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First of all, I would like to thank Nilli Diengott, whose work I admire, for having taken the trouble to articulate her unease about my model in the Journal of
Literary Semantics. Thirteen years after Towards a Natural Narratology appeared in hardcover (i.e. fifteen years after its writing, and just as the book finally becomes available in paperback), I am myself beginning to take a more
critical attitude towards the theory, though perhaps from a different perspective
than does Professor Diengott. Her article has helped me look at some aspects
of the model in a new light, and this is always a good thing and opens ones
eyes to new insights. As I explicitly said at the end of Towards a natural narratology, I was hoping for constructive criticism and expecting the book to
become obsolete after maybe some ten years or so, depending on further developments, particularly in the area of cognitive studies.
On the other hand, I was somewhat surprised to find myself faulted for
setting a bad example within the framework of cognitive narratology and
particularly for betraying the methodological stringency of classical nar
ratology. And this perhaps for two reasons. On the one hand, I thought that
Diengott and I were safely positioned on one side of a divide within narratology, i.e. in our common defence of universally applicable descriptive categories. In the famous debate between Nilli Diengott and Susan Lanser in the
1980s (Lanser 1986; Diengott 1988; Lanser 1988), I tended towards the Diengott position, rejecting many of Lansers arguments for the introduction of
gender into narratology. It may be the fact that, as a former fellow combatant
on the frontier against cultural invasions into virginal structuralist theory, I
am now causing excessive wrath at apparently having betrayed the good old
cause.
My second reason for being surprised at Diengotts objections links with her
synecdochical move to depict me as a key representative of cognitive studies
and to see my work as typical of current trends in (implicitly) rampant cultur
alism and cognitivism, all developments that Diengott deplores and castigates
for a lack of precision. This is surprising to me because I am myself critical of
the methodological diversity of cognitivism in literary studies (see Fludernik
JLS 39 (2010), 203211
DOI 10.1515/jlse.2010.012
0341-7638/10/039203
Walter de Gruyter
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Figure 2 (the top part of the diagram on page 50, here reproduced for conveniences sake) does not repeat levels I to IV, but picks out the constitutive factor of consciousness in the constructivist production of narrativity through narrativization on the basis of experientiality. The frames that narrativization
resorts to are levels I to III, but on level IV the mere decision to read something
as a narrative can override the lack of material or appropriate story matter.
Thus, anything that is called a novel is immediately read as a narrative even
if it does not seem to have a proper protagonist, etc.
Finally, Figure 3 (the bottom part of the diagram on page 50) illustrates the
different types of consciousness that the mediating frames on level II are based
on. I have added ACTING to the diagram as suggested above in my reconsideration of the model.
My impression is that most readers actually understood that the diagram on
page 50 was not meant to reproduce levels I to IV in a one-to-one reflection;
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References
Bal, Mieke. 1997 [1985]. Narratology. Introduction to the theory of narrative. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Banfield, Ann. 1982. Unspeakable sentences: Narration and representation in the language of
fiction. Boston, MA: Routledge Kegan Paul.
Diengott, Nilli. 1988. Narratology and feminism. Style 22(1). 4251.
Diengott, Nilli. 2010. Fluderniks natural narratological model: A reconsideration and pedagogical
implications. Journal of Literary Semantics 39(1). 93101.
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