Rachel is the wife of Jacob, the immediate ancestor of the Israelites. Her life story which is scattered in the Book of Genesis seems to show that her life was a tragedy and she was almost a loser, though she was especially beloved by her husband. But a more in-depth reading suggests that the narrative about Rachel is actually so subtle as to imply that there is another possible interpretation of Rachel as a literary character: a life of dignity and passion. Rachel’s confrontation and even wrestle with hardships presents to readers a brave and active woman image, along with her happiness, sorrow, despair and hope. Meanwhile, her life is also a symbol of tragic, but unyielding historical experience that is shared by all the early matriarchs as well as the Israelites.
The purpose of this paper is to present the problem of unemployment from a new and fairly untypical perspective which was achieved thanks to the adopted form of narrative. The text consists of two stories about the experience of being unemployed: one told by the jobless person and the other by his life partner who is also the authoress of this article. The two stories later merge in the final section of the article where the fragments of the life-world of the unemployed and his partner presented here are juxtaposed with a wider discourse and reflection upon unemployment.
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Theorists of narrative studies often claim that the history of narrative theory is impossible to narrate because of its specific nature, consisting in the discontinuity of development due to disproportional introduction (and implementation) of the theory in various research cultures connected with diverse traditions of philological studies, which has resulted in a cluster-like character of particular narratologic systems. Narrative theory may represent a case study in the context concerned, i.e. in the discourse questioning historiographic methods in general. The question that narratologists may share with historians is this: are there any spheres of human culture and periods of its development so specific in their character as to prevent us from mediating them by means of current historiographic methods? A scheme for writing the history of narrative theory is presented here, based on negotiating between a history of ideas (including virtual links between related concepts dislocated in time and space) and an institutional history that enables us to understand the gaps. Various narrative modes are employed to re-construct the development of narrative studies as a coherent process. Recent attempts at replacing the history of narrative studies with a selection of canonic text are subject to criticism; the first synthetic essays on the topic Fludernik (2005) Herman (2005) are analyzed here in order to discern the principles of 'making a history of narrative theory possible'.
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The characteristic features of the later works by Paul Ricoeur (I have in mind his trilogy Time and Narrative and the anthropological summa Oneself as Another) include a 'linguistic turn' - concentration on the philosophical problems of language. The heart of the matter, however, concerns speech and a semiotic system isolated from the context and functioning according to conventionally established rules. Ricoeur considered both the vernacular and linguistic creations within the cultural circuit in the categories of a 'discursive instance' (a term introduced by Émile Benveniste), and as a consequence - within an existential and onto-anthropological perspective as the modus of the human condition: the hermeneutic envisages 'being-in-language' as an inseparable feature of 'being-in-the-world'. 'Discursive instances', i. e. acts of interpersonal dialogue and communication as well as the creation and reading of narrative works in the form of biographies or autobiographies, historiography and literature, poetry and art (mutatis mutandis including normative resolutions, political institutions, social organisations, etc.) are not reduced to the sphere of 'objective facts': the products of cultural creativity and the tools of social communication. From the hermeneutic point of view they are predominantly intermediaries of the self-understanding and self-confirmation of the human subject - his 'self-confirmation in being'. Narrative works in particular - novels - become the determinants of dynamic identity, 'being-oneself' (soi-meme) amidst the variable turns, tenuous connections and chaotic variability of life and history following their courses. The human 'I' emerges in the course of reading and interpreting linguistic products as a 'project' of the different possibilities of 'being-oneself' in a confrontation with 'the other' (un autre): we understand each other only by following a roundabout road amidst the signs of mankind rendered indelible in works of culture. Culture conceived as a human 'world of life' (Lebenswelt) can be, however, both an offer of individual self-realisation and a 'source of suffering' and personal alienation. Can one find oneself at home in this 'world' by 'changing it into speech' which according to Heidegger is the dwelling and refuge of the essence of man? This is the hope placed by Ricoeur in an erudite and extremely extensive hermeneutic 'dialogue' with traditional philosophy, claiming that an interpretation is the response to the fundamental alienation established by the objectivisation of man in the works of the discourse, comparable with the objectivisation that is the outcome of his work and art.
The article deals with the writings of Sokrat Janowicz approaching them as a kind of identity narrative characterised by a twofold, complimentary function: consolidating the subject and maintaining the Belarussian ethnos. It is revealed that the narrative's cohesion and continuity, which writer confirms with his personal signature, become guarantees of the survival of Belarussian identity. The narrative space emphasises the places (Białystok, Krynki) that hierarchise and evaluate its constitutive elements.
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This article investigates how the hypothesis of a plural reality is manifest in the fictional world of Urmedved (Ur-bear-novel, 1999), a work by Jiri Kratochvil (b. 1940). He employs for this purpose the theoretical concept of Postmodern fiction as an expression of a style that foregrounds the ontological structure, which was developed by Brian McHale, and the model of the narrative universe, as constructed by Marie-Laure Ryan. The analysis of these premisses of Postmodern fiction is aimed chiefly at the recursive narrative structure of the novel, which enables the disruption of the ontological boundaries or the bridging of narrative levels of different ontological status. McHale's theoretical concept of the ontological dominant is explained by employing Lyotard's hypothesis about mistrust of metanarratives. Because metanarratives are based on the premiss of a single accessible reality, a single real world, this loss does not merely mean the loss of trust in ideology, but also disrupts the need for a single real world. Moreover, this need is important for us as human beings - it reveals itself to be the organization of discontinuous entities into coherent wholes (as in the case of myth). Kratochvil's Urmedved reveals the ideological abuse of the need for a single reality, while undermining this human need. Postmodern fiction may destabilize the metanarrative by laying bare the contrivedness that distances from reality an individual member of the society veiled in the metanarrative. By the very nature of the need for one real world, however, the metanarrative remains dear to us.
This article discusses the applicability of semantic field analysis to the study of development and change in important interpersonal relations on the example of parent-child relationships. The narrative material was compiled from responses of 348 teenagers and young adults aged 13-30 years. Participants wrote about their parents ('Tell me about your parents'). On the basis of the context, semantic fields were generated for the high-incidence phrase 'to love one's parents', which is the primary model of conceptualizing the parent-child relationship in our culture. The results demonstrate the material complexity of the 'love for parents' semantic field in the study group, and reveal the associative network of other semantic relations involving this concept. They also confirm the hypotheses on subtle developmental changes in the understanding of 'love for parents' between early adolescence and adulthood. The study presents the application of methods based on linguistic analysis of language to the analysis of developmental changes in important personal relationships.
This article focuses on the ways in which intertextual references influence the narration in Ihara Saikaku's 'Koshoku gonin onna' (Five Amorous Women). The author chooses two classical texts, i.e. 'Ise Monogatari' (The Tales of Ise) and Yoshida Kenko's 'Tsurezuregusa' (Essays in Idleness) to illustrate the range of purposes the literary allusions in 'Five Amorous Women' serve. The distinction is made between the purely stylistic use of quotations from 'Tsurezuregusa', which involve neither playing with the source text nor a change in the meaning of Saikaku's narrative, and the parodic use of 'Ise monogatari' evoked mainly to bring humour into the stories. The important difference in the tone used while referring to the two classical works is also emphasised.
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The paper demonstrates one possible way of seeking an answer to the question: “What is the connection between a player’s general personality characteristics and the way he or she participates in role-playing game sessions?” An empirical study with 44 participants is presented, including its theoretical background, conduct, and results. Three phenomena play a pivotal role here: identity, narrative style of play and autonarrative inclination. The paper explains them, characterises the employed research methods and delineates the reasons for academic interest in these aspects of psyche. Afterwards, the results of the study are shown. They serve as an argument in support of the thesis that the three studied phenomena are related to one another.
The book reviewed is a post-conference monograph bringing methodological findings, re-interpretations, and analyses of domestic prose in the area of postcolonial research now developing in Poland. The thematic keystone of the articles collected is the issue of migration as a response to oppressive experiences of Polish history and culture of the 20th and 21st centuries
Under this heading the author discusses a host of literary puzzles and conundrums to be found in Boleslaw Prus' 'The Doll', ie. information withheld or passed over, places of indeterminacy, moot points, scenes in which the characters' behaviour, experiences and utterances appear disconcertingly ambivalent or ambiguous, as well as the problem of varying degrees of reliability of the accounts and observations stemming from narrative intermediaries. All those 'uncertainties' used to be treated as flaws, though, it was always stressed, excusable flaws. They were either blamed on the heavy-handed censorship the writer had to face or treated as minor, insignificant details. Nowadays our reading of 'The Doll' seems to be different. The modern reader will certainly not be put off by the occasionally blurred outlines of Prus' fictional world or the uncertainty bedevilling all attempts to give it a clear and fixed contour. Nor will he be annoyed by the Protean changeability of Prus' characters or the repeated shifts from illusion and to disenchantment in his novel. Today, both the well-read general reader and the dedicated student of literature may be expected to savour all those puzzles and treat them as early signs of a process of transition that the novel would undergo in the following decades.
„Procope“, a series of the Parisien publishing house Cerf, is designed to elicit critical discussions about selected authors, writings or issues. The first in this series has been Ricoeur’s Time and narrative in discussion published in 1989. Included in it are seven critiques or responses to Ricoeur’s Time and narrative written by philosophers, poets, and linguists, as well as the author’s replies.
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Following the path of research inquiring into the mutual relations of fine arts and literature, our intention is to investigate the alternatives of transferring certain ready-made structures from one media representation to another one, as well as the strategies of its adaptation to the capacity of the media taking over the new structure, i.e. literature and narrative fiction in particular. The focus is on such cases, where individual components of story comply with the general conditions of narrative structure and particular requirements of the plot, while representing a verbal form (or linguistic update) of a pictorial model, which often reflects a typical cultural scheme of the period concerned. Adopting the notion of pictorial model as introduced by Tamar Yacobi the authors revisit and explicate her analysis of its employment in Nabokov's short story “Spring in Fialta” (1936) to demonstrate its interpretive potential. Adding further examples from John Fowles's fiction they aim at distinguishing between singular (illustrative) and structural use of pictorial model. The latter is demonstrated in Frantisek Langer's short story „Susanna and the elders“ (1921) where the explicit quotation as well as latent presence of the eponymic pictorial model functions both as a plot scenario and as an interpretive matrix. Ecphrasis (of a fictional painting) and various more or less explicit, sometimes narrative diffused representations or even subtle allusions of several pictorial models may be found also in Alois Jirasek's novelette Zahoransky hon (1885); nevertheless, the crucial scheme is the employment of the gallant scenes typical of rococo paintings (particularly its prototypes which may be identified in Fragonard's works), including not only their topics and props but even techniques (such as scene lighting), which are applied here both as story components and discourse devices. While in many cases displayed by the author of the concept, Tamar Yacobi, pictorial models function as inset partial schemes and mere allusions carrying accessory cultural meanings, Jirasek's novelette may be considered as a salient example of their employment in construing the entire (rococo) story-world as well as in the narrative discourse.
This research deals with relationships between openness and opportunities to share asthma experiences between an ill child and close family, and effectiveness of medical therapy of asthma. Subjects were 58 children, between the age of 12-14, from the allergic outpatient clinic with a diagnosed bronchial asthma and under pharmacological therapy. Each child answered questions on frequency and satisfaction with talking with parents, or other close family members, on his or her experiences related to asthma. A doctor conducting the therapy was asked to evaluate results of therapy, and intensity of the asthma, for each child. The data support the hypotheses that degree of sharing own asthma-related experiences with close persons correlates positively with effectiveness of therapy. This effect appears stronger among children with more severe asthma.
The goal of the paper is to contemplate the nature of the narrative structures in the subgenre of family chronicle, which has undoubtedly left a trace in the western patterns of family story-telling. It is mainly theoretically based on a structuralist paper by Claude Bremond titled The Logic of Narrative Possibilities. However, French structuralist narratology is not mentioned here in order to examine the laws of a literary work of art per se. The paper investigates the layer of fabula in a number of European and Czech family chronicles, which is seen as a trace in a reader ́s memory made by reading a particular piece of writing and forming a meaningful whole. The paper uses Bremond ́s analysis to examine the logic of the narration, what impact it has on understanding the category of family in a family chronicle. What are researched is the patterns of the narration logic in family chronicles, which oscillates between the idyllic family togetherness and individualization. The paper proves that the pattern of deterioration seen as family dissolution and the disintegration of idyllic coexistence is not applied everywhere. This enables to review the current theory of the subgenre in question, which was solely defined by the logic of deterioration. Family chronicle brings a number of narrations based on ambivalent attitudes towards family, which is manifested by alternating processes of deterioration and improvement as well as their concurrence. These make the family chronicle characters hate the family, and at the same time regard it as an environment vital for life.
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Although the apartheid regime in South Africa collapsed in 1990, its memory continues to live in the present. In the 1990's, the trauma of the past was the most widespread literary subject. Although South African writing has since partly moved beyond the apartheid trauma towards the current issues of crime, HIV, xenophobia and homophobia, these continue to be explored by focusing on the trauma experiences. Modern trauma theory has become one of the most important cultural hermeneutic tools with which this literature has been analysed. This paper traces the parallels between trauma theory, post-structuralism and narratology to reflect upon the similarities and differences between psychoanalytic therapy and novelistic/autobiographical narrative as a space for collective national healing.
This theoretical-methodological text is focused on contemporary legends and rumours narrated in the context of the interactive process of social communication. The aim of the study is to draw to the possible approach to research these narratives. The text presents a perspective that understands the contemporary legends and rumours as a text narrated in context, while context is seen as a crucial factor influencing the content, form and transmission of these narratives. The basis and inspiration is a framework for contemporary legends and rumours research – "The Folklore Diamond", proposed by G. A. Fine. The study seeks to demonstrate the perspective of the Fine´s model of interconnection among several elements of contemporary legends and rumours. Then it tries to outline view of the use and limitations of the framework in field research in a particular environment.
The study aims to approach the idyllic within the context of realistic representation not as a category represented by strictly specified group of idyllic means of expression but rather a stylistic layer in which variability of expression plays a major role. The study focuses on particular examples of authorial metalepsis and intrusions of extradiegetic narrator which undermines mimetic illusion of realistic narrative and, as a result, the inventiveness of the story and the idyllic nature of the narrative are foregrounded. Several examples extracted from various genres (a travelogue, a short story, a sketch) and authors (G. K. Zechenter-Laskomerský, M. Kukučín and S. H. Vajanský) of Slovak literary realism are given to demonstrate the shifts from the realistic to the idyllic caused by the metaleptic quality of narrative embedding. The communicative value and the effect of the idyllic are determined by the technique how the narrative is integrated into the context of complex literary expression. The change of functional perspective from the realistic to the idyllic in the fiction concerned is signalled by the symptom of anachronism considered illegitimate in temporal and causal system of realistic depiction. The symptom challenges its epistemological and educational function and in the study it is evaluated as the expression of desire for transgression of relations of successiveness and equivalence, logic and causality of objective, external necessity typical of literary techniques of the period.
The article discusses the image of Ľudovít Štúr portrayed in history textbooks used in elementary and high schools in Slovakia during three different political regimes in the period of 1918 – 1989. Štúr was a prominent nineteenth century Slovak politician, journalist and a principle organizer of the Slovak national movement. He was also the initiator of the codification of the Slovak language and coordinator of voluntary Slovak campaigns against Hungarian rule in Upper Hungary during the 1848–49 revolutions in the Habsburg Monarchy. He has been considered an iconic figure of Slovak history, and thus the interpretation of his life and work, as well as the deeds of his closest collaborators – in Slovak historiography commonly referred to as the third generation of the Slovak national movement – became one of the key narratives in Slovak history textbooks. Yet, since history textbooks are part of the official historiography and, as such, are intended to pass on the values of current political elites onto subsequent generations, the narratives in them have been influenced by different political regimes and by different ideological needs and constrains. The author presents the changing perspectives on the historical importance of Ľudovít Štúr in history textbooks published in the interwar Czechoslovak Republic (1918 – 1938), during the independent WWII Slovak Republic (1939 – 1945) and, finally, during the times when Czechoslovakia was under the rule of the Communist Party (1948 – 1989) in the contexts of the official ideologies, mainstream social and political worldviews and values promoted during the respective periods. The interpretations of the historical importance of Ľudovít Štúr and his generation, and their simplified and rather schematic presentation in history textbooks have been characterized by selectiveness stemming from attempts to implement different ideologies. Yet, in each of the above-mentioned periods, the general image of Ľudovít Štúr was that of a hero, such as in Thomas Carlyle’s nineteenth century concept of great men moving the historical development.
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This article presents a general conception of aesthetic experience built on an analysis of the relationship between the narrative and the ambient dimensions of the aesthetic value of a natural environment, the forest. First of all, the two dimensions are presented with respect to the possibilities and problems raised by distinguishing between them. Next, the possibilities of their relationship are analysed and it is argued that they are strongly complementary. This complementarity becomes the core of the proposed conception of aesthetic experience, which can explain the difference between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, and can also provide an answer to the question of the non-reductive differentiation between the aesthetic experience of nature and the experience of a work of art. The conclusion of the article is mainly concerned to eliminate one of the problems localized in presenting the ambient dimension (the ambience paradox), by means of Ricoeur's conception of the relationship between time and narrative.
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