The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

152 Nationalism and ethnicity studies
The identification of these constants
established an orderliness to narrative that
implied an underlying logic to the stories
human tell about themselves and about
the world around them. Not all critics
agreed with the pre-eminent status of the
narrated, however. Influentially, Genette
stressed the importance of the way in
which the events of a story are unfolded.
For him, the attention on the narrated
tended to marginalize intriguing variations
in the process of recounting and
unveiling those narrated components. His
method of analysis focussed more closely
on the relationship between the text and
the story that it contained and, in particular,
on the devices brought to bear on the
telling to elucidate, obfuscate or problematize
the process of revelation. This
line of narratological criticism locates
and interlinks specific instances of prolepsis,
analepsis, ellipsis, summary, repetition
and others as a framework of
structural embedding that bears a productive
relation to the material that constitutes
the narrated story.
The most illuminating branch of
narratology is that which considers the
equal importance of the narrated and the
discursive manner of narration. This
allows readers to establish distinctions
between narrative genera through the
identification of consistent features whilst
also taking account of the formal and
contextual networks within which the narrative
as a whole operates. In this way, it
is possible to draw connections between
the interpretive freight of a text and its
stylistic and formal qualities in a manner
that is neither reductively mechanical nor
vaguely impressionistic.
See Roland Barthes, Image, Music,
Text (1977); Gérard Genette, Narrative
Discourse (1972); Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology (1958); Gerald
Prince, Narratology: The Form and
Functioning of Narrative (1982); Vladimir
Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928).
DL
Nationalism and ethnicity studies
To some it may seem unnecessary to
develop a field of study into nations and
nationalism. Nations present themselves
as immemorial communities, their histories
arching back into the mists of time;
they represent the natural divisions of
humankind. To study them would perhaps
involve nothing more than delineating the
distinctive features of that community, or
assembling its folklore; for such people –
nationalists – there is no need, however,
for analysis or explication. And yet,
despite their best efforts, nationalists have
failed convincingly to present nationhood
as a self-evident truth that requires no
further explanation. The phenomenon of
nations and nationalism has attracted considerable
scholarly and critical interest,
particularly, in the latter decades of the
twentieth century.
Contrary to the nationalists’ claims, it
is observable that nations represent a
historical innovation in the organization
of human social life. All critical studies of
nationalism, beginning in the nineteenth
century with the philosopher Ernest
Renan and the historian Lord Acton, have
sought to analyse and explain the emergence
of nations historically, which is to
say, as the product of historical forces
that determined them, not as the expression
of some ‘essence’. Renan, in fact,
prefigures, albeit it hesitantly, some of the
features of nationalism studies that have
emerged in the wake of post-structuralism
and other advances in cultural theory that
propose nations to be cultural constructs
that narrativize themselves into being.
In particular, his notion of the nation
being the product of a daily plebiscite
which entails a selective organization