ABC blog: Z

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Z is for zero focalisation. You didn't believe I would find a topic beginning with Z, did you? But I have written a lot on narrative perspective, and zero focalisation is one of the most common narrative devices in children's literature. It is not quite the same as omniscient narration, because focalisation is about seeing rather than speaking. Zero focalisation is a view from nowhere, a vantage point taken by an anonymous agency, and you almost feel guilty spying on somebody's life. Zero focalisation is not a tremendously exiting device because how can you engage with characters if you never share their point of view? It's like watching fish in a fish tank. In practice, it is most often shifting multiple focalisation, when the point of view moves from character to character, sometimes going inside their minds, sometime staying outside.

Z is also for zigzag temporality, when the narrative moves back and forth between two or more moments in story time.

Z is also for zoomorphism, which is a common device in children's literature when humans appear in animal disguise. It is the opposite of anthropomorphism, in which animals are endowed with human traits. You may think it is the same, but it isn't. However, we have now come to the end of the alphabet, and you may need a break.

ABC blog: N

To see previous entries, click A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M

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. 

ABC blog: C

See previous entries A B

C is for crossvocalisation. Like with aetonormativity, I coined this word because I needed it. It means that a male author uses a female first-person narrator and the other way round. I used crossdressing as analogy. Crossvocalisation is a performance: what interested me was whether a female narrative voice genuinely performs as female, which of course led to a whole bunch of questions about what it means for a voice to be male or female, because narrative voice, as everything else in a narrative text is a construction and has nothing to do with the real author's gender, nor the protagonist's gender. I tested the idea at a major children's literature conference, and the editor of a major journal asked me to develop my paper into an article. The reviewers found lots of petty faults with the article, but failed to notice my revolutionary approach to narrative, and the article was rejected. I published it in Swedish, and then I reworked it into a chapter in Power, Voice and Subjectivity. If you google it, there are 1,500 hits, most of them to my book, and some to course syllabi where the book is used. I haven't seen it employed in further scholarship, so here is your chance.

When I wrote that first article and even in my book I found very few examples of successful male-female crossvocalisation, while there were scores of female writers who used male voices. I also noticed that when male authors did use female voices, gender was often blurred by other, more prominent features, such as ethnicity or genre. I jumped to conclusions, but since then I have read some superb crossvocalised novels, such as The Fault in Our Stars and She is Not Invisible, so apparently male YA authors have recently become bolder in their choices of narrative perspective. Which makes me glad, because I didn't like the idea that women should be more imaginative and empathetic than men.

C is of course also for carnival and chronotope, which I have already mentioned; and it is for cats, a subject that I have studied academically as well as empirically.