N is for narrative.
No way I can omit it. I did not discover narrative theory until I had
finished my doctorate. When I tried to use Propp's sequence of
functions in my thesis I had to ditch a whole chapter because it
didn't really lead to anything beyond stating that fairy-tale
character functions were also present in fantasy. So I used a
different branch of structuralism. Some time after I was finished I
became a co-founder of the Swedish Semiotic Society (which, as far as
I know, has died a quiet death), and some of the members were more
interested in narratology than in pure semiotics, and this is how I
stumbled upon Genette and other narratology prophets. When I look at
my guest lectures, conference papers and publications from the 1990s
most of them were on narrative theory. What I got most fascinated by
was how many narrative devices acquired a different form and
different significance in children's literature as opposed to the
mainstream, all because of the discrepancy between the adult author,
adult voice, child point of view, implied child reader – we all
know that now, but it wasn't universally known when I started. In
fact, there were just a handful of children's literature scholars at
the time who were interested in narratology.
I wrote a textbook on
narrative theory and children's literature, Barnbokens byggklossar
(“The bulding blocks of children's literature”) in 1998, revised
in 2004 and never out of print. It is used in all courses in
children's literature in Sweden and Denmark, and, I am pleased to
know, in many courses in comparative literature because there isn't
anything quite like it. It's high time to revise it again, but I have
enough to keep me busy.
So N is for narration
and narrators: omniscient narrators, objective narrators,
introspective narrators, retrospective narrators, intrusive
narrators, unreliable narrators, witness narrators, metanarrators and
hyponarrators, and I have written on them all, but there are still
many narrators to explore, because there is no limit to authors'
inventiveness.
N is also for narratee,
the receiver of the narrator's discourse within the story. Not to be confused with the implied reader (anyway, not the way I interpret
it). At one of the first meetings of the Swedish Semiotic Society we
discussed what the Swedish would be for narratee and agreed there and
then on the term which has been used ever since.
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