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Resource type: Book Chapter Language: en: English BibTeX citation key: Revaz2020 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: Belgium, France, Narratology, Seriality Creators: Pier, Revaz Publisher: Ohio State Univ. Press (Columbus) Collection: Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology |
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Abstract |
“A related problem, though in a very different genre, is addressed by Françoise Revaz in “The Poetics of Suspended Narrative”: the suspensive effects of the fragmentation of narrative. By suspended narrative is understood “the sequential release of a narrative in installments, with a frequency of publication dictated by the type of publication.” This type of narrative, characterized by the rhetoric of seriality and discontinuous reading, is illustrated by a corpus of two kinds: media sagas in the press such as ongoing political or economic affairs in which the writer has no control over the episodes to come, and to-be-continued stories in comics magazines, where the writer is free to determine future episodes. Such narratives challenge the Aristotelian principle of wholeness based on unity and closure, and they do so in instructively contrasting ways that Revaz spells out in detail. This can be seen, for instance, in the boundary lines between the end and the beginning of successive episodes in media sagas as compared to those found in to-be-continued stories, but also in the fact that the former, unlike the latter, defy macro-narrative ordering. Moreover, the fragmentary mode of production (found also in TV series) generates a type of narrative tension in the reading experience that tests the usual norms of works completed prior to their publication.”
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