Narration
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This chapter explores experimental narrative strategies in life writing. The first part offers a survey of experiments with narrative voice and types of narration – such as narration by another character, third-person narration, and second-person narration – and then focuses on narrative point of view. Dorrit Cohn’s concepts of dissonant and consonant self-narration and Wolf Schmid’s typology of point of view are applied to autobiographical narratives to differentiate between those tending to prioritize the narratorial point of view (the narrating self’s present perspective) and those employing mostly the figural point of view (the narrated, earlier self’s perspective). The second part of the chapter analyses Mary Karr’s Cherry, focusing primarily on the effects of second-person narration and the figural point of view, and the role of these techniques in communicating experience. The chapter closes with a reflection on how formal experiments may contribute to challenging culturally dominant narratives and tropes. |
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