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.
Podwaliny [Foundations], the poem written by Leopold Staff right after the war and carrying traces of a profound trauma, takes advantage of the motifs drawn from the biblical parable of good and bad construction practices (Gospel According to St Matthew, 7:24–27). In her interpretation of the poem, the author analyses the way(s) in which the biblical paradigm has been transformed, and the consequences of this procedure. Use is made of the opinions of the scholars who have reconstructed the primary function of parabolic stories, having identified in them the original forms of thinking which preceded the evolvement of abstract concepts encoding qualities.
In recounting or representing speech, both oral storyteller and literary narrator as well as the modern translator have at their disposal similar interpretive choices in how to represent it, ranging from mimesis to paraphrase to a simple notice that speech occurred. Most commonly, these metapragmatic comments take the shape of quotative frames, which introduce the represented speech and specify various pragmatic features of it, such as the original speaker, the original addressee, the nature of the speech event, or the reason for the speech event. The metapragmatic variety of quotative frames encountered within the Hebrew Bible has usually been described as the work of authors/redactors and attributed to written literary style. In this paper we first describe the metapragmatic shapes of quotative frames in Biblical Hebrew narrative and their discourse pragmatic functions. We then review recent evidence which suggests that at least some of the metapragmatic variety in biblical narrative reflects the oral strategies of representation employed by the storytellers/performers of originally oral texts. Finally, we explore the ways in which modern translators of the biblical text also engage in interpretation (or, a metapragmatic analysis) of the speech events portrayed in the text, using the story of the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) as an example.
This article deals with recent Polish herstory narrations, i.e. works of fiction that, while relying on distinctly literary techniques and devices, foreground the feminine experience of history, and moreover, may be associated with the so-called Herstory Turn in Polish humanities and cultural studies. This category of fictions includes also novels in which the herstory narration belongs to a female subject created by a male author, notably Jacek Dehnel’s Abbess Macryna (Matka Makryna), Ignacy Karpowicz’s Little Sonya (Sońka) and Jarosław Kamiński’s Just Lola (Tylko Lola). These three novels are analyzed with the aim of showing how their narrative strategy foregrounds the women narrators/main characters (acting as history’s true subjects), identifying the marks of authorial imitation of the feminine discourse, and, finally, asking the question about man’s status in an ostensibly feminine text. It seems that one way of answering it would be to point to the male author’s validating the feminine experience of history and ensuring that it can be heard.