Overview

Embedded narrative is a privileged formal aspect of literature because norms of representation - and often reception - are themselves depicted. This work focuses on the exchange depicted between embedding and embedded narratives and how this exchange participates with other aspects of the text and with the socio-historical forces which ultimately frame any act of literature. The use of embedded narrative is studied in a wide variety of novels and short stories including works by Balzac, Huysmans, Zola, Gide, Camus, Duras, and Tournier.

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Reviews

As the most salient and original quality of this work, I would cite the author's probing insistence on linking narrative not to one context, but to several: in this way he explores a range of theoretical perspectives while remaining sympathetic and attuned to the demands of embedded narrative itself (such as attention, focus, frames, listening, etc.) He sensitively regards the narrator's accessibility to and manipulation of the listener/reader's sensorium as a multi-layered process. In doing so, he also teaches the reader a great deal by coordinating theories with practices of reading. Richard Shryock accedes rapidly to the limits of critical categories and criticisms. By exploiting in an original way Austin's notion of perlocutionary act in the context of embedded narrative, he helps us to read the very structures of modern self-fashioning with new eyes. (James Winchell, Stanford University)

Author Information

The Author: Richard Shryock is an associate professor of French at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He received his B.A. from Ohio State University, a Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies from l'Universite de Haute Bretagne-Rennes II, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

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