The Death of the Narrator and Other Essays
Résumé
Can we conceive "narratorless" narration? The narrator (the answer to the question "who is speaking?") is a com- monly used notion in the teaching of literature and in literary criticism, even though it is the object of a theoreti- cal debate which is still too little known. Clarifying it re- quires an historical and epistemological approach to the opposition between communicational theories of narrative in general (no difference between fictional narrative, non- fictional narrative and communicational discourse) and non-communicational or poetic theories of the fictional nar- rative in particular (these theories are based on a thorough study of the linguistic and textual peculiarities of fictional narrative). The articles gathered here confront the two ap- proaches starting from problems such as the identity and difference between certain terms and concepts, the refu- tation of theories, the reinterpretation of old theories within new theories and the historicity of translations.