A Reflection on Postmodernist Fiction in China: Avant-Garde Narrative Experimentation Wang Ning (bio) As we know, postmodernism, as a literary and cultural movement, came to an end some time ago not only in the West but also in China, although it has permeated in a fragmentary way nearly all aspects of contemporary culture and thought. Today, we readily think about the duality of something without falling back on the traditional idea of “center” or “totality.” In the field of critical theory, there is no longer any dominant theoretical school or literary current that plays a role like the one played by postmodernism and poststructuralism in the latter part of the twentieth century. But as a literary scholar who promoted postmodern studies in China in the late 1980s and early 1990s and once focused on the study of postmodern literature and theory in a global and comparative manner, I still feel some regret. That is, in carrying out post-modern studies from a literary critical perspective, we Chinese critics and scholars, including myself, seldom put forward insights based on our close reading of literary works with postmodern characteristics. The spirit of this particular age might well have changed, but superb narrative techniques will always remain useful and valuable to those who undertake literary innovation. If the peak period of the Chinese avant-garde novel came to an end over a decade ago, when certain novelists stopped experimenting with narrative techniques and shifted their attention to more commercial and popular writing, nevertheless the value of their experiments for literary [End Page 296] history may be “rediscovered” by future researchers. But I still think it appropriate to reflect on this historical phenomenon, which I will do before I analyze in detail a characteristically postmodern text by Mo Yan. Rethinking Chinese Postmodernism in a Context of Global Culture It is true that postmodernism was once one of the most heatedly discussed and debated theoretical topics, first in the West and then in the East. But when it started in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the American literary and cultural field, it largely referred to avant-garde practice in philosophical thinking and narrative experimentation, especially to such postmodernist theorists as Ihab Hassan and some others. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, due to the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s book La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (1979), the debate originally confined to the North American literary and cultural field quickly became European and then international in scope. Since the beginning of the debate on an international scale, postmodernism has undergone continual redefinitions and redescriptions. So-called “constructive postmodernism” is a recent example of the revival of interest in post-modernism at the turn of the century (Schiralli). In the peak years of the international postmodernism debate, such eminent Western theorists or thinkers as Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, Matei Călinescu, Ihab Hassan, Leslie Fiedler, Douwe Fokkema, Hans Bertens, Linda Hutcheon, Jonathan Arac, and Brian McHale, among others, offered their own definitions and descriptions of postmodernism, both in culture and in literature. Their theoretical constructs were based largely on Western literary and cultural practices, seldom touching on Asian or Third World cultures and literatures. We Chinese scholars, confronted with the impact of postmodernism, reacted mainly passively, translating and introducing the different versions of this new literary and cultural phenomenon to our colleagues and the broad reading public in the Chinese context. In our piecemeal introduction of postmodernism to our Chinese colleagues, we usually read whatever books we could get hold of and then immediately wrote our introductory articles and published them in Chinese literary magazines or scholarly journals, without first letting our Western and international colleagues examine them. So in this sense, we should admit that the introduction of postmodernism to Chinese academia was partial at best, with many major works, literary and theoretical, left untranslated and even unintroduced.1 Until the mid-1990s, we were almost confined to the postmodernism debate within the isolated Chinese context, seldom carrying on dialogues with our Western and international colleagues. Thanks to the kind invitation by such open-minded Euro-American scholars and journal editors like Douwe Fokkema and Hans...

Recalcitrant Simplicity: Thin Characters and Thick Narration in A Farewell to Arms Alexander Hollenberg (bio) Recalcitrant Simplicity Simplicity is rarely talked about in critical investigations of literary modernism, and it is even rarer to talk about simplicity in narratological terms. Here, I begin to suggest a vocabulary with which we can begin to discuss more precisely the hermeneutic effects of simplicity in modernist literature. I propose the term “thin character” as a way both to nuance traditional distinctions between minor and major characters and to introduce the idea of simplicity as recalcitrant. I examine how simplicity and “thinness” operate as implicit hermeneutic frames, what Werner Wolf refers to as “basic orientational aids,” which “inform our cognitive activities and generally function as preconditions of interpretation” (5). Using A Farewell to Arms as a case study, I consider how a simply drawn character can suggest the terms of our rhetorical relation to the larger text while also causing us to think self-consciously about the relative importance we assign to mimetic, thematic, and synthetic character dimensions. Further, I argue that the experiencing-Frederic Henry persistently misreads Catherine Barkley’s recalcitrant simplicity and that the reader’s recognition of this misreading is key to understanding the novel’s interrogation of the limits of interpretation. While not all simplicity is necessarily recalcitrant—indeed, some simple texts make interpretation easier—I am interested in literary strategies of simplicity that challenge our interpretive efforts. My argument that the simple can also be recalcitrant does not sidestep the project of understanding simplicity as a strategy in and of itself. I do not wish to transform simplicity into its opposite; rather, to talk about [End Page 301] simple recalcitrance is to gesture towards the way certain styles and discourses can work simultaneously as a means to accessible communication and an obstacle to interpretation. “Obstacles,” according to Doris Sommer, “enable something different from control; they summon the kinds of interpretive labor that accept the burden of difference instead of wishing it away” (207–208). James Phelan divides recalcitrance into “the difficult” and “the stubborn.” He argues that “The difficult is recalcitrance that yields to our explanatory efforts, while the stubborn is recalcitrance that will not yield” (Narrative 178). Like Sommer, Phelan implicitly recognizes that the will to explicate—to know and explain something—can lead to an unethical reduction of a text’s autonomy. But what Phelan’s theorization of difficulty as a subcategory of recalcitrance also suggests is that not all recalcitrance must be difficult. In other words, he leaves room for a mode of simplicity that does not always already yield to our explanatory efforts. His categorization allows us to see not necessarily the difficulty of simplicity, but the possibility of talking about a simple aesthetic as an interpretive challenge without minimizing the reader’s experience of its formal manifestations. Thin Characters Towards the end of Book IV of A Farewell to Arms, just before Frederic and Catherine flee Italy to Switzerland, Frederic plays a game of billiards with Count Greffi in their Stresa hotel. Positioned as this scene is, in the midst of this narrative of war, desertion, and vigorous love, such a peaceful interlude might strike the reader as strange. Both Frederic and Catherine know that he is “liable to be arrested [in Stresa] at any time,” and Frederic has already insinuated his plan of escape to Catherine: “Switzerland is down the lake, we can go there” (251). Thus, the reasoning behind Frederic’s decision to play with Greffi in such a public space as the hotel billiard room—a space where he can be monitored and detected—is, from the perspective of survival, difficult to determine. Unlike the barman, who takes Frederic fishing as a pretext to offer him his boat—“Any time you want it . . . I’ll give you the key” (256)—Greffi is of no material use to Frederic. Although the Count shares in Frederic’s war weariness and skepticism, summing up the entire affair as “stupid” (262), Frederic does not solicit any sort of substantive help from him. He does not ask for money (actually, Frederic loses money to him in the billiards game) or any means to aid his...

Narrative Knowledge, Phronesis, and Paradigm-Based Medicine1 Ronald Schleifer (bio) Literature is hardly of interest to medicine only because great books have been written about illness and death. More fundamental by far than the content of Bleak House or King Lear is the modeling, by literary acts, of deeply transformative intersubjective connections among relative strangers fused and nourished by words. Recognizing that my responsibility toward my patient includes my being a dutiful and skillful reader helps me to understand what skills to develop within my doctorly self. —Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine (54) In this essay, I examine the concept and function of “narrative knowledge” both in general and in the practice of medicine. I focus on narrative knowledge not only in terms of the knowledge that a physician-listener can glean from narrative—knowledge that Rita Charon richly describes in her presentation of part of medical practice she calls narrative medicine—but also the knowledge of narrative itself and how a working understanding of the shape and features of narrative can contribute to successful medical practices (which she also describes). There is great controversy concerning the nature of narrative, its “salient” features, its cognitive functioning, its role in cognition and, indeed, in human neurological organizations, its place in interpersonal relationships and larger social formations. In her response to David Rudrum’s pragmatist analysis of narrative, Marie-Laure Ryan nicely summarizes “a tentative formulation of … nested conditions” by which narrativity could be progressively defined or circumscribed (193–94). She lists nine criteria by which people might decide if a particular text is a narrative, beginning most generally with the contention that [End Page 64] “(1) narrative must be about a world populated by individuated existents” and ending with “(9) The story must have a point” (194). When people are asked if a particular text is a narrative, she writes, some will be satisfied it is if the text is about individuated existents in a world that undergoes historical change cause by external events, “while others … will insist that narrative must be about human experience.” Still others, she writes, will insist a narrative demonstrates a “sequence of [non-habitual] events [that] must form a unified causal chain and lead to closure”; and finally there are some who see that “the story must have a point,” even “while others … think that a pointless utterance can still be a narrative” (194). While such controversy inhabits scholarly debates about the nature of narrative and the qualities that allow us to recognize a text as a narrative, no such controversy inhabits the situation when a patient tells her doctor the narrative of her illness. These stories, like Ryan’s final criterion, must have a point, an overriding “concern”: the stories patients bring to physicians are necessarily goal-oriented even when—or perhaps particularly when—they present themselves in the form of a not-yet-completed narrative. In fact, it is engagement with just such not-yet-completed narratives that led Aristotle to develop his ethical notion of phronesis, his sense of “practical reason,” one of whose chief examples, in his discussion, is the work of medicine. (Aristotle’s father was a physician.) For Aristotle, phronesis is focused on action rather than knowledge, actions that make its agents achieve goodness in particular behavior and in life more generally (see II, 2; 1104a). Such an understanding, as Aristotle suggests, is closely connected to practices of medicine, whose aims, after all, are not so much the achievement of knowledge as action that realizes a certain result, namely an imprecise or unfixed sense of “health” that can only be grasped (as Aristotle notes of “practical reason”) in “outline and not precisely” simply because there can be no “fixity” in understanding what good health always and only is. But even if there is no fixity in understanding health, there is a range of agreed-upon understandings of what we might mean by health, whether it be the restoration of an earlier state of affairs before affliction or illness, the achievement of an ideal of human physical and psychological potential, or simply the accomplishment of functioning in day-to-day living in the face of affliction or illness.2 This range...

"The Impossible Has a Way of Passing Unnoticed":Reading Science in Fiction Peter J. Rabinowitz (bio) Prologue Rebecca Goldstein's novel Properties of Light, inspired by (but not really "based on") the life of physicist David Bohm, tells the poignant story of Samuel Mallach, a scientist "of even more than singular promise" (15), who has developed (as Bohm did) a "deterministic model for quantum mechanics" ("Afterword" n.p.). Mallach's theories, "deemed to be impossible by nearly all who were given to thinking about these matters" (16), threaten the status quo. As a result, he has been marginalized (as Bohm was) by the scientific community in which he works. Many years later, a young physicist named Justin Childs finds himself in the same institution as Mallach, now reduced to teaching "Physics for Poets" while his rival, Dietrich Spencer, gets all the glory (including a Nobel Prize). Justin, antagonistic to the "quantum occult" (45) championed by Bohr and his followers, tries to revive and refine Mallach's insights, so long ignored that Mallach himself has forgotten them—and, in the process, he meets and falls in love with Mallach's daughter Dana. The triangle of Mallach, Justin, and Dana, with its complex intellectual and erotic components, swirls the characters into dark and terrible, but simultaneously beautiful, places. It's an emotionally gripping and intellectually stimulating novel; but even more than that, Properties of Light stands out because it has a special flavor (using the word "flavor" in its ice-cream, not its physics, sense)—a flavor as strange and paradoxical as the sensations of "icy flames" and "frozen fire" that appear in the novel (77, 79). In fact, it is unlike that of any other novel I know. It's not easy to describe. But readers and critics have addressed it in a roundabout way, noting the novel's "stimulated [End Page 201] uncertainty" (Brownrigg) or its "bewitchingly ethereal" quality ("Review") or the way we are "mysteriously moved" by Goldstein's vision (Burstein) or, as Corinne Bancroft puts it (appropriately quoting Proust, one of Goldstein's key intertexts), the way Goldstein "opens the 'abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself.'"1 So the question anchoring my essay is, "What's the source of this strange flavor—and what are its consequences?" There are, of course, many routes into this question—and mine will require some initial theoretical mapping, including a discussion of what I'm temporarily dubbing "Possible Persons Theory." It's an awkward term, especially since it has the same acronym as PowerPoint; but it at least has the advantage of coming without prior baggage, being one of the extremely rare combinations of three ordinary words that generates absolutely no Google hits (at least, as of early January 2010). What you're in for now is one of those drifts into taxonomy that I picked up, no doubt, from Wayne Booth (James Phelan suffers from the same disease). I hope the lengthy detour will be useful even to people who don't know the novel. Let me start with a basic query: how can we talk about the rhetorical use of science in literary texts? In framing the question in terms of rhetoric, I'm steering away from several other interconnected lines of inquiry. Thus, I'm not going to be talking about the ways that science and literature influence each other—about the relationship between naturalism and Darwin, for instance, or about the influence of quantum mechanics on postmodernism, or about analogies between postclassical narratology and postclassical physics.2 I won't be dealing, either, with shared premises or epistemological differences of the sort that Allen Thiher studies in Fiction Refracts Science. Nor am I concerned, except tangentially, with the representation of science and scientists as thematic "content" or with narrative commentary on scientific issues—for instance, with the kinds of safety issues raised when we look at the film The China Syndrome as a critique of the nuclear power industry. In general, I won't be pursuing issues of scientific truth here, either; to the extent that issues of truth become relevant, it won't be a matter of scientific accuracy per se, but of...

Towards a Transnational Turn in Narrative Theory:Literary Narratives, Traveling Tropes, and the Case of Virginia Woolf and the Tagores Susan Stanford Friedman (bio) In the foreword to his 1938 novel Kanthapura, about the growing participation of village women in the Gandhian movement, Raja Rao explains the experimental method of the tale as a combination of colonial hybridity and cultural difference in language, style, and narrative form: The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a[n alien] language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own.… I use the word "alien," yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up—like Sanskrit or Persian was before—but not of our emotional make-up.… After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly.… There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. And our paths are paths interminable. The Mahabharatha has 214,778 verses and the Ramayana 48,000. Puranas there are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous "ats" and "ons" to bother us—we tell one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move [End Page 1] on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our storytelling. (v–vi) The narrative poetics of Kanthapura are not Aristotelian, do not fall into a neat structure of beginning/middle/end, do not center on actions following principles of causality, and do not develop characters related to those actions in any ordinary way. Created by the cosmopolitan Indian writer, the old woman who narrates the tale does so out of a collective female/village consciousness, as a "we," not an "I." And yet there is a linear drift in the novel as the village women increasingly join the protests and assimilate the Gandhian cause into their own goddess-based, symbolic, and narrative practices. The text is recognizably a novel, recognizably a narrative—indeed, recognizably a fascinating experiment with the genre and its forms of telling. What, then, is the task of narrative theory in the context of Rao's assertions and the blended forms of Kanthapura? Is it possible to develop a transnational narrative theory that can incorporate the many forms that literary narrative has taken across space and through time? Or should we reconceptualize the project of narrative theory? How would such a newly formulated transnational framework relate to the narratological project of identifying "universal" principles or components of literary narrative that transcend or undergird vast cultural differences? To explore these questions, I will reflect on universalism versus difference in narrative theory and then offer some strategies for transnationalizing the reading of literary narratives. By way of example, I propose the concept of "the implied story" embedded in tropes that travel transnationally and examine diverse nineteenth- and early twentieth-century instances of the trope that Virginia Woolf later made famous in A Room of One's Own—the trope of Judith Shakespeare, or the woman writer as gifted as the man. I focus particularly on the trope as it plays out in the life and early writings of the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and his elder sister, Swarnakumari Devi, the first prominent woman writer in Bengal. A Transnational Turn in Narrative Theory? Has there been one? I think not and wonder why. The transnational turn has swept many subfields of literary studies, along with the tidal wave of globalizations across the disciplines and interdisciplines.1 The national paradigm of literary studies is still firmly fixed in institutional and linguistic structures, but globalization in the humanities has conceptually speaking greatly dissolved that framework and transformed literary studies. There is, of course, an exponentially increasing study of non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial literary narratives as a reflection of the transnational turn in the academy. But with a few notable exceptions, this engagement with...

One morning, in December 1982, a medical student named John McCool developed a headache, and he wondered what it meant. We know this because several years later he wrote about that headache in an essay entitled Brain Tumor. His story begins with the headache even though on that morning the tumor had already been growing in his brain for some time, though nobody had been able to tell it was there. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan has called illness narratives an extreme test case

In narrative, exists on two levels: the plotting of the author, who creates the storyline; and the plotting of the characters, who set goals, devise plans, schemes and conspiracies, and try to arrange events to their advantage. The plotting of both author and characters is meant to exercise control: for the author, control over the reader, who must undergo a certain experience; for the characters, control over other char- acters and over the randomness of life. But sometimes the goals of the author are at odds with the goals of characters. The author needs to make the characters take par- ticular actions to produce a certain effect on the reader, such as intense suspense, cu- riosity, or emotional involvement; but acting toward this situation defies narrative logic, because is not in the best interest of the characters, or not in line with their per- sonality. In this article I propose to investigate two types of aesthetically deficient twists that arise from this conflict between author and character goals. One in- volves an active intervention by the author, an attempt to fix the problem through hackneyed devices; I call this cheap tricks (henceforth CPT). The other results from ignoring the problem, or covering it up, a strategy (or omission) that leads to what is known among film writers as plot holes (henceforth PH). Through this em- phasis on the kind of events that makes the sophisticated reader groan, I will be breaking away from the almost exclusively descriptive tradition of both classical and postclassical narratology, and I will adopt an evaluative stance closer to the prescrip- tive spirit of Aristotle's Poetics.

In many ways, horror films appeal to our desire for life rather than to our death drive. We subject ourselves to the terrors of the genre in order to affirm the stability of our own existence in contrast to the expendable lives on screen. As Morris Dickstein argues, horror films offer us the opportunity of neutralizing anxiety by putting an aesthetic bracket around it (54). The grueling experiences we encounter in the dark world of the theater may deeply influence our relationship to our own world: What we take with us from these films is a deeper perceptual awareness of life and of our involvement in its complexities (Telotte 31). The tagline of the 1979 film Phantasm-If this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead!-plays on the restorative potential of horror by implying that the more terror we experience in the theater, the more we confirm our position as one of the living. The horror film franchise Saw (2004) recently thematized this function of the genre by featuring a villain who targets his victims according to their inability to value their existence. Affected by terminal cancer, he envisions elaborate tortures requiring people who don't appreciate their blessings to commit gruesome acts (such as amputating their own legs) in order to save their lives. The moralistic undertone of this popular series foregrounds the horror film's valorization of life through its rupture. In this essay, I will address a subgenre of the horror film, which I term spectral incognizance, that seems dedicated to reassuring viewers of their safety. The subgenre includes films such as Charles Vidor's The Spy (1929), Robert Enrico's La Riviere du Hibou (1962), Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder (1990), M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999), Alejandro Amendibar's The Others (2001), and Mark Forster's Stay (2005). In contrast to the