Acts of narrative
Enlarge text Shrink text- Book
O'Neill's approach rests on three assumptions: first, that all stories are stories told in particular ways; second, that these particular ways of telling stories are interesting objects of study in and for themselves; and third, that modern German fiction includes a number of narratives that allow us to indulge that interest in ways that are themselves compelling. The relationship of story and discourse is central to Acts of Narrative; in particular, each of the texts under analysis continually foregrounds the active role of the reader, which O'Neill sees as an inescapable feature of modern and postmodern narrative as a semiotic structure. The volume might be described as an exercise in semiotic narratology, exploring a variety of aspects of the semiotics of narrative as a discursive system. ; Because German literary criticism tends to be strongly historicist in character, modern and postmodern German narrative has remained relatively unexplored by poststructuralist critics. In the eight individual analyses of twentieth-century German texts that make up this book, Patrick O'Neill deviates from the theoretical mainstream. O'Neill applies the principles of structuralist and poststructuralist narratology to a selection of narratives from both modernist and postmodernist German authors: Mann, Kafka, and Hesse, and Canetti, Johnson, Handke, and Bernhard.
Title |
Acts of narrative : textual strategies in modern German fiction / Patrick O'Neill. |
---|---|
Edition |
1st ed. |
Publisher |
Toronto, [Canada] Buffalo, [New York] London, [England] : University of Toronto Press |
Creation Date |
1996 |
Notes |
Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph Includes bibliographical references and index. English |
Content |
Death in Venice : narrative situations in Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig -- Trial : paradigms of indeterminacy in Franz Kafka's Der Prozess -- Harry Haller's records : the ludic imagination in Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf -- Auto da fe : reading misreading in Elias Canetti's Die Blendung -- Tin Drum : implications of unrealibility in Günter Grass's Die Blechtrommel -- Two views : the authority of discourse in Uwe Johnson's Zwei Ansichten -- Goalie's anxiety : signs and semiosis in Peter Handke's Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter -- Lime works : narrative and noise in Thomas Bernhard's Das Kalkwerk. |
Series |
Theory / Culture |
Extent |
1 online resource (216 p.) |
Language |
English |
Copyright Date |
©1996 |
National Library system number |
997010703921705171 |
MARC RECORDS
Have more information? Found a mistake?