In the following exercise, I’ve made use of a focalisation framework to examine passages from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The passages are reproduced in full below. Text 1: Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales General Prologue lines 309-330: The Sergeant of the Law 309 A Sergeant of the Lawe, war and wys, 310…
Tag: Genette
Repetition and narrative time in Muriel Spark’s ‘The Bachelors’, ‘The Ballad of Peckham Rye’ and ‘A Member of the Family’
This essay is not far short of 11,000 words, so I’ve posted the opening section here as a taster, followed by a pdf for download. ‘Story time’ is not the same thing as ‘narrative time’. The Russian Formalists, active during the early years of the twentieth century, used the terms ‘fabula’ and ‘sjuzhet’ to refer…
‘Outside,’ said the barmaid: repetition as a temporal location marker
If a word, phrase, or passage is repeated in a literary text, the reader’s natural response will be to assume that that which is repeated must be significant in some way. The very fact that a particular cluster of words has been included in the text more than once invites the reader to assign a…
