Laia Díaz Quero
NIU: 1705049
ARC 4: Narrative Language, Keith Hughes (Leader)
Section A, Introduction (page 1)
- A narrative can be any story being related by a variety of means, for example, a film
has a narrative. On the other hand, literary narrative is a telling, it has no other way of
showing the story other than telling it. This refers to prose narrative (paragraph 2).
- This telling can affect the reader in different ways depending on how it is delivered
and formal elements, such as the length of the text (paragraph 2).
Section B, Realism (pages 2 and 3)
- A linguistic feature of narrative prose is trying to invoke a sense of reality. Attempts
to convince the reader that what they are reading is true through a linguistic
representation of an emotion. This is called realism (paragraph 3).
- Literary prose narrative contains more than one language and different voices and
registers. The speech of different characters helps to the realism effect if they speak as
they would do in real life according to their class, gender, nationality and regional
affiliation. This is also a characteristic of drama. (paragraph 4).
- What makes narrative prose distinctive is that there is a narrator, who can lead or
mislead us, Wayne Booth would call that an “unreliable narrator”. This narrator
distorts reality (paragraph 6).
Section C, Narrative Multiplicity (pages 3, 4 and 5)
- Two participants are necessary in a language act: the teller and the listener/reader. The
author is both, a reader and a teller (paragraph 7).
- A text is a collection of different languages, registers, and idioms. Therefore, all
narratives are dialogical, in dialogue with the external world and with themselves
(paragraph 7).
- Two useful terms to describe all the languages that a text has are polyphony (many
voices) and heteroglossia (differences between voices). Mikhail Bakhtin said that
heteroglossia “is the indispensable pre-requisite for the novel as a genre’ (Morris
114)” (paragraph 8).
- In this section, some examples are given, specifically passages from Vladimir
Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955). The examples show the reader how narration helps us
NIU: 1705049
ARC 4: Narrative Language, Keith Hughes (Leader)
Section A, Introduction (page 1)
- A narrative can be any story being related by a variety of means, for example, a film
has a narrative. On the other hand, literary narrative is a telling, it has no other way of
showing the story other than telling it. This refers to prose narrative (paragraph 2).
- This telling can affect the reader in different ways depending on how it is delivered
and formal elements, such as the length of the text (paragraph 2).
Section B, Realism (pages 2 and 3)
- A linguistic feature of narrative prose is trying to invoke a sense of reality. Attempts
to convince the reader that what they are reading is true through a linguistic
representation of an emotion. This is called realism (paragraph 3).
- Literary prose narrative contains more than one language and different voices and
registers. The speech of different characters helps to the realism effect if they speak as
they would do in real life according to their class, gender, nationality and regional
affiliation. This is also a characteristic of drama. (paragraph 4).
- What makes narrative prose distinctive is that there is a narrator, who can lead or
mislead us, Wayne Booth would call that an “unreliable narrator”. This narrator
distorts reality (paragraph 6).
Section C, Narrative Multiplicity (pages 3, 4 and 5)
- Two participants are necessary in a language act: the teller and the listener/reader. The
author is both, a reader and a teller (paragraph 7).
- A text is a collection of different languages, registers, and idioms. Therefore, all
narratives are dialogical, in dialogue with the external world and with themselves
(paragraph 7).
- Two useful terms to describe all the languages that a text has are polyphony (many
voices) and heteroglossia (differences between voices). Mikhail Bakhtin said that
heteroglossia “is the indispensable pre-requisite for the novel as a genre’ (Morris
114)” (paragraph 8).
- In this section, some examples are given, specifically passages from Vladimir
Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955). The examples show the reader how narration helps us
