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ENG 212

Popular Narrative: Crime Fiction-- the Great Detectives

story: a sequence of actions or events conceived as independent of their manifestation in discourse

vs.

discourse the discursive presentation or narration of events.'

Systematic study of narrative, including novels, stories, films, reporting, conversation, and other places where we find narration.

Our experience of reality is structured like a language. Therefore, human culture and its artifacts are structured by systems of differences:

  • raw -- cooked
  • hot -- cold
  • clean -- dirty
  • legal -- illegal
  • true -- false
  • male -- female
  • elite -- popular
  • natural -- artificial
  • rational -- emotional

Narrative structured like a language:

  • grammar vs. utterance
  • langue vs. parole (de Saussure)
  • competence vs. performance
  • story vs. discourse (Culler)
  • tale vs. telling (Dale Parker)
  • embedding
  • reliability
  • focalization
  • direct/indirect/free indirect discourse

Embedding (or nesting)-- can cause tension between inside and outside of the frame. Can the outside cast doubt on the inside? Certainly. But can the inside cast doubt on the outside? We can have different narrators with different perspectives. How many narrators do we have in "A Study in Scarlet?" Watson, Holmes, Gregson, LeStrade, Jefferson Hope...

Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, first published 1961.

What makes a narrator trustworthy? Untrustworthy?

Is there such a thing as a fully reliable narrator?

Is the detective a fairy tale about a reliable narrator?

Does it matter if a narrator is intentionally encoded to be unreliable or not?

Focalization: similar but not identical to

point of view or perspective.

Internal focalizer-- the "angle of mind"-- not who speaks but whose eyes or mind the narration looks or thinks through. Who is the focalized?

  • DD Direct Discourse
  • ID Indirect discourse
  • FID Free Indirect Discourse
  • (<<style indirect libre>>)

DD uses quotation marks.

ID uses "that" (usually)

FID uses the third person but blurs boundary between narrator's and character's language.

Narratology and Detective Fiction

The Tale vs. the Telling

Dr. Jonathan Newman

Bishop's University

Narration ("telling")

Tale vs. Telling

Narratology

Structuralist (classical) narratology

Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, Routledge Classics ed. (London: Routledge, 2001) 189

Structuralism

Important figures:

  • Ferdinand de Saussure (linguistics)
  • Claude Lévi-Strauss (anthropology)
  • Roland Barthes (literary criticism)

Who is the focalized? The focalizer?

Representing Thought and Speech

"As he spoke, he whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face... As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent. For twenty minutes or more he continued his researches, measuring with the most exact care the distance between marks which were entirely invisible to me, and occasionally applying his tape to the walls in an equally incomprehensible manner."

Embedding

Focalization

Reliability -- Unreliability

"Gregson and Lestrade had watched the manoeuvres of their amateur companion with considerable curiosity and some contempt. They evidently failed to appreciate the fact, which I had begun to realize, that Sherlock Holmes's smallest actions were all directed towards some definite practical end."

Screenshot from "The Testament of Sherlock Holmes," Xbox 360. Frogwares Studios. Focus Home Interactive. 2012.

A Study in Scarlet

"As to what occurred there, we cannot do better than quote the old hunter's own account,

as duly recorded in Dr. Watson's Journal, to which we are already under such obligations."

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