“I’ll begin again in a jiffy”: récits cycliques dans la littérature anglophone
A book is by definition a closed and delineated shape, which explains why most literary narratives are linear: they begin on the first page and end on the last. However, though this form is the most conventional, many authors—James Joyce among others, with Finnegans Wake—have tried to question the t...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte"
2018-07-01
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| Series: | Sillages Critiques |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/6392 |
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| Summary: | A book is by definition a closed and delineated shape, which explains why most literary narratives are linear: they begin on the first page and end on the last. However, though this form is the most conventional, many authors—James Joyce among others, with Finnegans Wake—have tried to question the traditional teleology of narration by offering to the reader cyclical narratives, stories you can only start in medias res and leave behind? desert because of the formal constraints of the volume. This analysis of cyclical narratives in Anglophone literature is organized in three parts, three ways of going against the readers’ narrative expectations and of pitting closure against rereading. I shall first scrutinize stories structured around thematic cycles, in which linearity is present but diminished by stylistic echoes that link the end and the beginning of the text. I then wish to analyze narrative cycles, books in which the story never ends since the last page sends one back to the first. I will end with a panorama of narratives that consider the cycle as an ideal, realized form, trying to go beyond the closed form of the codex and its linear constraints. |
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| ISSN: | 1272-3819 1969-6302 |