Unreliable narrators

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.

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.

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

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 subtitle of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) is not "A Novel,” but "A Biography." Though Woolf's diaries establish that Orlando's subject owes homage to Vita Sackville-West, her long-time lover, the text's fantastical plot marks it as a work of fiction. Yet Orlando's male narrator insists that his account — Orlando's "life story" — is true. This paper explores this tension by pulling apart what we know as the “subject” (in a biography) vs. “character” (in a novel); biographer vs. narrator; and narrator vs. author. Working through Percy Lubbock's and Marthe Robert's attempts at defining the novel, Boris Tomashevsky's stab at "narrative,” and Hermione Lee's work on "biography,” this paper unmasks the biographer-narrator's pretensions to objectivity and truth-telling. Because Orlando's narrator "has a desire to mislead, to ring true" (Marthe Robert), he is fundamentally a novelist — yet in this text, he is also a character that Woolf dresses up as a biographer in order to ridicule the profession, to mock. Orlando is A Biography, then, because it is a caricature, "a joke,” a romp.

Homer's Odysseus proves himself a storyteller of cunning, wit and invention - and dubious reliability. In a genre often criticized for being 'historically inaccurate', I discuss the use of the unreliable narrators Odysseus (Troy), Ptolemy (Alexander) and Dilios (300) in creating narratives that encourage the viewer to question how history is recorded and related to us, both in film and as written history through the ages.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An unreliable narrator is defined as an untrustworthy storyteller, most often used in narratives with a first-person point of view just like "Çalıkuşu" in the book of Reşat Nuri Güntekin. The book consists of four chapters which are in the first person point of view and last chapter which is written omnisciently. Because the first four chapters are the diary of Feride, we learn everything that is happening from her point of view.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

This paper considers the narratological phenomenon of unreliable narration in the novel The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, concentrating on mechanisms of reader perception. Starting with a survey of the main contemporary definitions of unreliable narration as well as sources of unreliability, the article moves to the problem of how unreliable narration can influence a reader of the analysed text, discussing ways in which unreliability combines with other aspects of the narrative. The effect of unreliable narration on the reader is examined in terms of recipient immersion. The disclosure of unreliable statments, the search for truth hidden beneath the cover of narration, along with the recuperation of the “reliability” of the narrator are viewed as supplementary objects of the reader’s interest during text perception. Attention is focused on two components of reader gratification as manifest in Hawkins’ novel: intellectual satisfaction due to the solution of the murder mystery (temporal immersion), as well as satisfaction resulting from the protagonist’s psychic recovery and revenge (emotional immersion). The last section of the paper compares the reader’s perception of the novel with the viewer’s reactions to a screen version directed by Tate Taylor.

""
Atonement offers one of the key patterns of Ian McEwan’s canon in its purest: namely, the author’s tendency to play with the confidence the readers inevitably instill in his brilliantly described characters. To what extent can we believe what we have read, to what degree is the narrative process a manipulative act which is consciously or unconsciously accepted by the readers and where is the elusive boundary between creation and forgery set – these are some of the questions introduced by this novel that this paper attempts to answer. In Atonement, McEwan enters directly into the very essence of the complex author-narrator relationship and deconstructs the entire creative process with a lot of self-irony; he shows us a kind of anti-development of his characters and enables us to draw many more conclusions about them from what they keep as secret than from what they openly state. Finally, this paper will try to answer quite possibly the most complex question posed: whether every artistic triumph represents the relativization of truth as an objective category.""

In this paper, I  analyse the narrative in Minette Walters's The Shape of Snakes, focusing on the role of the interpolated letters, the gothic references, and the construction on the first-person narrator-protagonist, who proves to be unreliable. Eclectic uses of genre conventions mean that reading strategies must be reconsidered during reading.

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.

یکی از مباحث اصلی دانش رجال، تعیین اعتبار راوی و مقدار اعتماد به او است. این کار مهم، نیازمند توانایی استفاده از منابع رجالی، آگاهی از مبانی توثیق و تضعیف و نیز پیمودن مراحل منطقی آن است. کتاب حاضر می کوشد تا با ارائه مبانی و دیگر آگاهی های لازم، مخاطبان را در بهره‌گیری از اطلاعات موجود در منابع رجالی برای توثیق و تضعیف راویان، یاری رساند.

This paper focuses on postmodern concepts of the narrator unreliability, intertextuality and humor. It describes the postmodern unreliable narrator according to postmodern views of theory in general, and more specifically according to Asgar Nünning’s list of textual signs of unreliability. It also explicates the inseparability of the postmodern intertextuality, or parody as described by Linda Hutcheon, and humor, precisely, irony in the service of creating a parody. Furthermore, the paper analyzes Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, concentrating on the novel’s unreliable narrator, intertextuality and humor. It is explicated that Lolita’s narrator shows signs of unreliability. In addition to that, it is discussed that the novel’s intertextuality in combination with irony parodies different genres, making intertextuality and humor inseparable in the novel. Lolita’s film adaptations by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne are also analyzed according to their narrator, intertextuality and humor. The elements of the narrator unreliability, intertextuality and humor in film adaptations are compared to those elements in the novel. The paper identifies Kubrick’s Lolita as a postmodern film as it features these postmodern elements. It also shows that these elements cannot be found in Lyne’s Lolita, concluding that Nabokov’s and Kubrick’s Lolita are examples of postmodern art, while Lyne’s Lolita is not.

The article asks the seminal question: who is the narrator in a film? Conjuring up key concepts such as “le grand imagier,” “mega-narrator” or “perceiver,” he claims that “monstration” is a form of story-telling even though there are different levels of “monstration.” In the case of a very specific genre, “docu-horror,” and of its recurring narrative technique, found footage, it seems that there are two kinds of narrator: the “mad” diegetic narrator, responsible for the footage, and the actual narrator, in charge of the editing.

محمدرضا شمس نویسنده‎ای پست مدرن است که با شیوه‎ی روایت گری خاص خود گامی رو به جلو در ادبیات کودک ایران برداشته‏است. رمان دختره‏ی خل و چل (1381) از رمآن های براندازنده‎ای است که در سالهای اخیر مورد توجه قرار گرفته است. شیوه‌ی خاص روایت گری داستان در انتخاب نوع روایت گر بروز می‌یابد. روایت گر این داستان،«خانم بس»، دچار عقب ماندگی ذهنی است که این خود گونه‎ای از روایتگری اعتمادناپذیر را به وجود می‎آورد. استفاده از چنین روایتگری موجب ایجاد ابهام و شگردآفرینی در این رمان شده است. بدین ترتیب، روایتگر با روایت خلاقانه و استفاده از همین شیوه روایتگریِ بازیگوشانه و طعنه‎آمیز،خواننده را به برداشت دقیقتری از فرهنگ مردم و روستایش فرا میخواند.آنچنان که از پیشینه بر می‎آید، نقد جامعی بر شگرد روایتی این رمان صورت نگرفته؛ به جز مقاله‎ی حسین شیخ‎الاسلامی (1386) که به نقد و بررسی کلی‎ایی از رمان دست زده است. در این مقاله شیخ‎الاسلامی به طور گذرا به ساختار و روایت رمان می‎پردازد. اما در این جستار که به صورت کیفی و با روش توصیفی تحلیلی انجام شده است، به طور گسترده به ویژگیهای نوع روایتگر و ارتباط شیوه روایت بر دیگر عناصر داستان می‌پردازیم.

کلیدواژه:روایت، راویتگر اعتمادناپذیر، محمدرضا شمس؛ دختره‏ی خل و چل