Jakob Lothe - Böcker

This book explores how different forms of narrative maintain and extend our knowledge of the Holocaust at this critical moment in history, when the last survivors are passing away. It develops and uses an original approach that combines key aspects of narrative studies, memory studies, narrative ethics, narrative hermeneutics, and narrative psychology. The book shows that testimony, narrative fiction, and film play a key role in forming our individual and collective memory of Nazi Germany's mass murder of six million Jews. Inspired by narrative hermeneutics, these narrative analyses are linked to and supplement one another in a historicizing movement.After having discussed testimonies given by four Jewish women in Chapter 1, Chapters 2 and 3 analyze three nonfiction films, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1956), and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985). Chapters 4-7 discuss four novels and one film that, albeit in different ways and more or less directly, are framed and characterized by the historical event of the Holocaust: Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (2006), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), James Ivory's film adaptation The Remains of the Day (1993), W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001), and Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days (2012). The interpretations demonstrate that written narratives and film narratives can be constructive responses to the ethical challenge of remembering the Holocaust.

This important addition to Conrad studies, as well as to the study of narrative, is the first book-length attempt to apply recent developments in critical theory and practice to the whole canon of Conrad's works.Using a broadly structuralist approach, Dr Lothe analyses Conrad's sophisticated narrative method, focusing on his use of devices, functions, variations, and thematic effects or implications. More widely, he explores the relationship between Conrad's narrative method and the complex thematics engendered and shaped by this method. Discussing the notions of major post-structuralist critics such as Edward W. Said and J. Hillis Miller, he develops and applies a critical methodology which is flexible enough to respond to the varying interpretative problems presented by Conrad's fiction.

Narrative in Fiction and Film gives a clear presentation of key concepts of narrative theory. A growing field in the humanities, narrative theory (or 'narratology') studies such narratives, thus discussing central questions concerning human communication. This introductory book has a two-part structure: Part I presents key concepts of narrative theory - for example, author, narrator, time, perspective, event, characterization. The discussion is oriented towards narrative fiction and centred on literary texts, yet since film can also have an important narrative dimension, the film aspect is brought into each chapter. Part II analyses five prose texts: the parable of the sower in St. Mark's Gospel, Franz Kafka's The Trial, James Joyce's 'The Dead', Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Part II also discusses film versions of four of these texts: Orson Welles's The Trial, John Huston's The Dead, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and Colin Gregg's To the Lighthouse. The book brings together and lucidly presents concepts and theories in narrative theory, and illustrates and tests theses theories. It will be an invaluable text for undergraduates studying narrative theory as part of a literature or film studies course.