Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 38.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
[1] From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com> (21)
Subject: Re: 17.032 nesting and linear narratives
[2] From: Virginia Knight <virginia.knight@bristol.ac.uk> (20)
Subject: linear narratives and nesting
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 06:56:21 +0100
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com>
Subject: Re: 17.032 nesting and linear narratives
Willard and all,
Thanks to everyone who's responded so far on my "nesting of narrative"
question. (Thanks especially to Ryan Deschamps for the Symposium reference.
Of course! This is also an interesting example on the cusp of a shift
between oral and literary, perhaps where the literary "breaks out". Chaucer
is also in an interesting shift between oral and literary, at any rate if
the Tales were meant for oral presentation.)
Part of why I'm interested in whether there's a distinction apparent here
between oral and literary narratives is that I wonder whether the literary,
because of both its means of composition (signs on a page as well as sounds
in the air) and its means of transmission, doesn't "tolerate" deeper
nesting. Plato and Chaucer (experimenters with written forms) giving us
such deep examples may lend weight to this idea.
Nonetheless, I agree whole-heartedly that it is evidently an ancient (and
beautifully effective) technique of drawing attention to the contingency
and, frequently, dubiousness, of what we hear and see, the narrativity of
narrative....
I'll also have to return to Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller",
which IIRC deals rather directly with this.
Cheers,
Wendell
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 06:57:23 +0100
From: Virginia Knight <virginia.knight@bristol.ac.uk>
Subject: linear narratives and nesting
The _Odyssey_ reaches four levels, for example at Od. 9.508-514. During
Odysseus' extended account of his journey from Troy to Scheria, Odysseus
quotes a speech made by the blinded Cyclops Polyphemus in which he
(Polyphemus) recalls in turn a prophecy given to him by the seer Telemos.
Irene de Jong's recent _A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey_ has
invaluable discussions of embedded narratives within the poem.
Dostoevsky may furnish further examples, not perhaps of multiple levels
of narrative but of extended episodes two or three levels deep, especially
if we allow the narrators of _The Brothers Karamazov_ or _The Devils_, who
take a back seat almost all the time, to put us at one remove further from
the action.
Virginia Knight
-- Virginia Knight, Institute for Learning and Research Technology Tel: +44 (0)117 928 7154 Fax: +44 (0)117 928 7112 University of Bristol, 8-10 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1HH Virginia.Knight@bristol.ac.uk Official homepage: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/aboutus/staff?search=cmvhk Personal homepage: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~ggvhk/virginia.html ILRT homepage: http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk
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