The objective of the book is to offer students an account of various ways of approaching narrative fiction (usually: 'the novel') which have succeeded and competed with each other during this century, and particularly since the 1950s. It will offer not only an account of these approaches, but also a demonstration, as each chapter will include a reading in the terms of the selected approach of one major narrative text. The book will therefore have the double appeal of giving not only an overview of theoretical and critical schools from New Criticism (if not Aristotle) to Postmodernism, but also a fresh new insightful (I hope) reading of important texts which are on a large number of reading lists. I plan to include at least one Australian text - to increase the appeal to the Australian market.
Ten chapters (plus an introduction), each treating one major critical approach to the novel, and each doing a reading in terms of that approach of one text in the international canon. A balance will be maintained between the theoretical and the practical, with not too much of the former. Although each chapter will exhibit mainly one approach (which might not necessarily seem at first sight to be the 'appropriate' one), suggestions will also be made briefly as to the effectiveness of some others in approaching the same text. A very brief list at the end of each chapter will suggest further reading on both the approach as such and also on different approaches to the same text. Readers will be empowered to be aware that they can choose whatever approach they wish to a narrative text - and any combination of approaches. Each chapter will refer to one key paper or chapter [1] - a possible spinoff companion volume would contain these papers as an anthology of the development of critical approaches to narrative fiction.
I'll be writing with an undergraduate audience in mind: like the students I teach - but I write in a non-threatening style with a minimum of technical jargon, and I believe the book will be accessible by and useful to students approaching Tertiary Entrance. I shall explain each approach clearly and in a demystifying way, and show its strengths and weaknesses in a practical demonstration. I might mention here that, although I've been a university lecturer for fifteen years or more I was a high-school teacher for ten continuous years before that (Literature and English and Languages), and so have a clear sense of the needs of that audience as well.
One primary market for Approaching Narrative Fiction is undergraduate. The book should be very useful to any university student of Literature who is doing a course unit on the novel or on narrative - which would be the majority of all Lit students. The book will be prescribed for my own courses.
Another important (and even larger) market is that of upper secondary Literature students. As the plan of the book is to deal with one large narrative per chapter, Approaching Narrative Fiction could be followed as the set text for say a year's course in reading narrative, with one text read per month, using ANF as the primary source of approaching that text. So upper secondary could also be a primary market.
Although the enrolment in my own courses is only of the order of 50, Murdoch is a relatively small University. Also, you can multiply that number (or perhaps a larger one) by the number of universities (at least in Australia) that teach literature (which would be all of them, I should think). So the potential university market in each capital city in each year is well into the hundreds. The secondary market is of course much larger.
Surprisingly little. About the only almost current 'approaches to narrative' text that I'm aware of is Douglas Tallack (ed.) 1987, Literary Theory at Work: Three Texts (Batsford, London) - which, as its title implies deal with only three texts, although about seven approaches (and by nine different authors). From 1987, it is of course unable to deal with postmodernist and postcolonial approaches.
Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1978) continues to be a classic, but his more recent book, from 1992, Reading Narrative Fiction (Macmillan, New York) continues to take the same limited theoretical line: the division of texts into what is presented and the way it is presented. Chatman represents one approach.
James Phelan & Peter J. Rabinowitz, at the University of Ohio are productive (among other things, editing the journal called Narrative). James Phelan edited Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology (Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 1989, US$42.50 cloth), but this is a collection of conference papers: each of the writers is pushing her/his own barrow: giving an example of an approach, perhaps, but not discussing the approach as such. Together Phelan & Rabinowitz have edited Understanding Narrative (Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 1994, released at US$17.95 paper): but the several writers here are heading in new theoretical directions, and some chapters are not concerned with literature, but with film, travel writing and even music.
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's 1983, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (Methuen, London & New York) looks like a textbook, coming from the Routledge (ex-Methuen) series, but is too much a product of the Genettian school of linguistic structuralism to be very useful. We've set it as a textbook, but very few students get any use out of it.
Ross Chambers' 1984 book, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis) is good, but dated. And of course years ago there was Robert Scholes's edited collection, Approaches to the Novel: Materials for a Poetics (Chandler, Scranton, Penn.), but the date - 1966 - suggests that it is time for a new book.
Approaching Narrative Fiction will be the only book in the market by a single author which discusses a number of approaches to reading fiction, and which demonstrates their usefulness, and which provides the outline of a course in reading narratives.
Chapter 1. Introduction
This book is an introduction to most of the approaches to narrative fiction which have been found to be useful during the last fifty years or so and most recently. Each chapter deals with one text, usually a novel, and one approach - often associated with a particular theorist or critic. The novels have not necessarily been chosen for their appropriateness for that approach - because one of the aims of the book is to show that any approach can potentially be used in relation to any narrative. In some cases the approach taken will be the one which seems to suggest itself as the most appropriate; in other cases I shall deliberately read against the grain - to defamiliarise, or 'make strange' the text. To further underline this point, notes at the end of each chapter suggest some possible lines of thought in relation to different approaches other than the one used in the chapter. Within the given approach one particular theorist is usually featured, to add a historical dimension to the discussion. Again, the theorist is not necessarily chosen as having the last word on the subject, but as either having given rise to much useful further inquiry, or as giving particular weight or point to the investigation, or else as providing a particularly useful summary of the approach. Approaches and texts are both arranged in chronological order - only roughly, in the case of the approaches, as they overlap in time. Although each chapter 'features' one particular approach I have felt free to use others in reading the particular narrative, as, in the end, it is the story which will continue to exist when the critics are forgotten.
Chapter 2. Tom Jones and realism
Literary critics and theorists have always been concerned with the problem of representation. In Ancient times writers like Plato and Aristotle tried to deal with ethical questions about art by considering the notion of imitation. That the notion is still relevant is suggested by the title of one of the great literary books of this century, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, which of course is Greek for 'imitation.' But the notion of imitation cannot be dealt with alone, and questions about form immediately arise. In approaching Henry Fielding's great novel, due respect is given to Ian Watt's seminal 1957 work on 'Realism and the novel form.' [2]
Chapter 3. Dangerous Liaisons and point of view
Laclos's novel, being epistolary, of course presents an ideal field in which to begin to discuss the crucial topic of point of view: each letter must by definition offer just one. Wayne C. Booth's great 1961 book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, is a landmark still used as a triangulation point for work in the area. [3]
Chapter 4. Frankenstein and reception
Although Mary Shelley's novel might seem to invite treatment from some philosophical approach, this chapter will read the novel in the light of reader-response theory. Wolfgang Iser sees this as, among other things, filling up the gaps or 'indeterminacies' inevitably left by the text. [4]
Chapter 5. Oliver Twist and myth
Again, Dicken's novel is usually read in the contexts of its period in history and the life of the author. It's possible no-one has ever tried to read it in the light of the structuralist approach to myth pioneered by Claude Lévi-Strauss, so it will be an interesting exercise: both the utility and limitations of the approach should be clearly shown. [5]
Chapter 6. The Brothers Karamazov and biography
This time an 'obvious' approach is used, one which has been found enlightening by many critics: Michael Holquist, for example, has shown the potential for understanding the novel in the relationship between its central themes and the author's life. Many critics have written about the usefulness of biography and history to criticism: Helen Gardner is an early example. [6]
Chapter 7. The Turn of the Screw and psychoanalysis
Again, a common approach (and the present author's area of expertise): but this chapter will offer not only a brief account of how psychoanalysis works (with reference to Freudian sympathisers like Lionel Trilling) but also a critique of Freud's work which results in a demystification of James's story. [7] Reference could also be made to the genre of the 'fantastic,' as Tzvetan Todorov has given such a clear account of it in relation to stories like this one.
Chapter 8. Heart of Darkness and marxism
Many of the approaches dealt with in this book are supported by social sciences or disciplines (as the mythic approach is by anthropology, for example). Now that the ideological thrust of marxism is exhausted, it can be seen once again in terms of its base discipline of sociology, where is began, in literary terms, with theorists like Lucien Goldmann. [8] This reading 'against the grain' should again make the nature of the approach even clearer than one - psychoanalytic, for example - which would collude with the target text.
Chapter 9. 'Dora' and deconstruction
Although Freud's case study seems not to belong to literature, it's worth remember that is was for Literature that he won the Goethe Prize in 1930. Barbara Johnson's is one example of how a deconstructive reading takes a text and forces it to reveal what it is most desirous to conceal - something which Freud's story badly needs! [9]
Chapter 10. A Passage to India and postcolonialism
The book concludes with two more conventional readings: but the approaches in each case are relatively new and in need of straightforward exposition. Forster's story inevitably presents 'his' view of the case, and a 'postcolonialist' reading will show that there are others clamouring for attention. [10]
Chapter 11. An Open Swimmer and postmodernism
Although Tim Winton's novel is not necessarily a clear example of a postmodern text in itself, it is moving in that direction, and certainly presents enough of those characteristics for a postmodernist reading to be useful, partly to throw new light on the story, partly on the approach. [11]
1 I'll give the reference in a footnote in each case.
2 Watt, Ian 1972 [1957], 'Realism and the novel form,' The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Penguin.
3 Booth, Wayne C. 1961, 'Distance & point of view: an essay in classification,' Essays in Criticism, 11; repr. Davis, Robert Murray ed. 1969, The Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 172-191; repr. Philip Stevick, The Theory of the Novel, Free Press, New York: 87-107
4 Iser, Wolfgang 1980, 'The reading process: a phenomenological approach,' in Jane P. Tompkins (ed.) 1980, Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London: 50-69; from Wolfgang Iser 1974, The Implied Reader, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
5 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1972 [1955], 'The structural study of myth,' in Structural Anthropology Volume 1, Penguin, London, tr. Claire Jacobson & Brooke Grundfest Schoepf from Anthropologie structurale, Plon, Paris, 1958: 206-31; first published under the same title in Myth: a Symposium, Journal of American Folklore 78, 270 (Oct-Dec 1955): 428-44.
6 Gardner, Helen 1959, 'The historical approach,' The Business of Criticism, Oxford: 25-51.
7 Trilling, Lionel 1970 [1942], 'The sense of the past,' Partisan Review, May-June 1942, repr. The Liberal Imagination, Penguin: 187-201.
Trilling, Lionel 1970 [1940], 'Freud and literature,' Kenyon Review, Spring 1940, rev. version Horizon, September 1947, repr. The Liberal Imagination, Penguin: 47-68.
8 Goldmann, Lucien 1967, The sociology of literature: status and problems of method, International Social Science Journal, 19, 4
9 Johnson, Barbara 1978, 'The critical difference,' Diacritics 8, 2; repr. The Critical Difference, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md & London, 1980.
10 Griffiths, Gareth 1987, 'Imitation, abrogation and appropriation: the production of the post-colonial text,' Kunapipi, 9, 1.
11 Jameson, Fredric 1984, 'Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism,' New Left Review 146, 53-92.