narratology

This paper aims to offer a critical reading of the contemporary English author Ian McEwan’s fifth novel entitled Black Dogs (1992). I postulate that literary critics have frequently read his fiction for what it is not. As such, McEwan’s thought-provoking engagement with cultural questions has more often than not gone unexamined owing to a critical blueprint that, reducing his oeuvre to the topoi of violence, or to a gallery of obnoxious characters branded as psychopaths, typecasts him as a writer of disturbing, salacious fiction. Arguing that McEwan writes to dissect and criticise contemporary cul-ture, I offer a reading of his novel as a literary intervention into a cultural debate. I argue that of cru-cial importance in McEwan’s novel is the question of the narrative structure through which the differ-ent segments of Black Dogs are recounted. Drawing on the narratological concepts and terminology in-troduced in the works of Gَerard Genette and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, I examine the complexities of the narrative discourses of McEwan’s novel and its interlinking thematic analogies. Based on this read-ing, I conclude that McEwan’s intervention in the ongoing cultural debates of today makes of him a se-vere critic of our time.

Various types of focalization are important elements in creating suspense and surprise. This study finds use of narrative discourse analysis in order to discover the narrative affordances and limitations of internal focalization for creating suspense and surprise in Persian detective novels, specifically, Esmail Fassih’s The Falcon and the Owls . Duality (the existence of two temporal sets in the structure of the narrative), raising implicit questions in the first and other scenes of the novel, flashback, flashforward, different types of internal and external conflicts, spatial limitation of the focalizer and the suspense after the surprise are some of the affordances and limitations of the internal focalizer in creating suspense and surprise. In The Falcon and the Owls , the most significant strengths of the internal focalizer are the extensive attention given to narrative affordances such as raising implicit questions in the first and other scenes of the novel as well as going back and forth in time; while its weaknesses include giving insufficient attention to the tactic of multiple internal focalization, paying unnecessary attention to unimportant omissions and omitting important events.

This paper introduces ‘translational narratology’ (TN) as an eclectic conceptual model for studying translated narrative texts. As a source-based theory, TN investigates the status of three planes of the original narratology in translation: ‘story’, ‘text’, and ‘narration’. In fact, as an eclectic model, TN aims to set a theoretical foundation for both the original narrative texts and their corresponding texts in translation. However, the process for the original writer and the translator is a little bit different: the writer usually begins with the elements of the ‘story’ plane, and then comes to the elements of ‘narration’ and ‘text’ planes, simultaneously; the translator, as a reader, begins with the ‘text/narration’, and then comes to the ‘story’ plane. The former is bottom-up; the latter is top-down. The translator may have nothing to do with the ‘story’ plane; however, he/she may deal with this plane in the process of reading, understanding, and, preferably, translating. Some theorists postulate that the original narrative models have made no room for the presence of the translator as the main agent of the translated narrative fiction. This paper sets the theoretical scene for the translator’s discursive presence in the translated narrative texts.