Narratives of transmission
By: Bernard Duyfhuizen.
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1992
Place of publication: Rutherford; London; Cranbury, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 278
Subjects: Narration (Rhetoric); Transmission of texts
Description: All narratives undergo some form of narrative transmission. Narratives of Transmission examines the storytelling process structured between the fictional universe of the text and the reader. By focusing on narratives that dramatize the medium of their telling--letters, diaries, memoirs, transcribed oral narrations, and the editorial prefaces that enframe them--the present volume uncovers dynamics of textuality that have long been overlooked by critics who have pursued the interpretation of narrative works at the expense of the processes of signification operations in narration.

By studying these special cases of narrative transfer, Bernard Duyfhuizen brings the reader to a clearer understanding of how the acts of transmission and framing within the literary text can affect the production of meaning. Drawing on the theories of Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Seymour Chatman, Susan Lanser, and Peter Brooks, Duyfhuizen develops the first extended reading of the code of communication in narrative poetics and of the force exerted by the medium of transmission on the reader's structuration of the literary text. This provocative study of the different acts and conditions of narrative transmission establishes a new ontological plane for the study and interpretation of prose fiction.

By examining the various narrational filters through which a story must pass, Narratives of Transmission uncovers the interpretively rich problematics of narrative textuality.

Duyfhuizen's study goes beyond narratological description to provide interpretive readings that engage the mirrored play of transmission metaphors and metonymies in both the stories and the discourses of narrative fiction from the classical epic to the postmodern. These exemplary readings reveal, on the one hand, the power of transmission devices in the production of a particular version of the narrated events and the inescapable gap between the object of representation and its textual representation; while on the other hand, these readings display the negotiation of the different acts of reading encoded in the text and engaged at the outer frame by the actual reader.

After an introductory chapter detailing the theory of narrative transmission, Duyfhuizen explores the dynamics of transmission and transgression in epistolary fiction, the problematics of transmitting the "self" in diary fiction, and the inclusion of letters, diaries, and other documents in hybrid narratives of transmission. He then turns to the questions surrounding the framing devices of editorial prefaces and notes paratextually included in the fiction. Lastly, Duyfhuizen considers the textual dynamics of dialogism in narratives of transcribed oral narrations.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-271) and index.