The Boundaries of Narrative: The Problems, Possibilities, and Politics of Accommodating the Lyric Mode in Narrative Fiction

2007-01-01
Lyric and narrative are two distinct literary modes that are often hard to reconcile. They were, however, brought together especially in the kind of fiction that was widely produced in the early 20th century by writers like Virginia Woolf, who were highly interested in recording the elaborate thought processes and feelings of characters in an almost ‘poetic’ style. Works produced in this fashion are called ‘lyrical novels’ or ‘lyrical short stories’, suggesting that in such cases the boundaries of narrative fiction are extended to include and accommodate the lyric mode. This kind of labelling, however, is not without its problems. It is often possible to come across works of fiction whose lyrical aspects are so dominant that it is no longer possible to reconcile them with the basic defining characteristics of narrative. Such works may be said to challenge the boundaries of narrative fiction by appearing to be primarily narrative in mode but refusing at the same time to be categorised and subsumed under the title ‘narrative’.This paper focuses on those boundary cases in which the lyric mode refuses to be dominated by and subsumed under the narrative mode. Taking as an example Virginia Woolf’s short story, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, the paper looks into how far the boundaries of narrative can be extended to accommodate the lyric mode. In addition to demarcating the boundaries of narrative fiction, such an analysis, it is hoped, will shed light on the politics of resisting narrative as the only dominant mode in a work of fiction.

Suggestions

The Boundaries of Narrative: The Problems, Possibilities, and Politics of Accommodating the Lyric Mode in Narrative Fiction
Korkut Naykı, Nil (2003-06-23)
Lyric and narrative are two distinct literary modes that are often hard to reconcile. They were, however, brought together especially in the kind of fiction that was widely produced in the early 20th century by writers like Virginia Woolf, who were highly interested in recording the elaborate thought processes and feelings of characters in an almost ‘poetic’ style. Works produced in this fashion are called ‘lyrical novels’ or ‘lyrical short stories’, suggesting that in such cases the boundaries of narrative...
"Tradition and the female talent": Narrative poetry by women in the Victorian age.
Öz, Fahri; Çalışkan, Sevda; Department of English Literature (2003)
This study analyzes the question of tradition within the narrative poetry written by female poets, and deals with the strategies they employed to mark then- difference as women poets while they struggled to exist and make room for themselves in the canon in the Victorian age. The scope of the study İs confined to long narrative poetry by women in the Victorian age (1830-1901). The works to be studied are the Gondal poems (composed 1836-1848) by Emily Jane Brontö; Aurora Leigh (1859) and "Lady Geraldine's Co...
The Development of narrative skills in Turkish-speaking children: a complexity approach
Ögel Balaban, Hale; Hohenberger, Annette Edeltraud; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2015)
Narrative is a complex form of discourse. Creating it requires “a joint process of event comprehension and language production” (Trabasso & Rodkin, 1994, p.87), and understanding and explaining behaviors and emotions of others through perspective taking. In the present study, it is claimed that these requirements map into three levels of complexity: 1) Plot complexity reflecting the temporal and thematic organization of the narrative in a coherent manner, 2) Evaluative complexity indicating the narrator’s p...
Connective position, argument order and ınformation structure of discourse connectives in written turkish texts
Demirşahin, Işın; Bozşahin, Hüseyin Cem; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2008)
A text is a linguistic structure that is more than a random collection of sentences. A text is cohesive (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) and coherent (Mann & Thompson, 1987, 1988). Mainly ignored in the field of linguistics until recently, the text and the discourse structure have been inquired from various points of view (Asher, 1993; Asher & Lascarides, 1998; Grosz & Sidner, 1986; Mann & Thompson, 1987, 1988; Webber, 2004). D-LTAG is a discourse grammar work that extends a lexicalized sentence level grammar LTAG ...
The role of non-diatonic chords in perception of harmony
Atalay, Nart Bedin; Tekman, Hasan Gürkan; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2007)
The perceptual reality of the music theoretical relation between the Neapolitan chord and the dominant; and the secondary dominant chord and its diatonic associate was investigated within the chord priming paradigm. In Experiment 1, expectation towards the dominant chord after the Neapolitan chord was observed in Turkish musicians and non-musicians with piano timbre. In Experiment 2, expectation towards the dominant chord after the Neapolitan chord was observed in European musicians but not in European non-...
Citation Formats
N. Korkut Naykı, The Boundaries of Narrative: The Problems, Possibilities, and Politics of Accommodating the Lyric Mode in Narrative Fiction. 2007, p. 180.