Sylvie Patron est maîtresse de conférence HDR à l’UFR Lettres, arts et cinéma, et directrice du Paris Centre for Narrative Matters, l’un des trois projets IdEx Université Paris Cité du laboratoire CERILAC. Ses recherches actuelles portent sur l’histoire et l’épistémologie de la théorie littéraire, notamment dans le domaine de la théorie du récit.
Twentieth-century narratology fostered the assumption, which distinguishes narratology from previous narrative theories, that all narratives have a narrator. Since the first formulations of this assumption, however, voices have come forward to denounce oversimplifications and dangerous confusions of issues. Optional-Narrator Theory is the first collection of essays to focus exclusively on the narrator from the perspective of optional-narrator theories.
Sylvie Patron is a prominent advocate of optional-narrator theories, and her collection boasts essays by many prominent scholars—including Jonathan Culler and John Brenkman—and covers a breadth of genres, from biblical narrative to poetry to comics. This volume bolsters the dialogue among optional-narrator and pan-narrator theorists across multiple fields of research. These essays make a strong intervention in narratology, pushing back against the widespread belief among narrative theorists in general and theorists of the novel in particular that the presence of a fictional narrator is a defining feature of fictional narratives. This topic is an important one for narrative theory and thus also for literary practice.
- Titre : Optional-Narrator Theory. Principles, Perspectives, Proposals
- Auteur : Sylvie Patron (dir.)
- Éditeur : University of Nebraska Press
- Date de publication : février 2021
- Nombre de pages : 318
- ISBN : 978-1-4962-2337-1