Narratives Across Borders

Thick Corpus, Organic Variation and Textuality in Oral Tradition, ed. Lauri Honko, 2000

This research paper presents a comprehensive comparative study of narratology in eastern and western literature, focusing on the distinct narrative structures, character development, narrative perspectives, and thematic elements that define storytelling in these diverse cultural spheres. Through a systematic analysis of selected literary works from both eastern and western traditions, the study reveals the profound influence of cultural contexts on narrative techniques. Key findings demonstrate that while western narratives often exhibit a linear structure emphasizing individualism and psychological exploration, eastern narratives display a preference for cyclical or non-linear structures, highlighting collective experiences and societal roles. The paper synthesizes these findings to discuss the broader implications of cultural influences on narrative forms. By juxtaposing classical literature, the research explains the variations in character development, narrative perspective, and thematic focus between eastern and western literature. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of understanding these cross-cultural narrative techniques, suggesting avenues for future research in comparative narratology, especially in the context of contemporary global literature and translation studies.

Middle Eastern Literatures 7, 2004

This essay compares some of the tales from the Arabian Nights with corresponding versions in other sources, above all the fourteenth-century collection known as allfikiiyiit al-'ajfba (Wonderful Stories). The aim of this comparison is to identify and analyse the different narrative strategies used by the authors or compilers of the tales to convey specific messages. Against this backdrop, the essay discusses three tales as examples for three different types of narrative adaptation: The tale of Abii MuJ;ammad Lazybones as an example for different interpretations in vaguely contemporary versions; the tale of Jullaniir as an example for an Eastern tale gone West; and, finally, the tale of the Forty Girls as a highly adaptable scheme preserving its main idea even in reduced versions.

2015

The articles in this section draw on the texts of plenary lectures presented at the seventh Narrative Matters Conference, Narrative Knowing/Recit et Savoir, organized at the Universite Paris Diderot, in partnership with the American University of Paris, from June 23-27, 2014. Philippe Carrard’s article, “History and Narrative: An Overview,” is a sequel to his latest book, Le Passe mis en texte: Poetique de l’historiographie francaise contemporaine [The Past in Textual Form: A Poetics of Contemporary French Historiography]. In this work, Carrard (2014) sets himself the task of examining, as a scholar of poetics, the writing protocols and conventions used by historians when they finally present the data they have gathered in textual form. One of the major questions of the work concerns to what extent the authors resort to narrative form: does the discourse of the historian always take the form of a narrative and, if not, under what non-narrative forms can it be structured? In the arti...

Studies in Narrative, 2013

As we seek to map out the many travels of the concept of narrative, we are very aware of the risks involved. To stretch the metaphorical expression of travelling one might ask, if narrative travels with enough baggage, and whether border control is tight enough. While the theme of this book is the travelling concept of narrative, it is by no means meant to function as a travel advertisement. Rather, while welcoming and encompassing new openings in narrative theory, this volume aims at collecting a number of questions that are recurrently raised in interdisciplinary discussions about research on narratives as well as narrative research. To use a distinction Paul Atkinson (1997) has used, our intention is not so much to celebrate the travels as it is to analyse the transformations, displacements and possible incommensurabilities between the old and new narrative languages.

Originally published 1985 SBL Semeia Studies, pdf copyright 2005 George Aichele

2004

It is said that an ancient Greek painter was challenged by a younger rival to a painting contest. The younger man produced a painting of grapes so realistic that it attracted the attention of nearby birds which mistook them for real.

"SJANI" (Thoughts) Georgian Scientific Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, 2017

This research was done as a part of the project Orient and Occident in Georgian Folktales: Oral and Literary Traditions [FR 217488], supported by Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation Georgia. During the Eighteenth Century, a romantic philosophical phenomenon about the “orient” kindled major interest in literary works such as The Thousand Nights and a Night, which Jean Antoin Galland translated into French in 1704 and the following years. The enthusiasm with which Galland’s translation has received among the general European public signaled the adoption of this Eastern narrative anthology in the West. Western translators and editors of “The Thousand and One Night” added new texts to their European editions, for example, “Aladdin and the Wonder Lamp”, “Ali-Baba and the forty thieves”, “The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou”, “The Voyages of Sindbad” etc. They are not original stories of “The Thousand and One Night” but they are included in further collected fairy-tale-books by European editors. What is Arabian folktale? Are “Arabian nights” and “Arabian folktales” synonyms? What form of interaction is between Arabian folktales and Arabian literature? According to Hasan El-Shamy, The narrating of folktales survived almost exclusively outside the main stream of the literature. In Arab-Islamic cultures, three categories of narrative traditions may be designated: 1) formal religious– historical stories; 2) semi-literary narratives of folk extraction re-worked by literate editors and redactors, and 3) folk-oral tales, which remained unrecorded. The contents of each of these repertoiresconstitute a cognitive sub-system; the narrator of each is typically cast in a specialized role--which specifies a set of behavioral expectations-– with a corresponding status. The fairytales belong to the women repertoire. However a dynamic relationship of exchange exists among these repertoires; some folk legends have been “institutionalized” into formal religious literature; while a few literary stories may have been adopted by oral taletellers. In this respect, each narrative category constitutes a repertoire of latent traditions for the others, awaiting adoption. Yet, each remains distinct, independent and autonomous in its own right. Muslim theologians specified that narrating must be confined to “truthful” accounts of events and that a qissah (story) must be used for didactic-religious or ethical purposes. Typically, adult male narrators prefer to tell the religious, philosophical, or otherwise serious qissah, and refrain from narrating the haddûtah (fantasy tales, novelle, and formula tales). Muslim bibliographers call khurâfât predominantly entertaining narrative works such as the Persian hazâr ‘afsâneh (a thousand myths), and the Arabic Alf laylah wa laylah (A Thousand Nights and a Night). These and similar anthologies contained narratives typically labeled khurâfât, a term which denotes the fantastic and unbelievable, and, in this respect, is akin to the Greek term mythos after Christianity had been embraced. Curiously enough, some tales which are highly recurrent in various parts of the Arab world are absent from the native editions of “The Thousand and One Night”. These include wonder tales as ATU 327B The Children and the Ogre ATU 403 The Black and the White Bride. Ugly bride substituted for beautiful bride ATU 408 The Three Oranges. The quest for the Orange Princess. The false bride ATU 432 The Prince as Bird ATU 450 Little Brother and Little Sister. They flee from home; brother transformed into deer, sister nearly murdered by jealous rivals ATU 480 The Spinning Women by the Spring. The Kind and Unkind Girls. Ogress rewards the kind stepsister and punishes the unkind 511A The Little Red Ox. Cow helps orphans (brother and sister). More similarities between “The Thousand and One Night” and folktales we see in the subcategory of realistic tales. According to the “Index of AT Tale-Types in Major European Translations of the Arabian Nights” by Ulrich Marzolph, the most coincidences of Arabian Nights with folktale-types are in the area of realistic tales (novelle) and anecdotes. The visible example of a literary plot in oral traditions is a story about the noblest act, included in “The Thousand and One Night”. This story forms part of the narrative cycle enframed by “The Forty Viziers”. It is told by the ruler’s wife to urge him to take action. The sultan of Egypt, feels that his end is drawing near. The sultan tells his sons that he has deposited a box with jewels that they should divide among themselves. When hehas died, the youngest son steals the box. His brothers soon find it, but it is empty. They consult the qadi, and he tells them a story. A young woman who is deeply in love with her cousin is married to someone else. On the wedding night, the young woman confesses her love to her husband and is generously allowed to visit her beloved. On the way she is spared by a thief who follows the example of her husbands’s generosity; the lover is also impressed and sends her back to her husband. After finishing the story, the qadi asks them which of the three men was the most generous. While the two eldest sons choose the lover, the youngest son chooses the thief and thereby discloses his guilt. This tale with both its characteristic frame story and the enframed narrative corresponds to the international tale-type ATU 976: Which was the noblest act? On their wedding night, a man allows his bride to visit her former lover, in order to keep a promise she had made previously or, according to some oral variants, to cancel the engagement. On her way she meets a robber. When she tells him her story, he leaves her unmolested. When her lover hears about her bridegroom’s and robber’s magnanimity, he takes her back to her bridegroom without touching her. In some variants the tale occurs in conjunction with a frame tale that deals with the discovery of a thief. Three (four) sons inherit jewelry from their father. The money is stolen by one of the brothers. The robbed owners call a wise man (judge, king, Solomon), who is to discover the thief. The wise man (or his daughter) then starts to tell the story. The thief betrays himself unconsciously when he answers the question, “Who acted in the noblest way?” He argues that the robber in the story was the most noble one or he answers other questions in a revealing manner. According to the folklorists’ researches and “Arabian Nights Encyclopaedia”, this tale-type originates from India. Its oldest version, dating from the third century C.E., is included in the Buddhist “Tripitaka”. Other early versions are contained in the Indian collection “Vetalapancavimsatika” (The Ocean of Streams of Stories), as well as in the various redactions of the “Tuti-name”. In European tradition, the tale was popularized by Boccaccio’s “Decamerone”. Its version in Chauser’s Franklin’s Tale probably derives from French models. The tale about a contest in generosity is included in French editions of Oriental tales “Le cabinet des fées, ou collection choisie des contes des fées, et autres contes merveilleux” (1786). The tale is called as Histoire du Sultan Aqschid. The same story is included in the English book “Tales of the East, comprising the most popular romances of Oriental origin and the best imitations by European authors” by Henry Weber (1812). In this edition is prefixed an introductory dissertation, containing an account of each work and of its author or translator. “The History of Sultan Aqschid” is a part of cycle of “Turkish tales”. In further French editions, the tale about a contest in generosity is a part of the narrative cycle “Charming Tales of Careless Youth”. In the Joseph Charles Mardrus’s version of the late nineteenth century, there is a tale of Habib and Habiba, two cousins in Bagdad. The two grow up together and are in love, but then Habiba is married to another man. When she cries on her wedding night, her Husband allows her to take her cousin as her lover. Subsequently she is reunited with Habib. This Tale does not feature in the standard Arabic manuscripts of the Arabian Nights. According to Chauvin, Mardrus has appropriated the tale from an unknown source. The tale’s basic structure corresponds to the enframed narrative in the international tale-type ATU 976: Which Was the Noblest Act? In German versions of Oriental tales, this tale-type is included in the narrative cycle of “the Forty Viziers”, which denotes a frame story that corresponds to the story of “Craft and Malice of Woman”, although it contains different tales. The Story of the “Forty Viziers” is found only in the Stuttgart/Pforzheim edition of Gustav Weil’s German translation,included as part of the “Thousand and One Night”. In a footnote, the translator declares that in the Arabic text this story cannot be found in this place, but that he included it for the sake of “completeness” on the basis of other sources. Next to literary versions, the tale-type ATU 976 is spread in folklore of Europe, Asia and South America too. There exist Scottish, Irish, Slovenian, Russian, Turkish, Jewish, Armenian, Kazakh, Turkmen, Tadzhik, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Chilean, Argentine versions. This folktale-type is spread in Georgian folklore too. The plot of the contest in generosity became very attractive theme in literary novels and cinematography of the twelfth century. A short story by Tawfiq al-Hakim, Egyptian Writer, and a film by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the Indian film director, are based on the taletype ATU 976. Oral traditions and literary traditions belong to parallel categories of traditions. Each of the two types of narrative traditions belongs to a separate cognitive system. Oriental-Occidental plot parallels show an intensive internalization of folktale types. They also give information about the relationship between literary and oral traditions.

The Arts in Dialogue Essays in Honour of Fiona Bjorling, 2009

ACCORDING TO PAUL RICOEUR, the narrative form is crucial for a proper understanding of human identify. Basing his standpoint on Aristotle's theory about plot, Ricoeur underlines Aristode's conviction about the intimate relationship between plot and character: 'characters, we will say, are themselves plot' (Ricoeur 1992, 143). Ricoeur goes one step further than Aristotle and applies his analysis of literary plot to a theory of human identity. His suggestion is that, in the same way as the character in a narrative, our identity as human beings is fundamentally dependent on the chain of events that occur in our lives. In other words: the events and actions that we experience in our lives are as crucial for an understanding of ourselves as is the understanding of character through the plot in fiction. In precisely the same way as the plot undergoes a permanent change in a narrative, the identity of a human being will constantly change as times passes. Just as the events, once they have occurred in a narrative, become an integral part of the story's plot, the events that occur in a person's real life become an integral part of that person's story, of his or her identity. This article presents an analysis of two stories challenging a 'traditional' narrativei.e. a narrative that unfolds in a temporal succession, told from the point of view of a main character. In my textual analyses of two of Liudmila Petrushevskaia's so-called

The travelling concept of narrative. Studies across …, 2006

Narrative is no doubt one of the great academic travellers of the last forty years. As such, there is nothing exceptional or sensational in this mobility: narrative simply belongs to the same group of travellers as "culture", "discourse", "gender", and many others. Epistemic ruptures obviously encourage such fast transformations of the scholarly vocabulary. Many of these overlapping re-evaluations have been categorized under the more or less hyperbolic title of "turn", be it linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, constructivist, or narrative. At least in the case of narrative, the term as such is highly ironic, as if there were one, distinct lineage of thought, and a clear turn of the storyline: a perfectly conventional story indeed. But by remembering to keep these terms descriptive rather than normative, and by presuming that all these turns are far from unitary one-plot stories, we may be entitled to reason that the turns pin down important aspects of a profound intellectual change, a change within a broader web of concepts. Perhaps more consideration should even be given to the possibility that narrative may not have travelled all alone, at least not all the way. With these reservations in mind, one can still contemplate the qualities and contexts that made narrative such a quick and agile traveller. David Herman (2005) and Marie-Laure Ryan (2005) have recently made a similar argument about the birth of narrative as a distinct theoretical concept. The place of the birth, they argue, was not located within any conventional field of study. For example, study of the novel or fiction, as such, did not initiate the interest in narrative-in-general. Both Russian formalists from the 1920s and French structuralist narratologists from the 1960s were busy comparing different materials, from folk tales to gossip and high literature. This comparison of different text types required a more abstract concept and a more abstract theory. In other words, there was something comparative, abstract, and mobile in the concept right at the outset of its new career. Even though the concept was initially developed and theorized in terms of the scientific rhetoric of structuralist narratology, after coming to cultural studies it rather denoted subjective, diverse and socially constructed perspectives to identities, lives and social action.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE STUDIES, 2018

This essay explores the relationship between story structure and systems of power. I will demonstrate that every story written so far serves to either defend or overthrow property relations and the discourse of family. In the course of the Neolithic revolution, the cultural process that developed in patriarchal society spawned narrative structures, most notably tragedy, to channel trauma caused by systemic aggression and subjection. Yet pre-patriarchal narratives, as found in cave paintings and in residues of contemporaneous myth, suggest a different form potential and attest to the existence of another power structure effecting both gender and property. After briefly addressing the history of narratives and analyzing current contradictions between social relations and formal problems in storytelling, I will argue that serial storytelling and games could merge to become a new form of audio-visual narrative by combining empathy-driven dramatic storytelling and interactivity.

Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso

This article investigates the presence of heterodiscourse in narratives of oral tradition. Therefore, the theoretical foundation is based on the Bakhtinian perspective, which understands the discourse, in the literary narratives, as marked by heterodiscursivity, evidencing a diversity of social voices that signal ways of understanding and points of view about the world. The analysis of the corpus, composed of two narratives from the oral tradition, points out, therefore, that the voices of the narrator, of the traditional storytellers and of the characters appear in constant dialogicity with the social voices, guided by axiologies, positions and evaluative centers of social, cultural and historical order. The study thus found ways of reflecting and refracting the events of existence, moral frameworks that guide them and the understanding of ways of being and acting in concrete situations of life in society, in line with the dialogic assumptions of the research.