Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses

16 Introduction
mode, and as semiotic (rather than narrowly linguistic) in scope. The rhetorical
orientation of his argument appropriates Plato’s emphasis upon the act of
narrative representation as diegesis or mimesis. Walsh draws out the recursiveness
implicit in that formulation, and discriminates between its legitimate
scope as a model of agency and the rather different issue of rhetorical effect.
The semiotic nature of narrative representation is asserted through the metaphorical
nature of the concept of voice, and through Walsh’s efforts to take
the full measure of that fact with respect to other narrative media (principally
film, but also the cognitive medium of mental representation).
Werner Wolf’s is the first of two essays that attempt to close gaps in the
traditional narratological model. Noting that the concept of mise en abyme
has no conceptual counterpart relating to its frame, he proposes the concept
of mise en cadre for this lacuna. Wolf outlines how the addition of this
concept can help to describe a number of textual features and how it can
also be applied to medial contexts. Wolf’s contribution aims at bridging the
gulf between classical and postclassical narratology by proposing a “neoclassical”
variant. He suggests that the concepts devised by classical narratology
have not lost their relevance. On the contrary, they are open to a fruitful
development and supplementation and can be adapted to recent approaches.
Alan Palmer contributes to the extension of narratological categories by
proposing a theory of intermental thought. Such thinking is joint, shared, or
collective and community-based, as opposed to intramental, individual, or
private thought. It can also be described as socially distributed, situated, or
extended cognition, or as intersubjectivity. Intermental thought is a crucially
important component of fictional narrative because much of the mental functioning
depicted in novels occurs in large organizations, small groups, work
colleagues, friends, families, couples and other intermental units. It could
plausibly be argued that a large amount of the subject matter of novels is
the formation, development and breakdown of these intermental systems.
So far this aspect of narrative has been neglected by traditional theoretical
approaches and fails to be considered in discussions of focalization, characterization,
story analysis, and the representation of speech and thought.
Palmer therefore crucially contributes to closing this gap in the traditional
narratological paradigm.
Monika Fludernik in her contribution returns to a both historical and
critical analysis of the relationship between the terms mediacy, mediation,
and focalization. Following on from earlier work on drama as narrative,
Fludernik considers the status of mediality for narrativity and contrasts Stanzel’s
and Genette’s complex negotiations with the story-discourse dichotomy,
the status of the narrator as mediator, and with the placing of focalization