Both suspense and curiosity are emotions or states of mind characterised by expectant restlessness and tentative hypotheses that derive from a lack of information… Suspense thus essentially relates to the dynamics of ongoing action; curiosity [because conflicts have been resolved], to the dynamics of temporal deformation.
Trapped in the bandit lair, a young woman narrates her dream. How do we read it? How does she intend us to read it? By supplementing my narratological tool-kit with a borrowed stylistic one, I map out the transitivity processes, instances of agency and density of evaluative language involved in the construction of her (dream-)world.
Then Iphinoe led him through a beautiful porch and seated him on a gleaming chair before her mistress, who turned her eyes from him, maiden cheeks flushed red. Still, despite her embarrassment, she addressed him with well-crafted words.
‘First at the head of legendary crime stands Lemnos. People shudder and moan, and can’t forget – each new horror that comes we call the hells of Lemnos.’
‘She had told the lovely-haired maids in her house to set a great three-legged cauldron over the fire, so there could be hot water for Hektor’s bath when he came home from battle – poor child, she did not know that far away from any baths bright-eyed Athene had brought him down at the hands of Achilleus’.
Negotiating a neologism in Catullus 64. Is ‘nutrices’ a point of ingress into a world of myth (and art), an intertextual trigger, a distraction cloaking a temporal and thematic shift, a narrative device utilising the male gaze? All these and more?
When characters in narrative fiction engage in direct speech, we read via a narrator’s quotation the perspectives, thoughts, and interpretations of those characters on events (past, ongoing, and prospective) in the storyworld in which they operate. And when they don’t speak? We might have difficulty reading them.
‘Prototypically, narrative involves not only a temporal sequence into which events are slotted in a particular way, and not only a dynamic of canonicity and breach; more than this, stories represent – and perhaps make it possible to experience – what it is like to undergo events within a storyworld-in-flux.’
Reading Experiments / The Reading Experience
by Tim Kenny
by Tim Kenny · Published October 10, 2017 · Last modified July 1, 2023
‘Suspense thus essentially relates to the dynamics of ongoing action; curiosity to the dynamics of temporal deformation.’ Some thoughts on the ordering of exposition in the Argonautica’s Lemnian episode and how reordering might affect a reader’s experience and interpretation of the narrative.
Not everything in a narrative helps the reader’s transportation into a storyworld. Sometimes a narrator reminds us that we’re not actually there at all. A preliminary exploration of aitia in the Argonautica, considering how they might affect a reader’s immersion.
‘When he stretched the great bow into a circle, the bow twanged and the string rang out and the arrow leapt – sharp-pointed, eager to fall among the crowd.’ Thoughts on narrative duration using examples from Greek Epic: Gods, Archers and Stretching Time in the Iliad and Argonautica.
Stanzel, concerned with what the reader can fill in, makes a distinction between ‘spaces’ that can be filled with help from the text and ‘gaps’ in time and/or space which the reader must face alone – a post looking at indeterminacies in the Argonautica’s proem with the help of Stanzel, Iser and Sternberg. Complementary stories, reader-construction and narrative interest!
An outline of a reader-oriented theory of the novel. Narratives have gaps, narratives are selective, narratives are sketches of a world. What is a reader to do with the indeterminacies? Fill them in!