Conrad's Narrative Voice

Stylistic Aspects of His Fiction
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-90-04-33982-8
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 10, 262 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 522 g

Reihe: Conrad Studies

Werner Senn’s Conrad’s Narrative Voice draws on the methodology of linguistic stylistics and the analysis of narrative discourse to discuss Joseph Conrad’s perception of the role and the limitations of language. Tracing recurrent linguistic patterns allows Senn to demonstrate that Conrad’s view of the radical indeterminacy of the world is conveyed on the most basic levels of the author’s (often criticised) verbal style but permeates his work at all levels of the narrative. Detailed stylistic analysis also reveals the importance, to Conrad, of the spoken word, of oral communication. Senn argues that the narrators’ compulsive efforts to make their readers see and understand reflect Conrad’s ethics of human solidarity in a world he depicts as hostile, enigmatic and often senseless.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Senn, Werner

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction

2. Vocabulary and Language of Fact
The Adjectival Style
The Adjectival Series

3. Negation, Privation, Absence
The “Negative” Adjectives: Range and Types
The Deverbal Negative Adjective in Context
Negative Elements and Series

4. Sight and Insight
Seeing
Perception and Cognition: Marlow
Epistemology and Point of View: “Typhoon”

5. Physiognomy: Eyes, Faces, Looks
Author, Narrator and Character as Physiognomists
The Language of Eyes, Faces, and Looks

6. Character Reference
Naming and Point of View
Names, Appositions, and Substitutions

7. Conjecture, Estrangement, and Distancing
The as if-Locution
Modification in First Person Narrative
Modification in Third Person Narrative
Modalization by seem and appear

8. Free Indirect Style
Forms and Functions of Free Indirect Style
Free Indirect Speech and Thought in Nostromo

9. Conclusion: Narrative Voice

Appendix: Tables
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Werner Senn, Ph.D. (1972), University of Berne, was Professor of English Literature at that university from 1984 until his retirement in 2007. He has published monographs on Elizabethan drama and Joseph Conrad and numerous articles on Australian and English literature.