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Pronouns in Literature pp 193–215Cite as

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Multi-Teller and Multi-Voiced Stories: The Poetics and Politics of Pronouns

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Abstract

This chapter explores the poetics (narrative functions) and ‘politics’ (alignment with cultural and social contexts) of pronouns in polyvocal narration. It introduces the important referential capacity of pronouns and their role in developmental cognition, everyday discourse, and narrative world-making, considers the ways in which fiction exploits the referentiality of pronouns and offers an analysis of a specific mode of polyvocal narration called liminal deixis.

Pronouns facilitate retrieval and revision of referential frames in the process of reading and their assimilation to reader’s own experiential world. Rather than being merely a manifestation of playfulness and experimentation, polyvocal narration is loaded with various cognitive and exploratory tasks. It problematises essentialist conceptions of identity and authority, challenges various types of totalising thought and reveals tensions between the group and individual thinking.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In “Telling in the Plural” (2000: 603–604), Uri Margolin describes the “group talk” in Wittig’s Les Guérillères as a combination of they-, we- and anonymous individual voices.

  2. 2.

    This is a hypothetical allusion. However, the motifs of “sailing on the sea”, child’s consciousness , desire for escape as well as connections with anti-war protests, all of which are also prominent in Barnes , refer to “Yellow Submarine” as a likely sub-text of the escape episode in Barnes’ chapter.

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Acknowledgements

Research for this chapter was supported by the Estonian Research Council (Grants 192 and 1481) and by the European Union Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence in Estonian Studies).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Comparative Literature, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Marina Grishakova

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  1. Marina Grishakova
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  1. Department of Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Alison Gibbons

  2. Department of English Literature and Modern Languages, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Andrea Macrae

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Grishakova, M. (2018). Multi-Teller and Multi-Voiced Stories: The Poetics and Politics of Pronouns. In: Gibbons, A., Macrae, A. (eds) Pronouns in Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95317-2_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95317-2_11

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