Brian Richardson | University of Maryland (original) (raw)

Papers by Brian Richardson

A Poetics of Plot for thr Twenty-first Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives, 2019

I offer an account of narrative temporality that attempts to encompass several postmodern practi... more I offer an account of narrative temporality that attempts to encompass several postmodern practices. I argue that a theory of narrative time is most useful if it contains six aspects: the time of the story, the sequence in which it is presented, the time of the telling, the time of its reception, the frequency of representations of the same events, and the correspondence or noncorrespondence with historical events that occur at the same time as the fictional ones. I then investigate the increasing number of antimimetic works that violate physically or logically possible temporality. Such practices include circular narratives, the last sentence of which is also the work’s first sentence; narratives that move backward temporally and causally, narratives with multiple contradictory story lines; and those with systematically conflated temporalities. I try to demonstrate the consequences and utility of this approach with an analysis of the complex fabricated temporalities of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Introduction à la narratologie postclassique, 2018

Soon after the restoration of Independence in 1990, The Act for the Restitution of the Status of ... more Soon after the restoration of Independence in 1990, The Act for the Restitution of the Status of the Catholic Church in Lithuania was adopted, which declared cooperation between the State and the Church on the basis of parity. A difficult search for consensus between the bishops and changeable negotiations with secular authorities lasted ten years and the process was reinitiated three times until finally, in 2000, three agreements between the Holy See and the Republic of Lithuania were signed. Having been granted access to the current archives of the Lithuanian Bishops' Conference and the archdioceses for the first time, the author of the present article aims to reconstruct the course of preparation of the agreements from the perspective of the Church. It is revealed how the agreement that had to regulate the restitution of Church property was completely rejected. While discussing the fifteen-year experience of the integration of ratified acts into the Lithuanian legal system and administrative practice, the author asserts that they made a wider impact on civic power and the development of democracy than their direct function would allow us to imagine. The understanding 1 This research was funded by a grant (No. LIT-7-11, 'Christians in Lithuania Before and After Revival') from the Research Council of Lithuania. 336 Politeja 6(45)/2016 Paulius V. Subačius that the Church and the State had a common aim-welfare of person-led the Catholic community itself to greater openness and a positive interaction with other agents of society.

Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 2011

Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 2013

Style, Sep 22, 2007

In narrative theory and literary analysis, it is regularly assumed that a text has a single impli... more In narrative theory and literary analysis, it is regularly assumed that a text has a single implied author and a single implied reader. This is no doubt usually the case, but there are a number of interesting examples that cannot fit within this simple framework. In the last chapter of my book, Unnatural Voices, I argued the case for multiple implied authors; in this article, I would like to examine the other side of the narrative transaction and explore the possibilities of multiple implied readers inscribed within the same text. Perhaps the most obvious class of works written for two distinct audiences is one well known to all parents: children's literature. Many works of this genre appeal both to the child's mind and sensibility and at the same time to the very different interpretive frameworks of adults. In a stimulating essay on this subject, Per Krogh Hansen quotes Hans Christian Andersen on his intentions to address both groups simultaneously (101). For a notorious example from American popular culture, we may point to the Betty Boop cartoons of Max and Dave Fleischer, which are filled with brazen sexual innuendo that a child cannot fully comprehend. Defining the implied reader [implizierte Leser], Wolfgang Iser stated that the implied reader "incorporates both the prestructuring of the potential meaning of the text, and the reader's actualization of this potential through the reading process" (Implied xii). But much children's literature has two different prestructurings, one for the simple child and the other for the knowledgeable adult. And both are equally privileged, though in very different ways. And when literary authors like Lewis Carroll or William Makepeace Thackeray get into the act, yet another reader may be prestructured in the text as well, adding the highbrow sophisticate who understands the playful references to logic and parodies of Wordsworth ("The White Knight's Tale") to the more ordinary parent and, of course, the child audience of the Alice books. (1) Political censorship produces its share of double codings. To take one notorious example, a conservative Irish newspaper, Irish Society, printed an unsigned poem called "An Ode of Welcome" to celebrate the return of the Royal Navy ships from South Africa in June 1900 during the Boer War. It contains appropriately patriotic and indeed jingoistic stanzas like: The Gallant Irish yeoman Home from the war has come Each victory gained o'er foeman Why should our bards be dumb. How shall we sing their praises Our glory in their deeds Renowned their worth amazes Empire their prowess needs. So to Old Ireland's hearts and homes We welcome now our own brave boys In cot and Hall; neath lordly domes Love's heroes share once more our joys. Love is the Lord of all just now Be he the husband, lover, son, Each dauntless soul recalls the vow By which not fame, but love was won. United now in fond embrace Salute with joy each well-loved face Yeoman: in women's hearts you hold the place. The amorous turn toward the end of the poem further enhances the praise of the warriors by affirming their status as heroes in a gendered national allegory as well as promising each the love awaiting them in "women's hearts." The poem, however, turned out to have been written by Oliver St. John Gogarty, and the first letters of each line form an acrostic that produces an entirely opposite assessment of the virtues and rewards of British imperialism from that inscribed in the poem proper. Conditions of political censorship have produced such compositions for some time; one thinks of Milton secreting his radical politics within the story of the Fall of Man in Paradise Lost, perhaps the only way he could get them into print after the restoration of the monarchy (see Hill 341-412, esp. 380-90). Similarly, one may point to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's rousing depiction of Hindu nationalists' victorious struggle over British forces in Anandamath (1882) by framing the text with anti-Muslim rhetoric and a pacifistic epilogue. …

Choice Reviews Online, 2012

See also plot master narratives, 170 material practices,

Narrative, 2010

(Germany), where he teaches English literature and film. He is the author of a critical monograph... more (Germany), where he teaches English literature and film. He is the author of a critical monograph entitled Narrating the Prison and the editor/co-editor of numerous volumes, such as Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age and Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Alber has written articles that were published or are forthcoming in international journals such as Dickens Studies Annual, The Journal of Popular Culture, Short Story Criticism, Storyworlds, and Style, and he has contributed to the Routledge Enyclopedia of Narrative Theory, the Handbook of Narratology, and the online dictionary Literary Encyclopedia. Stefan Iversen received his PhD in 2008 from the Scandinavian Department at Aarhus University where he is a postdoctoral scholar working on a project on Danish narratives from concentration camps. Iversen is the organizer of the Intensive Programme in Narratology (www.ipin.dk). He is co-editing Moderne Litteraturteori (a series of anthologies on modern literary theory) and has written articles and books on narrative theory, on trauma narratives, and on the Scandinavian fin de siècle. Henrik Skov Nielsen is Associate Professor and Director of Studies at the Scandinavian Institute, University of Aarhus, Denmark. In the first half of 2010 he is a visiting scholar at Project Narrative at The Ohio State University. He is the editor of a series of anthologies on literary theory and is currently working on a narratological research project on the relation between authors and narrators. Brian Richardson is Professor at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Unnatural Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative and Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, which was awarded the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies in 2006. He has edited two anthologies, Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames and Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices, and has published essays on many aspects of narrative theory. He is currently working on unnatural and antimimetic narratives.

Poetics Today

In the analysis and interpretation of fictional minds, unnatural and cognitive narratology may se... more In the analysis and interpretation of fictional minds, unnatural and cognitive narratology may seem mutually exclusive. They each highlight different aspects of what narrators and characters think and feel, and their explanatory grounds differ. An unnatural reading unearths the narrative features, such as literal mind reading, that cannot be reduced to real-world possibilities, whereas a cognitive approach may focus on what is analogous to real-world cognition, or it may explain how unusual fiction is made sense of in cognitive terms. This article offers a synthesis in which the contrast between the two is closely examined. Then the article makes a case for a dialectical approach in which readings move from one position to another in order to achieve a more rewarding and encompassing understanding of fictional minds in general and unnatural minds in particular. The argument is developed through a reading of Peter Verhelst’s The Man I Became and through a discussion of the case of mind reading.

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Teaching Narrative Theory. Table of Contents. Introduction. David Herman, Brian McHale, and James... more Teaching Narrative Theory. Table of Contents. Introduction. David Herman, Brian McHale, and James Phelan. Part I: Situations. The Undergraduate Literature Classroom. Suzanne Keen. The Undergraduate Theory Course. Robert F. Barsky. The Graduate Classroom. Susan Mooney. Across the Curriculum: Rhetoric and Composition. Beth Boehm and Debra Journet. Across the Curriculum: Creative Writing. Brian Evenson. Across the Curriculum: Folklore and Ethnography. Amy Shuman. Across the Curriculum: History/Historiography. Hans Kellner. ...

K&K - Kultur og Klasse

UNNATURAL NARRATIVES, UNNATURAL NARRATOLOGY | In recent years, the study of unnatural narrative h... more UNNATURAL NARRATIVES, UNNATURAL NARRATOLOGY | In recent years, the study of unnatural narrative has developed into one of the most exciting new paradigms in narrative theory. Both younger and more established scholars have become increasingly interested in the analysis of unnatural texts, many of which have been consistently neglected or marginalized in existing narratological frameworks. By means of the collaboration of four scholars who have been developing unnatural narratology, this article seeks to summarize key principles, to consolidate some conclusions, to extend the work through carefully chosen examples, and, finally, to point toward the future.

Style, Jun 22, 2000

Аннотация Provides information on different concepts surrounding narratives in literature. Basic ... more Аннотация Provides information on different concepts surrounding narratives in literature. Basic approaches to narratives; Information on the narrative styles used by authors and novelists in the United States; Details on the use of narratives in religion and philosophy; ...

A Companion to Narrative Theory, 2000

... Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Traje... more ... Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses. James Phelan,; Peter J. Rabinowitz. Brian Richardson. ... More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: Brian Richardson. ...

James Joyce Quarterly, 2004

Discusses literary value in *Ulysses* as theme, performance, and agon between British and Irish s... more Discusses literary value in *Ulysses* as theme, performance, and agon between British and Irish speakers.

A Poetics of Plot for thr Twenty-first Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives, 2019

I offer an account of narrative temporality that attempts to encompass several postmodern practi... more I offer an account of narrative temporality that attempts to encompass several postmodern practices. I argue that a theory of narrative time is most useful if it contains six aspects: the time of the story, the sequence in which it is presented, the time of the telling, the time of its reception, the frequency of representations of the same events, and the correspondence or noncorrespondence with historical events that occur at the same time as the fictional ones. I then investigate the increasing number of antimimetic works that violate physically or logically possible temporality. Such practices include circular narratives, the last sentence of which is also the work’s first sentence; narratives that move backward temporally and causally, narratives with multiple contradictory story lines; and those with systematically conflated temporalities. I try to demonstrate the consequences and utility of this approach with an analysis of the complex fabricated temporalities of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Introduction à la narratologie postclassique, 2018

Soon after the restoration of Independence in 1990, The Act for the Restitution of the Status of ... more Soon after the restoration of Independence in 1990, The Act for the Restitution of the Status of the Catholic Church in Lithuania was adopted, which declared cooperation between the State and the Church on the basis of parity. A difficult search for consensus between the bishops and changeable negotiations with secular authorities lasted ten years and the process was reinitiated three times until finally, in 2000, three agreements between the Holy See and the Republic of Lithuania were signed. Having been granted access to the current archives of the Lithuanian Bishops' Conference and the archdioceses for the first time, the author of the present article aims to reconstruct the course of preparation of the agreements from the perspective of the Church. It is revealed how the agreement that had to regulate the restitution of Church property was completely rejected. While discussing the fifteen-year experience of the integration of ratified acts into the Lithuanian legal system and administrative practice, the author asserts that they made a wider impact on civic power and the development of democracy than their direct function would allow us to imagine. The understanding 1 This research was funded by a grant (No. LIT-7-11, 'Christians in Lithuania Before and After Revival') from the Research Council of Lithuania. 336 Politeja 6(45)/2016 Paulius V. Subačius that the Church and the State had a common aim-welfare of person-led the Catholic community itself to greater openness and a positive interaction with other agents of society.

Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 2011

Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 2013

Style, Sep 22, 2007

In narrative theory and literary analysis, it is regularly assumed that a text has a single impli... more In narrative theory and literary analysis, it is regularly assumed that a text has a single implied author and a single implied reader. This is no doubt usually the case, but there are a number of interesting examples that cannot fit within this simple framework. In the last chapter of my book, Unnatural Voices, I argued the case for multiple implied authors; in this article, I would like to examine the other side of the narrative transaction and explore the possibilities of multiple implied readers inscribed within the same text. Perhaps the most obvious class of works written for two distinct audiences is one well known to all parents: children's literature. Many works of this genre appeal both to the child's mind and sensibility and at the same time to the very different interpretive frameworks of adults. In a stimulating essay on this subject, Per Krogh Hansen quotes Hans Christian Andersen on his intentions to address both groups simultaneously (101). For a notorious example from American popular culture, we may point to the Betty Boop cartoons of Max and Dave Fleischer, which are filled with brazen sexual innuendo that a child cannot fully comprehend. Defining the implied reader [implizierte Leser], Wolfgang Iser stated that the implied reader "incorporates both the prestructuring of the potential meaning of the text, and the reader's actualization of this potential through the reading process" (Implied xii). But much children's literature has two different prestructurings, one for the simple child and the other for the knowledgeable adult. And both are equally privileged, though in very different ways. And when literary authors like Lewis Carroll or William Makepeace Thackeray get into the act, yet another reader may be prestructured in the text as well, adding the highbrow sophisticate who understands the playful references to logic and parodies of Wordsworth ("The White Knight's Tale") to the more ordinary parent and, of course, the child audience of the Alice books. (1) Political censorship produces its share of double codings. To take one notorious example, a conservative Irish newspaper, Irish Society, printed an unsigned poem called "An Ode of Welcome" to celebrate the return of the Royal Navy ships from South Africa in June 1900 during the Boer War. It contains appropriately patriotic and indeed jingoistic stanzas like: The Gallant Irish yeoman Home from the war has come Each victory gained o'er foeman Why should our bards be dumb. How shall we sing their praises Our glory in their deeds Renowned their worth amazes Empire their prowess needs. So to Old Ireland's hearts and homes We welcome now our own brave boys In cot and Hall; neath lordly domes Love's heroes share once more our joys. Love is the Lord of all just now Be he the husband, lover, son, Each dauntless soul recalls the vow By which not fame, but love was won. United now in fond embrace Salute with joy each well-loved face Yeoman: in women's hearts you hold the place. The amorous turn toward the end of the poem further enhances the praise of the warriors by affirming their status as heroes in a gendered national allegory as well as promising each the love awaiting them in "women's hearts." The poem, however, turned out to have been written by Oliver St. John Gogarty, and the first letters of each line form an acrostic that produces an entirely opposite assessment of the virtues and rewards of British imperialism from that inscribed in the poem proper. Conditions of political censorship have produced such compositions for some time; one thinks of Milton secreting his radical politics within the story of the Fall of Man in Paradise Lost, perhaps the only way he could get them into print after the restoration of the monarchy (see Hill 341-412, esp. 380-90). Similarly, one may point to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's rousing depiction of Hindu nationalists' victorious struggle over British forces in Anandamath (1882) by framing the text with anti-Muslim rhetoric and a pacifistic epilogue. …

Choice Reviews Online, 2012

See also plot master narratives, 170 material practices,

Narrative, 2010

(Germany), where he teaches English literature and film. He is the author of a critical monograph... more (Germany), where he teaches English literature and film. He is the author of a critical monograph entitled Narrating the Prison and the editor/co-editor of numerous volumes, such as Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age and Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Alber has written articles that were published or are forthcoming in international journals such as Dickens Studies Annual, The Journal of Popular Culture, Short Story Criticism, Storyworlds, and Style, and he has contributed to the Routledge Enyclopedia of Narrative Theory, the Handbook of Narratology, and the online dictionary Literary Encyclopedia. Stefan Iversen received his PhD in 2008 from the Scandinavian Department at Aarhus University where he is a postdoctoral scholar working on a project on Danish narratives from concentration camps. Iversen is the organizer of the Intensive Programme in Narratology (www.ipin.dk). He is co-editing Moderne Litteraturteori (a series of anthologies on modern literary theory) and has written articles and books on narrative theory, on trauma narratives, and on the Scandinavian fin de siècle. Henrik Skov Nielsen is Associate Professor and Director of Studies at the Scandinavian Institute, University of Aarhus, Denmark. In the first half of 2010 he is a visiting scholar at Project Narrative at The Ohio State University. He is the editor of a series of anthologies on literary theory and is currently working on a narratological research project on the relation between authors and narrators. Brian Richardson is Professor at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Unnatural Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative and Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, which was awarded the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies in 2006. He has edited two anthologies, Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames and Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices, and has published essays on many aspects of narrative theory. He is currently working on unnatural and antimimetic narratives.

Poetics Today

In the analysis and interpretation of fictional minds, unnatural and cognitive narratology may se... more In the analysis and interpretation of fictional minds, unnatural and cognitive narratology may seem mutually exclusive. They each highlight different aspects of what narrators and characters think and feel, and their explanatory grounds differ. An unnatural reading unearths the narrative features, such as literal mind reading, that cannot be reduced to real-world possibilities, whereas a cognitive approach may focus on what is analogous to real-world cognition, or it may explain how unusual fiction is made sense of in cognitive terms. This article offers a synthesis in which the contrast between the two is closely examined. Then the article makes a case for a dialectical approach in which readings move from one position to another in order to achieve a more rewarding and encompassing understanding of fictional minds in general and unnatural minds in particular. The argument is developed through a reading of Peter Verhelst’s The Man I Became and through a discussion of the case of mind reading.

[

Teaching Narrative Theory. Table of Contents. Introduction. David Herman, Brian McHale, and James... more Teaching Narrative Theory. Table of Contents. Introduction. David Herman, Brian McHale, and James Phelan. Part I: Situations. The Undergraduate Literature Classroom. Suzanne Keen. The Undergraduate Theory Course. Robert F. Barsky. The Graduate Classroom. Susan Mooney. Across the Curriculum: Rhetoric and Composition. Beth Boehm and Debra Journet. Across the Curriculum: Creative Writing. Brian Evenson. Across the Curriculum: Folklore and Ethnography. Amy Shuman. Across the Curriculum: History/Historiography. Hans Kellner. ...

K&K - Kultur og Klasse

UNNATURAL NARRATIVES, UNNATURAL NARRATOLOGY | In recent years, the study of unnatural narrative h... more UNNATURAL NARRATIVES, UNNATURAL NARRATOLOGY | In recent years, the study of unnatural narrative has developed into one of the most exciting new paradigms in narrative theory. Both younger and more established scholars have become increasingly interested in the analysis of unnatural texts, many of which have been consistently neglected or marginalized in existing narratological frameworks. By means of the collaboration of four scholars who have been developing unnatural narratology, this article seeks to summarize key principles, to consolidate some conclusions, to extend the work through carefully chosen examples, and, finally, to point toward the future.

Style, Jun 22, 2000

Аннотация Provides information on different concepts surrounding narratives in literature. Basic ... more Аннотация Provides information on different concepts surrounding narratives in literature. Basic approaches to narratives; Information on the narrative styles used by authors and novelists in the United States; Details on the use of narratives in religion and philosophy; ...

A Companion to Narrative Theory, 2000

... Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Traje... more ... Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses. James Phelan,; Peter J. Rabinowitz. Brian Richardson. ... More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: Brian Richardson. ...

James Joyce Quarterly, 2004

Discusses literary value in *Ulysses* as theme, performance, and agon between British and Irish s... more Discusses literary value in *Ulysses* as theme, performance, and agon between British and Irish speakers.