The word ‘narrative’ is used unusually often in the social sciences. The basic aim of this article is to draw the attention of social researchers, particularly sociologists, to problems with narrative theory. Narratology constitutes an important source of inspiration for sociologists. There are many perspectives and analytical approaches to the theory of the narrative. In this article, it is viewed from the perspective of sociological thought inspired by phenomenology and hermeneutics. Narration should certainly not be perceived as synonymous with other notions, as it has its own history and meaning. The author points, however, to the possibility of a link, on sociological grounds, between narrative and life history (biography) as two different but mutually interacting ideas.
The object of our deliberations is structuralism in literary studies, whose beginnings in Poland can be traced back to the thirties of the 20th century. It was developing at two centres at the time: at the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius, around Professor Manfred Kridl, and at the University of Warsaw. Structuralism was reborn in Poland in the sixties and it impacted all of literary studies; its main centres were: the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Focusing on the analysis of literary systems, it combined them with theory of text and interpretation of individual works, emphasizing their broadly understood linguistic, discursive and rhetorical properties. In the culmination stage of its advancement, it tackled the fundamental problems of our discipline, including those that were only starting to emerge, such as reception of literary works as intended by its structural properties, or intertextuality. Structuralism had (and still has) a strong impact on the entirety of literary studies in Poland. It also became a sphere of reference for researchers of the younger generation, who prefer newer methodological tendencies.
The study focuses on the relationship between the ethics of reading and the narrator’s unreliability in the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day. Drawing on James Phelan’s research, the authoress states that unreliability that can be attributed to the narrator of Ishiguro’s novel can be classified as either an error of being in the wrong or withholding some information consciously. Consequently, six types of unreliability can be distinguished: misreporting, misinterpreting, misevaluating, underreporting, underinterpreting, underevaluating. Employing these categories, the authoress analyses a literary text and lists different types of unreliability which are characteristic of Stevens, the main character and the narrator in Ishiguro’s novel.
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