Distance and Dramatization: Henry James on the Art of Fiction (Narrative Theory, 4) (original) (raw)
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Henry James The Art of Fiction
; paragraphing and capitalization follow the Library of America edition.] I SHOULD not have affixed so comprehensive a title to these few remarks, necessarily wanting in any completeness, upon a subject the full consideration of which would carry us far, did I not seem to discover a pretext for my temerity in the interesting pamphlet lately published under this name by Mr. Walter Besant. Mr. Besant's lecture at the Royal Institution--the original form of his pamphlet--appears to indicate that many persons are interested in the art of fiction and are not indifferent to such remarks as those who practise it may attempt to make about it. I am therefore anxious not to lose the benefit of this favourable association, and to edge in a few words under cover of the attention which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited. There is something very encouraging in his having put into form certain of his ideas on the mystery of story-telling. It is a proof of life and curiosity--curiosity on the part of the brotherhood of novelists, as well as on the part of their readers. Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it-of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that; it would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of the novel, as Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however, naïf (if I may help myself out with another French word); and, evidently, if it is destined to suffer in any way for having lost its naïveté it has now an idea of making sure of the corresponding advantages. During the period I have alluded to there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that this was the end of it. But within a year or two, for some reason or other, there have been signs of returning animation-the era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain extent opened. Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of genius, are not times of development, are times possibly even, a little, of dulness. The successful application of any art is a delightful
A Theory of Literary Structuralism (in Henry James)
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2013
Structuralism provides innovative grounds for the analysis of prose literature. The role of the fiction reader, story in the service of language, and story no longer for representing the concrete reality but for manufacturing new, relational, and pluralistic realities in language spaces are some of the outcomes of literary structuralism. The present article intends to discuss the application of Henry James's theories of the novel for providing a grammar of narrative. For doing this, it also attempts to show that James's theories of novel testify to the literary structuralisms of Claude Levi_Struass, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Jonathan Culler. The role of language in James, his innovative narrative modes like the use of "scenic method" and "unreliable narrator," and the highlighted role of the reader in his last style which renders it a space of critical interpretation by the professional elite make his fiction structurally analyzable. In addition, these structuremaking features bear witness to what Barthes suggests "structural activity" of fiction should be based on. Some of these Barthesian formulas are: regarding the "text" as an open-ended site of signification which should consequently be handled differently from the "work," transferring the task of producing meaning from the author to the reader, and considering characters not as psychological entities but as "participants" in the formation of textual discourse. James's theories also testify to Todorov's theory of "absolute and absent cause" which he finds in the fiction of James and the outcome of which is the production of new frames of intelligibility. In addition, they give evidence to Culler's formula as to the production of meaning in novels, because reading James structurally is strategic for creating new realities in the space of language.
usindh.edu.pk
The present oeuvre explores the nature of stylistic choices that markedly appear in the literary discourse of Henry James in order to exemplify the desired aims of the author embedded within these choices along with the impressions these stylistic choices create on the mind of the reader in a multidimensional framework of Psychostylistics. Psychostylistics in its Postmodern orientation celebrates diversity in terms of narrative perspective, stylistic preferences, fictional substance and the entities of the writer, the text, and the reader. Keeping with this thesis, Psychostylistics endows not only with theoretical standpoint but a method to examine and investigate 'style' in the backdrop of narrative psychology in literary discourse. The theoretical assumption operational here is that 'any conceptualization of a fictional world presupposes both a world to refer to, and a mind through which that world is reflected' (Leech & Short, 1984:187). The formal design of the study is based on Roger Fowler's theory of 'mind style'. Practical analysis has been done by applying the properties of Bocketing 1994's model of Psychostylistics eclectically and homogeneously. The main focus has been on focalization techniques, art of characterization, transitivity patterns, manifold narrative perspectives and marked stylistic idiosyncrasies resulting essentially as part of writer's particular mind style. Likewise, the mutual interplay of language and consciousness has also been appraised to reveal how narrative perspective is counterbalanced by stylistic choices that direct the consciousness of the reader towards an apposite interpretation of the narrated phenomenon.
Narrative in the Contemporary Novel - Some Reconceptualisations
Tekstualia, 2018
This paper discusses two contemporary novels from a narratological perspective. The Unfortu- nates by B.S. Johnson and S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst demonstrate inapplicability of narrative most commonly theorised as a representation of events. Instead, due to their unconventional usage of typography, multimodality and/or transmediality, they provoke daring attempts at reconceptu- alisations of this fundamental concept of modern narrative theory and novel studies. In addition, the two novels exemplify an increasingly common trend in contemporary fiction of undermining the traditional understanding of the novel as a monomodal (exclusively verbal) work and self-contained, printed entity.
A Theory of Realistic Representation in Henry James
Studies in Literature and Language, 2012
A dimension of the later style of the fiction of Henry James is its deep concern not with selves and identities but with images and appearances. These works typically picture the character in in-between situations where he is recognized not as he really is but as he shows himself, as he appears in projected situations. However, another aspect of James's later style is the magnificence of the appearance, because appearance is the outcome of reciprocal spaces which in turn signify vivified and productive relations among the agents of the narrative. These facades of James's later style render it a space for a new mode of realistic representation which depends on a new kind of verisimilitude, the story in the service of language, and consciousness dramatization. And the watershed of the Jamesian verisimilitude is the work of successive centers of consciousness from where the tale is narrated. In addition, to show the deepest layers of the human soul, James's narrator can occasionally go beyond the frontiers of language and take use of the nonverbal structures of culture also. This mode of fiction mainly wants to exhibit the consciousness in the process of evolution. And it shows "the real" not as what has so far been considered as real, but as what emerges in this modern analytical consciousness.
The nature and function of dialogue in the short stories of Henry James
1965
The thesis opens with a short introduction setting forth my aims and reasons in choosing to work on dialogue in the short stories. It continues, in the first chapter, with a description of varieties of speech other than dialogue, of component parts of Jamesian dialogue, and of the two distinct types into which it falls. Chapter two demonstrates James's use of dialogue for purposes of characterisation, with a preliminary examination of his range of characters. In chapter three, the main types of Jamesian themes and 'atmospheres' are outlined and the ways in which these are brought out by means of dialogue. Chapter four describes the two kinds of action to be found in the tales, and an attempt is then made to prove that the most important of these two - psychological action - is often most effectively conveyed through dialogue, with the reasons for this. (The influence of the drama is also discussed.) The next chapter, on form, begins with a brief recapitulation of relevan...