Joshua Parker is an associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Salzburg, with interests in place and space in American literature, transatlantic relations, and narrative theory. He is co-editor of the volumes Austria and America: Cross-Cultural Encounters 1865-1933 and Austria and America: 20th-Century Cross-Cultural Encounters, and author of Tales of Berlin in American Literature up to the 21st Century. His translations have been published by Flammarion, Editions du Patrimoine, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. He is currently completing a translated collection of seventy-five poems by Austrian refugees, tentatively entitled Blüten im Schnee: Austrian Refugees in Manhattan, with funding from the Botstiber Institute.
While on a conscious level, readers of fiction take for granted that quoted text represents words... more While on a conscious level, readers of fiction take for granted that quoted text represents words spoken by characters to other characters in a diegetic story-world, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on polyphony and Franz Stanzel’s (and, more recently, Wolf Schmid’s) ideas on stylistic “contamination” of narrators’ speech by characters’ speech have long nuanced our understanding of quoted speech as always being read as purely diegetic. The article suggests how a reader’s stance toward a narrator’s voice can be mirrored by a similarly dialogically positioned pair of diegetic characters, with implications for the reader’s empathy. It examines how “resonance” between paired voices on separate narrative levels occurs when repetition of a deictic across juxtaposed passages or narration and dialogue leads readers to sense a rhetorical continuity despite the grammatical discontinuity.
Narrative has often been considered “an art of time.” This essay traces some of the historical re... more Narrative has often been considered “an art of time.” This essay traces some of the historical reasons for this state of the field, or fields, of narratology, pinpointing spots in classical, postclassical and contemporary narrative theory where compensation was attempted or is being made though a focus instead on space. It suggests that as geography and geographers have become increasingly interested in narrative approaches in dealing with concepts, visualization and digitalization, it is perhaps (once again) time narratology itself took account of its history of treating space and place, while looking at how geography has implemented narratological concepts in its technical and philosophical approaches, as narratology continues to explore and focus on space.
While the U.S. Civil War's end marked a boom in U.S. tourism in Europe, Austria's own Civil War in 1934 both curtailed American tourism in Austria and marked a small but important wave of Austrian emigration to the United States. The essays in this volume explore ways Austrian-born immigrants in these years defined their own identities as American citizens, how they interpreted, performed and profited from "American" modernity at home, and how their work, as immigrating authors, film makers and musicians, impacted mainstream culture in the United States, illuminating often overlooked connections not only between Austria and America, but between Austrians and Americans.
“Second-person narratives” may often be experimental, but are hardly new. The forms they take tod... more “Second-person narratives” may often be experimental, but are hardly new. The forms they take today are just the latest in a long history that stretches back to our earliest records of written English narratives. This book traces the various forms they have taken in the past and the criticism they have provoked, exploring the historical links between narratorial apostrophe, indefinite or generic “you” address, and “experimental” uses of second person.
The book argues that “second-person fiction” can no longer be limited to texts which use the pronoun “you” to designate a fictional protagonist. While examples of such texts date back at least as far as the mid-nineteenth century (Nathaniel Hawthorne provides one notable early example), and sections of longer texts have used this technique as early as the seventeenth century, interest in second-person protagonist fiction mounted in the latter half of the twentieth century. As authors like Butor, Perec, and Calvino found international critical success, experimenting with second person became almost a rite of passage for many writers, spawning hybrid and partial forms of use. Moreover, second person use once considered experimental has become commonplace in contemporary fiction – both literary and mainstream.
Part One examines narratorial apostrophe, first in several Old English texts and then in a range of texts from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, when, with the influence of continental linguistic habit, writers for a time had a choice of second person pronouns: the quotidian “thou,” the socially formal “you,” and the plural “ye.” A brief inquiry into how pronoun use adapted to social, political, and cultural changes closes with a study of the use of second person in texts by Sterne, Kirkland, and Fielding. The fluctuating use of “thou” and “you” in these eighteenth-century texts seems by turns to indicate reference to an ideal or “textual reader” (Mieke Bal), and to a growing awareness on the part of these writers of a wider audience coming into being with the advent of mass production and distribution of literary texts: an audience at once unknown and in control of authors’ financial success.
Part Two explores how nineteenth-century writers century adapted narratorial apostrophe to the general disappearance of “thou” and how perceptions of their reading audience might have been related. It also examines the increasing use of indefinite “you,” especially in the United States, in texts by Melville and Hawthorne. Increasing use of indefinite “you,” and the development of a “generic narrattee” capable of becoming an actor on certain narratological levels of a text, it suggests, opened the door for the “you” protagonist.
Part Three examines twentieth-century critics’ early responses to second-person protagonists, tracing reactions from the New Critics through Poststructuralism, and finally through the work of several contemporary narratologists. The increasing volume of “second-person fictions” produced in the twentieth century’s latter half caused theorists like Genette, Fludernik, and Bal to reexamine and revamp traditional narratological “levels” of texts, and to examine how integral metalepse has become to contemporary fiction. Finally, the book asks how we might place texts which increasingly use a mix of indefinite “you,” apostrophe, and other more complex forms of second person within a traditional narratological framework. It suggests that a synthesis of Greimas, Bremond and Ricoeur is useful for diagramming what author-reader-character relations are indicated by such use, in a time where, according to linguist Eric Hyman, indefinite “you” may be fast becoming the unmarked use of the pronoun. It also examines a more general perspective on the dialogical relations of enunciator and co-enunciator, identification and alterity with fictional figures through the writings of Martin Buber, Kaya Silverman, and Mark Currie.
Part Four uses the narratological schema developed in part three to analyze several contemporary fictions not normally considered “second-person fiction.”
Finally, it examines how increasing use of second person in contemporary fiction isn’t limited to French and American writers, but is also increasingly present in the work of foreign writers working in English or French.
http://www.amazon.com/Metamorphosis-Place-Joshua-Parker/dp/1443811041
If personal and national ... more http://www.amazon.com/Metamorphosis-Place-Joshua-Parker/dp/1443811041 If personal and national identity is often constructed in terms of place, how do our identities and values change as places themselves are transformed? What happens to the spaces in which we live as societal values and identities change? These questions can be asked of almost any discipline, whether one is taking a photograph or mapping a literary topography, tracing linguistic change in a geographic region or language's importance to our conception of a political territory, building a house or place of worship on a physical plot of land, or constructing them from words on a page or computer software. Few places are ever uniquely our own. We share them, knowing that the geographic points stabilizing our own identities serve, on their reverse side, to support an entirely different set of meanings. We project our cultural (or disciplinary) markers onto landscapes which are already hardly blank, but full of others' meanings. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, history, political science, architecture, anthropology, photography and art history, communications, sociology, lexicography, linguistics, tourism management and theoretical psychoanalysis, each shedding light on how place is both a transforming subject and a transformed object.
What we talk about when we talk about space and narrative Since Michel Foucault's suggestion that... more What we talk about when we talk about space and narrative Since Michel Foucault's suggestion that ours may be "the epoch of space" and the post-Sojan "spatial turn," we often imagine any early theoretical neglect of space in narrative theory has long been compensated. Some may have thus been surprised when, as late as 2006, James Phelan suggested "narrative space" was one of several directions still to be explored by narratology (Scholes, Phelan and Kellogg 2006: 336). In continental theory, too, Dietrich Jägers (1998) has written of an "erzählten Raum" still largely ignored by German theory, on which Armin von Ungern-Sternberg more recently concurred: "Um den literarischen Raum hat sich die Literaturwissenschaft kaum je gekümmert" (2003: 548). In a more recent overview of notions on space in narrative theory, Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz note that "despite some earlier notable efforts by A. J. Greimas and Gabriel Zoran," narrative theory has only recently ("as a result of work by David Herman and Susan Stanford Friedman, and others") "begun to take up more sophisticated questions about space and setting and to give them the attention they deserve" (Herman et. al. 2012: 84). Aside from setting's often overly-simplistic associations with symbolism, two problems, Phelan and Rabinowitz surmise, have delayed such work. First, they note, the notion of setting, in being conflated with "background" generally, often "begins to merge with character," as "'environment' and psychology begin to intertwine." 1 Second, a tendency to conflate setting with "description" often turns setting "(one element within narrative) into a discursive mode that is, from certain philosophical perspectives, in opposition to narrative" (Herman et. al. 2012: 85).
Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity, 2020
This chapter draws parallels between perhaps the earliest complete American fiction set in Berlin... more This chapter draws parallels between perhaps the earliest complete American fiction set in Berlin and some of the most recent, by comparing urban space and its treatment in Theodore Sedgwick Fay’s The Countess Ida: A Tale of Berlin (1840), Chloe Aridjis’s Book of Clouds (2009), and J.S. Marcus’s The Captain’s Fire (1996). Though the authors juggle enormously different social, historical, political, and cultural themes of their respective periods, all three novels treat foreign German urban space as one which is inherently violent, with a violence that must be repressed, deflected, or fled by the New World protagonists negotiating its thematic spaces.
Among the estimated 135,000 Austrians who fled the country after the Anschluss of 1938 were some ... more Among the estimated 135,000 Austrians who fled the country after the Anschluss of 1938 were some 1,200 writers. A good number of these were among the estimated 35,000 Europeans coming through Austria to the United States just before and during the Second World War. Among this lost generation of Austrian authors were some of the best literary voices of their day, offering timely observations on the experience of exile and on America. Many remained in the United States at the war's end, often taking US citizenship. Yet because many of them continued over their lifetimes to write and publish in German, most American readers still have yet to hear their voices or their stories. Examples are provided here of some of the poetry of Ulrich Becher, Guido Zernatto, and Ernst Waldinger.
This article examines verbal narrativizations of ecological disaster footage posted on YouTube. T... more This article examines verbal narrativizations of ecological disaster footage posted on YouTube. The video clip discussed presents few visible human actors, no clear cause and effect, and seemingly little closure. Yet thousands of uninvolved internet commenters from around the world are viscerally engaged in how to make sense of the scenes depicted. Their collective debates, agreements, and humorous or horrified comments frequently focus on constructing coherent narratives—narratives evolving online through "small spatial stories" (Turner 19) and "thought contagion" (Lynch ix). This article, aided both by recent work on collective online storytelling and by traditional structuralist models of narrative, examines how such narrativizations are negotiated online. In an age when news and other video footage is often accessed directly through platforms like YouTube and without traditional media contextualization or framing, viewers are often eager to share their narrativizations, building on each other's as they do so. The article examines how they do so, what larger cultural tropes they play on in doing so, and what may be at stake in the stories they construct, which often hinge on issues of ecology, politics, and race.
Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives
Palgrave Macmillan
Eds. A. Gibbons and A. Ma... more Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives Palgrave Macmillan Eds. A. Gibbons and A. Macrae
While on a conscious level, readers of fiction take for granted that quoted text represents words... more While on a conscious level, readers of fiction take for granted that quoted text represents words spoken by characters to other characters in a diegetic story-world, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on polyphony and Franz Stanzel’s (and, more recently, Wolf Schmid’s) ideas on stylistic “contamination” of narrators’ speech by characters’ speech have long nuanced our understanding of quoted speech as always being read as purely diegetic. The article suggests how a reader’s stance toward a narrator’s voice can be mirrored by a similarly dialogically positioned pair of diegetic characters, with implications for the reader’s empathy. It examines how “resonance” between paired voices on separate narrative levels occurs when repetition of a deictic across juxtaposed passages or narration and dialogue leads readers to sense a rhetorical continuity despite the grammatical discontinuity.
Narrative has often been considered “an art of time.” This essay traces some of the historical re... more Narrative has often been considered “an art of time.” This essay traces some of the historical reasons for this state of the field, or fields, of narratology, pinpointing spots in classical, postclassical and contemporary narrative theory where compensation was attempted or is being made though a focus instead on space. It suggests that as geography and geographers have become increasingly interested in narrative approaches in dealing with concepts, visualization and digitalization, it is perhaps (once again) time narratology itself took account of its history of treating space and place, while looking at how geography has implemented narratological concepts in its technical and philosophical approaches, as narratology continues to explore and focus on space.
While the U.S. Civil War's end marked a boom in U.S. tourism in Europe, Austria's own Civil War in 1934 both curtailed American tourism in Austria and marked a small but important wave of Austrian emigration to the United States. The essays in this volume explore ways Austrian-born immigrants in these years defined their own identities as American citizens, how they interpreted, performed and profited from "American" modernity at home, and how their work, as immigrating authors, film makers and musicians, impacted mainstream culture in the United States, illuminating often overlooked connections not only between Austria and America, but between Austrians and Americans.
“Second-person narratives” may often be experimental, but are hardly new. The forms they take tod... more “Second-person narratives” may often be experimental, but are hardly new. The forms they take today are just the latest in a long history that stretches back to our earliest records of written English narratives. This book traces the various forms they have taken in the past and the criticism they have provoked, exploring the historical links between narratorial apostrophe, indefinite or generic “you” address, and “experimental” uses of second person.
The book argues that “second-person fiction” can no longer be limited to texts which use the pronoun “you” to designate a fictional protagonist. While examples of such texts date back at least as far as the mid-nineteenth century (Nathaniel Hawthorne provides one notable early example), and sections of longer texts have used this technique as early as the seventeenth century, interest in second-person protagonist fiction mounted in the latter half of the twentieth century. As authors like Butor, Perec, and Calvino found international critical success, experimenting with second person became almost a rite of passage for many writers, spawning hybrid and partial forms of use. Moreover, second person use once considered experimental has become commonplace in contemporary fiction – both literary and mainstream.
Part One examines narratorial apostrophe, first in several Old English texts and then in a range of texts from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, when, with the influence of continental linguistic habit, writers for a time had a choice of second person pronouns: the quotidian “thou,” the socially formal “you,” and the plural “ye.” A brief inquiry into how pronoun use adapted to social, political, and cultural changes closes with a study of the use of second person in texts by Sterne, Kirkland, and Fielding. The fluctuating use of “thou” and “you” in these eighteenth-century texts seems by turns to indicate reference to an ideal or “textual reader” (Mieke Bal), and to a growing awareness on the part of these writers of a wider audience coming into being with the advent of mass production and distribution of literary texts: an audience at once unknown and in control of authors’ financial success.
Part Two explores how nineteenth-century writers century adapted narratorial apostrophe to the general disappearance of “thou” and how perceptions of their reading audience might have been related. It also examines the increasing use of indefinite “you,” especially in the United States, in texts by Melville and Hawthorne. Increasing use of indefinite “you,” and the development of a “generic narrattee” capable of becoming an actor on certain narratological levels of a text, it suggests, opened the door for the “you” protagonist.
Part Three examines twentieth-century critics’ early responses to second-person protagonists, tracing reactions from the New Critics through Poststructuralism, and finally through the work of several contemporary narratologists. The increasing volume of “second-person fictions” produced in the twentieth century’s latter half caused theorists like Genette, Fludernik, and Bal to reexamine and revamp traditional narratological “levels” of texts, and to examine how integral metalepse has become to contemporary fiction. Finally, the book asks how we might place texts which increasingly use a mix of indefinite “you,” apostrophe, and other more complex forms of second person within a traditional narratological framework. It suggests that a synthesis of Greimas, Bremond and Ricoeur is useful for diagramming what author-reader-character relations are indicated by such use, in a time where, according to linguist Eric Hyman, indefinite “you” may be fast becoming the unmarked use of the pronoun. It also examines a more general perspective on the dialogical relations of enunciator and co-enunciator, identification and alterity with fictional figures through the writings of Martin Buber, Kaya Silverman, and Mark Currie.
Part Four uses the narratological schema developed in part three to analyze several contemporary fictions not normally considered “second-person fiction.”
Finally, it examines how increasing use of second person in contemporary fiction isn’t limited to French and American writers, but is also increasingly present in the work of foreign writers working in English or French.
http://www.amazon.com/Metamorphosis-Place-Joshua-Parker/dp/1443811041
If personal and national ... more http://www.amazon.com/Metamorphosis-Place-Joshua-Parker/dp/1443811041 If personal and national identity is often constructed in terms of place, how do our identities and values change as places themselves are transformed? What happens to the spaces in which we live as societal values and identities change? These questions can be asked of almost any discipline, whether one is taking a photograph or mapping a literary topography, tracing linguistic change in a geographic region or language's importance to our conception of a political territory, building a house or place of worship on a physical plot of land, or constructing them from words on a page or computer software. Few places are ever uniquely our own. We share them, knowing that the geographic points stabilizing our own identities serve, on their reverse side, to support an entirely different set of meanings. We project our cultural (or disciplinary) markers onto landscapes which are already hardly blank, but full of others' meanings. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, history, political science, architecture, anthropology, photography and art history, communications, sociology, lexicography, linguistics, tourism management and theoretical psychoanalysis, each shedding light on how place is both a transforming subject and a transformed object.
What we talk about when we talk about space and narrative Since Michel Foucault's suggestion that... more What we talk about when we talk about space and narrative Since Michel Foucault's suggestion that ours may be "the epoch of space" and the post-Sojan "spatial turn," we often imagine any early theoretical neglect of space in narrative theory has long been compensated. Some may have thus been surprised when, as late as 2006, James Phelan suggested "narrative space" was one of several directions still to be explored by narratology (Scholes, Phelan and Kellogg 2006: 336). In continental theory, too, Dietrich Jägers (1998) has written of an "erzählten Raum" still largely ignored by German theory, on which Armin von Ungern-Sternberg more recently concurred: "Um den literarischen Raum hat sich die Literaturwissenschaft kaum je gekümmert" (2003: 548). In a more recent overview of notions on space in narrative theory, Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz note that "despite some earlier notable efforts by A. J. Greimas and Gabriel Zoran," narrative theory has only recently ("as a result of work by David Herman and Susan Stanford Friedman, and others") "begun to take up more sophisticated questions about space and setting and to give them the attention they deserve" (Herman et. al. 2012: 84). Aside from setting's often overly-simplistic associations with symbolism, two problems, Phelan and Rabinowitz surmise, have delayed such work. First, they note, the notion of setting, in being conflated with "background" generally, often "begins to merge with character," as "'environment' and psychology begin to intertwine." 1 Second, a tendency to conflate setting with "description" often turns setting "(one element within narrative) into a discursive mode that is, from certain philosophical perspectives, in opposition to narrative" (Herman et. al. 2012: 85).
Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity, 2020
This chapter draws parallels between perhaps the earliest complete American fiction set in Berlin... more This chapter draws parallels between perhaps the earliest complete American fiction set in Berlin and some of the most recent, by comparing urban space and its treatment in Theodore Sedgwick Fay’s The Countess Ida: A Tale of Berlin (1840), Chloe Aridjis’s Book of Clouds (2009), and J.S. Marcus’s The Captain’s Fire (1996). Though the authors juggle enormously different social, historical, political, and cultural themes of their respective periods, all three novels treat foreign German urban space as one which is inherently violent, with a violence that must be repressed, deflected, or fled by the New World protagonists negotiating its thematic spaces.
Among the estimated 135,000 Austrians who fled the country after the Anschluss of 1938 were some ... more Among the estimated 135,000 Austrians who fled the country after the Anschluss of 1938 were some 1,200 writers. A good number of these were among the estimated 35,000 Europeans coming through Austria to the United States just before and during the Second World War. Among this lost generation of Austrian authors were some of the best literary voices of their day, offering timely observations on the experience of exile and on America. Many remained in the United States at the war's end, often taking US citizenship. Yet because many of them continued over their lifetimes to write and publish in German, most American readers still have yet to hear their voices or their stories. Examples are provided here of some of the poetry of Ulrich Becher, Guido Zernatto, and Ernst Waldinger.
This article examines verbal narrativizations of ecological disaster footage posted on YouTube. T... more This article examines verbal narrativizations of ecological disaster footage posted on YouTube. The video clip discussed presents few visible human actors, no clear cause and effect, and seemingly little closure. Yet thousands of uninvolved internet commenters from around the world are viscerally engaged in how to make sense of the scenes depicted. Their collective debates, agreements, and humorous or horrified comments frequently focus on constructing coherent narratives—narratives evolving online through "small spatial stories" (Turner 19) and "thought contagion" (Lynch ix). This article, aided both by recent work on collective online storytelling and by traditional structuralist models of narrative, examines how such narrativizations are negotiated online. In an age when news and other video footage is often accessed directly through platforms like YouTube and without traditional media contextualization or framing, viewers are often eager to share their narrativizations, building on each other's as they do so. The article examines how they do so, what larger cultural tropes they play on in doing so, and what may be at stake in the stories they construct, which often hinge on issues of ecology, politics, and race.
Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives
Palgrave Macmillan
Eds. A. Gibbons and A. Ma... more Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives Palgrave Macmillan Eds. A. Gibbons and A. Macrae
Abstract This article investigates how narrative form and thematic content work in conjunction to... more Abstract This article investigates how narrative form and thematic content work in conjunction to encourage a reader's support for specific political, cultural and social views, using examples of metalepsis that mirror and support thematic socio-political stances in Russell Banks's ...
Critics have often hinted at an allegory for contemporary U.S. politics in The Marble Faun. Hawthorne's Romanized portrait of his own country tells different tales, depending on whether it is read as an unfolding series of narrative events, or as a narrativized arrangement of stable, enduring symbolic places. This article suggests how one allegory might be outlined not so much through plot or character, but through a spatial reading of the novel, proposing that frequent cataloguing of characters’ movements through “foreign” space might be read as a plot in itself, sometimes complementing the texts’ temporal, event-based narratives, at other times undermining or subverting their most obvious tenets.
Doctorate Anglophone Literature, University of Paris VII-Denis Diderot, School of the History and... more Doctorate Anglophone Literature, University of Paris VII-Denis Diderot, School of the History and Semiotics of Text and Image, March 10, 2005.
M.A. Anglophone Literature, University of Paris VII-Denis Diderot, 1998.
Thesis: Paris in Americ... more M.A. Anglophone Literature, University of Paris VII-Denis Diderot, 1998. Thesis: Paris in Americans, Americans in Paris: Toward a Semiotics of Place in Expatriate Literature. (sample chapter)
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Books by joshua parker
While the U.S. Civil War's end marked a boom in U.S. tourism in Europe, Austria's own Civil War in 1934 both curtailed American tourism in Austria and marked a small but important wave of Austrian emigration to the United States. The essays in this volume explore ways Austrian-born immigrants in these years defined their own identities as American citizens, how they interpreted, performed and profited from "American" modernity at home, and how their work, as immigrating authors, film makers and musicians, impacted mainstream culture in the United States, illuminating often overlooked connections not only between Austria and America, but between Austrians and Americans.
The book argues that “second-person fiction” can no longer be limited to texts which use the pronoun “you” to designate a fictional protagonist. While examples of such texts date back at least as far as the mid-nineteenth century (Nathaniel Hawthorne provides one notable early example), and sections of longer texts have used this technique as early as the seventeenth century, interest in second-person protagonist fiction mounted in the latter half of the twentieth century. As authors like Butor, Perec, and Calvino found international critical success, experimenting with second person became almost a rite of passage for many writers, spawning hybrid and partial forms of use. Moreover, second person use once considered experimental has become commonplace in contemporary fiction – both literary and mainstream.
Part One examines narratorial apostrophe, first in several Old English texts and then in a range of texts from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, when, with the influence of continental linguistic habit, writers for a time had a choice of second person pronouns: the quotidian “thou,” the socially formal “you,” and the plural “ye.” A brief inquiry into how pronoun use adapted to social, political, and cultural changes closes with a study of the use of second person in texts by Sterne, Kirkland, and Fielding. The fluctuating use of “thou” and “you” in these eighteenth-century texts seems by turns to indicate reference to an ideal or “textual reader” (Mieke Bal), and to a growing awareness on the part of these writers of a wider audience coming into being with the advent of mass production and distribution of literary texts: an audience at once unknown and in control of authors’ financial success.
Part Two explores how nineteenth-century writers century adapted narratorial apostrophe to the general disappearance of “thou” and how perceptions of their reading audience might have been related. It also examines the increasing use of indefinite “you,” especially in the United States, in texts by Melville and Hawthorne. Increasing use of indefinite “you,” and the development of a “generic narrattee” capable of becoming an actor on certain narratological levels of a text, it suggests, opened the door for the “you” protagonist.
Part Three examines twentieth-century critics’ early responses to second-person protagonists, tracing reactions from the New Critics through Poststructuralism, and finally through the work of several contemporary narratologists. The increasing volume of “second-person fictions” produced in the twentieth century’s latter half caused theorists like Genette, Fludernik, and Bal to reexamine and revamp traditional narratological “levels” of texts, and to examine how integral metalepse has become to contemporary fiction. Finally, the book asks how we might place texts which increasingly use a mix of indefinite “you,” apostrophe, and other more complex forms of second person within a traditional narratological framework. It suggests that a synthesis of Greimas, Bremond and Ricoeur is useful for diagramming what author-reader-character relations are indicated by such use, in a time where, according to linguist Eric Hyman, indefinite “you” may be fast becoming the unmarked use of the pronoun. It also examines a more general perspective on the dialogical relations of enunciator and co-enunciator, identification and alterity with fictional figures through the writings of Martin Buber, Kaya Silverman, and Mark Currie.
Part Four uses the narratological schema developed in part three to analyze several contemporary fictions not normally considered “second-person fiction.”
Finally, it examines how increasing use of second person in contemporary fiction isn’t limited to French and American writers, but is also increasingly present in the work of foreign writers working in English or French.
If personal and national identity is often constructed in terms of place, how do our identities and values change as places themselves are transformed? What happens to the spaces in which we live as societal values and identities change? These questions can be asked of almost any discipline, whether one is taking a photograph or mapping a literary topography, tracing linguistic change in a geographic region or language's importance to our conception of a political territory, building a house or place of worship on a physical plot of land, or constructing them from words on a page or computer software. Few places are ever uniquely our own. We share them, knowing that the geographic points stabilizing our own identities serve, on their reverse side, to support an entirely different set of meanings. We project our cultural (or disciplinary) markers onto landscapes which are already hardly blank, but full of others' meanings. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, history, political science, architecture, anthropology, photography and art history, communications, sociology, lexicography, linguistics, tourism management and theoretical psychoanalysis, each shedding light on how place is both a transforming subject and a transformed object.
Papers by joshua parker
Palgrave Macmillan
Eds. A. Gibbons and A. Macrae
While the U.S. Civil War's end marked a boom in U.S. tourism in Europe, Austria's own Civil War in 1934 both curtailed American tourism in Austria and marked a small but important wave of Austrian emigration to the United States. The essays in this volume explore ways Austrian-born immigrants in these years defined their own identities as American citizens, how they interpreted, performed and profited from "American" modernity at home, and how their work, as immigrating authors, film makers and musicians, impacted mainstream culture in the United States, illuminating often overlooked connections not only between Austria and America, but between Austrians and Americans.
The book argues that “second-person fiction” can no longer be limited to texts which use the pronoun “you” to designate a fictional protagonist. While examples of such texts date back at least as far as the mid-nineteenth century (Nathaniel Hawthorne provides one notable early example), and sections of longer texts have used this technique as early as the seventeenth century, interest in second-person protagonist fiction mounted in the latter half of the twentieth century. As authors like Butor, Perec, and Calvino found international critical success, experimenting with second person became almost a rite of passage for many writers, spawning hybrid and partial forms of use. Moreover, second person use once considered experimental has become commonplace in contemporary fiction – both literary and mainstream.
Part One examines narratorial apostrophe, first in several Old English texts and then in a range of texts from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, when, with the influence of continental linguistic habit, writers for a time had a choice of second person pronouns: the quotidian “thou,” the socially formal “you,” and the plural “ye.” A brief inquiry into how pronoun use adapted to social, political, and cultural changes closes with a study of the use of second person in texts by Sterne, Kirkland, and Fielding. The fluctuating use of “thou” and “you” in these eighteenth-century texts seems by turns to indicate reference to an ideal or “textual reader” (Mieke Bal), and to a growing awareness on the part of these writers of a wider audience coming into being with the advent of mass production and distribution of literary texts: an audience at once unknown and in control of authors’ financial success.
Part Two explores how nineteenth-century writers century adapted narratorial apostrophe to the general disappearance of “thou” and how perceptions of their reading audience might have been related. It also examines the increasing use of indefinite “you,” especially in the United States, in texts by Melville and Hawthorne. Increasing use of indefinite “you,” and the development of a “generic narrattee” capable of becoming an actor on certain narratological levels of a text, it suggests, opened the door for the “you” protagonist.
Part Three examines twentieth-century critics’ early responses to second-person protagonists, tracing reactions from the New Critics through Poststructuralism, and finally through the work of several contemporary narratologists. The increasing volume of “second-person fictions” produced in the twentieth century’s latter half caused theorists like Genette, Fludernik, and Bal to reexamine and revamp traditional narratological “levels” of texts, and to examine how integral metalepse has become to contemporary fiction. Finally, the book asks how we might place texts which increasingly use a mix of indefinite “you,” apostrophe, and other more complex forms of second person within a traditional narratological framework. It suggests that a synthesis of Greimas, Bremond and Ricoeur is useful for diagramming what author-reader-character relations are indicated by such use, in a time where, according to linguist Eric Hyman, indefinite “you” may be fast becoming the unmarked use of the pronoun. It also examines a more general perspective on the dialogical relations of enunciator and co-enunciator, identification and alterity with fictional figures through the writings of Martin Buber, Kaya Silverman, and Mark Currie.
Part Four uses the narratological schema developed in part three to analyze several contemporary fictions not normally considered “second-person fiction.”
Finally, it examines how increasing use of second person in contemporary fiction isn’t limited to French and American writers, but is also increasingly present in the work of foreign writers working in English or French.
If personal and national identity is often constructed in terms of place, how do our identities and values change as places themselves are transformed? What happens to the spaces in which we live as societal values and identities change? These questions can be asked of almost any discipline, whether one is taking a photograph or mapping a literary topography, tracing linguistic change in a geographic region or language's importance to our conception of a political territory, building a house or place of worship on a physical plot of land, or constructing them from words on a page or computer software. Few places are ever uniquely our own. We share them, knowing that the geographic points stabilizing our own identities serve, on their reverse side, to support an entirely different set of meanings. We project our cultural (or disciplinary) markers onto landscapes which are already hardly blank, but full of others' meanings. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, history, political science, architecture, anthropology, photography and art history, communications, sociology, lexicography, linguistics, tourism management and theoretical psychoanalysis, each shedding light on how place is both a transforming subject and a transformed object.
Palgrave Macmillan
Eds. A. Gibbons and A. Macrae
Critics have often hinted at an allegory for contemporary U.S. politics in The Marble Faun. Hawthorne's Romanized portrait of his own country tells different tales, depending on whether it is read as an unfolding series of narrative events, or as a narrativized arrangement of stable, enduring symbolic places.
This article suggests how one allegory might be outlined not so much through plot or character, but through a spatial reading of the novel, proposing that frequent cataloguing of characters’ movements through “foreign” space might be read as a plot in itself, sometimes complementing the texts’ temporal, event-based narratives, at other times undermining or subverting their most obvious tenets.
Attached is a short excerpt from the article.
Thesis: Paris in Americans, Americans in Paris: Toward a Semiotics of Place in Expatriate Literature.
(sample chapter)