Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses

8 Introduction
describe feminist/queer (or postcolonial) strategies by resorting to narratological
categories. Thus, the use of second-person fiction in Edmund White’s
Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) allows the author to inveigle the
heteronormative reader into sympathizing with a love relationship, which
only later emerges as homosexual (cp. Fludernik 1994b: 471).
Analogously, postcolonial narratologists centrally address the question
of how the narrative text is imbued with colonial or neocolonial discourse
that correlates with the oppression of native populations and how the discourse
simultaneously manages to undermine this very ideology (Pratt 1992,
Spurr 1993, Doyle 1994, Aldama 2003). Brian Richardson (2001a, 2006,
2007b), for instance, has suggested that we-narration occurs strategically in
postcolonial fiction, reflecting the anti-individual conception of traditional
cultures. 8 While these two examples focused on the use of a prominent experimental
form of narrative for the purposes of conveying non-normative or
counterhegemonic messages, other narratologists have tried to argue that the
categories of narratology need to be modified or extended in order to accommodate
the concerns of race, power, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
In a recent MLA panel on “Race and Narrative Theory,” Dorothy M. Hale
proposed that narratology could not adequately deal with postcolonial writing
since its categories were imbued with colonial logocentrism (Hale 2008).
Though we do not share this viewpoint, we do agree that colonial, sexist, or
racist literature often uses narrative devices and strategies that through their
use in these ideologically loaded texts may seem to acquire phallogocentric
and discriminatory overtones. Yet postcolonial, queer or antihegemonic narratives
may be using the same writing strategies for quite subversive ends.
Such a technique of “double-voicing” can be fruitfully compared with Henry
Louis Gates’s category of “signifying” (Gates 1988) and of course with
Mikhail Bakhtin’s characterizations of heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981). Narrative
devices by themselves do not carry any ideological freight; often they are
neutral modes of focusing attention that only acquire normative or critical
meanings in their various contexts of use.
Another important feature of postclassical narratologies already noted in
Herman (1999a) is their emphasis on new media. While traditional narratologists
such as Stanzel and Genette primarily focused on the eighteenth-century
to early twentieth-century novel, transmedial approaches seek to rebuild
narratology so that it can handle new genres and storytelling practices across
a wide spectrum of media. An interesting issue in this context is the question
of how narrative practices are shaped by the capacities of the medium in
which the story is presented. In their attempts to determine the different lan-
8. For work in the area of cultural narratology see also Nünning (1997 and 2000).