Course Overview

CRITICAL TERMS AND CONCEPTS
ENGLISH 220

The following is an introduction to some of the critical strategies and theories of narrative we will be exploring this semester. Becoming familiar with these should help you to become a better reader and critic. But as Theodor Adorno wrote, with each act of criticism we must begin again: allow the text to speak to us, attend to our own responses, frame our questions and our arguments out of the urgencies of our encounter. There is no golden key to good criticism, then. But there are enabling terms and techniques.

I. STORY-SHAPED WORLD; WORLD SHAPING STORIES

Story-shaped World:

Contemporary critical theory shares with much fiction the assumption that we live in a "story-shaped world" (Brian Wicker, The Story-shaped World). On the one hand, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live . . . interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices" (Joan Didion, The White Album). On the other, "reality comes to us in the form of . . . stories" (William Dowling, Jameson, Althusser, Marx): the stories we employ in interpreting it, the stories told to us every day in conversation, in the newspaper, on television, in songs, in sermons, and in innumerable books and textbooks. These "stories" or narratives both describe and prescribe: they map the world in specific ways that implicitly and explicitly valorize some styles of being while denigrating others. When we assent to such stories they begin to shape our perceptions, beliefs, values, and actions. We need to understand the features of narrative, then, not only in order to understand and appreciate literature but also in order to make sense of and have some control over our lives and our communities.

--"Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semi-conscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed."
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p 3.

--"A self, therefore, is an 'interpretation,' in effect an invention of storytelling; a way of extending one's 'present' sense of one's life backward and forward into temporal areas which are not 'directly observable.'"
Frank Lentricchia, "Philosophers of Modernism"

--"Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts."
Salman Rushdie on The Satanic Verses and the story of Islam in Imaginary Homelands

--Language is the ultimate virus . . . and its ability to create fictions detached from reality opens up multifarious possibilities of control and seduction. Discourse, in the form of 'word lines controlling thought and feeling and apparent sensory impressions,' lodges itself in the human host and reproduces its scripts, argumentative routines, and programs in ways that entangle the human subject in a world it can neither master nor effectively negotiate. As the host of a language virus, the individual body becomes a mere 'flesh script' or 'soft machine,' a grid of received discourses."
Frederick Dolan on William Burroughs' view of language (Cont. Lit., xxxii, 4)

--"You have the world in front of your eyes, and yet it's funny how your mind prints out comic strips all day long."
from V.S. Naipaul's Guerrillas, 24-25

To say that the word is "story-shaped" does not mean, of course, that it is shaped only through stories. The fears and hopes, the expectations, beliefs, values, and codes of behavior that are inscribed in narrative can also be inscribed in the form of arguments, manifestos, political or philosophical theories, proverbs, rituals, etc. Where some critics talk of the world as "story-shaped," then, others speak of it as shaped by ideologies (in the broadest sense of the term, systems of belief) or discourses (subsystems of language with their own formal and ideological features). The thrust of all such discussions is to emphasize the discursively inflected nature of what we all too often take for "reality" itself, or "simple truth."

Master Narratives:

"Master-narratives" (Jameson) or "metanarratives" (Lyotard) are the great stories (of progress, enlightenment, liberation, success) by which whole societies achieve a sense of self and purpose and legitimate their ways of working.

Genre:

--"Romance is for Frye a wish-fulfillment or Utopian fantasy which aims at [and relates] the transfiguration of the world of everyday life in such a way as to restore the conditions of some lost Eden, or to anticipate a future realm from which the old morality and imperfections will have been effaced. . . . 'The quest-romance is the search of the . . . desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality.'"
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 110
--"Comedy . . . is clearly also a wish-fulfilling narrative structure. The materials of comedy, however, are not the ethical oppositions and magical forces of its generic opposite, but rather those of the Oedipal situation, with its tyrannical fathers, its rebellious younger generation, and its renewal of the social order by marriage and social fulfillment." (143)

--"The [realist] novel has as its historical function the systematic undermining and demystification [of the narrative paradigms, images of the real, and utopian promises of romance]." (152)

--A text is a "unity of structurally contradictory or heterogeneous elements, generic patterns, and discourses." (141)

II. DISCOURSES AND KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS

Used in this context, a "discourse" or a "language" is an ideologically and stylistically marked subset of language: a way of speaking that asserts a way of knowing and of acting. We might speak of the discourse of secular reason, then, or of evangelical discourse, or the discourse of market values. In given cultures and communities, certain discourses are "authoritative," "meaning-legislating," "official," or "hegemonic," while others, victims of a "system of exclusion" (Foucault) are marginalized, "subjugated," or silenced.

--"Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief systems."

-- "Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These 'languages' of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways."

-- "All languages of heteroglossia . . . are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings, and values. As such they all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically."
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 288, 291, 292

-- "By subjugated knowledges [or languages] one should understand . . . a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. I also believe that it is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges , these unqualified, even directly disqualified knowledges . . . these local popular knowledges, that criticism performs its work."
Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures," Power/Knowledge, 82.

In reading a text, we will want to identify the main discourses in play, to note as well the way in which various speech communities are represented (as relatively closed or open, univocal or polyvocal, totalitarian or dialogic, stable or in process), and finally to examine the narrative treatment of the discourses deployed (monologic or dialogic) and the ways in which discursive conflicts are resolved.

III. THE SELF IN LANGUAGE

--Even "the illiterate peasant, miles away from any urban center . . . nevertheless lived in several language systems: he prayed to God in one language . . . sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third, and, when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried speaking yet a fourth language (the official-literate language, 'paper' language). All these are different languages . . . but these languages were not dialogically coordinated in the linguistic consciousness of the peasant; he passed from one to the other without thinking, automatically; each was indisputably in its own place. . . . As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur in the consciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear that . . . the ideological systems and approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected with these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live in peace and quiet with one another--then . . . the necessity of actively choosing one's orientation among them began."
M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 295-6

What Bakhtin calls "authoritative discourse" plays, he claims, a crucial role in the shaping of the self. This discourse, the product and property of parents, teachers, politicians, preachers, and advertising writers, "demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally." It tells us how we will be expected to think, and feel, and behave. Sometimes this "authoritative discourse" also functions as an "internally persuasive discourse": we assent to it fully, accept it as truth. But "it happens more frequently that an individual's becoming . . . is characterized precisely by a sharp gap between these two categories: in one, the authoritative word (religious, political, moral; the word of a father, of adults, and of teachers, etc.) that does not know internal persuasiveness, in the other internally persuasive word that is denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism). . . . The struggle and dialogic interrelationship of these categories of ideological discourse are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness."
M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 342

Bakhtin's model of the discursive order (social and subjective) can of course be questioned in a range of ways. Fredric Jameson has claimed, for instance, that we live in a society of "discursive heterogeneity without a norm." And "some scholars have talked about the development of a 'multiplex consciousness'" in contemporary America: "When Americans are preoccupied with the question of religion, they can be intensely preoccupied; yet the same people, without feeling dissonance, when they are preoccupied with the question of economics, can be intensely preoccupied with it--to the point that they seem to express the same 'ultimate concern' about the sphere, or for that matter, about athletics, or success, or sex, or nationalism" (Martin Marty, "How Religious are Americans?"). Perhaps contemporary society and subjectivity are more stubbornly plural and decentered than Bakhtin's two-term model (authoritative/innerly persuasive) might suggest:

"The modern subject is defined by its insertion into a series of separate value-spheres [or discourses], each one of which tends to exclude or attempts to assert its priority over the rest. Subjective experience is itself the conflictive 'totality' described by all of these. At one level, these conflicts seek resolution in terms of the efforts of different spheres of culture to constitute themselves as autonomous and independent, and as having a commanding authority over the whole of social or cultural life. But since the condition of subjectivity is intimately tied to individuals, who through the organizing power of social institutions inhabit [and are inhabited by] these cultural and discursive spheres, the autonomy of the various discourses in the modern age inevitably shows up as contradictions within the subject-self."
Anthony Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity, 3

From this perspective, the self is always unstable, always in formation, never (or never for very long) single, stable, univocal.

IV. LIFE PATHS AND PROJECTS

Leo Bersani's claim that novelistic character "tests the life and death possibilities of different styles of being" might be rephrased in terms of life projects, paths, or strategies. For it is not just styles of being that are tested, but practices of becoming, projects of self-formation over time. Such paths or itineraries, some clearly marked and located within a socially prescribed hierarchy of paths, others all-but-invisible, guide and govern a person's becoming and being, shape her self and her sense of self, determine her situation in society. Novels model different life projects, but they also dramatize 1)the search for a worthy project, 2)the attempt to liberate oneself from an assigned or confining project, 3)the effort to imagine and "open" a new path, and 4)the vicissitudes of following a path.

Three questions would seem to govern the novel's preoccupation with life paths, then. The first is ethical, and has to do with the question of how (best) to live, how to define and pursue the good life. The second is practical, and has to do with the possibility of actually following a chosen path. And the third, closely related question is social, and has to do with the question of a society's capacity to make the good life available to its subjects. Is the society promoting socially and personally constructive life paths? Is it making the paths it privileges available to all? Is it leaving sufficient space for a range of divergent paths to flourish?

Life Paths, Pathless Lives, Pathless Paths: In spiritual biographies and secular narratives of heroic self-formation one finds stories of people who seek out, select, and then follow a specific path with a specific code, set of practices, and goal. This path is designed, as Michel Foucault puts it in The Care of the Self, to "transform, correct, and purify" the subject and win her "salvation" (42).

Many people, however, never embark on such a deliberate project of self-transformation; for them, "such relations of oneself to oneself are largely undeveloped" (43). They may pursue paths of a different sort, seeking status or wealth. Or they may simply refuse to sign up for any particular "life task" (Weber), orienting themselves instead by taken for granted roles, social pressure, impulse, or chance, proceeding from one short-term goal to the next, etc.

Still other people, such as the postmodern "nomads" celebrated by Deleuze and Guattari, may make a conscious decision for immediacy, improvisation, and multiplicity over the deliberate, structures, and centered life of those who choose and follow paths. Foucault speaks, in this regard, of "societies of promiscuity" (42) that do not encourage long term attachments and projects. Like traditional nomads, who wander across the pathless terrain of steppe or desert, postmodern nomads "prefer what is . . . multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems"; they "develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction" rather than by limitation, singularity, and continuity
Foucault, Preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, xiii

Georges Bataille, another French thinker, reacts in a similar manner against the traditional notion of the life project as a disciplined path. There is, Bataille writes, "an affinity between on the one hand, the absence of worry, generosity, the need to defy death, tumultuous love, sensitive naivete; on the other hand, the will to become the prey of the unknown. In both cases, the same need for unlimited adventure, the same horror for calculation, for project"
Bataille, Internal Experience, 21

Some questions for analysis:
1. Is the protagonist's chosen project/path already well-marked (socially-given) or must it be carved out by the protagonist herself over time? Can you name the protagonist's project/path? What are the goals of the protagonist's project/path? Its definition of the desirable? What practices, rules of conduct, attitudes define the protagonist's project/path? What temptations and terrors shadow the project/path? What turnings and transformations are required? What alternative projects/paths does the protagonist reject, and why? Who and what assists, who and what hinders the protagonist in her effort? What is at stake, socially and ideologically, in the protagonist's choices?

V. IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES

If novels explore and map different notions of human character, they also explore and the world inhabited by humans, trace its divisions and the conflicts they produce, set characters in motion across conventionally recognized boundaries (national, local, class, gender) or boundaries which the texts themselves construct. It is useful, then, to pay attention to how the world is divided up in a text, how the different zones are described, evaluated, and related to one another in simple oppositions or more complex configurations, how they collide or change, and what happens to individuals as they move from zone to zone.

Of course, spaces or settings, like characters, are rarely homogenous: at one level a novel may map its world in terms of a single great division between North and South, city and country, home and abroad. But these zones almost inevitably will be divisible into more local settings, and these again into even smaller spaces, each with its own particular significance. Furthermore, different mappings are often deployed in the same text: different characters (positioned differently and speaking different discourses) divide and define the world differently. And what look at first like clearly demarcated and opposed regions often turn out to resemble and in some senses "produce" each other.

Mapping, worlding: a heuristic: (from Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression):
--How does a given discourse divide up the world? What zones and boundaries matter, and what principles of discrimination (ideological, geographical, economic, cultural, racial, etc.) Determine the designation of boundaries, the definition of difference?
--Are the different zones hierarchically related in some sort of high/low, self/other spectrum or opposition, and if so, is this opposition simply asserted, or is it challenged in some way?
--Can one detect a degree of "phobic fascination" with what is repudiated as "low" or "other" in the discourse?
--What does the text have to say about the possibilities of passage between zones? Does it represent passage as easy or difficult, wise or foolish, a means of gain or of loss?
--In a novel, where different languages and perspective are in conflict, how do different characters map the world, and which mappings are affirmed, which repudiated?

Edward Said on the European construction of "the Orient": (from Orientalism):
-- "the imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections." (8)

-- "Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying 'us' Europeans as against all 'those' non-Europeans . . . the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures." (7)
-- "The Orient was overvalued for its pantheism , its spirituality, its stability, its longevity, its primitivity, and so forth. . . . Yet almost without exception such over esteem was followed by a counterresponse: the Orient suddenly appeared lamentably underhumanized, antidemocratic, backward, barbaric, and so forth." (150)

VI. ONTOLOGICAL CONFRONTATIONS

If novels explore the adequacy of different organizations and understandings of social reality, they also explore the adequacy of different ontologies, or models of the real. Indeed, the history of the novel can be read as an ongoing debate over different models of the real, some secular, some sacred. Thus George Levine writes that "the realistic impulse is most precisely located in the historical context of a secularizing movement directed against the falsehoods of earlier imaginations of reality." (George Levine, The Realistic Imagination, 11). Modernism and postmodernism have in turn directed their energies to an interrogation of realism's representation of the real, or to a questioning of the category of the real itself. And many works of fiction are internally structured around such ontological debates.

Ontological Landscapes: "Ontological landscapes [models of the ultimate structure of the universe] may be double, as in the many cultures that distinguish sacred and profane levels of reality. In such cultures, the two levels typically 'fuse' at certain prescribed places and times--temples, festivals, and so on. In other cultures the fusion of the levels may be more or less total, either strongly fused, as in Medieval Catholic culture, or weakly fused, as in late-nineteenth-century European Protestant culture. Or the ontological landscape may occupy only a single plane, for instance in the strictly this-worldly . . . ontology of hard-core positivism. Finally, ontological landscapes may be plural rather than double." (Brian McHale. Postmodernist Fiction, 36-7)

The Social Distribution of Ontologies: According to Thomas Pavel, most societies accommodate a certain "ontological pluralism": they make room for both scientific and religious constructions of reality, or for different religious constructions. But, Pavel writes, "the freedom of choice appears to be subject to some constraints. . . . If most societies seem to accommodate . . . some diversity . . . there are, however, means to indicate that only one of these [ontological] landscapes represents the ontology proper. . . . The most important ontology may then play the role of an absolute norm. . . . When conflicts arise, the peripheral ontologies have to yield. In typical European villages, for instance, popular beliefs in local spirits, witchcraft, etc., coexisted with the new system; even if they were tolerated at the periphery, the slightest danger of expansion or conquest was severely repressed." " Seen from this angle," Pavel continues, "orthodoxy wasn't as much the defense of a single ontology as the production of a certain ontological focalization, of a certain ordering of neighboring ontologies.. But, when one

observes the large number of beliefs and heresies condemned in the name of one [privileged ontology] or another, one cannot avoid the impression that ontologies are in a continuous state of fermentation, change, and degradation, in a permanent movement." Pavel goes on, controversially, to argue that "the only defense" against ontological anarchy is "the dogmatic reinforcement of" the orthodox focalization ("Fiction and the Ontological Landscape," Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, [1981-82], 155).

The Work of Literature as the Site of Ontological Confrontation: "A single work, in Pavel's view, may be apportioned among several different ontologies. He cites the example of the confrontation in such Renaissance plays as Marlow's Dr. Faustus between a bi-planar, other-worldly ontology and a single-plane, this-worldly ontology." (McHale, 34)

Worlds in the Plural: "And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes?" (William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902)

VII. NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND FUNCTIONS

Oppositions and their Interrogation: Structuralism and poststructuralism alike privilege the role of oppositions in the structuring of thought and the mapping of all sorts of domains. Structuralism sought to disclose the logic of opposition it found everywhere in human discourse, deconstruction to challenge this logic. Narrative, like other modes of discourse, seems both to depend on binary oppositions and to seek to undermine them.

-- "The formal device on which the symbolic code is based is antithesis. If the text presents two items--characters, situations, objects, actions, in a way which suggests opposition, then 'a whole space of substitution and variation is opened to the reader (Barthes, S/Z, 24). The presentation of two heroines, one dark and the other fair, sets in motion an experiment . . . in which the reader correlates this opposition with thematic oppositions that it might manifest: evil/good, forbidden/permitted, active/passive, Latin/Nordic, sexuality/purity. The reader can pass from one opposition to another, trying them out, inverting them, and determining which are pertinent to larger thematic structures which encompass other antitheses presented in the text. . . .

Levi-Strauss's study of codes suggests that symbolic interpretation is a matter of moving from the antitheses in the text to the more basic oppositions of other social, psychological, or cosmic modes."
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 225-27

-- "Here is Derrida describing 'une strategie generale de la deconstruction': 'In a traditional philosophical opposition we do not have a peaceful coexistence of facing terms but a violent hierarchy. One of the terms dominates the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), occupies the commanding position.' . . . To deconstruct a discourse is [to intervene in its field of oppositions] and to show how it undermines the [oppositions] it asserts."
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction,85-87

-- "Society might well be benefitted by the corrective of a disintegrating art which converts each simplicity into a complexity, which ruins the possibilities of ready hierarchies, which concerns itself with the problematical, the experimental, and thus by implication works corrosively upon those expansionist certainties preparing the way for our social cataclysms."
Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, 105

Approaching a text, then, one might ask: 1) What oppositions inform the text? 2) How are these oppositions specified and generalized in the text? 3)What philosophies and discourses sponsor or a sponsored by these oppositions? 4) How are these oppositions complicated in the text (oppositions within oppositions)? 5) How are they dismantled (deconstructed)? 6) And to what end, with what consequences, are they complicated and deconstructed?

Progressive Form: Narrative tends to be structured not only around some pattern of dramatic conflict and resolution, but also around some pattern of thematic conflict and resolution, "a logic of question and answer, enigma and solution" (Jonathon Culler, Structuralist Poetics 203). Questions are raised and explored, conflicting visions and ideologies put in conflict, and specific beliefs, ideologies, stories, styles of being are either valorized and privileged or interrogated, disputed, discredited. We need both to determine the shape of an narrative argument and to be ready to question it: interrogate its assumptions; notice the role of primary exclusions in its construction; ask whether the representation of the competing positions is equitable. In some novels, Bakhtin writes, competing discourses (positions) are represented in all their power, but in most, one discourse is privileged, and others are introduced only to be mocked and dismissed.

--"Imagine the work as a rejoinder in a given dialogue."
M.M. Bakhtin, the Dialogic Imagination 274

The conflicts that drive any complex work are likely themselves to be complex and many-sided. Kenneth Burke suggests that it helps to think of narrative conflict in terms of equations and oppositions. In getting at the argument of a work, he writes, we need to ask what goes with what and against what: how characters are aligned with and against each other, but also how they are equated with or opposed to specific settings, groups, images, and discourses.
Kenneth Burke, the Philosophy of Literary Form

--"[Novelistic plot] is a means of testing the life and death potentialities of certain styles of being; and the fate of a certain character, as it slowly takes shape in the course of a novel, reveals the value of his or her style, its complicity with life or with death."
Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax 197

Plots often provide "the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction" or attempt "to resolve, in the imaginary, what is socially irreconcilable." The wishful argument of the traditional novel, in other words, is that seemingly impossible obstacles to the mutually satisfactory resolution of social tensions can be overcome.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious and Marxism and Form

--"The [realist] novel has as its historical function the systematic undermining and demystification . . . of [preexisting constructions of reality]."
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

--In The Art of Biblical Narrative Robert Alter shows how "techniques of repetition" (88) or repetition with variation (of key-words, images, descriptions, situations, etc.) have the effect of "intensifying, complementing, qualifying, contrasting, expanding" (97) what is first said and of establishing "a whole network of ramified interconnections in the text" (3).

-- "The composition of the novel is the paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and discreet components into an organic whole which is then abolished over and over again."
Georg Lukacs, Theory of the Novel

--"Literary works may be diffuse, incomplete and internally contradictory."
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory 146

--"Textual analysis does not try to find out what it is that determines the text (gathers it together . . .), but rather how the text explodes and disperses."
Roland Barthes in Young, Untying the Text 135

VIII: FIVE PRINCIPLES FOR THE STUDY OF THE NOVEL

1. We live in a "story-shaped world." Narratives (and especially "master narratives") shape our fundamental beliefs about self, society, and world in profoundly significant ways. And "life narratives" shape our sense of self and purpose.
--Ideologies and the life strategies identified with them are both communicated by exposition, image, and story
--Master narratives are those powerful, anonymous stories that define a culture's sense of things: we live under the spell of master narratives of progress, enlightenment, romantic love, redemption, apocalypse, etc.
--Redemptive narratives (salvation stories) define the good and tell us what we must do to be saved, or satisfied, or successful: some forms of redemptive narrative are the sermon, the saint's life, the tale of the hero, the self-help book, the prescription, the advertisement.
--Life Narratives are the stories we use to give shape, direction, and meaning to individual existence, to orient ourselves, establish and maintain our identities. Life narratives can be imposed, appropriated, invented.

2. Stories are descriptive, prescriptive, and dream-like: they attempt to represent what is and to tell us what ought to be, but they also reflect our deepest wishes and fears, as dreams do.
--And we evaluate, praise, and criticize them in these terms: does the story offer an accurate representation, is it enabling, is it persuasive, is it compelling? Or what is it trying to tell us about what is, what ought to be, what we imagine to be?

3. Every individual story is only partly individual: it belongs to a family or community of stories, with which it is formally and/or ideologically affiliated.
--It will both rehearse and revise the elements, formulas, and conventions of the family of stories to which it belongs.
--Formal elements: plot structure, character system, setting, tone, style, imagery, intertextual reference.
--Ideological elements: particular constructions of reality (of world, society, self), ethical principles, definitions of the desirable, assessments of human possibility, political beliefs, etc.
--"Genre" and "sub-genre" are two terms used to designate stylistically and ideologically inflected clusters of stories.
--When we read, then, we need to ask both "What's going on in this story?" and "What kind of story is it, and how does it resemble and differ from other stories of its kind?".

4. Novels work with and on the privileged narratives, ideologies, and world-views of their cultures, rehearsing, endorsing, testing, contesting, and subverting them, and suggesting alternatives.
--One theory of the origins of the novel sees the novel emerging to test and contest (subvert) the aristocratic "story" of romance in the name of the newer, more democratic and worldly ideologies of the bourgeois epoch.
--Other genres, master narratives, or life narratives interrogated in the novel include adventure stories, popular fables of success, and tales of exemplary heroism and goodness such as the saint's story.
--The terms of interrogation include plausibility, adequacy, utility, nobility. According to Leo Bersani, "Novelistic plot is a means of testing the life and death possibilities of different styles of being."
--But novels also work to revise, rearticulate, and reinvent the ideologically laden narratives they inherit: to render them more accurate (realistic), more habitable, more ethically, politically, spiritually enabling.

5. All stories are built around conflict, but not all end in resolution.
--Conflicts:
--between passions, inclinations, obligations, understandings (psychological)
--between persons (individual)
--between communities and institutions (social and political)
--between beliefs and practices (ideological): constructions of the self, the social, the world, history, etc. (philosophical)
--Often what looks like a personal conflict turns out to embody all the others as well: to be psychological, social, and ideological. "A novelistic character is the image of a language" (Bakhtin).
--Conflicts may define a novel without being resolved within it: the open-ended or dialogic novel tends not to achieve closure or resolution.

IX. ON WRITING PAPERS

A good class paper gets beyond the obvious, beyond what has been said in class or what might be said by anyone with a basic familiarity with the subject. And it contributes to the work of the class. Sometimes you'll be tracking an issue of your own so powerfully that you'll feel the need to write a paper that departs dramatically from the preoccupations and methods of the course. But in most cases an appropriate paper addresses the issues of the course and/or makes use of the methods introduced.

It helps to think of a course as a kind of text, organized around a set of assumptions and questions, developing a set of analyses and arguments, employing and recommending certain methods of study. And it helps to think of a paper as a contribution to this course text, an effort to apply its argument and methods, or to extend or interrogate them. If one finds oneself faced with a paper assignment, then, one can perhaps generate a topic by reviewing the course text and listening for one's own responses: for moments of recognition ("Yes, that would apply nicely to ...), or interrogation ("But how could we say that about . . .), or rebellion (Impossible, that's simply not what . . .).

At times, however, we find inspiration in much fainter and less focused responses. We glimpse a pattern in a text, are haunted by a question of motivation or style or development, notice that a passage or phrase of gesture catches our attention, seems to promise some illumination or produce some unnameable pleasure. The challenge here is to stay with the initial response, taking it seriously enough to see what it can tell you about the texts at hand: the course text as well as the literary.

Another, more schematic, approach to constructing a paper is by way of localization: taking the given interpretation or mode of interpretation to a specific site in the text. No reading, let alone a reading developed in two or three lectures, can be exhaustive. So one way to get to a topic is by taking a reading developed in class to some local site within the text and examining that site in a way which will extend, enrich, complicate, qualify, or even disqualify the reading.

Yet another way to come at a text is by deliberately shifting the focus or level or method of interpretation, while keeping the course questions and analyses in mind. Bakhtin shows us that characters can be understood literally, as more or less psychologically complex individuals, or as "images of a language," spokespersons for particular discourses. Northrop Frye reminds us that any given work is likely to be affiliated with a number of different generic traditions. What happens to the already developed reading, then, when one shifts focus, level or method? Is the effect simply to enrich that reading, or to complicate it, or to produce new meanings altogether?

However one approaches a topic, one has to allow one's argument time to grow and change. This means, at the very least, hanging around with the question awhile, taking notes and trying out patterns of development, writing and revising a draft. If you start early enough, and feed enough raw material into your mind, it will do some of the work itself.