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Death and Vocation: Narrativizing Narrative Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Bruce Robbins
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Abstract

Literary critics mistrust periodization, that basic act of literary history, because they are suspicious of narrative. Where does this suspicion come from? And why has it arisen, paradoxically, together with the growing authority of the concept of narrative itself? This essay places the rise of narrative theory in the contexts of professionalism, decolonization, and the nineteenth-century novel. Gérard Genette's account of the triumph of “discourse” over “story” parallels the upward mobility of many nineteenth-century novelistic protagonists. Even denying that narrative theory can be narrativized, as Jonathan Culler does, has similarities to the vocational crisis in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Each of these narratives functions as a rhetoric of professional legitimation, leading outward from some account of “the ‘storiness’ of the story”—the role, for example, of death for Walter Benjamin and Frank Kermode—to a sense of vocation anchored in the concerns of an extraprofessional public.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Theory of Literary History , January 1992 , pp. 38 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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