Reading for the Plot - Revision history

Robert.adlington: /* In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot */

2025-09-07T13:29:53Z

In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:29, 7 September 2025
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	=== In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot ===		=== In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot ===

	*		*Ends, it seems, have become difficult to achieve. In their absence, or their permanent deferral, one is condemned to playing: to concocting endgames, playing in anticipation of a terminal structuring moment of revelation that never comes, creating the space of an as-if, a fiction of finality.
			*We have, in a sense, become too sophisticated as readers of plot quite to believe in its orderings.
			*There is, in Robbe-Grillet's work a radically "constructivist" sense of narrative: the reader is asked to build a novel, not as the traditional plenum of meaning but as a possible model of narrative itself, a kind of laboratory experiment.
			*Narrative becomes a combinatoire: a game of putting together, a kind of generalized metonymy in which the given elements - as the given products and paradigms of culture and society - provide, as it were, the metaphoric glue.
			*The difference of the postmodern is, I think, one of degree: a greater explicitness in the abandonment of mimetic claims, a more overt staging of narrative's arbitrariness and lack of authority, a more open playfulness about fictionality.
			*If narrative indeed has to do with the recovery of the past, and more generally with the attempted rescue of meaning from passing time, the psychoanalytic model of remembering is invaluable since it reaches out to include repeating, working-through, and reconstructing - all of which seem to me to characterize the literary text and our reading of it, to define the text as read.
			*Plots are valuable for the use-value they give to stories, the way they make them exchangeable, transactable.

Robert.adlington: /* 11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom! */

2025-09-07T12:37:41Z

11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom!

← Older revision		Revision as of 12:37, 7 September 2025
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	*Barthes proairetic code concerns the logic of actions, how the completion of an action can be logically derived from its initiation, and the whole of an action seen as a complete and nameable unit, which then enters into combination with other actions, to form sequences.		*Barthes proairetic code concerns the logic of actions, how the completion of an action can be logically derived from its initiation, and the whole of an action seen as a complete and nameable unit, which then enters into combination with other actions, to form sequences.
	*The hermeneutic code concerns the questions and answers that structure a story, their suspense, partial unveiling, temporary blockage, eventual resolution, with the resultant creation of a retarding structure or dilatory space which we work through toward what is felt, in classical narrative, to be meaning revealed.		*The hermeneutic code concerns the questions and answers that structure a story, their suspense, partial unveiling, temporary blockage, eventual resolution, with the resultant creation of a retarding structure or dilatory space which we work through toward what is felt, in classical narrative, to be meaning revealed.
	*Plot, we suggested, might best be conceived as a combination of the proairetic and the hermeneutic, or better, and overcoding of them. The actions and sequences of actions of the narrative are structured into larger wholes by the play of enigma and solution: the hermeneutic acts as a large, shaping force, allowing us to sort out, to group, to see the significance of actions, to rename their sequences in ~~termes~~ of the significance for the narrative as a whole. We read in the suspense created by the hermeneutic code, structuring actions ~~accoring~~ to its indications, restructuring as we move through partial revelations and misleading clues, moving toward the fullness of meaning provided by the saturation of the matrix of the sentence now full predicated.		*Plot, we suggested, might best be conceived as a combination of the proairetic and the hermeneutic, or better, and overcoding of them. The actions and sequences of actions of the narrative are structured into larger wholes by the play of enigma and solution: the hermeneutic acts as a large, shaping force, allowing us to sort out, to group, to see the significance of actions, to rename their sequences in terms of the significance for the narrative as a whole. We read in the suspense created by the hermeneutic code, structuring actions accoridng to its indications, restructuring as we move through partial revelations and misleading clues, moving toward the fullness of meaning provided by the saturation of the matrix of the sentence now full predicated.
	*There is narrative aplenty here, as throughout the novel, but inadequate grounds for narrative.		*There is narrative aplenty here, as throughout the novel, but inadequate grounds for narrative.
	*We have on the one hand plenty of narrating, and on the other at least the postulation of a story that may equal history itself. What appears to be missing is the level of plot, the result of Mr Compson's chemical operation, that comprehensible order of even that was the very substance and raison d'être of the classical narrative.		*We have on the one hand plenty of narrating, and on the other at least the postulation of a story that may equal history itself. What appears to be missing is the level of plot, the result of Mr Compson's chemical operation, that comprehensible order of even that was the very substance and raison d'être of the classical narrative.
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	*As narrators, narratees, and characters become compounded and interchangeable - and the narrated and the narrating occupy shifting positions - we have very nearly a literal realization of Barthes' point: the distance between telling and listening, between writing and reading, has collapsed; the reader has been freed to speak in the text, toward the creation of the text.		*As narrators, narratees, and characters become compounded and interchangeable - and the narrated and the narrating occupy shifting positions - we have very nearly a literal realization of Barthes' point: the distance between telling and listening, between writing and reading, has collapsed; the reader has been freed to speak in the text, toward the creation of the text.
	*Narration can become fully dialogic, centerless, a transaction across what may be a referential void - gilled perhaps only with phantasies from the past - yet a transaction that creates, calls into being, a necessary hermeneutic fiction. The narrative transaction thus appears fully consonant with the psychoanalytic transference, a Zwischenreich in which narration works through and works out a narrative solution.		*Narration can become fully dialogic, centerless, a transaction across what may be a referential void - gilled perhaps only with phantasies from the past - yet a transaction that creates, calls into being, a necessary hermeneutic fiction. The narrative transaction thus appears fully consonant with the psychoanalytic transference, a Zwischenreich in which narration works through and works out a narrative solution.
			*One need no longer worry about the "double logic" of narrative since event is merely a necessary illusion that enables the interpretive narrative discourse to further, as in the mind of some Borgesian demiurge. This in turn might imply that the ultimate subject of any narrative is its narrating, that narrative inevitably reveals itself to be a Moebius strip where we unwittingly end up on the plane from which we began. Origin and endpoint - and, perforce, , genealogy and history - are merely as-if postulations ultimately subject to the arbitrary whims of the agency of narration, and of its model in readership. Narrative plots may be no more - but of course also no less - than a variety of syntax which allows the verbal game - the dialogue, really - to go on.
			*Fathers and sons are perhaps the dominant thematic and structural concern and shaping force in the 19th C novel, ultimately perhaps constituting a theme and a structure incoporate with the very nature of the novel as we know it.
			*Is coherent understanding, the explanatory narrative plotted from origin to endpoint, possible and transmissible?
			*Two threads of patterning in the book:
			**Incest is that which overassimilates, denies difference, creates too much sameness. If, as Levi-Strauss has claimes, it is the taboo on incest that creates the differentiated society, the attraction to incest raises the threat of the collapse of difference, loss of tension, and the stasis of desire extinguished in absolute satisfaction.
			**On the other hand there is miscegenation, mixture of blood, the very trace of difference: that which overdifferentiates, creates too much difference, sets up a perpetual slippage of meaning where one cannot find any points of fixity in the signifying chain.
			**Incest thus would belong to the pole of metaphor, but as static, inactive metaphor, the same-as same; whereas miscegenation would be a "wild", uncontrollable metonymy.
			*Narrating is an urgent function in itself, in the absence of pattern and structure, patterning and structuration remain necessary projects, dynamic intentions.
			*The recovery of the past - which I take to be the aim of all narrative - may not succeed in AA, if by the recovery of the past we mean its integration within the present through a coherent plot fully predicated and understood as past. Yet the attempted recovery of the past makes known the continuing history of past desire as it persists in the present, shaping the project of telling.
			*To speak at all is to express the desire to be recognized and heard, whether the speech is in the form of a demand or not.
			*AA may speak both of an unmasterable past and of a dynamic narrative present dedicated to an interminable analysis of the past. Faulkner's present is a kind of tortured utopia of unending narrative dialogue informed by desire for a "revelatory knowledge". That knowledge will never come, yet that desire never will cease to activate the telling voices.

	=== In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot ===		=== In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot ===

	*		*

Robert.adlington: /* 11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom! */

2025-09-07T11:41:29Z

11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom!

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:41, 7 September 2025
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	=== 11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom! ===		=== 11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom! ===

	*... a retarding structure or dilatory space which we work through toward what is felt, in classical narrative, to be meaning revealed.		*Other novels questioning the epistemology of narrative: Ulysses, Les Faux-monnayeurs, La conscienza di Zeno, La Modification
			*Chronology, genealogy, and maps are traditional schemata for the ordering of time and experience from which AA markedly departs, yet by which it is also haunted, as by the force of an absence.
			*A given narrative weaves its individual pattern from pre-existent codes, which derive, most immediately at least, from the "already-written". The reading of a narrative then tends to decipher, to organize, to rationalize, to name in terms of codes derived from the "already read".
			*Barthes proairetic code concerns the logic of actions, how the completion of an action can be logically derived from its initiation, and the whole of an action seen as a complete and nameable unit, which then enters into combination with other actions, to form sequences.
			*The hermeneutic code concerns the questions and answers that structure a story, their suspense, partial unveiling, temporary blockage, eventual resolution, with the resultant creation of a retarding structure or dilatory space which we work through toward what is felt, in classical narrative, to be meaning revealed.
			*Plot, we suggested, might best be conceived as a combination of the proairetic and the hermeneutic, or better, and overcoding of them. The actions and sequences of actions of the narrative are structured into larger wholes by the play of enigma and solution: the hermeneutic acts as a large, shaping force, allowing us to sort out, to group, to see the significance of actions, to rename their sequences in termes of the significance for the narrative as a whole. We read in the suspense created by the hermeneutic code, structuring actions accoring to its indications, restructuring as we move through partial revelations and misleading clues, moving toward the fullness of meaning provided by the saturation of the matrix of the sentence now full predicated.
			*There is narrative aplenty here, as throughout the novel, but inadequate grounds for narrative.
			*We have on the one hand plenty of narrating, and on the other at least the postulation of a story that may equal history itself. What appears to be missing is the level of plot, the result of Mr Compson's chemical operation, that comprehensible order of even that was the very substance and raison d'être of the classical narrative.
			*Stories are told in the name of something or someone; they are told for something. The incessant narrating of AA however, seems to bring us perilously close to narrative without motive.
			*There is a split and a polarization: narrating on the one hand, an epic historical story on the other, and no narrative plot or design to join them.
			*The novel becomes a kind of detective story where the object of investigation - the mystery - is the narrative design, or plot, itself.
			*We have a complex, intricate, seemingly highly motivated plot that ultimately appears to get the story of Bon and Henry all wrong.
			*Sutpen himself is a master-plotter, endowed with an abstract, formalist sense of what the future shape of his life must be. Yet his repeated attempts to found a genealogy do not work, no doubt because one cannot postulate the authority and outcome of a genealogy from its origin. The authority of genealogy is known only in its outcome, in its issue, using that word in all its possible senses. Sutpen attempts to write the history of the House of Sutpen prospectively, whereas history s evidently always retrospective. I have indeed argues that all narrative must, as a system of meaning, conceive of itself as essentially retrospective.
			*Only the sons can tell the story of the fathers. Narrative, like genealogy, is a matter of patronymics.
			*As narrators, narratees, and characters become compounded and interchangeable - and the narrated and the narrating occupy shifting positions - we have very nearly a literal realization of Barthes' point: the distance between telling and listening, between writing and reading, has collapsed; the reader has been freed to speak in the text, toward the creation of the text.
			*Narration can become fully dialogic, centerless, a transaction across what may be a referential void - gilled perhaps only with phantasies from the past - yet a transaction that creates, calls into being, a necessary hermeneutic fiction. The narrative transaction thus appears fully consonant with the psychoanalytic transference, a Zwischenreich in which narration works through and works out a narrative solution.

	=== In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot ===		=== In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot ===

	*		*

Robert.adlington: /* 10. Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding */

2025-09-06T13:36:35Z

10. Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:36, 6 September 2025
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	=== 10. Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding ===		=== 10. Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding ===

	*		*...the detective story, which claims that all action is motivated.
			*The figure of the detective may be seen as an inevitable product not only of the 19th C's concern with criminal deviance, but also, more simply, of its pervasive historicism, its privileging of narrative explanation, accounting for what we are through the reconstruction of how we got that way.
			*Freud with the Wolf Man is in a position analogous to that of the Proustian narrator in relation to his own buried past or, better, to those Faulknerian narrators who must unearth, order, make sense of the past stories of others in order to make sense of history and their own understandings of life.
			*The elements occupy shifting positions in relation to one another, as the story and its plotting and it must be the task of the fourth element, the writing of the case history itself, to recover the other elements in their complex interrelationship.
			*"forcing a structure which is itself in many dimensions "onto a 2D plane. He must manage to tell, both "at once" and "in order".
			*The thematic material suggested by the dream, and the associations that the dreamer is able to articulate in reviewing the dream, can only begin to make sense when narrativized, ordered as a sequence of events.
			*Freud readily concedes that he cannot offer a decision between them; they constitute an either/or, a moment of sequential and causal undecidability which may revise our very conception of the narrative interrelationship of event. We are faced with a recombinant potential of postures and possibly reversible chains of association. The relation between fabula and sjuzet, between event and its significant reworking, is one of suspicion and conjecture, a structure of indeterminacy which can offer only a framework of narrative possibilities rather than a clearly specifiable plot.
			*We know what we are because we can say where we are, and we know this because we can say where we came from. The authority of narrative derives from its capacity to speak of origins in relation to endpoints.
			*Freud argues that undecidability (of whether the Wolf Man's original trauma was real or phantasy) is not of importance, since the subsequent history, whether it derives from primal scene or primal phantasy, remains unchanged.
			*A narrative explanation that surely foresaw that much of its celebrity would come from its recovery of so spectacular a moment of origin doubles back on itself to question that origin and indeed to displace the whole question of origins, to suggest another kind of referentiality, in that all tales may lead back not so much to events as to other tales, to man as a structure of the fictions he tells about himself.
			*A narrative account that allows the inception of its story to be either event or fiction - that in turn opens up the potential for another story, anonymous and prehistoric - perilously destabilizes belief in explanatory histories as exhaustive accounts whose authority derives from the force of closure, from the capacity to say: here is where it began, here is what it became.
			*The shape of the individual and his biography becomes uncontrollable: their etiology and evolution are assigned to an unspecifiable network of event, fiction, and interpretation.
			*Biography, even in the form of the case history, appears to be intimate with fiction: it is a hypothetical construction.
			*That the Wolf Man's narrative and his very identity are bound up with the fictions he was told and read and dreamed as a child suggests a classic trope of the novelistic genre, from Cervantes on, where the hero must be disillusioned of a bookish, mystified conception of reality. What is radically modernist in Freud's narrative is that there is not and cannot be any disillusion: the self is bound in illusory relations, and the most one can hope for is some understanding of the order of relation itself, its uses as symbolic code. Freud's suggestion that the individual life history may open backward onto a phylogenetic masterplot is a further modernist gesture.
			*The individual, we might say, makes raids on a putative masterplot in order to remedy the insufficiencies of his own unsatisfactory plot.
			*Thus the way a story is ordered does not necessarily correspond to the way it works. Indeed, narrative order, sequence as a logical enchainment of actions and outcomes, must be considered less a solution than part of the problem of narrative explanation. How we narrate a life - even our own life to ourselves - is at least a double process, the attempt to incorporate within an orderly narrative the more devious, persistent, and powerful plot whose logic is dictated by desre.
			*Freud also recognizes that there are elements of cause and signification that can never really be narrativized at all, but must rather be understood through a structural analysis, in a mapping of a certain psychic set toward neurosis, a network analyzed with extraordinary complexity.
			*Narrative itself, as a mode of discourse and understanding, has only a provisional status. Its understanding work on and in time, while the unconscious remains timeless.
			*James: "Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so."
			*There is in Freud's case histories an underlying assumption that psychic health corresponds to a coherent narrative account of one's life. Marcus: "Human life is, ideally, a connected and coherent story, with all the details in explanatory place, and with everything (or as close to everything as is practically possible) accounted for, in its proper causal or other sequence. And inversely illness amounts at least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or an inadequate narrative account of oneself.
			*Freud and his patient together demonstrate that it is not so much simple coherence and mere plausibility that make our narratives persuasive. Narrative sequences and scenarios must accord with the complex, twisting, subversive patternings of desire. The insistent past must be allowed to write its design at the same time once attempts to unravel it. As well as having form, plots must generated force: the force that makes the connection of incidents powerful, that shapes the confused material of a life into an intentional structure that in turn generates new insights about how life can be told. The powerful fiction is that which is able to restage the complex and buried past history of desire as it covertly reconstitutes itself in the present language.
			*The "true" narrative lies in-between, in the process of exchange; it is the product of two discourses playing against one another, often warring with one another, working toward recognitions mutually acknowledged but internalized in different ways.
			*The patient comes to the analyst with a story to tell, a story that is not so much false - since it does in some manner signify the truth - as it is incomplete and untherapeutic. Its plot lacks the dynamic necessary to creating sequence and design that integrate and explain. The fuller plot constructed by the analytic work must be more dynamic, thus more useful as a shaping and connective force; above all it must be hermeneutically more forceful. It must carry the power of conviction, for its tellers and its listeners, that is the ultimate goal of storytelling. Truth, then, arises from a dialogue among a number of fabula and a number of sjuzet, stories and their possible organizations, as also between two narrators, analysand and analyst. A centerless and reversible structure, dialogue is an agency of narration that creates as it questions the narrative, and designates the field of force of the necessary fiction.

	=== 11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom! ===		=== 11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom! ===

	*		*... a retarding structure or dilatory space which we work through toward what is felt, in classical narrative, to be meaning revealed.

	=== In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot ===		=== In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot ===

	*		*

Robert.adlington: /* 8. Narrative Transaction and Transference */

2025-09-04T17:41:38Z

8. Narrative Transaction and Transference

← Older revision		Revision as of 17:41, 4 September 2025
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	=== 8. Narrative Transaction and Transference ===		=== 8. Narrative Transaction and Transference ===

	*		*"Transaction" is of course, another word for "metaphor", as is "transference", which we shall use in a moment; all three terms image a process of substitution, cross-over, exchange.
			*Analysis works toward the more precise and orderly recollection of the past, no longer compulsively repeated, insistently reproduced in the present, but ordered as a retrospective narrative.
			*There can be a range of reasons for telling a story, from the self-interested to the altruistic.
			**Seduction appears as a predominant motive, be it specifically erotic and oriented toward the capture of the other, or more nearly narcissistic, even exhibitionistic, asking for admiration and attention.
			**Yet perhaps aggression is nearly as common, and of course, often inextricably linked to the erotic: a forcing of attention, a violation of the listener.
			*A historical shift, an increasingly acute self-consciousness about the status of narrative within art that is itself self-consciously "modern". Curiously, this intense awareness of the epistemological and linguistic problems posed by storytelling is less a discovery of Modernism than a rediscovery of a concern central to earlier fiction, particularly in the 18th C, such as "Tristram Shandy" and Diderot's "Jacques le fataliste"

	=== 9. An Unreadable Report: Conrad's Heart of Darkness ===		=== 9. An Unreadable Report: Conrad's Heart of Darkness ===

	*		*Heart of Darkness - a detective story gone modernist: a tale of inconclusive solutions to crimes of problematic status.
			*Marlowe's journey is a repetition, which gains its meaning from its attachment to the prior journey. It is not primary: it attaches itself to another's story, seeking there its authority; it retraces another's path, repeats a journey already undertaken.
			*What stands at the heart of darkness - at the journey's end and at the core of this tale - is unsayable, extralinguistic.
			*Language as a system of social communication and transmission, as the medium of official biographies and readable reports, has no place for the unspeakable; it is used rather to cover up the unnameable, to reweave the seamless web of signification.
			*Marlowe's tale makes the darkness visible.
			*"it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone."
			*HoD does not "end"; it is a potentially interminable analysis that simply breaks off.
			*Any future retelling of Marlow's tale of Kurtz's story will have to be narrative in nature because there is no way to state its kernel, its wisdom, directly: this can only be approached metonymically, through a trying-out of orders, through plottings. And these will never take you there, they will only indicate where "there" might be located.
			*One finally needs to read HoD as act of narration even more than as narrative or as story.
			*Like the Ancient Mariner's Wedding Guest, he has been made to hear. If a number of 19th and 20th C narrative texts present sophisticated versions of traditional oral storytelling, it is because this gives them a way to force the reader into transferential relationship with what he may not want to see or hear.
			*All stories are in a state of being retold, that there are no more primary narratives.
			*The implicit conviction that there are no new plots, no primary stories left, only the possibility of repeating others. The sons are not free of the fathers but bound to the retracing of their traces. But yet again, the impossibility of original story, the need to retell, places the primary emphasis of the tale on the plane of narration itself, calls attention to the attempt to repeat, reconstruct, retell.
			*Conrad on James: "These solutions are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for which our hearts yearn, with a longing greater than the longing for the loaves and the fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be set at rest."

	=== 10. Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding ===		=== 10. Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding ===

Robert.adlington: /* 8. Narrative Transaction and Transference */

2025-09-03T15:38:54Z

8. Narrative Transaction and Transference

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 *...this beautiful and inhuman text.
 *Frédéric will enter the world of Parisian luxury without doing much of anything, remaining largely a passive agent.
 === 8. Narrative Transaction and Transference ===

Robert.adlington: /* 7. Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert's Perversities */

2025-09-03T11:18:47Z

7. Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert's Perversities

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 === 7. Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert's Perversities ===
+*The novels of Flaubert appear to us today to mark a turning point in the history of the novel.
 === 8. Narrative Transaction and Transference ===

Robert.adlington: /* 6. The Mark of the Beast: Prostitution, Serialization, and Narrative */

2025-09-03T10:50:39Z

6. The Mark of the Beast: Prostitution, Serialization, and Narrative

← Older revision		Revision as of 10:50, 3 September 2025
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	=== 6. The Mark of the Beast: Prostitution, Serialization, and Narrative ===		=== 6. The Mark of the Beast: Prostitution, Serialization, and Narrative ===

	*		*The roman-feuilleton - the serial novel running in regular installments in the daily newspaper - was an early capitalist invention that helped to create modern mass-circulation journalism.
			*It is characteristic of the 19th C novel, and perhaps in some degree of all narrative, which in general has precious little use for the simple, calm, and happy, since whatever moral obeisance one makes to these, they lack narrative interest.
			*André Gide referred to the novel as a "lawless" form.
			*The prostitute is pre-eminently someone with a novelistic destiny: a special, idiosyncratic form of life.
			*The novel tends to maintain its plots between exploration of the maximal, most daring social deviance on the one hand, and the counter-discipline of the police on the other.
			*One can speculate that prostitutes allowed 19th C novelists to deal with the dangerous and fearful subject of female sexuality in a manner not possible when portraying women of the upper and middle classes.
			*Sexuality circulates across class lines, the low and high meet, extremes converge.
			*The prostitute, then, stands out as the key figure and term of access to the eminently storied subword, realm of power, magic, and danger; she exemplifies the modern narratable.
			*Plotting as the masterful management of suspense and mystery, artfully leading the reader through an elaborate dilatory space that is always full of signs to be read, but always menaced with misreading until the very end.
			*The middle decades of the 19th C seemed to have an unlimited appetite for narrative.

	=== 7. Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert's Perversities ===		=== 7. Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert's Perversities ===

Robert.adlington: /* 5. Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations */

2025-09-01T18:02:10Z

5. Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations

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 === 5. Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations ===
+*We have defined plot, for our purposes, as a structuring operation deployed by narratives, or activated in the reading of narratives: as the logic and syntax of those meanings that develop only through sequence and succession.
 === 6. The Mark of the Beast: Prostitution, Serialization, and Narrative ===

Robert.adlington: /* 4. Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative */

2025-08-31T16:01:14Z

4. Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative

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 === 4. Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative ===
+*Todorov elaborates a model of narrative transformation whereby plot - sjuzet, recit - is constituted in the tension of two formal categories, difference and resemblance.
 === 5. Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations ===