Title: Dissonant and consonant narrators : Dorrit Cohn's concepts, narratorial Stance theory and cognitive literary studies
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2022, vol. 48, iss. 2, pp. 189-206
Extent
189-206
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2022-2-10
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/digilib.77884
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
Our paper reconsiders the notions of dissonance and consonance introduced in Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds (1978). Cohn applies the terms to psycho- and self-narration and defines them with reference to the narrator's prominence, distance/intimacy as well as moral and cognitive privilege with reference to the character. Taking advantage of stance theory, we argue that dissonance and consonance are best taken as dimensions of the narrator's attitude towards the character and/or the narratee, we relate aspects of consonance/dissonance to the basic facets of focalization – emotional, interpretive, and evaluative – and we analyze them in terms of convergence or divergence and further, in the case of divergence, in terms of superiority or inferiority. We claim that there is no automatic correlation between narratorial consonance/dissonance and reliability. Overall, we believe that narratorial consonance/dissonance deserves much attention because it has great impact on the reader's reception of the narrator and characters.
References
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[3] Canfield, Dorothy (1946) Sex Education. Napa: Tales for Travellers.
[4] Cohn, Dorrit (1978) Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP.
[5] Du Bois, John W. (2007) The stance triangle. In: Englebretson, Robert (ed.) Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction.Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 139–182.
[6] Fludernik, Monika (2002) Towards a "Natural" Narratology. London: Routledge.
[7] Herman, David, ed. (2011) The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
[8] Keen, Suzanne (2003) Narrative Form. Houndmills: Palgrave.
[9] Keisanen, Tiina and Elise Kärkkäinen (2014) Stance. In: Schneider, Klaus P. and Anne Baron (eds.) Pragmatics of Discourse.Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 295–322.
[10] Landert, Daniela (2017) Stance in fiction. In: Locher, Miriam A. and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.) Pragmatics of Fiction. Berlin: De Gruyter, 489–514.
[11] Lanser, Susan S. (1981) The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[12] Margolin, Uri (2003) Cognitive science, the thinking mind, and literary narrative. In: Herman, David (ed.) Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences.Stanford: CSLI Publications, 271–294.
[13] Margolin, Uri (2003) Narrator. In: Hühn Peter, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert (eds.) Handbook of Narratology. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 351–369.
[14] Maziarczyk, Grzegorz (2005) The Narratee in Contemporary British Fiction. Lublin: KUL.
[15] O'Neill, Patrick (1994) Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory. Toronto: U of Toronto P.
[16] Palmer, Alan (2004) Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
[17] Palmer, Alan (2007) Thought and consciousness representation (literature). In: David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Routledge.
[18] Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (1999) Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge.
[19] Stanzel, Franz (1992) Consonant and dissonant closure in Death in Venice and The Dead. In: Fehn, Ann et al. (eds.) Neverending Stories: Toward a Critical Narratology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 112–123.
[20] Tokarczuk, Olga (2019) Nobel lecture by Olga Tokarczuk. Svenska Akademien. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/104871-lecture-english/. Accessed on: Jan. 11th, 2022.
[21] Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides (2009) The evolutionary psychology of the emotions and their relationship to internal regulatory variables. In: Lewis, Michael and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, Lisa Feldman Barrett (eds.) Handbook of Emotions.New York: The Guilford Press, 114–137.
[22] Warhol, Robyn R. (1986) Toward a theory of the engaging narrator: earnest interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot. PMLA 101 (5), 811–818.
[23] Wright, Robert (2018) Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. Simon and Schuster.
[24] Zunshine, Lisa (2006) Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.