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In literature, polyphony (Russian: полифония) is a feature of narrative, which includes a diversity of simultaneous points of view and voices. Caryl Emerson describes it as "a decentered authorial stance that grants validity to all voices". [1] The concept was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin, using a metaphor based on the musical term ...
Authorial intentionalism is the hermeneutical view that an author's intentions should constrain the ways in which a text is properly interpreted. [1] Opponents, who dispute its hermeneutical importance, have labelled this position the intentional fallacy and count it among the informal fallacies .
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. [1] Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot: the series of events.
This diversity of voice is, Bakhtin asserts, the defining characteristic of the novel as a genre. When heteroglossia is incorporated into the novel, it is "another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way".
Name Definition Example Setting as a form of symbolism or allegory: The setting is both the time and geographic location within a narrative or within a work of fiction; sometimes, storytellers use the setting as a way to represent deeper ideas, reflect characters' emotions, or encourage the audience to make certain connections that add complexity to how the story may be interpreted.
Free indirect discourse can be described as a "technique of presenting a character's voice partly mediated by the voice of the author". In the words of the French narrative theorist Gérard Genette, "the narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two instances then are merged". [1]
Examples of this kind of narrator include Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in Timequake (in this case, the first-person narrator is also the author). In some cases, the narrator is writing a book—"the book in your hands"—and therefore he has most of the powers and knowledge of the author.
The subsumption of Haley's own voice in the narrative allows the reader to feel as though the voice of Malcolm X is speaking directly and continuously, a stylistic tactic that, in Wideman's view, was a matter of Haley's authorial choice: "Haley grants Malcolm the tyrannical authority of an author, a disembodied speaker whose implied presence ...