Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Narratology may be defined as the theory of narrative. It provides a “grammar” of narrative, useful in approaching
any text in prose, as the one intended for analysis in the present course (The Firebird’s Nest, by Salman Rushdie). A
narratological enterprise presupposes a decoding of the inner mechanisms of a literary text which, besides its
obvious content of ideas, implies a structural core or an architectural design – open for interpretation, but
simultaneously providing the ground for a more or less objective discussion on the intentional scaffolding of the
discourse.
From the numerous models advanced by theoreticians along the years (Tzvetan Todorov, Vladimir Propp,
Roland Barthes, Percy Lubbock, Jonathan Culler, Michael Toolan, Mieke Bal and others), the one chosen here for
its clear, methodologically-oriented content, appropriate for workshop practice in a classroom situation, is that of
Gérard Genette (b. 1930).
1. STRUCTURALISM
Structuralist approaches to literature challenge some of the most cherished beliefs of the ordinary reader.
Traditionally, the literary work was looked upon as the child of an author’s creative life, expressing the author’s
essential self. The text was the space where the reader met the author’s feelings and thoughts. Another assumption
was that good books tell the truth about human life. Structuralist critics have tried to persuade of the fact that the
author is ‘dead’ and that literary discourse has no truth function.
3. PSYCHOANALYSIS
Broadly speaking, psychoanalysis has aimed at enacting a critique of subjectivity within the cultural context
through interpreting disconnected or syncopated structures, the reading of disparate narrative details (considered
parts of a larger interpretive pattern) that are not made explicit by the narrative itself, or through showing texts to
have meanings of various types on different levels simultaneously. Principal directions: Freudian, archetypal
(Jung), structuralist (Lacan), feminist (Belsey) etc.
4. MARXISM
Even if Marx made his famous statements about culture and society in the 1850s, marxist criticism is a twentieth
century phenomenon. Its history is complex and its manifestations diverse, but everything stems from two famous
pronouncements by Marx himself: it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the
contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness; the philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways; the point is to change it.
5. POSTCOLONIALISM
Postcolonialism, not to be associated simply with the period of time following colonialism, opposes dominant
discourses and allows for the margins to express themselves. Centre-front is the notion of cultural identity in
colonised societies, its representations, the power structures involved, the politics formulated. Binary opposition
structures are exposed as authoritarian, false and limited, effaced in the approach by references to heterogeneity,
hybridity and transculturalisation.
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Main points of interest:
rejecting the claims to universalism made by Western canonical literature, especially its inability to
empathise across cultures
examining the representations of other cultures or of cultural otherness
showing how canonical literature is evasive and crucially silent on matters concerning colonisation and
imperialism
foregrounding questions of cultural difference and diversity, celebrating hybridity and cultural polyvalency
developing a perspective, not only applicable to postcolonial writing, where states of marginality, plurality
and otherness are seen as sources of energy and potential change
6. FEMINISM
Feminist criticism, in all its various manifestations (Marxist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, deconstructive,
postcolonial, black, women-of-colour, third-world etc), has attempted to free itself from that which it considers to
be the naturalized patriarchal (in literature and literary theory). It refuses to be assimilated by any particular
approach, and therefore subverts and contradicts all traditional theoretical practices. From this point of view, it may
very well be defined in terms of a cultural politics.