An Asymmetry Of Implicit Fictional Narrators In Literature And Film

Recently, the debate on the ubiquity of fictional narrators – whether every fictional narrative has a fictional narrator – has spread from film to literature. George Wilson reacted to Noël Carroll’s and Andrew Kania’s claims that no fictional narrators but 1 explicit ones such as Ishmael from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick exist. a near-ubiquity position claiming that almost every fictional novel, except those consisting exclusively of dialogue, has at least a minimal narrating agency or a fictional narrator. Yet, he disassociated himself from the usual ontological-gap argument made to support such claims. In other words, he denied the main tenet of an argument made by Jerrold Levinson; the claim that only fictional entities are able of presenting fictional events to the reader or viewer

An Asymmetry Of Implicit Fictional Narrators In Literature And Film

Recently, the debate on the ubiquity of fictional narrators – whether every fictional narrative has a fictional narrator – has spread from film to literature. George Wilson reacted to Noël Carroll’s and Andrew Kania’s claims that no fictional narrators but 1 explicit ones such as Ishmael from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick exist. a near-ubiquity position claiming that almost every fictional novel, except those consisting exclusively of dialogue, has at least a minimal narrating agency or a fictional narrator. Yet, he disassociated himself from the usual ontological-gap argument made to support such claims. In other words, he denied the main tenet of an argument made by Jerrold Levinson; the claim that only fictional entities are able of presenting fictional events to the reader or viewer

Montage aesthetics : narrative, adaptation and urban modernity in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz

Alfred Döblin’s famous 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz has often been discussed in terms of the appropriation of film poetics by the medium of literature and is said to abound with examples of literary montage. In most post-war discussions of literary montage in Berlin Alexanderplatz, however, the device is regularly understood as an umbrella term for anything of stylistic interest. Deploying 1920s and 1930s literary and film criticism I demonstrate that this regularly leads to anachronisms and terminological over-inflation. I thus offer a historically informed definition of literary montage in precise narratological, stylistic and experiential categories. Montage rests on the identification of intradiegetically unmotivated ready-mades and the perceived experiential similarities between the novel, Soviet montage films, and Dadaist photomontage. The lack of motivation affords the experience of disruption which, I demonstrate, has within the Benjaminian “modernity thesis” too often been extrapolated to characterize all film editing. My analysis shows that contemporary critics regularly discriminated between different types of editing on at least three experiential axes – tempo and dynamism, confusion, and disruption. My proposed definition of literary montage thus also allows me to analyse the novel in terms of the key narratological novelties that literary montage introduces: the global proliferation of heterodiegetic zero-level narrators accompanied with the local elimination of zerolevel narrators altogether. In other words, Döblin accomplishes in literary fiction what holds for film fiction in general – the absence of a narrator held to be fictionally in control of the whole of the text. Conversely, through the use of intertitles and the particular type of voice-over interjections, Fassbinder’s adaptation endeavours to emulate the reciprocal commonplace of literary fiction – the narrator’s continuous presence. Paired with Fassbinder’s film, Jutzi’s adaptation demonstrates how visual and sound film montage both differ from literary montage. Whereas literary montage hinges on disruptive stylistic shifts, film montage rests on disruptive spatio-temporal dislocation

Late 1920s film theory and criticism as a test-case for Benjamin’s generalizations on the experiential effects of editing

This article investigates Walter Benjamin’s influential generalization that the effects of cinema are akin to the hyper-stimulating experience of modernity. More specifically, I focus on his oft-cited 1935/36 claim that all editing elicits shock-like disruption. First, I propose a more detailed articulation of the experience of modernity understood as hyper-stimulation and call for distinguishing between at least two of its subsets: the experience of speed and dynamism, on the one hand, and the experience of shock/disruption, on the other. Then I turn to classical film theory of the late 1920s to demonstrate the existence of contemporary views on editing alternative to Benjamin’s. For instance, whereas classical Soviet and Weimar theorists relate the experience of speed and dynamism to both Soviet and classical Hollywood style editing, they reserve the experience of shock/disruption for Soviet montage. In order to resolve the conceptual disagreement between these theorists, on the one hand, and Benjamin, on the other, I turn to late 1920s Weimar film criticism. I demonstrate that, contrary to Benjamin’s generalizations about the disruptive and shock-like nature of all editing, and in line with other theorists’ accounts, different editing practices were regularly distinguished by comparison to at least two distinct hyper-stimulation subsets: speed and dynamism, and shock-like disruption. In other words, contemporaries regularly distinguished between Soviet montage and classical Hollywood editing patterns on the basis of experiential effects alone. On the basis of contemporary reviews of city symphonies, I conclude with a proposal for distinguishing a third subset – confusion. This is an original manuscript / preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Early Popular Visual Culture on 02 Aug 2016 available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2016.1199322

The problem of the general narrator in fiction film

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