermination of the ‘you’ and the novel's narrating voice, and demonstrating that this overdetermination leaves the origin of the narrative discourse, the identity of the narrator, and the ontological nature of both principal protagonists utterly ambiguous. The fluidity and ambiguity of Protean-‘you’ in ‘Almost You’ is discussed in terms of ‘second-person’ intersubjectivity, but with a view to demonstrating the indebtedness by the notion of intersubjectivity to Cartesianism's hegemony of ‘person’. I then turn to a discussion of what might be a more ‘old fashioned’ if perhaps ultimately more far-reaching approach to the ‘second person’s’ often startling ambiguities. This is Keats's notion of negative capability, a capacity or quality in which a person ‘is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ I suggest that Protean-‘you’ texts will license all of the readings of ambiguity and fluidity proposed in my discussion of ‘Almost You’, but conclude that the instances of indeterminacy illustrate no more than that: the fluidity and deep ambiguity, and thus, finally, the lack of coherence, of Protean-‘you’ discourse. This has particular implications for how we are to consider readers’ experiences of narrative texts. More fundamentally, it has implications for how we are to consider readers as subjects. I suggest that unstable, ambiguous instances of ‘second-person’ narrative can tear the complex and systematic embroidery of ideological suture that unifies Cretinism’s experience or sense of subjectivity, leaving the reader in a condition of epistemological and ontological havoc. I go on to argue that much of the deeply unsettling effect of Protean-‘you’ discourse anises because its utterances explicitly gesture towards Cretinism’s notion of self. Protean-‘you’ involves a sense of address that is much more pronounced than we are accustomed to facing when reading literary narrative, alerting us to the presence of inscribed anthropomorphic subjects. At the very same time, protean-‘you’ leaves its inscribed subjects indeterminate, ambiguous. This conflict generates a tension between the anticipation of the emergence of speaking and listening selves and our inability to find them. I go on to propose that Protean-‘you’ narrative's lack of coherence is also to be understood as the condition of narrative actuality generally, but a condition that is vigorously mediated against by dominant practices of reading and writing, hocusing my discussion in this respect on the issue of narrative ‘person,’ I argue that narrative ‘person’ is constituted within texts as an apparent unity, but that it is in fact, produced as unitary solely within the practice of making sense, that is, Within our habits of reading, and so is never finally unified. I propose that this is the case for ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ modes no less than for the ‘second.’ Where ‘second-person’ narrative at its most radical and Protean differs from conventional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narratives is the degree to which each has been circumscribed by practices of tantalization, containment and limit, and, in particular, Cretinism’s hegemony of ‘person.’ It may be that the most significant insights ‘second-person’ narrative has to offer are to be found within its capacity to reveal to the engaged reader the underlying condition of narrative discourse, and more generally, its capacity to reveal the actual condition of the human subject-a condition in which, exactly like its textual corollary of narrative ‘person,’ the self is glimpsed as thoroughly dispersed and contingent.

Melodrama and Narrative Fiction: Towards a Typology

Recent research on melodrama has stressed its versatility and ubiquity by approaching it as a mode of expression rather than a theatrical genre. A variety of contexts in which melodrama is at work have been explored, but only little scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between melodrama and novels, short stories and novellas. This article proposes a typology of melodrama in narrative prose fiction, examining four different categories: Melodrama and Sentimentalism, Depiction of Melodramatic Performances in Narrative Prose Fiction, Theatrical Antics and Aesthetics in Narrative Prose Fiction and Meta-Melodrama. Its aim is to clarify the ways in which melodrama, ever since its early days on the stages of late eighteenth-century Europe, has interacted with fictional prose narratives, thereby shaping the literary imagination in the Anglophone world.

La théâtralité de la prose narrative dans les"Chroniques du Plateau Mont‐Royal" de Michel Tremblay

Qu’advient-il lorsqu’un dramaturge à succès se glisse dans la peau d’un chroniqueur? Comment se manifeste alors l’influence du modèle théâtral sur sa prose narrative? À une époque où la question des genres canoniques semble dépassée et où les notions d’intergénéricité et d’hybridation paraissent plus aptes à expliquer les pratiques esthétiques contemporaines, nous avons choisi de nous intéresser aux différentes modalités d’inscription de la théâtralité dans les « Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal » de Michel Tremblay. Notre premier chapitre se penche sur les manifestations ostensives de la théâtralité dans les six récits. Grâce au recours à des figures comme l’hypotypose et à certains procédés de distanciation comme la mise en abyme, l’adresse au lecteur et l’aparté, le lecteur assiste à une mise en œuvre récurrente du dispositif spectaculaire. Notre deuxième chapitre porte sur les procédés de dramatisation du romanesque. À travers un mouvement impétueux qui fait alterner et même cohabiter le comique et le tragique, le réel et le fantastique, le sublime et le grotesque, l’excès et le manque, l’auteur pratique non seulement le mélange des genres et des tonalités au sein de son œuvre, mais fait appel à divers procédés qui visent à produire la catharsis chez le lecteur. Notre troisième chapitre dégage les modalités de théâtralisation de la parole romanesque. Par la mise en place d’un double régime discursif, qui oscille entre l’effacement de l’énonciation auctoriale et la pulsion rhapsodique, l’auteur donne à voir une parole romanesque qui reflète les grands enjeux de l’écriture dramatique contemporaine.

Le roman édifiant aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

Réalisé en cotutelle avec l'université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3

The Vida of Queen Fredegund in Tote Listoire de France: vernacular translation and genre in thirteenth-century French and Occitan literature

This article examines the role that translation may have played in the development of medieval vernacular literature. It analyses an extract of an early 13th-c. translation into a hybrid French-Occitan vernacular of an 8th-c. historical text, the 'Liber Historiae Francorum'. The translation coincides with the adoption of narrative prose both in Old French and in Occitan literature, which reflects a growing interest in historical writings. The second half of the article compares the anecdote with the narrative structures and content of one of the troubadour 'vidas' and 'razos' - biographical texts in prose that emerged in the same period and regions as this translation. The article concludes by suggesting that the new vernacular genre shares narrative features with the early medieval Latin text that are preserved in its translation.

Masculinity and femininity in "The Mabinogion"

This thesis is submitted within the discipline of Women's Studies. It attempts to assess the life of women in a tribal society at the brink of dissolution. Wales at the eve of and during the first century of the Norman occupation is representative of such a society and historians admit that what little we know of its social conditions can be gleaned from the pages of the narrative prose collection The Mabinogion. Consequently this study uses an interdisciplinary approach. Eight stories from The Mabinogion collection have been studied: The Four Branches, comprising Pwyll Prince of Dyfed, Branwen Daughter of Llyr, Manawydan Son of Llyr and Math Son of Mathonwwy; the story of Culhwch and Olwen and the Three Romances, comprising The Lady of the Fountain, Peredur Son of Efrawg and Gereint Son of Erbin. The Four Branches are a fourfold narrative held together by the figure of Sovereignty (formerly the Celtic goddess of the land), her chosen consort and her son. The protagonists are now represented as superhuman men and women and encoded in their lifestories are the rules for gender-related 'right' behaviour of princes and their spouses. The Three Romances still show the same constellation, but the figures of Sovereignty and her consort have been replaced by the Knight and his Lady with considerable loss of behavioural certainty for both genders. The romances are also indicative of growing economic insecurity. Culhwch and Olwen has been included for contrast and for its richness in folkloric motifs. Apart from studying the gender-roles in leading families at the time, the thesis advances the theory that The Four Branches may have been the work of a Welsh noblewoman - a theory based on the inherent knowledge of Welsh pre-Christian dynastic traditions, legal and political practices and the realities of women's lives at the time. The study also shows that the status of women and their legal rights in pre-Norman Wales were much more restricted and cannot generally be compared with that of women in England or Ireland.

Hilda Hilst: amor, angústia e morte - passagens grotescas de uma arte desarmônica

Pós-graduação em Estudos Literários - FCLAR

Rondônia, uma memória em disputa

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Cartas para el más allá

Las novelas de Juan Pedro Aparicio y Juan Cruz pueden leerse como dos largas epístolas, dirigidas a la madre, la una, y al padre, la otra; la primera se presenta con la forma de una ficción narrativa, mientras que la segunda está escrita a la manera de un libro memorialístico. Los dos son prosistas, narradores de larga trayectoria, aunque la actividad principal del escritor canario haya sido el periodismo cultural; mientras que Aparicio, quien ha cultivado con fortuna la literatura de viajes y el artículo periodístico, ha centrado su actividad en las diversas dimensiones de la prosa narrativa: microrrelato, cuento y novela

Cartas para el más allá

Las novelas de Juan Pedro Aparicio y Juan Cruz pueden leerse como dos largas epístolas, dirigidas a la madre, la una, y al padre, la otra; la primera se presenta con la forma de una ficción narrativa, mientras que la segunda está escrita a la manera de un libro memorialístico. Los dos son prosistas, narradores de larga trayectoria, aunque la actividad principal del escritor canario haya sido el periodismo cultural; mientras que Aparicio, quien ha cultivado con fortuna la literatura de viajes y el artículo periodístico, ha centrado su actividad en las diversas dimensiones de la prosa narrativa: microrrelato, cuento y novela

Cartas para el más allá

Las novelas de Juan Pedro Aparicio y Juan Cruz pueden leerse como dos largas epístolas, dirigidas a la madre, la una, y al padre, la otra; la primera se presenta con la forma de una ficción narrativa, mientras que la segunda está escrita a la manera de un libro memorialístico. Los dos son prosistas, narradores de larga trayectoria, aunque la actividad principal del escritor canario haya sido el periodismo cultural; mientras que Aparicio, quien ha cultivado con fortuna la literatura de viajes y el artículo periodístico, ha centrado su actividad en las diversas dimensiones de la prosa narrativa: microrrelato, cuento y novela

Entre la provincia y el mundo. Modernidad e innovacion en la narrativa de Lino Novas Calvo

Lino Novás Calvo (1903–1983) is by many considered the best Cuban short story writer. Critics acknowledge his major contribution to the modernization of narrative prose in that country. With Cayo Canas and La Luna Nona, the short story achieved a language of its own, a precise technique, an acute outlook and an awareness of its own individual art form. Nevertheless, his novels and short stories have not received the recognition and the distribution they deserve, in part because his books have not been reprinted. ^ The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the innovative character of Novás Calvo's work. From the starting point of traditional discourse, he gathered together the main tendencies that until then co-existed in Cuban literature (realism, social criticism, criollismo, Afro Cuban themes and cosmopolitism) and renewed them with modern contributions, mainly assimilated from American authors writing between the two World Wars. He based himself in a concept of realism that does not limit itself to recreating reality and that eludes language localisms and the portrayal of environments. He brought Cuban characters and themes to his stories which at the same gave them a universal dimension. Novás Calvo participated in debates which amounted to a rupture between tradition and localism and brought universality to the Cuban short story. This achieved the aesthetic syncretism imposed by modernity. ^

Hyperlinks in e-books : expanding the functionality of end-notes

With its powerful search engines and billions of published pages, the Worldwide Web has become the ultimate tool to explore the human experience. But, despite the advent of the digital revolution, e-books, at their core, have remained remarkably similar to their printed siblings. This has resulted in a clear dichotomy between two ways of reading: on one side, the multi-dimensional world of the Web; on the other, the linearity of books and e-books. My investigation of the literature indicates that the focus of attempts to merge these two modes of production, and hence of reading, has been the insertion of interactivity into fiction. As I will show in the Literature Review, a clear thrust of research since the early 1990s, and in my opinion the most significant, has concentrated on presenting the reader with choices that affect the plot. This has resulted in interactive stories in which the structure of the narrative can be altered by the reader of experimental fiction. The interest in this area of research is not surprising, as the interaction of readers with the fabric of the narrative provides a fertile ground for exploring, analysing, and discussing issues of plot consistency and continuity. I found in the literature several papers concerned with the effects of hyperlinking on literature, but none about how hyperlinked material and narrative could be integrated without compromising the narrative flow as designed by the author. It led me to think that the researchers had accepted hypertextuality and the linear organisation of fiction as being antithetical, thereby ignoring the possibility of exploiting the first while preserving the second. All the works I consulted were focussed on exploring the possibilities provided to authors (and readers) by hypertext or how hypertext literature affects literary criticism. This was true in earlier works by Landow and Harpold and remained true in later works by Bolter and Grusin. To quote another example, in his book Hypertext 3.0, Landow states: “Most who have speculated on the relation between hypertextuality and fiction concentrate [...] on the effects it will have on linear narrative”, and “hypertext opens major questions about story and plot by apparently doing away with linear organization” (Landow, 2006, pp. 220, 221). In other words, the authors have added narrative elements to Web pages, effectively placing their stories in a subordinate role. By focussing on “opening up” the plots, the researchers have missed the opportunity to maintain the integrity of their stories and use hyperlinked information to provide interactive access to backstory and factual bases. This would represent a missing link between the traditional way of reading, in which the readers have no influence on the path the author has laid out for them, and interactive narrative, in which the readers choose their way across alternatives, thereby, at least to a certain extent, creating their own path. It would be, to continue the metaphor, as if the readers could follow the main path created by the author while being able to get “sidetracked” into exploring hyperlinked material. In Hypertext 3.0, Landow refers to an “Axial structure [of hypertext] characteristic of electronic books and scholarly books with foot-and endnotes” versus a “Network structure of hypertext” (Landow, 2006, p. 70). My research aims at generalising the axial structure and extending it to fiction without losing the linearity at its core. In creative nonfiction, the introduction of places, scenes, and settings, together with characterisation, brings to life the facts without altering them; while much fiction draws on facts to provide a foundation, or narrative elements, for the work. But how can the reader distinguish between facts and representations? For example, to what extent do dialogues and perceptions present what was actually said and thought? Some authors of creative nonfiction use end-notes to provide comments and citations while minimising disruption the flow of the main text, but they are limited in scope and constrained in space. Each reader should be able to enjoy the narrative as if it were a novel but also to explore the facts at the level of detail s/he needs. For this to be possible, end-notes should provide a Web-like way of exploring in more detail what the author has already researched. My research aims to develop ways of integrating narrative prose and hyperlinked documents into a Hyperbook. Its goal is to create a new writing paradigm in which a story incorporates a gateway to detailed information. While creative nonfiction uses the techniques of fictional writing to provide reportage of actual events and fact-based fiction illuminates the affectual dimensions of what happened (e.g., Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall), Hyperbooks go one step further and link narrative prose to the details of the events on which the narrative is based or, more in general, to information the reader might find of interest. My dissertation introduces and utilises Hyperbooks to engage in two parallel types of investigation Build knowledge about Italian WWII POWs held in Australia and present it as part of a novella in Hyperbook format. Develop a new piece of technology capable of extending the writing and reading process.

El tratamiento estético de la figura de la prostituta en la lírica modernista española

This PhD thesis sets out to show, firstly, that Spanish modernist poets are lavish in their sublimation of the figure of the prostitute in their lyrical compositions. It argues that ultimately, they do not do this randomly or arbitrarily, but in response to a series of mechanisms that turn this sublimation into an investigation within the modernist movement. The need for a study such as this one seems indisputable, as not very much work has been done on this topic in Spanish literature, unlike in other literatures (particularly Latin American literature, precisely in the same turn-of-the-century period and in connection with Modernism). What little work has been published on the treatment of the figure of the prostitute in turn-of-the-century Spanish literature refers to narrative prose, notably the realist and naturalist novel, as well as the short story. Also, such work usually lacks a general theoretical framework, as it deals with one novel, one author, or in the case of greater generalisation, a specific type of novel. The study of this figure in literary texts involves studying Modernism itself, as it neatly draws together the panoply of topics so dear to Modernism, namely, the erotic, the marginal, the feminine, the cursed and Culturalism...