Multireality in narrative discourse: Emplotment in modern fiction

This project studies modern fiction by investigating narrative discourse, its nature, problematics, significance, its relations with language, and its referential reality in light of (1) Paul Ricoeur on narrativity, especially his concept of emplotment to humanize time and to structure human action; (2) Bakhtin's "prosaics" as opposed to poetics cultivated in his dialogic imagination; (3) the semiotic vs. the symbolic (the dialectic between the feminine vs. the patriarchal discourse) in French feminist theory; (4) Hayden White's interdisciplinary study of history and narrative, which demonstrates that each borrows as much from the other; and (5) the cultural critique as seen in the modern-postmodern debate, chiefly in the confrontation of Fredric Jameson and Jean-Francois Lyotard.;The "narrative" I engage runs the gamut from a story, plot, structure, genre, and more importantly to a way of expression, a mode of thinking, and a means of approaching and representing truth. Finally narrative as an irreducible material body turns back on narrative as a well-shaped form to recognize its other. Modern (including postmodern) fiction is highlighted to expose the dynamic process of narrative making, which is more implicit in typical nineteenth-century realistic fiction since it has a more or less stable objective world for its support and goal.;The chapter on Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse attempts to illuminate the emplotment of symbolic/poetic epiphanic language to subsume the prosaic facts of time passing, things changing, and people dying. The chapters on William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Toni Morrison's Beloved turn to explore tropics of narrative discourse. Both Caddy and Beloved are taken as metaphoric matrixes, from which germinate the two novels. In D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel, different narrative modes interact so that no underlying ideology is privileged. By examining the medium and mediation in narrative discourse and the competition between the centripetal and centrifugal drives in writing, this study expands reality to encompass author, reader, and the world as well as text. The agonistic struggle within (textual) and without (social, cultural) these fictions illuminates the complexity of narrative making and the multifarious nature of reality.