Unreliable narrators

The present paper is committed to the topic of time and narrative. We will firstly draw a contextualizing outline, emphasizing the conditions which brought about the postmodern shift, followed by a cursory survey concerning the cultural aspects of postmodernism. In the second part of the paper, we will review some of the major works in the field of time and narrative. In the last part, we will finally investigate a postmodern British novel (Ian McEwan's Atonement) by using structuralist and phenomenological instruments of analysis.

This article provides a summary of a book that lays the foundation for a stylistical and rhetorical approach of narratology whose aim is to describe with the greatest possible precision the mechanism of immersive and intriguing literary narratives. Noting the existence of a strong polysemy around the notion of plot, I propose to start with a functionalist definition capable to emphasize the close relationship between narrative dynamics and emplotment, which builds, maintain, and resolve tension in the aesthetic experience. I also mention how the characterization of characters and the mutability of their roles can determine in an essential way the profile of narrative tension.

Cet article propose une synthèse d'un ouvrage qui pose les fondements d'une approche narratologique d'orientation stylistique et rhétorique visant à décrire avec le plus de précision possible le mécanisme des récits littéraires immersifs et intrigants. Partant du constat de l'existence d'une forte polysémie autour de la notion d'intrigue, je proposerai de partir d'une définition fonctionnelle apte à souligner le rapport étroit entre la dynamique du récit et la mise en intrigue, qui noue, entretien et dénoue une tension dans l'expérience esthétique. J’évoquerai également la manière dont la caractérisation des personnages et la mutabilité de leurs rôles peuvent déterminer de manière essentielle le profil de la tension narrative.

The "old school" and the "new school" of narratology seem to share a referential bias in their view of fictional minds. (1) Classical studies assume that via a meticulous differentiation of voices and viewpoints, we are able to extract a "reliable" representation of the fictional world. (2) Recent cognitive approaches tend to regard fictional and actual minds as being based on precisely the same cognitive schemata; we should ask ourselves, however, whether the natural parameters of thought and those of fiction actually converge. In this paper, I wish to demonstrate the challenge that fictional characters representing each other's perceptions, thoughts and feelings issue to both classical and cognitive approaches to fictional minds. I suggest that fictional agents -not only narrators but focalizers as well -may take advantage of precisely the same techniques of constructing the minds of others as are used in omniscient narration. Furthermore, I try to demonstrate how this feature of literary representation inherently problematizes the "naturalizing" of (fictional) mental functioning. I will start with examples from homodiegetic narration (Ford Madox Ford, Richard Ford) and then widen the scope to more problematic instances in the heterodiegetic mode (Emmanuèle Bernheim, Fay Weldon). I argue that the "narrative tendency" of a character constructing other characters' minds potentially mitigates the binarity of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration. Finally, such speculating and narrativizing -and perhaps fantasizing, hallucinating -fictional minds provide a parallel, not 232

Expongo aquí mi punto de vista sobre dos figuras textuales estrechamente relacionadas en la ficción narrativa: el autor implícito y el narrador no fiable. Son dos conceptos narratológicos que surgieron asociados a la obra de Wayne Booth, y que han tenido suertes diferentes en narratología: el autor implícito se bate en retirada en tanto que concepto teórico, en tanto que el narrador no fiable, adquiere un protagonismo casi imperialista, aun a costa del que podría parecer su correlativo necesario. Con alguna nota histórica intentaré mostrar que no es tan fácil librarse del autor implícito—y reiteraré su necesidad para una definición adecuada del narrador no fiable.

Michel Houellebecq est un auteur controversé, non seulement parce que certains critiques s’interrogent sur le statut littéraire de son oeuvre, qui a connu un immense succès commercial, mais aussi parce que ses romans, souvent provocateurs, engendrent chez les lecteurs des réactions contrastées, qui vont du rejet radical, accompagné par une mise en cause de la valeur morale du texte, à une forte adhésion, généralement fondée sur le constat de la lucidité de l’auteur et de sa capacité à représenter le monde tel qu’il est, avec férocité, sans complaisance, mais également avec courage et un certain humour. Au coeur de ces jugements qui engagent des valeurs essentielles pour la littérature, se pose la question fondamentale de la polyphonie romanesque. Sur la base d’une analyse de quelques extraits tirés des Particules élémentaires, seront dégagés différents facteurs, textuels et contextuels, susceptibles de conditionner la réception du texte, notamment la perception de la « voix » de l’auteur, tout en offrant un espace ouvert sur une pluralité interprétative. Je me centrerai en particulier sur la manière dont le roman présente des opinions racistes, homophobes et antiféministes susceptibles d’engendrer de violentes réactions de la part du public, tout en engageant, à des degrés différents, la responsabilité morale de l’écrivain. Cette analyse visera également, en préambule, à réfléchir sur le statut éthique des énoncés fictionnels.

Für manche Zwecke ist es hilfreich, die Auslegung der Werke eines Autors von der Rekonstruktion seiner Lebensumstände zu trennen. Eine solche Abgrenzung von Leben und Werk ist jedoch nur bis zu einem gewissen Punkt sinnvoll. Sie wird wahrscheinlich zu weit getrieben, wenn wir uns vornehmen, den Autor vorübergehend beiseite zu lassen, um das Werk zuerst aus seinen Strukturen heraus zu verstehen. Denn es ist unklar, wie wir die Strukturen eines Werks analysieren wollen, ohne den Autor zu berücksichtigen, der sie mit sprachlichen Mitteln aufbaut. Einige einflussreiche Erzählforscher lassen sich indes von der Vorstellung leiten, man könne die Eigenschaften einer fiktionalen Erzählung beschreiben, ohne den Autor einzubeziehen. Sie finden es angemessen, den Autor auszuklammern und ihn grundsätzlich vom werkimmanenten Erzähler zu trennen. Diese Denkweise bestimmt seit längerer Zeit die literaturwissenschaftliche Auslegungspraxis. Auch das Verständnis von Kleists Erzählungen hat sich dadurch erheblich verändert: Viele Interpretationen wären ohne die Voreinstellung, dass die Erzählungen einen fiktiven Erzähler haben, nicht entstanden. Im Folgenden wird die These entwickelt, dass die ungeprüfte Annahme einer gesonderten Erzählstimme zu Missverständnissen führen kann. Die betreffenden Interpretationen und das Bild, das sie von Kleist entwerfen, müssen neu durchdacht werden.

L’objet de l’article est de définir ce que pourrait être une « critique polyphonique », qui s’attacherait, non pas à trancher la question de savoir qui parle dans un texte, mais à « faire l’inventaire » des voix qui peuvent se faire entendre dans un énoncé fictionnel en montrant que c’est la manière dont les interprètes rattachent les énoncés à des voix spécifiques et relient ces voix entre elles qui détermine pour eux les valeurs éthiques, aléthiques et esthétiques de l’œuvre.

Flashback and flashforward, as well as analepsis and prolepsis in the terminology of Gérard Genette, belong to some of the few almost undisputed concepts in narrative theory. But if we dig deeper into their original definitions, we come to re- alize that they appear either vague or as an oversimplification of a more complex issue. In order to add precision to narrative theory’s efforts to analyze time shifts, I propose a distinction between dramatized analepsis, which is synonymous with flashback, and undramatized analepsis, which is not. Dramatized analepsis and flashback are syn- onyms because each involves an enactment of the past, while undramatized analepsis refers to past events but does not involve a real shift from one space-time to another. After looking at how this distinction can illuminate some paradigmatic cases in film and graphic narrative, I consider how these distinctions apply to verbal narratives. In addition, I discuss “fading effects” in verbal narratives, effects that follow from the pro- gressive transition from one space-time to another. Finally, I suggest how these tools can illuminate the handling of temporality in Guy de Maupassant’s The Signal. More generally, this essay contributes to narratological understanding of the intersequential organization of narratives by adding greater precision to Genette’s discussion of ana- lepsis by means of the distinction between dramatized and undramatized analepsis. Methodologically, the essay shows the value of transmedial comparisons, since my case about verbal narrative follows from work on narrative in visual media.

La fiction peut-elle mentir occasionnellement ou est-elle
d'emblée un mensonge? Aborder cette question pose des problèmes complexes, car nous nous situons devant un abîme creusé par le statut illocutif propre aux énoncés fictionnels. Cet article examine deux nouvelles de Borges (La Forme de l'épée, Le Livre de sable) pour définir les conditions du "bluff" fictionnel et de l'éventuelle "vérité" que peut transmettre un récit de fiction.

The ‘curse of knowledge’ is a pervasive cognitive bias that makes it very difficult
for us accurately to imagine, once we know something, what it is like not to know it. This article analyzes examples drawn from both novels and films to demonstrate that this bias plays a substantial and previously unexamined role in narrative structure.
I argue that narratives often take advantage of the curse of knowledge to solve an ongoing storytelling dilemma: how to engineer satisfying twists that genuinely surprise audiences but also avoid coming off as non-sequiturs or cheats. The curse of knowledge provides a useful mechanism to encourage readers to over-generalize propositions in predictable and reproducible ways, while making it likely that they will also agree, in retrospect, that these generalizations were mistaken. The same bias serves to enhance the impression, in hindsight, that the narrative’s outcome was indeed possible to predict.

En este trabajo analizamos la técnica narrativa y la explotación particular del punto de vista del narrador en "La Bestia en la Jungla". En los relatos de James, la subjetividad suele ser representada a través de las percepciones, reflexiones e inferencias que hace el personaje, de modo que el relato se presenta al lector a través de la focalización en una conciencia que tiene una comprensión necesariamente limitada de los acontecimientos. James estaba interesado en la psicología de sus personajes, le preocupaba explorar los motivos de sus actos: no le interesaba tanto contar lo que los personajes hicieron, sino narrar sus historias desde la perspectiva de la subjetividad de  ellos. Por lo tanto, el estilo oblicuo, indirecto, sutil es el que mejor se ajusta a su estética.

The article emphasizes some of the hitherto under-explored aspects of the The Plague that constitute the novel's complex system of ethical and aesthetic convictions and contradictions. I attempt to expand on the critical discussion of the fictional narrative, dealing the thematization of narrative reliability and its infractions, and complement this with an analysis of the novel's aesthetic principles – juxtaposing a literary-critical discussion with the description of a literary-historical process. Enlisting evidence from Camus's published notebooks, the analysis aims to show how the rendering of the ethical issues of this narrative is facilitated by its formal and aesthetic features. The “amateur” narrator's self-proclaimed narrative ethics includes a claim to artlessness, yet the infractions, along with the various narrative stances – collective, extended, and self-concealing – subvert this claim. Analysis of the thematization of “narrative reserve” in the novel shows how the form and the issues raised are fused in the novel's characters while leaving the readers the freedom to take their own stand. The suggestion is made that the final incorporation of narrative reserve itself reflects the kind of moral development dramatized in the novel.

Stories recounted by mentally ill narrators have long been considered prime examples of unreliable narration. Yet in the light of the “cognitive turn” in literary studies, recent theories on unreliable narrators extend beyond text-immanent models to include the reader’s perception of the narrator. In this respect, assumptions about normalcy are particularly relevant. It is my aim to analyse the obsessive-compulsive narrator Daniel in Steve Martin’s humorous novel The Pleasure of My Company (2003), who aims at reconstructing the definition of normalcy. I want to show how the motif of “acting vs. being,” which permeates the novel, serves as the narrator’s means to control the reader’s perception in an attempt to present himself as “normal,” i.e. “likeable.” Yet my analysis reveals that the characters’ and the reader’s normative notions about health eventually dominate, undermine the narrator’s strategy and drive the plot to a deus-ex-machina ending that fully reestablishes conventional normalcy.

Unter Zuhilfenahme der Lotmanschen Raumtheorie, deren Prägnanz für die Beschreibung fantastischer Literatur nicht neu ist, sondern von Marianne Wünsch, Hans Krah und Henning Kasbohm bereits beschrieben wurde, werden in vorliegendem Aufsatz die Grenzen der literarischen Fantastik abgesteckt. Im Anschluss hieran bleibt zu erörtern, wie sich das Moment der Unschlüssigkeit, also die „Unordnung der Räume“, wie Kasbohm es formuliert hat, einstellt.
Dass der Erzähler hierbei eine immens wichtige Rolle einnimmt, haben Thomas Wörtche und Uwe Durst bereits angenommen. Gegenstand des zweiten Abschnittes ist die Frage, welche Aufgabe ihm genau zukommt.
Dabei wird erläutert, wieso die These vom destabilisierten Erzähler als „inszenatorische Grundlage der phantastischen Literatur“ derartige Anerkennung findet. Nach einer Beschreibung dessen, was mit Destabilisierung genau gemeint ist, ist die Annahme zu plausibilisieren, dass für eine exaktere Bestimmung der Art der  vorliegenden Fantastik mithilfe der Raumtheorie eine Verbindung mit der Theorie der erzählerischen Unzuverlässigkeit gewinnbringend sein kann. Abschließend finden die raumtheoretischen Folgerungen, die aus den ungleichen Möglichkeiten der Evokation des Moments der Unschlüssigkeit resultieren, Erwähnung. Ich werde mithin der Frage nachgehen, wer hier auf der Schwelle steht, wer der Grenzgänger in fantastischer Literatur ist.

Lorenzo Vilches ha editado el Diccionario de teorías narrativas: Cine, Televisión, Transmedia

TEORIAS NARRATIVAS: anotación completa de las teorías clásicas y contemporáneas
NARRATIVAS DE CINE: las teorías y análisis del cine visto desde las teorías específicas
NARRATIVAS DE TELEVISIÓN: teorías de la narración de ficción y no ficción televisiva
NARRATIVAS TRANSMEDIA: las principales voces de las teorías fundacionales
APROXIMACIONES NARRATIVAS: los ámbitos sociales, políticos, de género.
›880 términos clave
994 páginas de texto en versión tapa blanda (1740 páginas de navegación en ebook).
ver más información:
https://narrativas.blog/

The chronicler-narrator of Dostoevsky's Demons, Anton Lavrentievich G—v, seems like an inscrutable and oscillatory storyteller. On the one hand he is profusely talkative and repeatedly justifies his position as narrator; on the other, he reports scenes that he did not witness and could not have direct knowledge about, including what people say and even think. The spectrum of responses from Dostoevsky critics includes some saying that the novel has “technical inconsistencies,” others claiming that there are in fact two narrators (the character G—v and a separate omniscient authorial narrator), and yet others developing the notion of an “ambivalent meaning” behind the text. Even those who accept G—v as a single narrator come to the conclusion that he has invented much of the story, and is himself, like the character of Peter Stepanovich Verkhovensky, one of the novel's “devils.”“The Enigmatic G—v” examines these many interpretations, and confronts them with counterexamples that demonstrate why the novel is neither inconsistent nor ambivalent. After culling Doestoevsky's text for the few clues he gives into G—v's own character, the article compares the characters and narrative methods of G—v and Peter Verkhovensky in order to distinguish between their radically different motivations–giving us access to the diverging meaning behind each one's telling. The Enigmatic G—v attempts to recover both Dostoevsky's intention to create such a convoluted narrator, and at the same time defend that narrator against the notion of his being a “devil.” It argues that, in order to apprehend the full implication of the events, a reader must face the dilemma over whether or not to believe that G—v can tell the truth even when he wasn't present to witness it—suggesting an ethical plane to the interpretation of his narrational border crossing.

"Cet article propose de se pencher sur un aspect typique de
la Novelle allemande romantique, à savoir que beaucoup des
textes de l’époque se présentent comme enchâssés dans un
cadre nocturne. Les prosateurs de l’Allemagne romantique
empruntent ce dispositif à une tradition extrêmement
ancienne, celle de la fiction à récitcadre,
très
fréquente dans la littérature antique et tout
particulièrement renaissante, et dont les deux matrices
sont Les Mille et une nuits et Le Décaméron (qui ne se
déroule pas dans un cadre nocturne, mais s’y apparente
structurellement). La communication se concentre sur le
modèle renaissant, et cherche à montrer, à travers l’étude
d’Eckbert le Blond [Der Blonde Eckbert, 1797] de Ludwig
Tieck et de La Maison déserte [Das Öde Haus, 1817]
d’E. T. A. Hoffmann, comment certains auteurs
déconstruisent le protocole renaissant du récit nocturne
pour mieux souligner la spécificité de la nuit romantique,
qui repose sur l’envahissement du monde humain par la
« face nocturne de l’existence » (Gotthilf Heinrich von
Schubert). Chez Tieck et chez Hoffmann, il ne s’agit pas
de séparer des ordres pour témoigner de la puissance
d’organisation du discours, mais au contraire de mélanger
les niveaux du récit et des sphères de la réalité que le
lecteur pensait séparés, et que les narrateurs croyaient
séparer par leur art de la parole, afin de souligner
l’activité de ce monde nocturne qui ne laisse pas
domestiquer."

Las máscaras del héroe depicts Spanish society from the Second Republic to the start of the Civil War, a period when Spain was torn by poverty and immorality. This intertextual historical novel portrays figures such as Pedro Luis de Gálvez, the last of the bohemians and a failed writer. We encounter Gálvez through the first-person narration of Navales, who hates him deeply and presents him as a despicable, egotistical man. Navales himself proves to be an immoral person who tortures and kills for fun. Following the work of Wayne Booth and other critics, the article shows that Navales is an unreliable narrator and that Gálvez is an antihero.

En este artículo se analiza el narrador infidente en el binomio formado por El casamiento engañoso y el Coloquio de los perros. Frente a la teoría de Avalle-Arce que identifica esta entidad narrativa como mendaz, es preferible diferenciarla y precisarla como aquella que suscita dudas y recelos en el lector, pero cuyas palabras no cabe calificar de mentiras. Es, además, estrategia que enlaza maravilla y verosimilitud. / This article analizes the unreliable narrator in the couple integrated by The Deceiftul marriage and the Talk of the Dogs. Opposite to Avalle-Arce’s theory which identifies this narrative entity as mendacious, it is preferable to differentiate and specify it as that one which causes doubts and suspicions in the reader, but whose words cannot be qualified as lies. Moreover, it is an strategy which links the marvelous and the verosimilitude.

Abstract & Contents Page:
The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature seeks to understand the ways in which literature has engaged deeply with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It is the most comprehensive collection in this growing field of study and includes essays by Brian McHale, Catherine Belling, Ronald Schleifer, Helen Swift, and Ira Nadel, as well as the work of a generation of younger scholars from around the globe, who bring valuable transnational insights.

Encompassing a diverse range of mediums and genres – including biography and autobiography, documentary, drama, elegy, film, the novel and graphic novel, opera, picturebooks, poetry, television, and more – the contributors offer a dynamic mix of approaches that range from expansive perspectives on particular periods and genres to extended analyses of select case studies. Essays are included from every major Western period, including Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and so on, right up to the contemporary.

This collection provides a telling demonstration of the myriad ways that humanity has learned to live with the inevitability of death, where “live with” itself might mean any number of things: from consoling, to memorializing, to rationalizing, to fending off, to evading, and, perhaps most compellingly of all, to escaping. Engagingly written and drawing on examples from around the world, this volume is indispensable to both students and scholars working in the fields of medical humanities, thanatography (death studies), life writing, Victorian studies, modernist studies, narrative, contemporary fiction, popular culture, and more.

Table of Contents
Introduction

          PART I Traversing the Ontological Divide
          – Introduction

The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death
– Brian McHale

"Still I Danced": Performing Death in Ford’s The Broken Heart
– Donovan Sherman

Death and the Margins of Theatre in Luigi Pirandello
– Daniel K. Jernigan

Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to Postmodernist Narratives
– Jan Alber

Literature and the Afterlife
– Alice Bennett

The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones
– Neil Murphy

Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave
– Philippe Carrard

The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts
– Jessica Goodman

PART II Genres
– Introduction

Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children’s Literature
– Lesley D. Clement

In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature
– Karen Coats

Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative
– José Alaniz

Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation
– Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter

Death and the Fanciulla
– Reed Way Dasenbrock

Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre
– Ronald Schleifer

PART III Site, Space, and Spatiality
– Introduction

Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment
– Flore Coulouma

A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife
– Stacy Thompson

Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition
– Kelly McGuire

Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners
– Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh

Death "after Long Silence": Auditing Agamben’s Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats’s Lyric
– Samuel Caleb Wee

The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf
– Ian Tan

"Memento Mori": memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore’s Poetry
– Jen Crawford

PART IV Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs
– Introduction

Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece
– Arianna Gullo

Fictional Will
– Helen Swift

Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare
– John Tangney

Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating among the Tombs
– Carol Margaret Davison

Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era
– Jolene Zigarovich

The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead
– Angela Frattarola

Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets
– Laura Davies

Biography: Life after Death
– Ira Nadel

PART V Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation
– Introduction

"An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing": Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss’s Abschied von den Eltern
– Christopher Hamilton

Paradox, Death, and the Divine
– Jamie Lin



Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins’s Blind Man’s Bluff and Other Life Writing
– Lara O’Muirithe

Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry
– Ivan Callus

When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives
– Rosalía Baena

"Grief made her insubstantial to herself": Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories
– Graham Matthews

PART VI Historical Engagements
– Introduction

On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and Fictions
– Catherine Belling

Death to the Music of Time: Reticence in Anthony Powell’s Mediated Narratives of Death
– Catherine Hoffmann

Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser
– W. Michelle Wang

Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor
– Kit Ying Lye

"Doubtfull Drede": Dying at the End of the Middle Ages
– Walter Wadiak

Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn
          – Wanlin Li

  42.  Coda

          – Julian Gough

Abstract
Claire Clairmont (1798–1879), her journals and letters brilliantly edited, is in no danger of being lost to history. However, a significant quantity of her writing remains only partially published, autobiographical memoranda and (apparently) copies of letters that she prepared in the 1870s at the urging of E. J. Trelawny. These manuscripts, 159 pages in total, are catalogued as Cl Cl 26 in the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library. Extracts, with warnings to readers not to trust these papers, have appeared in biographies and editions; they narrate some of the most dramatic and painful episodes of Clairmont’s life: her 1814 elopement with Mary Godwin and P. B. Shelley; the suicides of Harriet Shelley and Frances Imlay Godwin; the life and death of Allegra, her daughter by Byron, who died aged five. In the aggregate they are repetitive, incoherent, untruthful, and deeply informed by anger at Byron and Shelley. Perhaps the most mysterious component of Cl Cl 26 is a series of letters purporting to be from Clairmont’s mother, Mary Jane Godwin, to Margaret Moore, Lady Mount Cashell, in childhood Mary Wollstonecraft’s pupil and in adulthood a friend of the Shelleys and Clairmont’s special protector. Like Clairmont, both these women gave birth to daughters out of wedlock. The letters, concerned with the 1814 elopement and its aftermath, contain details found nowhere else. Clairmont tells Trelawny that she was given them by Lady Mount Cashell on Clairmont’s last visit to her in Pisa in 1832. Comprised of two sets of drafts, they survive only in the copies in Clairmont’s hand and contain errors pointing to composition much later than 1814. Nonetheless, most editors have accepted that Mary Jane Godwin did indeed write the letters and that her daughter then doctored them. Andrew Stott has suggested in an unpublished essay that Clairmont simply wrote them herself. In this article I follow the implications of this idea, first by reviewing Claire Clairmont’s life to understand why, in its evening, she might have impersonated her mother and by proxy her mother’s supposed correspondent, in writing this version of the decisive events of her youth; and second, to explore where this, her most fully realized work of fiction, might have come from. If we accept her as the sole author, we gain a new view of her: Clairmont as a writer. We know from her journals and letters that she tried intermittently to write fiction; she did publish one short story. She was keenly aware that writing was the family business and that she had not come up to scratch. We may see, then, in these letters, a final effort to tell her story. Much of the work of this article will be to attend to her inflections as she writes and rewrites, and to learn from the physical evidence offered by the manuscripts. With or without originals, in her work on this project Claire Clairmont would have felt herself, aged seventy-seven, sheltered again by the only two women whom she had ever experienced as protectors.

Larsson, Kristian: Masken des Erzählens. Studien zur Theorie narrativer Unzuverlässigkeit und ihrer Praxis im Frühwerk Thomas Manns. (Epistemata: Reihe Literaturwissenschaft; 718). Würzburg: Königshausen&Neumann 2011. 263 S. Broschiert. EUR (D) 38,00. ISBN: 3-8260-4461-4.

whose work McCormack identifies as having rejuvenated the experimental pulse in Irish fiction (Boland 49; De Loughry 114). McCormack argues that experimental writing has the effect of illuminating experience: "It casts the world in a different light, and at a different angle. I hope you walk away from the book and you experience a part of the world that you haven't encountered before. I hope it illuminates something new about the world and, also, about what books are capable of " (Boland 49). For McCormack, the experimental novel is not merely a purely technical or fragmented exercise that serves to antagonize readers; rather, the function of the experiment is to offer a way of seeing (De Loughry 113). In this essay, I first elucidate the tradition from which such experimental innovation emerges, before proceeding to argue that the technical experiment that is Solar Bones is fundamental to its character-narrator's way of seeing and being in the world-or, more precisely, his way of no longer being in the world even as he posthumously bears witness to that world. McCormack's assertion that "our great writers are exclusively our experimental writers" (De Loughry 113) is a position that several other critics and writers have previously argued. 2 The centrality of innovation in the Irish novelistic tradition has long been observed: almost thirty years ago, Rüdiger Imhof noted the prevalence of technical innovation in Irish writingpost-O'Brien, Joyce, and Beckett-and specifically pointed to "the multi-faceted use of point-of-view […]; the spatialisation of narrative discourse; fragmented or split narrative; the disruption of chronology; fabulation and metafiction (including, possibly, historiographic meta fiction) […] a kind of narrative shown in the process of being created" (153). The novelist Aidan Higgins also wrote about what he saw as the experimental narrative tradition in Irish literature. Higgins shared Joyce's and Beckett's fascination with the ways that the world might be reconstituted in the forms of art and positioned them in the context of a European tradition of "free-fall and experiment" that extends back to Villon and Rabelais (21, 23). While many of these narrative experiments characterize modernist and postmodernist writing more generally, there is an extraordinarily high degree of concentration of such innovations in Irish writing. 3 These experiments with non-conventional narrations include the widespread use of mentally ill narrators (e.g., Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy and Dermot

The 'curse of knowledge' is a pervasive cognitive bias that makes it very difficult for us accurately to imagine, once we know something, what it is like not to know it. This article analyzes examples drawn from both novels and films to demonstrate that this bias plays a substantial and previously unexamined role in narrative structure. I argue that narratives often take advantage of the curse of knowledge to solve an ongoing storytelling dilemma: how to engineer satisfying twists that genuinely surprise audiences but also avoid coming off as non-sequiturs or cheats. The curse of knowledge provides a useful mechanism to encourage readers to over-generalize propositions in predictable and reproducible ways, while making it likely that they will also agree, in retrospect, that these generalizations were mistaken. The same bias serves to enhance the impression, in hindsight, that the narrative's outcome was indeed possible to predict. Finally, building on Mental Spaces theory (Fauconnier, 1985, 1997) and simulationbased theories of language processing (e.g. Barsalou, 1999; MacWhinney, 2005), I argue that the curse of knowledge is an artifact of a more general cognitive shortcut that is implicated in features of 'correct' sentence interpretation such as presupposition projection as well as in phenomena traditionally described as curse-of-knowledge errors. This account unifies the discussed examples and helps to explain why certain devices, particularly unreliable narration, emerge so frequently as aids to narrative surprise.

The skeptical mode of the discourse of Vanity Fair had been attributed to the novelist蒺s misanthropy and cynicism. This conclusion is to be questioned by the paper before it discusses who the narrator is and the ambivalence implicated in the stances he adopts. Committed to exposing hypocrisy, folly, deception of appearance and corruption of the privileged, the novelist had to recognize the paradoxes prevalent in human life: the tenderest angel is not free from suspicion of selfishness, a self鄄seeking adventurer talks brilliantly, the highest constancy has reward little worth it, and the least moral do not necessarily end up with the severest retribution. For laying bare contradictions no instrument is more appropriate than irony. Thackeray蒺s entire vision of life is filtered through irony and irony is pervasive in the novel. The paper aims to examine the presence of the narrator in relation to characters, the contemporary readership and socioeconomic environment.